Uncategorized
-
- Earth
Tiny tubes, big pollution
Making carbon nanotubes also produces a lot of airborne carcinogens.
-
Light switch
A photosensitive molecule makes switching off a gene as simple as flicking on a light.
- Tech
Corny collagen
Corn engineered to produce collagen may someday replace slaughterhouse leftovers as a source of gelatin.
- Earth
Arctic snow was dirtier in early 1900s
Arctic snow collects less soot now than it did a century ago, but it's still dirtier than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
- Animals
Bats hum for sugar too
Some nectar-feeding bats metabolize sugars as rapidly as hummingbirds do.
-
Believers gain no health advantage
Strong religious beliefs or practices don't appear to benefit depressed or socially isolated heart attack survivors.
- Health & Medicine
When antioxidants go bad
Overproduction of antioxidants, usually thought to be beneficial, is the cause of an inherited heart disease.
- Humans
The Wealth of Nations
Analysis of the connections among different types of economic activities explains why some countries succeed, and others fail, in diversifying their economies.
-
19877
This article describes the difficulty of moving from exporting one product to exporting another in terms of a “distance” between various products. I would imagine, however, that a nation that already manufactures computers, for example, could easily move into calculators, but that the reverse might not be true. Did the researchers consider the directionality of […]
-
Rethinking Bad Taste
Many animals use mimicry to gain a competitive advantage, but are there degrees of cheating?
- Computing
Can You Face It?
The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, has developed some face-transforming software that allows people to change the age, sex, or ethnicity of the person in an image that you export from your computer. Or, blend features from a number of faces into one amalgam. If all that is too creepy, then just import art […]
