Uncategorized
- Planetary Science
Web Special: Clay magic on Mars
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just completed a week of picture taking from as low as 300 kilometers above the surface of the Red Planet.
- Humans
Letters from the October 21, 2006, issue of Science News
Fish story? To argue that the concentrations reported in “Macho Moms: Perchlorate pollutant masculinizes fish” (SN: 8/12/06, p. 99) are environmentally relevant is misleading. Those concentrations are usually in groundwater, not surface waters. I’ve been involved in the environmental field for almost 20 years and have yet to hear of any fish being caught in […]
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- Humans
From the October 10, 1936, issue
The inner beauty of leaves, a better treatment for pneumonia, and alcohol fuel for cars.
- Physics
Hawking at CERN
Physicist Stephen Hawking visited the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in late September 2006. The CERN Web site offers a glimpse of Hawking’s visit and video of two lectures that he presented, one for a general audience on the origin of the universe and the other for a specialist audience on the “semi-classical birth […]
- Chemistry
Pretty in Pictures: Details of molecular machinery gain Nobel
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a researcher who determined the structure, in atomic detail, of RNA polymerase taken from yeast cells.
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It is ironic that the father of the current recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry won the prize in medicine. Looking at the research of 2006 winner Roger D. Kornberg, his prize should have been awarded in medicine. For his father, Arthur Kornberg, the prize in 1959 should have been in chemistry. The good […]
- Earth
Nearly Naked: Large swath of Pacific lacks seafloor sediment
Little or no sediment has accumulated on a broad patch of ocean bottom in the remote South Pacific, the result of a combination of factors that probably can't be found anywhere else on Earth.
- Animals
Courting Costs: Male prairie dogs seem too busy mating to dodge predators
Male prairie dogs get so distracted during mating season that predators find them easy pickings.
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Well Traveled: Gene split arose early in domesticated goats
Two separate goat lineages inhabited the same site in southwestern Europe about 7,000 years ago, indicating that the extensive transport and mixing of domesticated goats began shortly after the origins of farming in the Near East.
- Math
Messiness Rules: In high dimensions, disorder packs tightest
In high dimensions, disorderly arrangements of spheres pack together more densely than orderly arrangements do.
- Tech
Teasing Apart Nanotubes: Fast-spun carbon fibers may feed an industry
Researchers have devised a way to sort carbon nanotubes by size and electronic properties.
