Uncategorized
- Earth
Mineral Deposit: Asbestos linked to lupus, arthritis
Already known to cause lung cancer, asbestos has now been associated with three autoimmune diseases.
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19693
With the known link of asbestos to lung cancer, the new finding mentioned in this article that many other diseases can be caused by asbestos only serves as fodder for litigation, clogging of our legal system, and, unfortunately, more enrichment of trial lawyers instead of asbestos victims. Nelson MaransSilver Spring, Md.
- Chemistry
Carbon Goes Glam: Treated carbon dots fluoresce
Chemists have fashioned tiny dots of carbon that glow in response to light.
- Animals
Mixed Butterflies: Tropical species joins ranks of rare hybrids
A South American butterfly is one of the few animal species that seems to have arisen via the supposedly rare path of crossing two older species.
- Health & Medicine
Next Line of Defense: New drugs take on resistant leukemia
Two experimental drugs stop many cases of chronic myeloid leukemia that are resistant to the drug imatinib (Gleevec).
- Humans
Letters from the June 17, 2006, issue of Science News
Cuts on the bias After taking some of the bias tests, I am very skeptical (“The Bias Finders: A test of unconscious attitudes polarizes psychologists,” SN: 4/22/06, p. 250). Since the major tool is speed of reaction, and since my eyes are not too good now, the results were very curious and probably totally unreliable: […]
- Earth
Cleaning up pollution, whey down deep
Lab and field tests hint that dairy whey, a lactose-rich by-product of the dairy industry, could be used to clean up underground water supplies tainted by the solvent trichloroethylene.
- Earth
Subglacial lakes may not be isolated ecosystems
Large volumes of water may occasionally flow between the lakes that lie deep beneath Antarctica's kilometers-thick ice sheet.
- Health & Medicine
Inactivity, not altitude, is probably behind blood clots
Low cabin pressure aboard aircraft is not to blame for the rare but dangerous blood clots that some passengers get during long flights.
- Astronomy
Not a planet?
New observations add to the evidence that an image of a planetary-mass object discovered beyond the solar system is not that of a bona fide planet.
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19692
In this article, Alycia Weinberger says, “The discovery of a disk around the planetary-mass companion to 2M1207 should be a bit of a relief to planet-formation theorists” because it casts doubt on the object being a planet. But wouldn’t our early solar system have been composed of at least two planets, Jupiter and Saturn, that […]
- Anthropology
Variety spices up Neandertals’ DNA
A surprising amount of genetic diversity characterized Neandertals.
