Uncategorized
- Planetary Science
Martian dust storm
In late October, a day after Mars and Earth were at their closest approach until 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a large dust storm on the Red Planet.
- Health & Medicine
New malaria vaccine is off to promising start
An experimental malaria vaccine has been shown to induce a strong immune response in people.
- Tech
Sweets spur biodiesel reaction
A Japanese research team has made an environmentally friendly biodiesel catalyst from charred sugars.
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Urban fish show perturbed spawning cycle
Sediment-dwelling fish off Seattle's waterfront exhibit spawning abnormalities that may compromise their ability to reproduce successfully.
- Earth
Is Teddy a pollution magnet?
Stuffed toys can accumulate high concentrations of potentially toxic air pollutants.
- Ecosystems
Feminized cod on the high seas
Male cod in the open ocean are producing an egg-yolk protein ordinarily made only by females, signaling their potential exposure to estrogen-mimicking pollutants.
- Earth
Elevated pesticide threatens amphibians
The survival of certain mountain-dwelling amphibians may be threatened by toxic pesticides that are blown uphill from distant agricultural lands in California's Central Valley.
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The Sum of the Parts
Some researchers are breaking genomes into a collection of parts and precisely reassembling them to do a scientist's bidding.
- Anthropology
The Pirahã Challenge
A linguist has sparked controversy with his proposal that a tribe of about 200 people living in Brazil's Amazon rain forest speaks a language devoid of counting and color terms, clauses, and other elements of grammar often considered to be universal.
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19619
The lack of the linguistic device “recursion” in the Pirahã language might be more subtle than investigator Dan Everett suspects. I’ve heard examples of the sentence given as recursion—”When I finish eating, I want to speak to you”—rendered as a run-on sentence by speakers new to English and by lifelong speakers as well: “I finish […]
- Math
Rating Researchers
A physicist has come up with a formula for characterizing a researcher's scientific output.
- Humans
Letters from the December 3, 2005, issue of Science News
Eye on energy “Cosmic Ray Font: Supernova remnants rev up ions” (SN: 10/1/05, p. 213) is unfortunately murky. It’s confusing to state that accelerating charged particles to high speeds “therefore” produces cosmic rays. And what “charged particles”? Is the “energized” gas in fact “ionized”? “Energized” is too general a word. Finally, why are high-speed particles […]
