Uncategorized

  1. Health & Medicine

    Weight Matters, Even in the Womb

    Status at birth can foreshadow illnesses decades later.

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  2. Materials Science

    Making Stuff Last

    Chemistry and materials science step up to preserve history, old and new.

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  3. Math

    Football’s Overtime Bias

    The coin toss appears to play a significant role in deciding the winner in pro football's sudden-death overtime.

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  4. Humans

    Letters from the November 6, 2004, issue of Science News

    Another view I suggest that world maps with countries colored by some statistical feature often would be more useful if done on a cartogram that is a compromise between population and size of countries, rather than on a map with a simple Mercator projection (“A Better Distorted View,” SN: 8/28/04, p. 136: A Better Distorted […]

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  5. Humans

    From the November 3, 1934, issue

    Telephone transmitters, taking the bitter taste out of certain medicines, and the composition of planets.

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  6. Humans

    Bat Moves and More

    Take a look at the winners of this year’s Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science magazine. Particularly noteworthy is a dramatic video that shows a bat tracking and capturing a praying mantis. This video was made by researchers at the University of Maryland, who combined slow-motion video, animation, […]

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  7. Wayfaring Sleepers: Brain area linked to slumber-aided recall

    Enhanced activity in an inner-brain structure called the hippocampus during sleep solidifies memories of recently visited places and the routes taken to get to them.

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  8. Tech

    Smashing the Microscope: Tiny crashes harnessed for nanoconstruction

    A new technique supplies loose atoms for nanoscale experiments by using the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope to gouge out craters from a surface.

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  9. 19480

    I’m no fan of cell phones, but this seems to be an article about a solution looking for a problem. Presumably, cell phones would be disposed of in landfills and, therefore, not exactly “released” into the environment, as the article states. In any case, the 312,000 pounds of lead in all cell phones owned in […]

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  10. Materials Science

    Electronics Detox: Leadfree material for ecofriendly gadgetry

    Responding to growing concern over the disposal of electronic devices, scientists in Japan have created a lead-free piezoceramic that could replace the toxic components in many of these gadgets.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Persistent Cough: Pertussis rises in young adults and infants

    Pertussis, or whooping cough, appears to be rebounding in many age groups, causing long-lasting symptoms in adolescents and adults and threatening the lives of unvaccinated infants.

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  12. 19479

    There is another answer to how the toxin gets on the bird’s feathers besides the birds eating the beetles. Many birds use insects to preen their feathers. Ralph GundersenSt. Cloud, Minn. “Because we do find significant toxin levels in internal organs . . . we believe that [the birds] are ingesting at least some of […]

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