Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
Do Arctic diets protect prostates?
Marine diets appear to explain why the incidence of prostate cancer among Inuit men is lower than that of males anywhere else in the world.
By Janet Raloff - Paleontology
Reptile remains fill in fossil record
The fossil remains of a sphenodontian, an ancient, lizardlike reptile, are helping fill a 120-million-year-old gap between this creature's ancestors and today's tuatara, sole survivors of the once prominent group.
By Sid Perkins - Math
Best Guess
Economists are exploring the use of betting markets as tools for predicting the consequences of policy decisions by a government, corporation, or other institution.
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The proposed Policy Market Analysis (PAM) project might be useful if it sparks interest in market limitations. The stock market may have quickly determined who was to blame for the Challenger disaster, but it didn’t predict the disaster. An unexamined problem with the PAM plan is the presence of a superpower that can game the […]
By Science News -
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I feel that there is a major factor that nobody takes into account when modern people set out to replicate possible ancient voyages. It is that they’re attempting to get from point A to point B, which they know exists, but ancient seafarers weren’t. Setting off from Timor on a 600-mile voyage without knowing whether […]
By Science News - Anthropology
Erectus Ahoy
A researcher who explores the nautical abilities of Stone Age people by building rafts and having crews row them across stretches of ocean contends that language and other cognitive advances emerged 900,000 years ago with Homo erectus, not considerably later among modern humans, as is usually assumed.
By Bruce Bower - Humans
From the October 7, 1933, issue
ANCIENT MAP SHOWS HOW WORLD LOOKED TO COLUMBUS Startled to find the name Columbus mentioned on an old Turkish map of the Atlantic Ocean, Paul Kahle has subjected the map to closest study, finding on it important new clues to the discovery of America. In a report on his investigations, to appear in the forthcoming […]
By Science News -
Moral Sense
How do humans throughout the world decide what is right and wrong? Harvard researchers have designed a test, which consists of a series of moral dilemmas, to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying ethical judgments. The online test takes only about 10 minutes, and responses are completely confidential. Go to: http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/index.html
By Science News - Math
Goldbach Computations
In 1742, historian and mathematician Christian Goldbach (1690–1764) wrote a letter to Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) in which he suggested, in effect, that every integer greater than 5 is the sum of three prime numbers. A prime number is evenly divisible only by itself and 1. Nowadays, Goldbach’s conjecture is expressed in the following equivalent form: […]
- Earth
Toxic Controversy: Perchlorate found in milk, but risk is debated
Researchers in Texas have detected the chemical perchlorate in milk, crops, and a significant portion of the state's groundwater.
By Ben Harder -
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Your article didn’t include even a hint about the controversy about the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Many people believe that Raymond Damadian should have gotten at least a share in the prize. Damadian saw and demonstrated the potential for using MRI as a medical-scanning technique when others found the idea laughable. David L. […]
By Science News - Humans
Nobel prizes go to scientists harnessing odd phenomena
The 2003 Nobel prizes in the sciences were announced early this week.
By Nathan Seppa