Uncategorized

  1. Health & Medicine

    Born to Heal

    The controversial strategy of screening embryos to produce donors for siblings raises hopes and presents new ethical dilemmas.

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  2. 19387

    Your article quotes a pediatrician as saying, “we’re moving to selection on the basis of a trait that is of no benefit to the child to be born.” I disagree. The child to be born would have the benefit of a healthy older sibling. Even saving the parents from the trauma of a dying child […]

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  3. Math

    Mining the Tagged Web

    IBM's WebFountain project gathers and annotates Web content on a vast scale to serve as a platform for data miners.

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  4. From the March 3, 1934, issue

    High winds atop Mt. Washington, a new tool for brain studies, first chemical proof of the artificial transmutation of elements.

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  5. National Pi Day

    National Pi Day—March 14—is a time to celebrate the number 3.14159. . . . Take a look at how this remarkable number has been honored in various settings, from a middle school classroom to the Exploratorium and Harvard University. Go to: http://www.germantownacademy.org/academics/MS/PiDay/Index.htm, http://www.winternet.com/~mchristi/piday.html, http://www.nvnet.org/nvhs/dept/math/pi.html, http://mathforum.org/teachers/middle/activities/pi_day.html, http://www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/pi/, and http://www.math.harvard.edu/piday/index.html

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  6. Earth

    Lowering the Boom? Impact crater may predate extinction of the dinosaurs

    Analyses of sediments from the Yucatán in Mexico suggest that an extraterrestrial impact there more than 65 million years ago actually happened about 300,000 years before mass extinctions of dinosaurs occurred.

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  7. Worst of Two Worlds: Hybrid mosquitoes spread West Nile virus

    Interbreeding between two Old World mosquito species may explain why their blood-sucking brethren in the United States transmit West Nile virus to people as readily as they do.

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  8. Humans

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

    All we have to fear In “9/11’s Fatal Road Toll: Terror attacks presaged rise in U.S. car deaths” (SN: 1/17/04, p. 37: 9/11’s Fatal Road Toll: Terror attacks presaged rise in U.S. car deaths), it was assumed that people who switched from planes to cars after the terrorist attacks did so because of fear. However, […]

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  9. Physics

    Bubble Fusion: Once-maligned claim rebounds

    Researchers who reported 2 years ago that they created nuclear-fusion reactions inside bubbles imploding in a vat of liquid acetone have now bolstered their controversial claim with new evidence.

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  10. Anthropology

    Early Ancestors Come Together: Humanity’s roots may lie in single, diverse genus

    Newly discovered fossil teeth in eastern Africa that are more than 5 million years old suggest that the earliest members of the human family evolved as a single, anatomically diverse genus.

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  11. Animals

    Jungle Genes: First bird genome is decoded

    Researchers have unveiled a draft of the first bird genome to be sequenced, a vintage chicken.

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  12. 19386

    I know some people who carefully shield their bodies from the sun with sunscreen and clothing, and their skin is extremely pale. But if tanning acts as a protector, is it actually safer to maintain a “healthy” tan? Chris EsseBeverly Hills, Calif. Scientists continue to debate this question vigorously. Some say any tanning indicates skin-cell […]

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