Uncategorized

  1. Materials Science

    Vision Quest

    Increasing numbers of people with less-than-perfect vision can now wear contact lenses, thanks to innovations in lens design and materials.

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  2. Animals

    Bees log flight distances, train with maps

    After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.

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  3. Earth

    DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers

    Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.

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  4. Chemistry

    Tums of the Sea

    Ocean scientists question whether the seas can handle rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset

    Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.

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  6. Physics

    Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms

    Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.

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  7. Anthropology

    Ancient populations were game for growth

    Archaeological evidence of a Stone Age shift in dietary preferences, from slow to swift small game, suggests that the human population rose sharply sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

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  8. Anthropology

    Drowned land holds clue to first Americans

    A map of a now-flooded region charts the path that Asians may have taken to first reach the Americas.

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  9. Humans

    Treaty Nears on Gene-Altered Exports

    In an effort to help preserve biodiversity, negotiators from 130 nations crafted rules of conduct for international trade in living, genetically engineered organisms.

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  10. From the February 1, 1930, issue

    WHOSE MEMORY LIVES IN THIS EGYPTIAN TOMB? The great tomb of an unknown Egyptian who lived about 2800 B.C. has been discovered and entered by the expedition from the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, working at Meydum, fifty miles south of Cairo. A report just received from the director, Alan Rowe, states that the […]

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  11. Beams of Our Lives

    What are energy beams? How do they carry information, cure disease, illuminate distant points, or create images on our television screens? Answers to these and other questions you probably never thought to ask can be found on a Web site hosted by the Center for Beam Physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Funky stick […]

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  12. Math

    A Minimal Winter’s Tale

    The organizers of the Breckenridge snow sculpture championships in Colorado must be getting used to having a mathematical element in their annual competition. A simple version of Enneper’s surface just before (above) and just after (below) it self-intersects. The award-winning snow sculpture of Enneper’s surface. For the second year in a row, a team assembled […]

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