Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
Do-It-Yourself: Virus recreated from synthetic DNA
In an experiment with implications for bioterrorism, scientists have used poliovirus' widely known genetic sequence to synthesize that virus from DNA and other chemicals.
- Health & Medicine
Vaccine for All? Math model supports mass smallpox inoculation
Vaccinating an entire city in response to a smallpox terrorist attack would save thousands more lives than would quarantining infected people and vaccinating anyone they contacted.
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19020
“Vaccine for All? Math model supports mass smallpox inoculation” failed to mention an important complication for any type of smallpox-inoculation program: The vaccine might not work. A smallpox outbreak could be caused by a viral strain purposely engineered to evade any commercially available vaccine. Also, how likely is it that a new smallpox vaccine would […]
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19077
I found “Voltage from the Bottom of the Sea: Ooze-dwelling microbes can power electronics” both interesting and troubling. In essence, the article describes a bioelectrochemical fuel cell that has been under constant investigation since the 1960s, when such studies were funded by NASA and the Office of Naval Research. These devices have been variously referred […]
- Tech
Voltage from the Bottom of the Sea: Ooze-dwelling microbes can power electronics
Some types of bacteria living in seafloor mud can generate enough electricity to power small electronic devices.
- Animals
Altruistic Sperm: Mouse gametes team up to power one winner
The sperm of wood mice hook together by the thousands to form high-speed teams racing toward an egg, even though only one of the pack will get the prize.
- Materials Science
Healing Wounds: Interactive dressing speeds the process
A new, easily prepared hydrogel material promotes more rapid wound healing in laboratory animals than do conventional dressings.
- Animals
Pesticides Mess with Immunity: Double whammy promotes frog deformities
Agricultural pollutants may conspire with parasites to cause the epidemic of limb deformity that's sweeping through North America's frog populations.
- Anthropology
Evolution’s Surprise: Fossil find uproots our early ancestors
Researchers announced the discovery of a nearly complete fossil skull, along with jaw fragments and isolated teeth, from the earliest known member of the human evolutionary family, which lived in central Africa between 7 million and 6 million years ago.
- Astronomy
Let There Be Spin
X-ray outbursts from two different pairs of stars in our Milky Way are providing clues about how the most rapidly rotating stars in the universe got their spin.
- Planetary Science
Pristine fragments of asteroid breakup
Planetary scientists have for the first time precisely dated a collision that smashed an asteroid into fragments.
- Paleontology
Fossil leaves yield extinction clues
Analyses of fossil leaves provide more evidence that the mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago were sudden and probably brought about by an extraterrestrial impact.
