Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
Lost and found
Researchers have shown that a drug may shepherd a mutated protein—gone astray in people with cystic fibrosis—into its proper place.
- Health & Medicine
Processing corn boosts antioxidants
Cooking sweet corn increases its disease-fighting antioxidant activity, despite decreasing its vitamin C content.
- Planetary Science
It’s only a sharper moon
Astronomers have taken what appears to be the sharpest image of the moon ever recorded from Earth.
- Astronomy
Lonely Universe
In a universe dominated by a mysterious antigravity force, dubbed dark energy, distant galaxies will eventually recede from each other faster than the speed of light and observers in our Milky Way some 50 billion years from now will see only a handful of other galaxies in the sky.
- Math
Golden Blossoms, Pi Flowers
In the head of a sunflower, the tiny florets that turn into seeds are typically arranged in two intersecting families of spirals, one winding clockwise and the other winding counterclockwise. Count the number of florets along a spiral and you are likely to find 21, 34, 55, 89, or 144. Indeed, if 34 floret (or […]
- Health & Medicine
Inflammatory Ideas
Researchers are gathering evidence that inflammation precedes and predicts diabetes.
- Math
Losing to Win
It’s a gift to born losers. Researchers have demonstrated that two games of chance, each guaranteed to give a player a predominance of losses in the long term, can add up to a winning outcome if the player alternates randomly between the two games. This striking new result in game theory is now called Parrondo’s […]
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From the March 1, 1930, issue
BEAUTY IN A DITCH Among the photographs that attracted much attention at an exhibition of the London Salon of Photography not long ago was one that stood out as a gleaming example of the beauty to be found in common things–even in ugly things–by a sufficiently discerning eye. S. Uyeda saw a lot of big, […]
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Weird Science Projects
The name of this site–Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen–sums it up nicely. It describes, in detail, classic science projects originally published in books and magazines from the 1930s to 1960s. The list includes lessons on how to build your own seismograph, manufacture strange goo, or make pickles glow. The site even explains […]
- Math
Packing spheres around a sphere
A mathematician has proved that the optimal arrangement of 12 identical spheres around and touching a 13th is a highly symmetric pattern based on the 12-faced geometric shape known as the dodecahedron.
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19110
I’m glad to see that other mathematicians are working on the fair-division problem. The challenge is not so much with the optimizing-allocating procedures or algorithms but with how to explain the process and results in a way that is satisfying, understandable, and binding to the participants without seeming to benefit some distant party, like the […]
- Math
A fair deal for housemates
A new mathematical recipe for fair division allows people to resolve disputes over the splitting up of rent, goods, or even burdensome chores.
