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19145
Your recent article on the exact nature of bubbles in beer and other beverages keyed an old memory. In Cleveland, during Christmas, one brewery used to bring out its holiday oddity for sale. They billed it as “the pale stale ale with the foam on the bottom . . . and the top!” There really […]
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Ah, my pretty, you’re…#&! a beetle pile!
Hundreds of tiny, young blister beetles cluster into lumps resembling female bees and hitchhike on the male bees that they seduce.
- Tech
Civilians get better GPS
President Clinton directed the Defense Department to stop degrading signals from 24 Global Positioning System satellites, allowing civilians to receive the same location-pinpointing accuracy long available to the U.S. military.
- Plants
New gene-altering strategy tested on corn
Scientists have created herbicide-resistant corn with a new kind of genetic engineering that involves subtly altering one of the plant's own genes rather than adding a new gene.
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19184
In this article, I was surprised to read that chimeras harboring a mutation are not medically useful. Consider the value of cytokine-receptor mutations in humans, with respect to HIV. It’s likely that introducing some genetic mutations can inhibit viruses or bacteria in a host. Freda Wasserstein Robbins New Jersey City University Jersey City, N.J.
- Astronomy
X-ray satellite goes the distance
Using the sharp X-ray eye of an orbiting observatory, astronomers have employed a novel method to measure distance within the Milky Way.
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Leggy beetles show how insects lost limbs
Inactivating two genes in red flour beetles causes grubs to grow lots of legs—and provides clues to the puzzle of the evolution of the six-legged body plan.
- Paleontology
Africa’s east coast netted ancient humans
Excavations of an exposed reef on Africa's Red Sea coast indicate that humans lived there 125,000 years ago, pushing back the date for the earliest seaside settlement by at least 10,000 years.
- Humans
From the October 22, 1932, issue
SUN, MOON AND STARS IN THE MOVIES Joshua, it is recorded, commanded the sun and the moon to stand still and they obeyed him. In this modern Yankee land and age of hustle, we are much less interested in making things stand still than in making them move faster. Present-day Joshuas would be more likely […]
- Health & Medicine
A Most Dreadful Pest
Yellow fever was a deadly scourge that had a devastating effect on lives and economies throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This engrossing Web exhibit features historical documents from the Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection at the University of Virginia. It focuses on the work of the Reed Commission, which proved that the Aedes aegypti […]
