Uncategorized
- Astronomy
Enlarging a Mars photo album
A new set of more than 18,000 images of Mars, posted online in early October, features the sharpest picture of the Red Planet ever taken by an orbiting spacecraft.
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19196
The article claims that Lake Agassiz became the world’s largest lake. It seems to me that the same conditions should have occurred in Asia. Shouldn’t you compare Lake Agassiz to glacier-dam-produced lakes in Asia and contemporary freshwater versions of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea? Robert W. DavisMillburn, N.J. According to Martin Jakobsson of […]
- Earth
Once Upon a Lake
As Earth warmed at the end of the last ice age, the immense volumes of fresh water that occasionally and catastrophically spilled from Lake Agassiz—the long-defunct lake that formed as the ice sheet smothering Canada melted—may have caused global climate change and sudden rises in sea level.
- Math
Election Selection
By ignoring how voters might rank all the candidates in an election, the plurality system opens the floodgates to unsettling, paradoxical results when there are three or more candidates.
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19195
This article says that women taking some kinds of over-the-counter painkillers are more likely than others to have high blood pressure. The conclusion that the painkiller “boosts their chance of developing high blood pressure,” however, is unfounded. It’s also plausible that whatever causes the women to take the pain medication raises blood pressure. Geoffrey A. […]
- Health & Medicine
Hidden Effect? Hypertension risk linked to common, over-the-counter pain relievers
Women who take ibuprofen or acetaminophen for headaches or inflammation boost their chances of developing high blood pressure.
- Astronomy
Iron-Poor Star: Closing in on the birth of the first stars
Astronomers have found a star so old and metal poor that its chemical composition carries vestiges of the origin of our galaxy.
- Animals
Fish Fraud: Cleaners show off before biting clients
Some of the reef fish that make their living by nibbling parasites off other fish may be luring clients into scams by offering free massages.
- Materials Science
Metal Manipulation: Technique yields hard but stretchy materials
Researchers have combined a standard metalworking technology—rolling—with a programmed sequence of cooling and heating steps to process copper into a form that contains both nanoscale and microscale crystal grains.
- Planetary Science
Echoes of Icequakes: Simple probe could measure Europa’s ocean and icy shell
A football-size space probe could provide a low-cost way to determine whether there's a liquid ocean on the Jovian moon Europa.
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Neural Shape-Up: Brain anticipates object perception
A new brain-scan study indicates that so-called higher visual areas predict the structure of incoming visual information and suppress activity in the visual system's entry area to foster object recognition.
