Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
New twist on a pet theory
Growing up with cats may reduce a child's risk of developing asthma—unless the child's mother has asthma as well.
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19131
I was intrigued by the fact that some apoptotic cells can recover if not engulfed by another cell. DNA reassembly after the caspases tear it apart should result in many gene mutations. While most of the mutations would result in cell death, perhaps a few cells would have mutations that promote a cancerous or precancerous […]
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Get Rid of the Bodies
Scientists are learning how organisms safely clear out cell corpses.
- Plants
Fungus of the Month
Wisconsin botanist Tom Volk’s smorgasbord of a mycology Web site offers a variety of enticing distractions. You can find morel mushrooms dressed in their holiday best, fungi that ought to be avoided at a Thanksgiving feast, and much more. Be sure to check out the fungus of the month, then browse the archive of fungal […]
- Materials Science
Materials with Memory
Metal alloys and polymers that can remember a preprogrammed shape may literally reshape technologies ranging from warfare to medicine and car repair.
- Humans
From the March 29, 1930, issue
WANTED: EARLY PLANET PHOTOGRAPHS With the discovery of the planet beyond Neptune, by Lowell Observatory astronomers, many months of observation will be needed before even an approximate idea can be obtained of the orbit in which it is moving. A planet like this moves in the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth itself revolves around […]
- Tech
Ear to Traffic
Listen to the sounds of Web site activity, as massaged by statistician Mark Hansen of Lucent Technologies and translated into musical tones by audio artist Ben Rubin of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Intriguing audio samples offer hints of how aural cues might complement visualization techniques in data mining. Requires a Web browser with RealPlayer […]
- Math
The Incredible Pi Code
Extending this colored grid reveals (to some eyes) a provocative portrait. Researchers have expended a great deal of effort computing as many of those digits as computer technology and mathematical methods allow. Last year, Yasumasa Kanada of the University of Tokyo calculated pi to 206,158,430,000 decimal digits. A high school student has now smashed that […]
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19124
Your story didn’t surprise me. I doubted it the first time I saw it. When I read the original story (“Might night-lights blight sight?” SN: 5/29/99, p. 351), I said, “Wait a minute! Wouldn’t that mean that children raised north of the Arctic Circle should have unusually high levels of myopia?” Did the researchers involved […]
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19123
The opening paragraphs of this article make the curious observation that silicon dioxide is “little noticed outside the semiconductor industry.” That is, of course, nonsense. Silicon dioxide, widely known as quartz, is known to far more people than is silicon, the stuff of semiconductors. It has been valued by humans since we first started fashioning […]
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19122
I found this article interesting and informative. However, the story of life, both plant and animal, is the story of adaptation to changing environments. I am sure that if CO2 levels were to double in 50 or 100 years, most plants and animals would have little problem adapting. Considering that ice-core studies indicate that CO2 […]
- Math
DNA’s Error-Detecting Code
Computers employ a variety of schemes to check whether a chunk of digital information–transmitted as a message, stored in a database, or functioning as a set of instructions–remains error-free. Such error-detection codes would detect, for example, the change of one bit from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 in corrupted data. Nucleotides may be […]
