Uncategorized
- Math
A Fair Deal for Housemates
A triangulated triangle with a proper Sperner labeling and an odd number (3) of elementary triangles possessing all three labels (shown in color). Four friends move into a house and find they must choose among four rooms of different size and quality. Instead of sharing the rent equally, they decide to divide the total so […]
- Health & Medicine
Targeted Therapies
Tailoring prescriptions based on a person's genes may help reduce side effects and allow the development of more personalized medicine.
- Astronomy
Super fireworks
A blast wave from supernova 1987A, the brightest stellar explosion witnessed from Earth since 1604, has begun lighting up a ring of gas surrounding the explosion.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
No signal from Mars Polar Lander
A radio signal that NASA hoped came from the vanished Mars Polar Lander has a terrestrial origin, scientists from the space agency and Stanford University have concluded.
By Ron Cowen -
Is that salamander virus flying?
Scientists searching for the carrier of the iridovirus causing a salamander disease have dismissed frogs and fish, but not birds.
By Susan Milius - Chemistry
Rooting for new antimicrobial drugs
A compound from a tree found throughout tropical Africa could prove useful as a topical antifungal medication.
By Corinna Wu - Physics
Electron spins pass imposing frontier
Electron spins crossed from one semiconductor to another with apparent ease and little or no mussing of their direction, suggesting that sandwiches of materials common in microcircuits are no obstacle to creating spin-information channels in future circuits.
By Peter Weiss - Agriculture
Sprawling over croplands
Satellite imagery indicates that sprawling urban development has been disproportionately gobbling up those lands best able to support crops.
By Janet Raloff -
Glacial warming’s pollutant threat
Some Arctic wildlife are being exposed to high amounts of toxic wastes as glacial melting releases pollutants that had been buried in ice for decades.
By Janet Raloff - Archaeology
Could the Anasazi have stayed?
New computer simulations of the changing environmental conditions around one of the Anasazi cultural centers in the first part of the last millennium suggest that drought wasn't the only factor behind a sudden collapse of the civilization.
By Sid Perkins -
19115
This article comments that factors other than drought, such as disease, may have been at work in accounting for the disappearance of some Anasazi groups. If it is found that disease was a major factor, it would be unprecedented. As far as has been determined, the Anasazi didn’t experience exotic, culture-busting pathogens until Columbus made […]
By Science News - Earth
Chinese records show typhoon cycles
Historical records compiled by local governments along China's southeastern coast during the past 1,000 years suggest that there's a 50-year cycle in the annual number of typhoons that strike the area.
By Sid Perkins