Uncategorized

  1. Health & Medicine

    Painkillers may damage hearts

    A retrospective study suggests that commonly used painkillers called COX-2 inhibitors may slightly increase a person's risk of having a heart attack.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Placebos are dead, long live placebos

    A study provides new evidence for the placebo effect and suggests a mechanism through which placebos might benefit patients with Parkinson's disease.

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  3. Planetary Science

    Galileo finds spires on Callisto

    The sharpest images ever taken of Jupiter's icy moon Callisto show a group of features never seen before on the remote body—icy, knoblike spires that show signs of slow but steady erosion.

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  4. Astronomy

    X rays trace fierce stellar winds

    A high-resolution X-ray view of the Rosette nebula, a nearby star-forming region, has revealed for the first time that the stellar winds from massive stars heat surrounding gas to a scorching 6 million kelvins.

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  5. Earth

    Life on the Edge

    Will a mass extinction usher in a world of weeds and pests?

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  6. 18972

    Several key ideas seem missing from “Life on the edge”: 1) the fundamental nature of overpopulation and how it combines with technology to drive mass extinction; 2) the concept of functional extinction, an example being the decimated numbers and diminished range of elephants; and 3) a reasonable extrapolation of human technology. The statement that our […]

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  7. Animals

    Social Cats

    Who says cats aren't social? And other musings from scientists who study cats in groups.

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  8. 18966

    One cannot be around cats long without observing that they have intelligence and personalities nearly as complex and diverse as people do. They communicate with each other and people, both verbally and with body language. They have preferences for whom they associate with, both human and feline, and those can change. I think that complexity […]

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  9. From the September 12, 1931 issue

    ELEPHANTS JAWBONE SHOWS LIKENESS TO SCOOP SHOVEL Where the idea of the present-day scoop shovel came from is suggested in the illustration on the cover of this weeks Science News Letter. When President Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History received the weird lower jawbone of an ancient Asian elephant, he was […]

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  10. Physics

    Caught in a Flash

    View the tip of a snapped towel (which moves faster than the speed of sound), then take a look at a bursting water balloon, a collapsing water drop, a tennis ball in mid-collision with a racket, and many other amazing images in this gallery of high-speed photos snapped by high school students. Sorry! This Web […]

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  11. Math

    Waves of Congestion

    You’re confined to a single lane as you drive along a narrow, winding road. The car in front of you suddenly slows, then just as inexplicably accelerates a short time later, only to slow again. As you keep adjusting to the leading car’s erratic speed changes, you sometimes find a clump of vehicles closely tailing […]

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  12. Math

    Waves of Congestion

    You’re confined to a single lane as you drive along a narrow, winding road. The car in front of you suddenly slows, then just as inexplicably accelerates a short time later, only to slow again. As you keep adjusting to the leading car’s erratic speed changes, you sometimes find a clump of vehicles closely tailing […]

    By