Uncategorized
- 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 […]
- Chemistry
Novel material fights against cavities
A new material that dentists might eventually put under fillings and braces secretes calcium and phosphate ions to rebuild teeth as cavities form.
- Chemistry
Argon keeps chips and lettuce crisp
A new technique replaces the air in food packages with argon instead of widely used nitrogen, improving taste and shelf life.
- Chemistry
Tiny spheres may deliver oral insulin
Researchers have developed microscopic spheres that can sneak insulin past the stomach so it can be absorbed in the small intestine.
- Health & Medicine
Study challenges surgery for lung disease
Patients with the most severe emphysema shouldn't undergo major surgery that removes part of their damaged lungs.
- Health & Medicine
Walking and eating for better health
A low-fat diet and regular exercise can ward off diabetes in people at high risk of developing the disease.
- Chemistry
Faster, Better, Cleaner?
Chemists have found that a new class of compounds, called ionic liquids, can substitute for widely used, messy organic solvents while also performing better and producing new products of interest to industry.
- Health & Medicine
Gene implicated in deadly influenza
A strain of influenza virus that struck in Hong Kong in 1997 got some of its lethality from a mutation in the gene encoding an enzyme called PB2.
-
18965
The article says that evidence of past climate variations in Antarctica may invalidate global warming as a cause for the recent demise of several ice shelves in that area. Isn’t the length of time over which the changes occurred the critical thing? If the changes are occurring over roughly the same time span as they […]
- Earth
Antarctic sediments muddy climate debate
Ocean-floor sediments drilled from Antarctic regions recently covered by ice shelves suggest that those shelves were much younger than scientists had previously thought.
-
Glutamate paths surface in schizophrenia
Three new studies indicate that altered transmission of glutamate, a key brain chemical, plays an influential role in the severe mental disorder known as schizophrenia.
- Animals
Even deep down, the right whales don’t sink
A right whale may weigh some 70 tons, but unlike other marine mammals studied so far, it tends to float rather than sink at great depths.
