All Stories by Science News
- Earth
How Green Are Your Travels?
This website offers a rough gauge of the carbon-dioxide emissions associated with flying around the country. Just plug in a starting point and destination and it gives you a round-trip estimate of the greenhouse-gas “footprint” of your travel. The goal is to encourage visitors to buy carbon-offsets to cover the greenhouse-gas cost of their treks. […]
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19880
My cat has been doing for years what scientists at the University of St. Andrews reported of orangutans: motioning for healthy portions of their favorite foods. Except that four tins of cat food later, my cat is still motioning “Not that kind, wrong flavor.” Sally YoungNewport News, Va.
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19879
Although multinational agreements on global warming try to spread the burden among all nations, data from the MILAGRO project in Mexico City suggest that the major responsibility for excess production of greenhouse gases and other pollutants lies with the megacities, which constitute a rather small number of culprits and ones that not all nations possess. […]
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19878
Two recent articles hit on the same theme. This one discussed the recent sharp increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The summary of the new book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (SN: 11/17/07, p. 319) hit much closer to the mark. If you want to know why these diagnoses have increased so […]
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The Venter Decryption: Biologist decodes his own genome
For the first time, one man's genome, including both sets of chromosomes, has been decoded.
- Humans
Letters from the September 8, 2007, issue of Science News
Patent pending If Drs. Glass and Venter succeed in assembling a viable synthetic bacterial genome (“Life Swap: Switching genomes converts bacteria,” SN: 6/30/07, p. 403), will the genome or the new life form itself be patentable? Virgil H. SouleFrederick, Md. The team that performed this work stirred controversy when it applied for a patent on […]
- Humans
From the August 28, 1937, issue
Trying to revive an ancient Australian tree called Great-Grandfather Peter, first report of the eerie light known as Cerenkov radiation, and the discovery of a new vitamin.
- Animals
Cicada Serenades
One sound that characterizes American summers is the cicada chorus. The insects’ long, drawn out serenades can be loud and ethereal, reminiscent of some cross between the sounds of rustling and scraping. Half a world away, Borneo’s cicadas belt out very different melodies. Although some sound fairly familiar, one available at this German site is […]
- Humans
Letters from the September 1, 2007, issue of Science News
Risk reversal? “Diabetes drug might hike heart risk” (SN: 6/23/07, p. 397) reports 86 heart attacks among 15,560 rosiglitazone (Avandia) users, versus 72 others in a control group of 12,283. A study coauthor then says that “after statistical adjustment, that yields a 43 percent higher risk of heart attacks among rosiglitazone users.” Simple arithmetic would […]
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19877
This article describes the difficulty of moving from exporting one product to exporting another in terms of a “distance” between various products. I would imagine, however, that a nation that already manufactures computers, for example, could easily move into calculators, but that the reverse might not be true. Did the researchers consider the directionality of […]
- Computing
Can You Face It?
The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, has developed some face-transforming software that allows people to change the age, sex, or ethnicity of the person in an image that you export from your computer. Or, blend features from a number of faces into one amalgam. If all that is too creepy, then just import art […]
- Humans
From the August 21, 1937, issue
Solar astronomers argue over the influence of sunspots on the weather, Hubble (the man, not the telescope) finds a comet, and paramecia discover sex.
