All Stories by Science News
- Humans
From the June 26, 1937, issue
Fur fashions from Ethiopian monkeys, the Big Bang as the source of cosmic rays, and ensuring airline pilots get enough oxygen.
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19851
It has been reported that vinegar, taken before a meal, can lower postmeal blood glucose. If so, the lowering of postmeal blood glucose by alcohol, as reported in your article, may be the result of the alcohol being metabolized to acetic acid by the body. William HaagBloomer, Wis. While both alcohol and vinegar lower blood […]
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19850
If Drs. Glass and Venter succeed in assembling a viable synthetic bacterial genome, 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 a synthetic bacterial genome in October 2006. The patent hasn’t yet been […]
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19849
With respect to this article on kimberlites, diamonds, and mantle fractures, may I suggest that the fractures in question emanate from hypervelocity bolide impacts on Earth. There is ample spatial correlation between impact craters formed by oblique impacts with crustal-fracture systems that propagated outward along the direction of impact. Gregory C. HermanNew Jersey Geological SurveyTrenton, […]
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19848
Your review of Alex Vilenkin’s book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes, above, contained an often-made error. In Guth’s inflation model, during the first “zillionth of a second,” the universe did not inflate “to cosmic scale.” It inflated to about the size of a large grapefruit. Then it began its slow expansion. […]
- Humans
Summer Reading
The staff of Science News presents wide-ranging recommendations of books for readers to pack for their summer vacations.
- Humans
Letters from the June 30, 2007, issue of Science News
Hot and cold on the topic No mention was made in “In the Zone: Extrasolar planet with the potential for life” (SN: 4/28/07, p. 259) of the possibility that, being so close to its star and having a 13-day orbital period, the planet would keep the same surface to the star. Having one side baked […]
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We’re Only Human . . .
Former Science News writer Wray Herbert blogs about human behavior for the Association for Psychological Science. Go to: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/
- Humans
From the June 19, 1937, issue
Raindrop disruption as the cause of lightning, phonograph recordings of the language of wild gibbons, and a possible connection between jaundice and arthritis.
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19847
In this article, the unusual head positions seem to indicate that these creatures died from a kind of nerve damage. One of the possibilities is oxygen deprivation. Doesn’t this suggest that most of these creatures probably died from suffocation after a sudden mud slide or other deluge? Ron McMurtryModesto, Calif. Suffocation from a mud slide, […]
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19846
This article describes attaching a drug molecule to a molecule from the rabies virus that enables the drug to cross the blood-brain barrier. This suggests a possible danger if the ability to produce the molecule could be transferred to the genomes of disease organisms in the wild. If the field of genetic engineering for drug […]
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19845
In this article, the study is reported as the “first confirmed acoustic example of classic defensive mimicry.” Not so. In 1986, Matthew P. Rowe and colleagues published in Ethology an elegant study demonstrating that the burrowing owl’s hiss is acoustic defensive mimicry of the rattlesnake’s rattle. William K. HayesLoma Linda UniversityLoma Linda, Calif.
