All Stories by Science News
- Astronomy
When Galaxies Collide
Dramatic images from the largest computer simulation ever of a plausible collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies highlight this report from the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Astrophysicist John Dubinski describes the science underlying the computations. Go to: http://www.npaci.edu/online/v4.9/galaxies2.html and http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/.
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From the August 1, 1931, issue
THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH VALLEY Death Valley is a deep trough between two mountain ranges. It is something over 100 miles long and averages 10 miles wide. Within less than 100 miles of Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the United States proper, it sinks its lowest depression to 276 feet below sea level. This […]
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18939
I am writing in response to an article in the July 28 issue, “Having gathered moss, water drops roll.” You should have taken the time to find out that Lycopodium is not a moss. It’s true that a common name for the plant is club moss, but Lycopodium is in the division Lycophyta, sometimes called […]
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From the July 25, 1931, issue
98-TON BUTTERFLY VALVE, A SIMPLE DEVICE A good place for a photographer to take a picture, this penstock will be serving an even better purpose when it begins to carry water through the dam to turn the huge turbines of the Ruskin power plant, British Columbia. The flow of water through this 19-foot-diameter intake pipe […]
- Planetary Science
Space Flight Basics
For armchair space explorers, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers a tutorial on how to operate an interplanetary space mission. Originally created a decade ago, the newly updated guide includes information on spacecraft engineering, mission design, trajectories, launch, navigation, telecommunications, and much more. Go to: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/
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18938
In grad school, I read and learned from Ernst Mayr’s Populations, Species, and Evolution (1963, 1970, Harvard University Press). I think that “Alarming butterflies and go-getter fish” extremely simplifies Mayr’s position on speciation. The article says that Mayr focuses solely on geographic separation, “allopathic speciation.” This ignores the fact that Mayr discussed a variety of […]
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18937
Your story on trace amines in the brain neglected to mention the most interesting and well-studied of these, the powerful endogenous hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). DMTs role in endogenous psychosis was studied intensively in the 1960s, before research with these drugs became so controversial. We recently subjected DMT to intensive study in a group of normal […]
- Humans
Native American Geometry
The circle serves as starting point for this exploration of Native American geometry. Developed by Chris Hardaker for schoolchildren in Arizona, the Web site vividly illustrates the geometric principles that underlie Native American designs. Go to: http://www.earthmeasure.com/
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From the July 18, 1931, issue
AIR VIBRATIONS IN ORGAN PIPES REVEALED BY PATTERN IN SMOKE Making smoke rings in organ pipes, to show up the little cyclones that whirl in them when obstacles are placed in the openings, is the curious mode of research adopted by a London physicist, Prof. E.N. da C. Andrade of University College. These little cyclones, […]
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18936
I am grateful to Science News for having achieved with your words what no doctor has managed in the past 20 years: cured my diabetes. I now find that my average blood sugar falls safely within the range 80 to 240 milligrams per deciliter cited in the article as normal. On the strength of this […]
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18960
This concerns the story discussing the ability of flowers to protect their reproductive parts by closing up during a rain storm. I recently observed what may be other mechanisms to achieve the same end in flowers that can’t close up. As a storm approaches, Queen Anne’s lace dips its flat umbels to a vertical position […]
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18959
It may help to understand where that “missing antimatter” is if we just look around us. A proton has a positive charge–the sum of the quark polarities. If the (negative) electrical charge resident on the proton is in a reverse-time continuum, we would see it as positive. The mass remains the same. Hence, we have […]
