Science News

All Stories by Science News

  1. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, Mary Roach, ed.

    Relive or discover nonfiction science writing from the last year on topics from captive orcas to organ selling. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 384 p., $14.95

  2. Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality (FT Press Science) by Samuel Barondes

    A psychiatrist describes how findings in personality research can be used in everyday life to understand others and improve relationships. FT Press, 2011, 230 p., $25.99

  3. BOOK REVIEW: The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

    Review by Laura Sanders.

  4. BOOK REVIEW: World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement by Robert Crease

    Review by Devin Powell.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association

    The mystery of HIV elite controllers, a vaccine against C. difficile, blood transfusion and infection, and contaminated public surfaces.

  6. Letters

    Bull’s-eye targeted On the picture in “Galactic bull’s-eye” (SN: 9/24/11, p. 10), I am quite puzzled. Do my eyes deceive me, or is there another bull’s-eye galaxy behind the first, located at the 1 o’clock position? How is this possible? Are these strange objects magically clustered along some line pointing towards us? Jeff Brewer, Newton […]

  7. Science Past from the issue of November 4, 1961

    ARTIFICIAL HEART VALVE — A previously hopeless condition of the heart — a defective heart valve — can now be corrected by successful surgery, it was reported at the American Heart Association meeting in Miami Beach, Fla. Many of the 500 gravely ill patients described by three teams of surgeons who did partial or total […]

  8. Science Future for November 5, 2011

    November 15 The DuPont Challenge science essay competition opens for entries. Learn more at thechallenge.dupont.com November 17 The Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books is announced. See bit.ly/bookprz   November 19 The “Beyond Earth” exhibit opens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. See www.amnh.org

  9. SN Online

    DELETED SCENES BLOG An orbiting camera catches dust devils whirling at high speeds on the Red Planet. Read “HiRISE clocks hurricane-speed winds on Mars.” ATOM & COSMOS Astronomers get a new odometer to measure faraway objects. See “Longer cosmic ruler based on black holes.” ENVIRONMENT A warming climate could be making elk more destructive to […]

  10. Olive oil injections aid in treating pneumonia

    Treating pneumonia with olive oil sounds strange, but the idea showed signs of early scientific savvy.

  11. BOOK REVIEW: The Ambonese Herbal, Volume 1: Introduction and Book I: Containing All Sorts of Trees, That Bear Edible Fruits, and Are Husbanded by People by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius; translated by E.M. Beekman

    Review by Susan Milius.

  12. Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery by Nicholas L. Tilney

    The history of modern surgery is revealed through tales of surgical breakthroughs at a Boston teaching hospital that opened in 1913. Harvard Univ. Press, 2011, 358 p., $29.95