More Stories from the October 23, 2010 issue
- Tech
To tame traffic, go with the flow
Lights should respond to cars, a study concludes, not the other way around.
- Tech
A compass that lights the way
Researchers develop a highly sensitive optical instrument for measuring magnetic fields.
- Planetary Science
Life’s cold start
Primordial molecules could have replicated themselves in a slushy place, new experiments suggest.
- Humans
Clues to child sacrifices found in Inca building
Children killed in elaborate rituals were drawn from all over the South American empire, new research suggests.
- Life
X-rays in 3-D show nanosized details
A new X-ray microscope technique peers inside materials to reveal their inner nature.
- Tech
Everything really is relative
Two tabletop experiments demonstrate the time-warping principle at the human scale.
- Life
Lone Star cats rescue cousins in Sunshine State
Florida panther numbers have tripled since the introduction of females from Texas injected vital genetic diversity, a new report says.
- Humans
Neandertals blasted out of existence, archaeologists propose
An eruption may have wiped out Neandertals in Europe and western Asia, clearing the region for Stone Age Homo sapiens.
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- Life
A salty tail
Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.
- Physics
Glacier found to be deeply cracked
A new study finds deep fissures in Alaska ice that could affect future responses to melting.
- Life
A thousand points of height
A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.
- Space
Distant world could support life
For the first time, astronomers detect a planet beyond the solar system with the potential to be habitable.
- Life
Massive count a drop in the bucket
As the decade-long Census of Marine Life totes up thousands of new species, it leaves much yet to discover in the world’s oceans.
- Science & Society
2010 Nobels recognize potential of basic science to shape the world
Prizes go to IVF, graphene and ‘carbon chemistry at its best’
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Science Future for October 23, 2010
October 28 – 30 National Science Teachers Association holds its Kansas City area conference on science education. Go to www.nsta.org/conferences/2010kan November 1 Slated launch date for shuttle Discovery’s final spaceflight. See www.nasa.gov/missions November 5Nomination deadline for the 15th Annual Carnegie Science Awards. Go to www.carnegiesciencecenter.org
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Vitamin D is essential to the modern indoor lifestyle
It’s known that vitamin D is necessary for proper bone formation and maintenance. But recent decades have seen a torrent of studies suggesting that vitamin D can also affect many other aspects of health; some scientists have come to consider the daily recommended intake of 400 international units of vitamin D far too low. Michael […]
- Life
The unusual suspects
With no obvious culprit in sight, geneticists do broader sweeps to identify autism’s causes.
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Cosmic dioramas
Metamaterials may offer windows into other worlds.
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Letters
Music on the mind Common experience confirms that music serves language (“A mind for music,” SN: 8/14/10, p. 17). A person unfamiliar with, say, the musical South Pacific has only to listen to its songs a few times to sing the lyrics from memory. Another who tries to memorize the lyrics by just hearing them […]
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Science Past from the issue of October 22, 1960
WORLD TV VIA SATELLITES SET AT $170,000,000 — Fifty improved courier-type communications satellites would provide world-wide telephone and television facilities for a mere $170,000,000: $100,000,000 for the satellites and $70,000,000 for the ground stations. These are the figures the American Telephone and Telegraph Company estimated for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. Without the […]
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The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen
Review by Sid Perkins.
