Humans

Health & Medicine

Chocolate Therapies (with Recipe for Janet’s Chocolate Medicinal Mousse Pie)

Recently harvested cacao pods. Each holds several dozen seeds, from which chocolate and cocoa are made. (Allen M. Young) Copy of 1688 engraving by Phillippe Sylvestre Dufour of South American native with a chocolate pot and drinking cup at his feet and a molinet to stir the medicinal brew in his left hand. In his […]

Humans

From the March 15, 1930, issue

LARGEST BOILER One of the three largest boilers in the world is shown on the front cover. The boilers were recently installed in the East River station of the New York Edison Company to run the largest single-unit electric generator in the world. If this 215,000-horsepower turbo-generator had been developed in 1906, it could have […]

Health & Medicine

Is Snoring a DiZZZease?

Snoring may trigger high blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease or stroke.

Health & Medicine

HIV sexual spread exploits immune sentinels

The virus that causes AIDS latches onto a protein called DC-SIGN to hitch a ride on immune cells in mucus membranes and spread through the body.

Health & Medicine

Cell transplants combat diabetes in mice

Scientists have successfully reversed diabetes in mice by harvesting immature pancreatic cells that make insulin from one mouse, growing them in culture, and transplanting them into a mouse with the disease, which then recedes.

Health & Medicine

Smoking Gun? Mouse tests link nicotine to crib death

Nicotine may impair a molecule that's necessary for arousing people and other animals from sleep, an effect that could account for the heightened risk of sudden infant death syndrome in babies born to women who smoked during pregnancy.

Humans

From the March 8, 1930, issue

LEAVES OLDER THAN GRAND CANYON FOUND Fossil remains of plants found in the walls of the Grand Canyon show that many millions of years ago stunted vegetation of very singular aspect grew in a great, red, sandy floodplain under a semi-arid climate in northern Arizona. This great red land has been found by Dr. David […]

Humans

Small Steps: World Summit delegates wrangle over eco-friendly future

Twenty thousand delegates from around the world met in Johannesburg last week for a contentious World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Humans

From the September 10, 1932, issue

COVER PICTURE PURSUED OVER NEW ENGLAND HILLS By chasing a blue hole in the screen of cloud that covered part of New England, a party of eclipse observers that included Prof. John Q. Stewart, Princeton astronomer, successfully saw the corona in clear sky and obtained the News Letter‘s cover picture. Originally they planned to view […]

Health & Medicine

Targeted Therapies

Tailoring prescriptions based on a person's genes may help reduce side effects and allow the development of more personalized medicine.

Archaeology

Could the Anasazi have stayed?

New computer simulations of the changing environmental conditions around one of the Anasazi cultural centers in the first part of the last millennium suggest that drought wasn't the only factor behind a sudden collapse of the civilization.

Health & Medicine

Protein flags colon, prostate cancers

A compound first identified as a possible culprit in Huntington's disease may be an indicator of cancers of the prostate gland and colon.