All Stories
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What Are Gamma-Ray Bursts? by Joshua S. Bloom
Buy this book For readers willing to dive into (or skim past) a bit of math, this book surveys the latest research on these mysterious cosmic explosions. Princeton Univ. Press, 2011, 256 p., $27.95.
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Rabbits: The Animal Answer Guide (The Animal Answer Guides: Q&A for the Curious Naturalist) by Susan Lumpkin and John Seidensticker
Buy this book Learn little-known facts about the familiar animals, whose 90 species include several of the world’s most endangered. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2011, 235 p., $24.95.
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Letters
The liver’s carbon fixation The possibility that insects can harness solar energy (SN: 1/15/11, p. 8) is no less fascinating than the ability of the mammalian liver to do the light-independent part of photosynthesis: carbon fixation. When concentrations of the amino acid methionine rise after a high-protein meal, the liver shifts gears to get rid […]
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Basic research generates jobs and competitiveness
Trained as a mechanical engineer in India, Subra Suresh researched the interfaces between engineering, biology and materials science before becoming dean of engineering at MIT and, as of October, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation. In February in Washington, D.C., at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Suresh […]
- Earth
Great quake one of the biggest ever in Japan
BLOG: Magnitude-8.9 tremor will go down in seismology’s record books
- Health & Medicine
Body & Brain
The brain 'sees' Braille, plus engineered urethras and baseball practice swings in this week's news.
- Humans
In-laws transformed early human society
A study of today's hunter-gatherers finds marital relationships help spread a social fabric.
- Humans
Burying potential conflicts of interest
A new study reports evidence that few meta-analyses of human drug trials identify who funded the those trials, even though such information could be useful in identifying potential conflicts of interest
- Chemistry
Light-sensor pulls perplexing double duty
A long-studied eye pigment appears to also detect temperature, a study in fruit flies shows.
- Physics
Tractor beams arrive two centuries early
Trekkie devices that can pull instead of push have been developed by U.S. and Chinese physicists to move small objects.
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- Health & Medicine
Digging into the roots of lupus
Two new studies implicate common white blood cells called neutrophils in this autoimmune disease.
