All Stories
- Animals
Vampire bats don’t learn from bad lunch
For the first time, a mammal has flunked a controlled test for developing a food aversion after getting sick just once, and that unusual creature is the common vampire bat.
- Health & Medicine
Protective virus ties up HIV docking sites
A harmless virus that seems to keep HIV infections from progressing to AIDS appears to do so by occupying key molecular receptors on immune cells.
- Physics
New approach smooths wrinkle analysis
A simple new theory of wrinkle formation predicts basic traits of wrinkled surfaces, such as how close together the folds will be, without miring scientists in impossible-to-solve equations.
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19230
I read this article with both amazement and bemusement. The technique you describe has been in practice for decades, but without a computer. Samuel T. Orton realized that dyslexics needed to be explicitly taught letter-sound relationships, a knowledge that most of us acquire automatically. I have been in private practice as an educational therapist for […]
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Brain training aids kids with dyslexia
Preliminary brain-imaging evidence indicates that after completing an intensive reading-remediation program, children with dyslexia not only read better but also exhibit signs of increased activity in key brain areas as they read.
- Math
Goldbach’s Prime Pairs
Like the elements in chemistry, prime numbers serve as building blocks in the mathematics of whole numbers. Evenly divisible only by themselves and one, primes are a rich source of speculative ideas that mathematicians often find simple to state but difficult to prove. The Goldbach conjecture is a prime example of such a conundrum. In […]
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19229
The hominid dating puzzle is continually being pieced together due to interdisciplinary work between anthropologists and geologists. I would note, however, that radiation decays (not accumulates) at a known rate in buried minerals, per the radiation half-life law. Bruce M. RuckerBerkeley, Calif.
- Anthropology
Ancient people get dated Down Under
New dating analyses indicate that people reached southeastern Australia between 50,000 and 46,000 years ago and that two human skeletons previously unearthed there were buried about 40,000 years ago.
- Humans
From the August 16, 1930, issue
MILLION VOLT GLOBE The shiny metal globe which the front cover pictures was spun on a lathe from two flat sheets of copper one-eighth inch thick. It will be used with another by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company to measure man-made lighting of 2,000,000 volts and greater. When high potentials are measured by sphere […]
- Humans
From the August 9, 1930, issue
A FISH WITH HANDS A fish of more than ordinary piscine talent is sometimes found in the drifting masses of gulfweed or Sargassum in the great mid-Atlantic eddy. It is only a little fish, a couple of inches long, but it can use its two pectoral fins for some of the functions of hands. It […]
- Humans
From the August 2, 1930, issue
SHOOTING STARS, THE STORY-TELLERS OF THE UNIVERSE Of fortunate rarity are celestial visitors like the huge meteoric mass that dug the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona about 2,000 years ago. This scar on the face of the earth near Winslow, Ariz., is four-fifths of a mile across and 450 feet deep. It is shown on […]
- Math
Software’s Origin
One of the main functions of the venerable and massive Oxford English Dictionary is to record the earliest known use of a word (or sense of a word) in English. The current edition of the dictionary dates the word software back to 1960, though researchers have discovered an 1850 occurrence of the term in a […]
