News
- Planetary Science
Roving on the Red Planet
NASA last month selected the landing sites for rovers scheduled to begin exploring the Martian surface next January.
- Earth
Seismic waves resolve continental debate
New analyses of seismic waves that have traveled deep within Earth may answer a decades-old question about the thickness of the planet's continents.
- Health & Medicine
Protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease
Inhibiting the natural protein cyclo-oxygenase-2, or COX-2, might help fight Parkinson's disease.
- Physics
To pack a strand tight, make it a helix
The optimal way to pack long strings into small spaces is to coil them into helices—particularly the types of helices found in proteins and perhaps DNA.
- Computing
Tight packaging for digitized surfaces
A novel digital compression scheme may make it practical to transmit detailed models of three-dimensional surfaces over the Internet.
- Computing
Computer grid cracks problem
A large network of powerful computers solved a 32-year-old optimization challenge known as the "nug30" quadratic assignment problem.
- Computing
Strength and weakness in diversity
Although the Internet's redundancy and diversity help it survive local node malfunctions despite its vast size and complexity, it is vulnerable to attacks aimed specifically at the most highly connected nodes.
- Health & Medicine
Antibiotic for Huntington’s disease?
In mice genetically engineered to develop an illness similar to Huntington's disease, the drug minocycline significantly delays the onset of symptoms and death.
- Health & Medicine
Microbes implicated in heart disease
Viruses and bacteria besides chlamydia may play a role in human heart disease through an immune reaction to a heartlike protein they produce.
- Health & Medicine
Genes of cholera germ deciphered
The bacterium that causes cholera has nearly 4,000 genes on its two circular chromosomes.
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Feedback matters for getting the joke
Plausible information about how others react to jokes colors a college student's own perception of the humor value of the material.
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In gauging beauty, congeniality counts
People judge others who have positive personality traits by more lenient physical criteria for attractiveness than they do those about whom they have no personality information.
