Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
The Long Road to Beta Cells
In their quest to cure type 1 diabetes, scientists are finding that turning stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells is a lot harder than it first appeared.
- Ecosystems
Prairie Revival
Prairie restoration is attracting interest, but because so little long-term monitoring and comparative studies have been done, researchers are still wondering whether it's really possible to re-create a prairie.
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19908
This article talks of restoring prairies to an earlier state, but if the concepts summarized in Charles C. Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus are even within shouting distance of reality, the “native prairie” being pursued by some represents a fleeting moment in time created by the destruction of a civilization […]
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- Humans
Letters from the December 15, 2007, issue of Science News
Fuzzy logic Astronomer Masanori Iye of the National Observatory of Japan blames the blurry appearance of meteor trails at about 100 kilometers altitude on the fact that they were photographed with telescopes focused at infinity (“Out-of-focus find,” SN: 9/29/07, p. 205). But optics teaches that any object much farther away than the focal length of […]
- Humans
From the December 4, 1937, issue
The perfect beauty of frost rime, the sun's surprising influence on earth, and digging up evidence of ancient domestic cats.
- Earth
Water Vapor by Any Other Name
One can learn a lot by studying clouds—or just relax and soak in their beauty. Subscribers to both schools can find plenty of fodder in the British Cloud Appreciation Society’s gallery of nearly 3,200 photos. They’re organized by meteorological type, optical effects, and even by what a cloud might resemble—like “Casper the Ghost, spotted over […]
- Planetary Science
A sunlike star’s early development
A new infrared portrait of an embryonic sunlike star reveals an early, crucial step in the process of planet formation.
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Perchlorate Pump: Molecule draws contaminant into breast milk
A molecular pump meant to transport iodine also concentrates perchlorate, an environmental pollutant, in breast milk.
- Health & Medicine
Angiogenesis Factors: Tracking down the suspects in blood vessel growth near tumors
Tumors enlist certain bone marrow cells in efforts to grow new blood vessels for self-nourishment.
- Physics
15 = 3 × 5: Photons do their first quantum math
Physicists have performed the first calculation involving manipulation of the quantum states of photons, another step on the road to optical quantum computers.
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19907
I was disappointed to see optical quantum computers described as “exponentially faster than ordinary computers” in your article. Despite frequent misuse in the lay press, “exponentially” does not mean “a whole bunch.” It refers to a specific mathematical functional relationship, not merely a comparison of two numbers. The article doesn’t describe any such function. Even […]
