Uncategorized
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Believers gain no health advantage
Strong religious beliefs or practices don't appear to benefit depressed or socially isolated heart attack survivors.
- Health & Medicine
When antioxidants go bad
Overproduction of antioxidants, usually thought to be beneficial, is the cause of an inherited heart disease.
- Humans
The Wealth of Nations
Analysis of the connections among different types of economic activities explains why some countries succeed, and others fail, in diversifying their economies.
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19877
This article describes the difficulty of moving from exporting one product to exporting another in terms of a “distance” between various products. I would imagine, however, that a nation that already manufactures computers, for example, could easily move into calculators, but that the reverse might not be true. Did the researchers consider the directionality of […]
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Rethinking Bad Taste
Many animals use mimicry to gain a competitive advantage, but are there degrees of cheating?
- Computing
Can You Face It?
The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, has developed some face-transforming software that allows people to change the age, sex, or ethnicity of the person in an image that you export from your computer. Or, blend features from a number of faces into one amalgam. If all that is too creepy, then just import art […]
- Humans
From the August 21, 1937, issue
Solar astronomers argue over the influence of sunspots on the weather, Hubble (the man, not the telescope) finds a comet, and paramecia discover sex.
- Earth
O River Deltas, Where Art Thou? Coastal sinking stalls sediment accumulation
The western coast of Siberia lacks river deltas because of the way the terrain has subsided since the end of the last ice age.
- Physics
Crueltyfree: Counting photons without killing them
A delicate quantum measurement counts photons without destroying them.
- Astronomy
Separation Anxiety: Cosmic collision may shed light on dark matter
The debris from an ancient collision of galaxy clusters seems to show cosmic dark matter behaving in a puzzling way.
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Groomed for Trouble: Mice yield obsessive-compulsive insights
Mice lacking a gene that makes a certain brain protein display behaviors much like those of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a poorly understood psychiatric ailment.
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19876
Researchers may only recently have discovered that female zebra finches are more likely to flirt with strangers when background noise goes up, but young male humans seem to have known that about females of their species for eons. Jim SchneringerDallas, Texas
