Uncategorized
- Tech
Corny collagen
Corn engineered to produce collagen may someday replace slaughterhouse leftovers as a source of gelatin.
- Earth
Arctic snow was dirtier in early 1900s
Arctic snow collects less soot now than it did a century ago, but it's still dirtier than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
- Animals
Bats hum for sugar too
Some nectar-feeding bats metabolize sugars as rapidly as hummingbirds do.
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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.
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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 […]
- 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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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.
