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19848
Your review of Alex Vilenkin’s book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes, above, contained an often-made error. In Guth’s inflation model, during the first “zillionth of a second,” the universe did not inflate “to cosmic scale.” It inflated to about the size of a large grapefruit. Then it began its slow expansion. […]
- Humans
Summer Reading
The staff of Science News presents wide-ranging recommendations of books for readers to pack for their summer vacations.
- Humans
Letters from the June 30, 2007, issue of Science News
Hot and cold on the topic No mention was made in “In the Zone: Extrasolar planet with the potential for life” (SN: 4/28/07, p. 259) of the possibility that, being so close to its star and having a 13-day orbital period, the planet would keep the same surface to the star. Having one side baked […]
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We’re Only Human . . .
Former Science News writer Wray Herbert blogs about human behavior for the Association for Psychological Science. Go to: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/
- Math
Summing Up Literature
Statistical analyses of literary texts provide new insights about novels.
- Humans
From the June 19, 1937, issue
Raindrop disruption as the cause of lightning, phonograph recordings of the language of wild gibbons, and a possible connection between jaundice and arthritis.
- Animals
Profiles in Courtship: Flirting male fish show their best sides
Courting male guppies that sport a tad more orange on one side of their bodies than on the other tend to flash that brighter side at females.
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19847
In this article, the unusual head positions seem to indicate that these creatures died from a kind of nerve damage. One of the possibilities is oxygen deprivation. Doesn’t this suggest that most of these creatures probably died from suffocation after a sudden mud slide or other deluge? Ron McMurtryModesto, Calif. Suffocation from a mud slide, […]
- Paleontology
Jurassic CSI: Fossils indicate central nervous system damage
Fossils found in the head-thrown-back position, the so-called "dead bird" pose, probably died from central nervous system damage.
- Chemistry
Beyond Ethanol: Synthetic fuel offers promising alternative
A faster, simpler manufacturing technique could make a synthetic biofuel into an even stronger competitor to ethanol.
- Materials Science
Needling Cells: Stem cells could take their cues from silicon nanowires
Scientists have grown mouse stem cells on a bed of silicon nano-needles, hoping that they will be able to guide the cells' development through electrical stimulation.
- Paleontology
Winged dragon
A quarry on the Virginia–North Carolina border has yielded fossils of an unusual gliding reptile that lived in the region about 220 million years ago.
