Uncategorized
-
-
What’s the Buzz?
The highly unusual “bzzzpeek” Web site gives you a chance to compare how people in different countries try to imitate animal (and some vehicle) sounds. Click on an animal or vehicle symbol, then on the language of the native speaker, to hear each result. The animals include sheep, pigs, turkeys, frogs, dogs, and cats. Among […]
- Humans
Space Woes: NASA programs reel from shuttle problems
Technological problems for NASA's space shuttle Discovery, such as falling foam and dangling insulation, are causing safety worries and throwing a crimp into the U.S. space program.
- Tech
Speed Reader: Gene sequencing gets a boost
The first lab-ready technology to challenge the dominant gene-sequencing technique known as the Sanger method taps miniaturization and parallel reading of hundreds of thousands of DNA stretches to boost speed and slash cost.
- Health & Medicine
Virus Attack on Cancer: Heat makes neglected technology work better
Adding heat sensitizes tumor cells to the effects of a genetically modified virus, which then can kill them.
- Earth
Multifaceted Mineral: Intense heat, pressure bear new form of silica
By squeezing a mineral sample to pressures higher than those deep within Earth, then zapping it with a laser, scientists have created a crystalline form of silicon dioxide previously unknown on Earth.
- Health & Medicine
From Famine, Schizophrenia: Starvation gives birth to personality disorder
Women who go severely hungry during early pregnancy face twice the normal risk of having a child who develops schizophrenia in adulthood.
-
19581
While no obstetrician nowadays advocates starving expectant mothers, there was a general belief for many years that a pregnant woman should gain minimal weight. It might be of interest to know if this practice had any influence on the incidence of schizophrenia. Nelson MaransSilver Spring, Md.
- Planetary Science
Bigger than Pluto: Tenth planet or icy leftover?
Astronomers have found a body larger and more distant than Pluto, the biggest object found in the solar system since Neptune and its moon Triton were discovered in 1846.
-
Double Dog: Researchers produce first cloned canine
The dogged pursuit of a South Korean research team has produced Snuppy, the world's first cloned canine.
- Humans
Letters from the August 6, 2005, issue of Science News
Empty threat? “Empty Nets: Fisheries may be crippling themselves by targeting the big ones” (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360) reads as if there is something to be alarmed about. By selectively catching large fish, we have reduced “the mean size [of food fish to] one-fifth of what it was.” This is not cause for alarm. It […]
-
