Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
Vitamin may guard against mental decline
The B vitamin niacin may protect people against Alzheimer's disease and other forms of mental decline.
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Brain protein peps up and soothes rodents
A recently identified brain hormone increases wakefulness and appears to suppress fear when it's injected into rodents.
- Health & Medicine
Bright nights kindle cancers in mice
Data from mice subjected to constant illumination suggest that artificial light may increase risks of lung and liver cancers and leukemia.
- Animals
Policing egg laying in insect colonies
Kinship by itself can't explain the vigilante justice of some ant, bee, and wasp workers.
- Planetary Science
Martian ice could be sculpting surface patterns
Images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor suggest that most areas with geological features known as patterned ground appear at high latitudes.
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Some corals like it hotter
The heat-tolerant algae that live symbiotically within some corals may enable their hosts to adapt to the warmer water temperatures projected to accompany long-term climate change.
- Animals
How dingoes got down under
DNA analysis suggests that Australia got its famous dingoes from a very few dogs brought along with people fanning out from East Asia some 5,000 years ago.
- Tech
A new deep-sea submersible
Scientists have announced a 4-year, $21.6-million design-and-construction effort to replace the aging research submersible Alvin.
- Plants
Smokey the Gardener
Wildfire smoke by itself, without help from heat, can trigger germination in certain seeds, but just what the vital compound in that smoke might be has kept biologists busy for years.
- Math
A Better Distorted View
The mathematics used to describe diffusion can also be used to generate maps based on population data.
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19454
I suggest that world maps with countries colored by some statistical feature often would be more useful if done on a cartogram that is a compromise between population and size of countries, rather than on a map with a simple Mercator projection. The problem of Earth’s curvature mentioned in the article would not seem to […]
- Humans
Letters from the August 28, 2004, issue of Science News
In spite of them? Evidently, death waits for no one, except in Belgium (“Death Waits for No One: Deferred demises take a couple of hits,” SN: 6/5/04, p. 356: Death Waits for No One: Deferred demises take a couple of hits). Around 40 years ago, Belgian doctors went on strike for 3 months. If I […]
