Uncategorized
- Physics
Radioactive sprinkles keep machines true
Needing tiny radioactive sources to calibrate medical scanners with ever-sharper vision, an Australian team dipped tiny balls the size of candy sprinkles into a radioactive liquid.
- Planetary Science
A New Flight Plan
President Bush recently unveiled an ambitious plan for a manned mission to Mars, using the moon as a testing area and stepping-stone, but for many planetary scientists the moon is a desirable destination in and of itself.
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19388
I can think of a place other than the moon where NASA could develop a closed life-support system for staging rehearsals of manned Mars exploration. Why not Earth? Advantages would include a protective atmosphere, a day length closer to the Martian sol, bone-and-muscle-friendly gravity, and easy access to mechanical and medical resources. The cost would […]
- Health & Medicine
Born to Heal
The controversial strategy of screening embryos to produce donors for siblings raises hopes and presents new ethical dilemmas.
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19387
Your article quotes a pediatrician as saying, “we’re moving to selection on the basis of a trait that is of no benefit to the child to be born.” I disagree. The child to be born would have the benefit of a healthy older sibling. Even saving the parents from the trauma of a dying child […]
- Math
Mining the Tagged Web
IBM's WebFountain project gathers and annotates Web content on a vast scale to serve as a platform for data miners.
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From the March 3, 1934, issue
High winds atop Mt. Washington, a new tool for brain studies, first chemical proof of the artificial transmutation of elements.
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National Pi Day
National Pi Day—March 14—is a time to celebrate the number 3.14159. . . . Take a look at how this remarkable number has been honored in various settings, from a middle school classroom to the Exploratorium and Harvard University. Go to: http://www.germantownacademy.org/academics/MS/PiDay/Index.htm, http://www.winternet.com/~mchristi/piday.html, http://www.nvnet.org/nvhs/dept/math/pi.html, http://mathforum.org/teachers/middle/activities/pi_day.html, http://www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/pi/, and http://www.math.harvard.edu/piday/index.html
- Earth
Lowering the Boom? Impact crater may predate extinction of the dinosaurs
Analyses of sediments from the Yucatán in Mexico suggest that an extraterrestrial impact there more than 65 million years ago actually happened about 300,000 years before mass extinctions of dinosaurs occurred.
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Worst of Two Worlds: Hybrid mosquitoes spread West Nile virus
Interbreeding between two Old World mosquito species may explain why their blood-sucking brethren in the United States transmit West Nile virus to people as readily as they do.
- Humans
Letters from the March 6, 2004, issue of Science News
All we have to fear In “9/11’s Fatal Road Toll: Terror attacks presaged rise in U.S. car deaths” (SN: 1/17/04, p. 37: 9/11’s Fatal Road Toll: Terror attacks presaged rise in U.S. car deaths), it was assumed that people who switched from planes to cars after the terrorist attacks did so because of fear. However, […]
- Physics
Bubble Fusion: Once-maligned claim rebounds
Researchers who reported 2 years ago that they created nuclear-fusion reactions inside bubbles imploding in a vat of liquid acetone have now bolstered their controversial claim with new evidence.
