Uncategorized

  1. Health & Medicine

    HIV infects 1 in 100 in New York

    A change in how New York City officials identify and track cases of HIV infection has yielded the clearest picture yet of how deeply rooted that city's epidemic has become.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Primate virus found in zoo workers

    Viruses related to HIV can be found in the blood of some zoo staff and other people who work with primates, although the infections don't appear to be harmful.

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  3. Archaeology

    How agriculture ground to a start

    A major advance in agriculture occurred around 11,000 years ago, when western Asians began to walk through patches of wild barley and wheat and scoop handfuls of ripened grains off the ground, a report suggests.

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  4. Blocked gene gives mice super smell

    Deactivating a single gene can produce mice with an abnormally sharp sense of smell.

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  5. Humans

    Letters from the Feb. 28, 2004, issue of Science News

    It’s tough in there In the arts, we say that material, such as paper, that deteriorates readily because of its composition (“News That’s Fit to Print—and Preserve,” SN: 1/10/04, p. 24: News That’s Fit to Print—and Preserve) has “internal vice.” I suppose that could be said of newspapers on several grounds. Lawrence Wallin Santa Barbara, […]

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  6. Math

    Sculpting with a Twist

    There’s more than one way to slice a bagel. A bagel (or a doughnut) can serve as a physical model for a mathematical surface called a torus. You can slice it horizontally (or longitudinally) so that you end up with two halves, each containing a hole. That’s great for making sandwiches because the cut exposes […]

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  7. 19381

    The genetic link from obesity to macrophage production to inflammation to diseases in this article seems convincing. On an ecological scale, inflammation is an acute response to environmental insult, while fat is a chronic response, through its role in sequestering toxins. Perhaps the new research reveals a genetic program to arm the body’s defenses both […]

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Inflammatory Fat

    Immune system cells may underlie much of the disease-provoking injury in obese individuals that has been linked to their excess fat.

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  9. Computing

    Straining for Speed

    Hitting fundamental limits on how small they can make certain structures within semiconductor transistors, chip makers are deforming the silicon crystals from which those transistors are made to eke out some extra speed.

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  10. Astronomy

    Finding the star that was

    Sifting through archival images, astronomers have identified the star whose explosive demise was recorded by telescopes last year.

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  11. Chemistry

    Radical molecule could produce plastic magnets

    A team of chemists has synthesized an unusual organic molecule that could lead to cheaper and lighter magnets.

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  12. Physics

    Nuclear pudding—to go

    Moving at nearly the speed of light, atomic nuclei hurtling through a huge particle collider may become mostly dense, flattened puddings of nuclear particles known as gluons.

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