Uncategorized
- Math
Hunting e
Of the irrational, transcendental numbers, pi seems to get all the attention. Web sites and books celebrate its quirks and quandaries. Its digits have been computed to 1,241,100,000,000 decimal places. Lagging far behind in the celebrity sweepstakes is the number known as e. Carried to 20 decimal places, e is 2.71828 18284 59045 23536. Only […]
- Humans
From the February 10, 1934, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> CZAR’S BOOKS, RARE COSTUMES COME TO PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM Rare archaeological books from the private library of the late Russian czar and Russian peasant costumes centuries old have been received by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. About 125 of the czar’s books, mostly archaeological works, have come to the museum by […]
- Computing
Paint by Pixel
Aaron Hertzmann is both a computer scientist and a painter. Among his art-related programming projects, he has developed a way for computers to refashion images and animations to reflect different painting styles. Other work includes a stretched “canvas” that projects a continually-changing painting of the viewer and a learning-by-example system that animates characters based on […]
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19247
In this article, I read that an orb of a given size, when slightly flattened, will pack more densely than when perfectly round. No kidding? Do you suppose if we were to crush cars into little cubes we could hurl more into a landfill than we could just by driving them over a cliff? What […]
- Physics
Candy Science: M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres
Squashed or stretched versions of spheres snuggle together more tightly than randomly packed spheres do.
- Humans
Letters from the Feb. 14, 2004, issue of Science News
Revealing words “Bookish Math: Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries” (SN: 12/20&27/03, p. 392: Bookish Math) skipped one of the most significant methods for analyzing text for authorship. On March 11, 1887, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall reported in Science a straightforward method of plotting word length versus frequency. The beauty of this method is that […]
- Animals
Flesh Eaters: Bees that strip carrion also take wasp young
A South American bee that ignores flowers and collects carrion from carcasses has an unexpected taste for live, abandoned wasp young.
- Anthropology
Some Primates’ Sheltered Lives: Baboons, chimps enter the realm of cave
In separate studies, researchers have gathered the first systematic evidence showing that baboons and chimpanzees regularly use caves, a behavior many anthropologists have attributed only to people and our direct ancestors.
- Health & Medicine
Pregnancy Alert: Proteins may predict preeclampsia
Blood concentrations of two proteins that affect blood vessel growth appear to foretell the pregnancy condition known as preeclampsia.
- Paleontology
Early Flight? Winged insects appear surprisingly ancient
New analyses of a fossil suggest that winged insects may have emerged as early as 400 million years ago.
- Tech
Snappy DNA: Long strand folds into octahedron
By harnessing the self-assembling properties of DNA, researchers coerced a single strand of the genetic material to assume the shape of an octahedron.
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19246
This article details an advance in human-cloning efforts. The researchers charging into this field think that we should pass laws to keep others from abusing their research. Ha! Do they really think they can keep this genie in a bottle? If this keeps up, it won’t be long before people are cloning themselves and maybe […]
