Uncategorized
- Earth
Smog chemicals found even in rural western plains
Analyses of the atmosphere over the south-central United States show that gases emitted from the region's oil and natural gas industries contribute to air pollution—even over remote Kansas cornfields—that can surpass the noxious mix found in urban areas.
- Health & Medicine
Danger, danger, cry injured cells
Damaged cells may release uric acid to rouse the immune system.
- Planetary Science
To the moon, European style
The European Space Agency launched its first lunar mission, which is scheduled to reach the moon in 2005 and will search for water that may lie in the moon's permanently shadowed craters.
- Health & Medicine
Do Arctic diets protect prostates?
Marine diets appear to explain why the incidence of prostate cancer among Inuit men is lower than that of males anywhere else in the world.
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19351
Your article discusses the disease in Inuit men in arctic Alaska, Greenland, and Canada. Given the way temperature affects sperm production in the testicles, have the investigators considered any differences in hormone production between these men and populations in warmer climates? Not to say that diet isn’t the key factor, but the geography gave me […]
- Paleontology
Reptile remains fill in fossil record
The fossil remains of a sphenodontian, an ancient, lizardlike reptile, are helping fill a 120-million-year-old gap between this creature's ancestors and today's tuatara, sole survivors of the once prominent group.
- Math
Best Guess
Economists are exploring the use of betting markets as tools for predicting the consequences of policy decisions by a government, corporation, or other institution.
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19350
The proposed Policy Market Analysis (PAM) project might be useful if it sparks interest in market limitations. The stock market may have quickly determined who was to blame for the Challenger disaster, but it didn’t predict the disaster. An unexamined problem with the PAM plan is the presence of a superpower that can game the […]
- Anthropology
Erectus Ahoy
A researcher who explores the nautical abilities of Stone Age people by building rafts and having crews row them across stretches of ocean contends that language and other cognitive advances emerged 900,000 years ago with Homo erectus, not considerably later among modern humans, as is usually assumed.
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19280
I feel that there is a major factor that nobody takes into account when modern people set out to replicate possible ancient voyages. It is that they’re attempting to get from point A to point B, which they know exists, but ancient seafarers weren’t. Setting off from Timor on a 600-mile voyage without knowing whether […]
- Humans
From the October 7, 1933, issue
ANCIENT MAP SHOWS HOW WORLD LOOKED TO COLUMBUS Startled to find the name Columbus mentioned on an old Turkish map of the Atlantic Ocean, Paul Kahle has subjected the map to closest study, finding on it important new clues to the discovery of America. In a report on his investigations, to appear in the forthcoming […]
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Moral Sense
How do humans throughout the world decide what is right and wrong? Harvard researchers have designed a test, which consists of a series of moral dilemmas, to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying ethical judgments. The online test takes only about 10 minutes, and responses are completely confidential. Go to: http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/index.html
