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19316
The surprising statistic that teenage calorie consumption has remained stable while obesity has burgeoned and that physical activity among this group has fallen sharply may well suggest a cause and effect, but such a conclusion is premature and untested, at best. I wonder whether closer analysis of food intake would demonstrate an overall shift away […]
- Health & Medicine
Teen taters, too
The epidemic of adolescent obesity may owe more to a paucity of exercise than to a growing intake of calories.
- Health & Medicine
Athletes develop whey-better muscles
Dietary supplements coupling whey and creatine promote the development of bigger, stronger muscles in experienced body builders.
- Earth
Prenatal nicotine: A role in SIDS?
New data suggest why exposure to nicotine in the womb can put an infant at greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
- Health & Medicine
Little vessels react to magnetic switch
Magnets can act like vascular switches, increasing or decreasing blood flow to a region of the body.
- Earth
Traces of lead cause outsize harm
Minute amounts of lead in blood are worse for children than had been realized.
- Math
Recycling Topology
It’s hard to miss the triangle of three bent arrows that signifies recycling. It appears in newspapers and magazines and on bottles, envelopes, cardboard cartons, and other containers. The recycling symbol. Alternative (incorrect?) rendering of the recycling symbol. Cliff Long made a Möbius band the basis of his wood carving “Bug on a Band.” Photo […]
- Paleontology
Ancestors Go South
A group of new and previously excavated fossils in South Africa represents 4-million-year-old members of the human evolutionary family, according to an analysis of the sediment that covered the finds.
- Animals
Chicks open wide, ultraviolet mouths
The first analysis of what the mouths of begging birds look like in the ultraviolet spectrum reveals a dramatic display that birds can see but people can't.
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19315
The iron-sulfide hypothesis of life’s origin that Michael J. Russell and William Martin propose in this article is attractive because it provides an inorganic cell wall and a matrix with some catalytic capabilities. But even if the Russell-Martin hypothesis is true, it isn’t a comprehensive theory of bioorigins. The cardinal difficulty in the origin of […]
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A Rocky Start
A new origin-of-life theory holds that life began within the confines of iron sulfide rocks surrounding hydrothermal vents at the ocean bottom.
- Earth
Eye of the Tiger
Recent research has upended a 130-year-old, previously unchallenged theory about how the semiprecious stone called tiger's-eye is formed.
