Uncategorized

  1. 19095

    In doing your usual excellent job of presenting information in interesting and lighthearted ways, you implied that bug zappers control mosquitoes. In fact, bug zappers don’t attract mosquitoes and therefore kill very few of them. They do kill large numbers of harmless and even beneficial insects, including pollinators and insects such as the crane fly, […]

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  2. Chemistry

    Mosquito Magnets

    Your skin chemicals lure blood-sucking insects to their next meal.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Into the Tank: Pressurized oxygen is best at countering carbon monoxide exposure

    Oxygen treatment for serious carbon monoxide poisoning prevents long-term brain damage best if delivered as pressurized gas.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Loosen Up

    Bacterial toxin may lead to less painful treatments for diabetes and brain cancer.

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  5. Humans

    Flame Out: Fishy findings sustain, then snuff, stellar career

    Investigators have concluded that a young, up-and-coming physicist repeatedly faked data and committed other types of scientific misconduct.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Boning up on calcium shouldn’t be sporadic

    The gains in bone health can quickly disappear when people stop taking extra calcium.

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  7. 19119

    Regarding the discovery of the dinosaur heart with the single aorta, your readers should note that this morphology is more likely to be related to high blood pressure than metabolic rate per se. The typical reptilian heart, with its incompletely divided ventricle and double aorta, is quite functional at separating oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. The […]

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  8. Paleontology

    Telltale Dino Heart Hints at Warm Blood

    A recently discovered fossil dinosaur heart is more like the heart of birds and mammals than that of crocodiles, providing further evidence that dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded.

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  9. Chemistry

    Hot Spuds: Golden path to acrylamide in food

    The browning reaction that imparts flavor to french fries and breads also creates acrylamide, an animal carcinogen.

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  10. Materials Science

    Molecular Separations: New artificial sieve traps molecules

    Researchers have created a metal-laced organic solid that acts as a sieve with nanosize pores for capturing molecules.

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  11. Making Mice Mellow: Rodents yield clues to improved anxiety drugs

    Mice bred to lack a gene for a certain enzyme exhibit reduced anxiety and greater curiosity in stressful laboratory tasks, suggesting a possible new avenue of research into anti-anxiety medications.

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  12. Humans

    From the April 19, 1930, issue

    TRAVEL TO THE MOON BY THE YEAR 2050 By the year 2050, Earth-dwellers will probably be able to travel to the moon and to communicate with their terrestrial home by telephoning over a beam of light. They will get there by traveling in a rocket ship at a speed of some 50,000 miles an hour, […]

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