Uncategorized
- Tech
Ear to Traffic
Listen to the sounds of Web site activity, as massaged by statistician Mark Hansen of Lucent Technologies and translated into musical tones by audio artist Ben Rubin of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Intriguing audio samples offer hints of how aural cues might complement visualization techniques in data mining. Requires a Web browser with RealPlayer […]
- Math
The Incredible Pi Code
Extending this colored grid reveals (to some eyes) a provocative portrait. Researchers have expended a great deal of effort computing as many of those digits as computer technology and mathematical methods allow. Last year, Yasumasa Kanada of the University of Tokyo calculated pi to 206,158,430,000 decimal digits. A high school student has now smashed that […]
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19124
Your story didn’t surprise me. I doubted it the first time I saw it. When I read the original story (“Might night-lights blight sight?” SN: 5/29/99, p. 351), I said, “Wait a minute! Wouldn’t that mean that children raised north of the Arctic Circle should have unusually high levels of myopia?” Did the researchers involved […]
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19123
The opening paragraphs of this article make the curious observation that silicon dioxide is “little noticed outside the semiconductor industry.” That is, of course, nonsense. Silicon dioxide, widely known as quartz, is known to far more people than is silicon, the stuff of semiconductors. It has been valued by humans since we first started fashioning […]
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19122
I found this article interesting and informative. However, the story of life, both plant and animal, is the story of adaptation to changing environments. I am sure that if CO2 levels were to double in 50 or 100 years, most plants and animals would have little problem adapting. Considering that ice-core studies indicate that CO2 […]
- Math
DNA’s Error-Detecting Code
Computers employ a variety of schemes to check whether a chunk of digital information–transmitted as a message, stored in a database, or functioning as a set of instructions–remains error-free. Such error-detection codes would detect, for example, the change of one bit from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 in corrupted data. Nucleotides may be […]
- Math
Abbott and Costello’s Wacky Math
The Math in the Movies Web page (http://world.std.com/~reinhold/mathmovies.html) provides an annotated list of films in which mathematics plays some sort of role. The choices range from the calculus lessons of Stand and Deliver to the mystifying numerology of the 1998 thriller Pi. Among the notable omissions are several movies featuring the comedy team of Bud […]
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Gender Gap: Parasites’ bias for big animals gives female mammals longevity
Parasites infect male mammals more often than females, possibly contributing to the tendency among mammals of males to die earlier than females.
- Animals
Eat the Kids: Are cannibal fish just freshening the O2?
In beaugregory damselfish, males that snack on some of the eggs supposedly in their care may end up benefiting the rest of the egg clutch by making more oxygen available.
- Chemistry
The Dirt on Art: Chemists test laser cleanup of paintings
A new experiment shows that lasers can be a safe tool for cleaning paintings.
- Health & Medicine
Acetaminophen in Action: Effect on an enzyme may stop pain, lower fever
The discovery of an enzyme scientists are calling cyclooxygenase-3, which is disabled by acetaminophen, might explain why this drug can stop pain and fever but not inflammation.
- Humans
From the March 22, 1930, issue
THE SUN’S NEW TRANS-NEPTUNIAN PLANET The Lowell Observatory has made the discovery of a celestial body whose rate of motion and path among the stars indicate that it is a new member of the sun’s family of planets out beyond Neptune. Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Percival Lowell, director and founder of the Observatory at Flagstaff, […]
