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 […]
- Chemistry
Sensor sniffs out spoiled fish
A new electronic nose detects amine compounds produced when fish decay.
- Chemistry
Air knocks the wind out of nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes are very sensitive to oxygen, an effect that could limit their use in open-air applications.
- Chemistry
Heat spurs growth of tiny carbon trees
Microscopic carbon forests can grow on a graphite surface without the help of catalysts.
- Health & Medicine
Coagulation factor XI boosts clot risk
People who have had a major blood clot in a vein are roughly twice as likely to harbor high concentrations of blood coagulation factor XI as people who haven't.
- Health & Medicine
Myopia link to night lights doubted
Two studies cast doubt on the apparent link between night lights in a baby's nursery and an increased risk of being nearsighted later in childhood.
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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 […]
- Astronomy
X-ray telescope vanishes
Astro-E, a Japanese X-ray observatory, fell back to Earth and burned up just after launch on Feb. 9.
- Planetary Science
Unveiling Mars’ watery secret
A new gravity map of Mars has revealed a network of buried channels that billions of years ago may have been on the surface and helped carry water to fill an ancient ocean.
- Astronomy
Craft spies new class of gamma-ray sources
Roughly half the 120 unidentified sources of high-energy gamma-ray emissions in the Milky Way—those at midgalactic latitudes—may comprise a new class of objects and originate from a belt of massive stars that lies only a few hundred light-years from the solar system.
- Agriculture
Toxic bugs taint large numbers of cattle
U.S. cattle have dramatically higher rates of infection with a virulent food-poisoning bacterium than had been realized, a factor that leads to widespread carcass contamination during slaughter.
