Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
Success clearing clogged arteries
In the past 10 years, angioplasty and other procedures to unblock clogged arteries have steadily improved, probably due to increasing use of wire-mesh tubes called stents to help patients’ arteries stay open.
- Health & Medicine
A sticky problem solved
Researchers have identified a protein integral to making blood clot, a finding they hope will lead to better drugs for preventing clots in people at risk of heart attack or stroke.
- Plants
Dead pipes can still regulate plants’ water
Physiologists say they have demonstrated for the first time that dead xylem cells in plant plumbing can control water speed.
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18901
Since pandas produce twins “roughly half the time” and “the mother routinely selects one, and the other dies in a few days,” it seems that there is an opportunity to rear the discarded one experimentally (away from the mother). Has this been tried? It seems a waste to let one of the twins perish. Rhodes […]
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The Lives of Pandas
On a tight energy budget, newborns no bigger than chipmunks grow into roly-poly superstars.
- Humans
Explosions, not a collision, sank the Kursk
Analyses of the shock waves recorded at seismic stations across northern Europe indicate that the Russian submarine Kursk sank due to onboard explosions, not a run-in with another vessel.
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Rock guitarist inspires rock hounds
A team of paleontologists who dug up a new dinosaur recently chose to name their find after singer-songwriter Mark Knopfler, guitarist and cofounder of the rock group Dire Straits.
- Astronomy
Pulsar ages may need refiguring
New images taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirm that a known pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star, was born in a supernova explosion that Chinese astronomers witnessed in 386 A.D. and call into question how astronomers traditionally compute the ages of pulsars.
- Astronomy
Cloudy puzzle on Uranus
Astronomers can’t explain the seemingly ephemeral nature of bright clouds seen on the northernmost sunlit edge of Uranus.
- Physics
Voltage flip turns magnetism on, off
Researchers in Japan have made a material whose inherent magnetism can be turned off and on electrically, as long as the material, a novel semiconductor, stays ultracold.
- Physics
Collider is cookin’, but is it soup?
By making the densest, hottest matter ever in a lab, smashups between fast-moving nuclei in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are coming closer than ever to reproducing the superhot, primordial fluid that presumably filled the universe immediately after the Big Bang.
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18913
If the studies done by Lene V. Hau and by Ronald Walsworth and Mikhail Lukin are correct, then are we saying that our current interpretation of space and time can be misinterpreted? For example, if light passes through cold sodium gas, the speed of light can be greatly slowed. If this is so, then can […]
