Uncategorized
- Earth
Gulf spill harmed small fish, studies indicate
Effects vary but dire impacts seen with some very low exposures.
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- Health & Medicine
Protein’s destructive journey in brain may cause Parkinson’s
Clumps of alpha-synuclein move through dopamine-producing cells, mouse study finds.
- Tech
Building robots that slither
Howie Choset is a roboticist, but his team’s creations bear little resemblance to C-3PO or R2-D2. Instead, Choset finds inspiration in nature — specifically, snakes.
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Letters
To spot a planet “Planetary peekaboo” (SN: 9/22/12, p. 26) says that to hunt for faraway planets, the Kepler spacecraft “watches for blinks occurring when a planet dims a star’s light by passing in front of it.” For a star to dim when a planet moves in front of it requires us to be in […]
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SN Online
ON THE SCENE BLOG Geneticists poke a little fun at themselves during a recent meeting. Read “Buzzword bingo.” Emanuel Soeding/Christian-Albrechts University, William Hay SCIENCE & SOCIETY Mapping U.S. votes for president according to state population gives a new view of politics. See “Red state, blue state.” EARTH Feedback loops are melting more ice than predicted, […]
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Science Future for December 1, 2012
December 15 Activities, films and demonstrations reveal physics principles at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. See bit.ly/SFfullspec December 17 Learn about supermassive black holes with astronomer Günther Hasinger at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. See bit.ly/SFgunther
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Science Past from the issue of December 1, 1962
NEW DATING METHOD FOR MILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSILS — A new radioactive dating method promises to close one of the major remaining gaps in methods of fixing dates on the geological and archaeological time scales. The new procedure, based on radioactive inequality in nature between uranium-234 and its parent U-238, was originated by David Turber of Columbia’s […]
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Book Review: How Ancient Europeans Saw the World by Peter S. Wells
Review by Tom Siegfried.
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I, Lobster by Nancy Frazier
More than just a tasty meal — though this book does include recipes — the lobster is a star in history, art and science. Univ. of New Hampshire, 2012, 254 p., $24.95
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Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color by Nina G. Jablonski
An anthropologist examines the evolution of human skin pigmentation, its relation to health and the role of skin color in social history. Univ. of California, 2012, 260 p., $29.95
