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Science Past from the issue of October 6, 1962

Science & Society

Letters

Oceans

Soundings

The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt.

Paleontology

The Last Lost World

Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.

Neuroscience

Nonstick trick in the brain

Getting drugs into the brain has proved to be a nanoscale puzzle: Anything bigger than 64 nanometers — about the size of a small virus — gets stuck in the space between brain cells once it gets through the blood-brain barrier. Justin Hanes of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues got around this rule by coating particles destined for brain cells in a dense layer of a polymer called polyethylene glycol.

Health & Medicine

Tricks Foods Play

Most people would never equate downing a well-dressed salad or a fried chicken thigh with toking a joint of marijuana. But to Joseph Hibbeln of the National Institutes of Health, the comparison isn’t a big stretch.

Animals

Face Smarts

Macaques, sheep and even wasps may join people as masters at facial recognition.

Humans

Africans’ genes mute on human birthplace

Latest DNA studies confirm previous research on the prehistory of African groups, but still can’t locate the root of the species.

Humans

A moving lift for poor families

Federal housing subsidies didn’t fight poverty as hoped, but trading public housing for new neighborhoods brought psychological benefits.

Math

Bumblebees navigate new turf without a map

The insects can quickly calculate the best route between flowers.

Life

E. coli caught in the act of evolving

Researchers track thousands of bacterial generations to document the development of a trait nearly 25 years in the making.