More Stories from the January 27, 2001 issue
- Math
Reassessing an ancient artifact
The famous Mesopotamian clay tablet known as Plimpton 322 represents an ordered list of worked examples that a teacher would use to prepare a sequence of closely related questions about squares and reciprocals for student exercises.
- Math
Quirks of video poker
Even with perfect play over a long time, unfavorable odds and limits on how much a gambler may win per machine make playing video poker into a losing game.
- Chemistry
New technique makes water droplets sprint
A newly developed process encourages water droplets at the hydrophobic center of a wafer to speed outward to a water-friendly edge.
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Cells have molecule for protein triage
A molecule called CHIP slates bad proteins for destruction and may lead to heart disease therapies.
- Health & Medicine
Radiation therapy keeps arteries clear
Two new studies add to the growing evidence that radiation treatment may keep arteries open longer after angioplasty.
- Health & Medicine
Found: Mutation for deadly nerve disorder
Two research teams have discovered the genetic mutation that causes familial dysautonomia, a lethal hereditary disease that causes nervous system damage.
- Physics
Light Stands Still in Atom Clouds
Ordinarily in continuous motion, light pulses come to a dead stop in specially prepared atom clouds.
- 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.
- 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.
- Astronomy
Cloudy puzzle on Uranus
Astronomers can’t explain the seemingly ephemeral nature of bright clouds seen on the northernmost sunlit edge of Uranus.
- 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.
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Anthropology
Rumble in the Jungle
A new book raises troubling and controversial issues regarding research on a famous South American Indian population.
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The Lives of Pandas
On a tight energy budget, newborns no bigger than chipmunks grow into roly-poly superstars.
