- People
Postcards from Voyager
Suzanne Dodd is project manager for NASA’s twin Voyager probes. - 50 Years Ago
Nobelist's Cancer Theory
Excerpt from the July 13, 1963, issue of Science News Letter - Reviews & Previews
Billion-Dollar Fish
From imitation crab to McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, Alaska pollock is ubiquitous. American fishermen haul in more than a billion dollars’ worth of the flaky white fish annually. Yet just a century ago, Americans had no interest in pollock. Bailey, a fisheries biologist, documents the fish’s rise in popularity over the last 60 years, interweaving the scientific, political and economic forces that shaped the “most lucrative marine fish harvest in American waters.”
Japan became the first coun
- Reviews & Previews
Brilliant Blunders
Even brilliant scientists have bad days. Consider chemist Linus Pauling, who described the alpha helix structure of proteins in 1951. When he attempted to do the same for DNA, however, he botched it — badly. Among other problems, he flubbed the basic chemistry, proposing a structure for deoxyribonucleic acid that wasn’t an acid.
When asked about Pauling’s faulty DNA model, one of his contemporaries commented, “You could not have written a fictional novel in which Linus would have made an error like thi
- Letters to the Editor
Letters to the editor
Fructose fever
I was fascinated by the article “Sweet confusion” (SN: 6/1/13, p. 22) about the ambiguous health effects of high fructose corn syrup. I was surprised, however, to find little mention of taste, flavor and satiety. I can clearly recall from my childhood the satisfaction from a bottle of Coca-Cola. The transition in America in the 1970s from sucrose to corn syrup as a sweetener in soft drinks was brought home to me in my travels to Central America in the ’80s and ’90s, where cane sugar was still used as a sweetener. Drink a soft drink with cane s - News
Math targets cities' essence
New formula relates city size to infrastructure, productivity. - Feature
Cicadas' odd life cycle poses evolutionary conundrums
Scientists are getting an idea about the odd family tree of periodical cicadas, how the insects synchronize their life cycles and why they breed side-by-side with others unsuitable for mating. - Feature
When the atom went quantum
Bohr's revolutionary atomic theory turns 100. - News in Brief
Satellite captures Earth's greenery
Orbiting camera detects reflected light to determine the extent of the planet's vegetation. - News
Human brain mapped in 3-D with high resolution
“BigBrain” model, the most detailed atlas yet, could improve brain scanning tools and neurosurgeons’ navigation.