There’s nothing like a planned explosion in a really mysterious place to draw a crowd. NASA on Monday revealed plans to crash a hefty spacecraft’s booster rocket, and a second smaller missile from the same mission, into the lunar south pole to see if any water is in the giant plume of debris that should […]
NYTimes: Need a new Organ? Grow your own (like a salamander does?)
Many species can regrow parts of their bodies and, as the NYTimes’s Nicholas Wade reports in the lead item in this week’s Science Times, many scientists have wondered if human tissues can be cajoled into a multitude of such tricks (we already can regrow livers). The field, he tells us, could offer an alternative to […]
Media Replaying 1906 Earthquake 100 years later
On April 18, 1906, the great San Francisco Earthquake knocked down a lot of the city, and fire took care of much of the rest. The Bay Area dailies are running a lot on it, and some other outlets are also reviewing the progress make since then in understanding, and preparing for, earthquakes. The latest […]
NYTimes: Budget Cuts Erode Flood Warning Systems
Reporter John Schwartz puts color in what could be a dry policy story. He visits a hydrologist on Kentucky’s Licking River for a vignette on how money problems threaten ability to monitor streams and issue warnings of impending floods, blending the onsite reporting with a general rundown on the squeeze on runoff science. Read it
NYTimes: Never Mind Who’s Right–Creationists are nicer guys than those Pompous Scientists
NYTimes’s Cornelia Dean freshens the air in this profile of an evolutionary biologist-cum-filmmaker whose documentary, “Flock of Dodos”, suggests that while science may have the upper hand in the logic and evidence department, advocates of intelligent design are much better at talking plain, smiling, and being generally genial folks. Read it
Sacto Bee: Asthma Drug Shortage-Effort to Save Tomorrow’s Air Have Some People Breathing Harder Now
Yet another illustration of the law of unintended consequences. The Sacramento Bee’s Dorsey Griffith reports hospitals and pharmacists in California’s Central Valley are having a hard time getting inhalers containing the asthma drug albuterol. Griffith tracks the reason to the much-admired Montreal Protocol of 1987 banning aerosol sprays propelled by ozone-destroying and greenhouse-heating chlorofluorocarbon or […]