Lighting up the lies A Last year Sean A. Spence, a professor at the school of medicine at the University of Sheffield in England, performed brain scans that showed that a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care appeared to be telling the truth when she denied committing the crime. This deception study, along …
Reclaiming the future of aral sea A The Aral Sea gets almost all its water from the Amu and Syr rivers. Over millennium the Amu’s course has drifted away from the sea, causing it to shrink. But the lake always rebounded as the Amu shifted back again. Today heavy irrigation for crops such as cotton and …
Digital diet {A} Telecommuting, Internet shopping and online meetings may save energy as compared with in-person alternatives, but as the digital age moves on, its green reputation is turning a lot browner. E-mailing, number crunching and Web searches in the U.S. consumed as much as 61 billion kilowatt-hours last year, or 1.5 per cent of the …
Economic Evolution {A} Living along the Orinoco River that borders Brazil and Venezuela are the Yanomami people, hunter-gatherers whose average annual income has been estimated at the equivalent of $90 per person per year. Living along the Hudson River that borders New York State and New Jersey are the Manhattan people, consumer traders whose average annual income has …
The hidden lives of solitary bees There are 275 different species of bee in Great Britain and Ireland. Apart from the familiar honeybee and 25 species of bumblebee, the rest are known as solitary bees. Solitary bees are unlike ‘social’ honeybees and bumblebees, which live in large colonies consisting of a queen whose function is …
Conflicting climatic phenomena co-existing on the Mars A On Mars, signs of wetness keep pouring in: deeply carved river valleys, vast deltas and widespread remnants of evaporating seas have convinced many experts that liquid water may have covered large parts of the Red Planet for a billion years or more. But most efforts to explain how …
Changes in Air A A federal ban on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to conform with the Clean Air Act, is, ironically, affecting 22.9 million people in the U.S. who suffer from asthma. Generic inhaled albuterol, which is the most commonly prescribed short-acting asthma medication and requires CFCs to propel it into the lungs, will no longer be …
How war debris could cause cancer A Could the mystery over how depleted uranium might cause genetic damage be closer to being solved? It may be, if a controversial claim by two researchers is right. They say that minute quantities of the material lodged in the body may kick out energetic electrons that mimic the effect …
Volatility Kills A . Despite gun battles in the capital of Chad, rioting in Kenya, and Galloping inflation in Zimbabwe, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa are, as a whole, in better shape than they were a few years ago. The World Bank has reported recently that this part of the continent experienced a respectable growth rate of 5.6 …
The sense of flavour 2 {A} Scientists now believe that human beings acquired the sense of taste as a way to avoid being poisoned. Edible plants generally taste sweet; deadly ones, bitter. Taste is supposed to help us differentiate food that’s good for us from food that’s not. The taste buds on our tongues can detect …
