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Science News Headline and Article Archive

June 2003

Week of 29 June 2003

• Bone mimic makes anti-decay fillings
  • Smart cement swaps ions with saliva to keep cavities at bay. A new smart cement could keep dental braces in place while fending off tooth decay. It might also be used for fillings or treating damaged teeth, researchers say.
• Ideal Justice: Mathematicians judge the Supreme Court
  • The U.S. Supreme Court—already in the news this week for its decisions on affirmative action—is highlighted in a scientific journal. The court is driven by politics far less than Congress is, a new analysis suggests. Lawrence Sirovich, a mathematician at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, calculated that the current Supreme Court of nine judges behaves as if it were made up of about 4.68 "ideal" judges—adjudicators who make their decisions completely independently of each other.

Week of 22 June 2003

• NASA's Odyssey Orbiter Watches a Frosty Mars
  • NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft is revealing new details about the intriguing, dynamic character of the frozen layers now known to dominate the high northern latitudes of Mars. The implications have a bearing on science strategies for future missions in the search of habitats.
• New glass lets in light not heat
  • Does your office feel like a greenhouse in summer? Take heart: researchers in Australia are developing a new kind of glass that lets sunlight through but blocks much of its heat. Stefan Schelm and Geoff Smith of the University of Technology in Sydney have developed a cheap polymer that, laminated between glass sheets, cuts out the warming wavelengths, which are just below that of red light. Viewed at an oblique angle, it has a slight bluish haze. Otherwise, it appears transparent, with a hint of green.
• Researchers devise a new way to control the motion of tiny particles
  • Nanotechnology researchers may soon be able to design new types of tiny shuttles or conveyor belts which could be used to deliver medications to specific cells or to replace wires in molecular-sized electronic devices. Very tiny particles exhibit disordered motion, also known as Brownian motion, because they are subject to thermal noise. Learning how to transform this disordered wandering of molecules and small particles into ordered, directed motion is a major thrust in nanotechnology research.

Week of 15 June 2003

• Stroke risk: Could it start in the womb?
  • Malnourished pregnant women generations ago may account for today’s increased stroke risk in certain parts of Great Britain and the United States, according to a study in today’s rapid access issue of Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. In both countries, there are geographic variations in stroke death that are not explained by adult lifestyle.
• Researchers View Protein's Structural Changes In Real Time; X-ray Crystallography Records Changes In One 10-billionth Of A Second
  • Dramatic structural changes that take place inside a protein in less than a billionth of a second have been filmed in high resolution with X-ray crystallography, enabling scientists to view them like a movie. The ability to watch a protein functioning on the inside may lead to a better understanding of how it works, enabling scientists to engineer improved proteins for blood substitutes and improved treatments for genetic diseases.
• Super Fibers: Nanotubes make tough threads
  • The superior mechanical and electrical properties of carbon nanotubes have intrigued materials scientists for a decade. But they've struggled to take advantage of the hollow tubes, just nanometers wide, for macroscopic projects. Now, researchers have spun the tubes into composite fibers that are tougher than steel, Kevlar, or spider silk.

Week of 8 June 2003

• Mars rover launch lifts NASA's spirit
  • Spirit, the aptly-named Mars exploration rover, gave a welcome boost to NASA morale on Tuesday with a flawless launch. The Delta II rocket carrying Spirit blasted of from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 1358 EDT on Tuesday, after two days of delays caused by stormy weather. The Mars-bound craft separated from the launcher during a suspenseful communications gap, but was confirmed when it came within range of a tracking station in Canberra, Australia.
• National IgnitionFacility Sets Records for Laser Performance
  • The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently produced 10,400 Joules or 10.4 kiloJoules (kJ) of ultraviolet laser light in a single laser beamline, setting a world record for laser performance. In recent weeks NIF laser scientists also have used the first four NIF beamlines to set records for infrared and green single beam laser energies with 21 kJ and 11 kJ of energy delivered, respectively.
• Caught on Tape: Gecko-inspired adhesive is superstrong
  • As it scurries along the ceiling, a gecko has the sticking power to support not just its own body weight, but about 400 times as much. Besides that sticking power, the natural adhesive on this animal's feet is clean and reusable, and it works on all surfaces, wet or dry.

• Making a wormhole just got easier...
  • Good news for time travellers - it just got cheaper. The amount material needed to build a window through time is infinitesimally small, new research shows. To travel through time, all you need to do is open a wormhole in space-time and step through it. And to do that you need a magic ingredient called 'exotic matter', which is repelled rather than attracted by gravity.
• Weedkilling robots slash herbicide use
  • Robots make unlikely green warriors, but they could soon be doing their bit for the environment. Trials of a Danish robot that maps the position of weeds growing among crops suggest that herbicide use could be slashed by 70 per cent if farmers used it to adopt more selective spraying techniques. The robot drives across fields scanning the ground for any weeds and noting their positions. A later version will be able to kill the weeds too by applying a few drops of herbicide, says developer Svend Christensen from the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Tjele.
• "VIRTUAL BIOPSY" - A New Way to Look at Cancer
  • Scientists are using new imaging technology to help them perform "virtual biopsies," - biological profiles of specific tumors that may help predict a patient's response to treatment and probability of long-term survival. This whole new realm of imaging is called functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a process that offers insight into a tumor's character, not just its superficial structure.

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