Science News - February 26, 2011

Religion at Sacred Ridge? I follow your magazine with zeal. I was somewhat surprised by “Massacre at Sacred Ridge” (SN: 11/6/10, p. 22), which seems to attribute the slaughter to some action by those who were murdered and does not discuss potential religious overtones of the attack. Is organized religion the culprit in this incident? Man’s inhumanity to man has often been triggered by some form of religious belief system. Charles Havnen, New Orleans, La.

Religious beliefs of the Ridges Basin groups are poorly understood, though the documented ethnic differences would imply at least some religious differences. How religion may have played into the massacre at Sacred Ridge is unknown. — Bruce Bower

Measured confusion
There is a subtle but fairly egregious
error in “Science Stats: Reading
between the lines” (SN: 1/1/11, p. 4).
The short article is (ironically) about
the unclear labeling of medication
measuring devices, but the graphic
contains a huge infographic gaffe: It
shows the values as regular markings
up the side of a representation of a
3-D cup. But the cup is not cylindrical,
being wider at the top than the bottom
( just as many medicinal cups are). This
implies that what’s being measured is
the volume, not the height.

The reader is correct: While the markings on the graphic were meant to reflect height, not volume, the 3-D drawing of the cup does misleadingly imply volume. And the top label, the total, should have been more clearly linked to the entire pink area that it was supposed to describe. Apologies for adding to the confusion. — Eva Emerson

Correction

Due to a typographical error, the element strontium (Sr) is mislabeled as Si in the periodic table of the elements accompanying the article “Chemists want you to know that atomic weights aren’t constant” (SN: 1/29/11, p. 5).

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