Scientific Observations
“Why would you use rats [to sniff for land
mines and tuberculosis infections]?... Rats
have more genetic material allocated to
olfaction than any other mammal species.
They’re extremely sensitive to smell.…
Whereas a microscopist can process
40 [tuberculosis patient] samples in a day, a rat can process the same
amount of samples in seven minutes.… Can you imagine the potential
offspring applications — environmental detection of pollutants in soils,
customs applications, detection of illicit goods in containers.… You may
think this is about rats, these projects, but in the end it is about people. It
is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult, expensive
and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks, and doing that with a local
resource.”— ENGINEER BART WEETJENS OF APOPO-HERORATS, IN HIS TEDXROTTERDAM 2010 TALK “HOW I
TAUGHT RATS TO SNIFF OUT LAND MINES” (SN ONLINE: 12/23/10)
SN Online
www.sciencenews.org
MOLECULES
Researchers make strides
in understanding how
anesthetics work, plus
more in “News in Brief:
Molecules.”
ATOM & COSMOS
Astronomers spot what
may be the most distant
object ever observed. Read
“A galaxy far, far, far away.”
Science Past | FROM THE ISSUE OF FEBRUARY 25, 1961
TRAFFIC CONGESTION SEEN AS FUTURE SPACE PROBLEM —
Traffic congestion may be one of the most serious problems
man may have to face when he starts commuting regularly
from earth to outer space. This new fron-
tier gradually is becoming cluttered with
earth-launched orbiting vehicles and other
debris.… [A]stronomical observatories,
weather, TV and other communication sat-
ellites as well as the larger economy-sized
USSR spacecraft to be boosted upward
in the future also promise to diminish the wide open look
that has up to now characterized outer space. Control over
the amount of traffic plus the travel routes will depend on
international agreement. United States space scientists
already are worrying about this problem.
Science Future
February 28
Learn about the good and bad
of fat tissue at an afternoon
symposium in New York City.
Go to www.nyas.org/events
March 7
At the Houston Museum of
Natural Science, a geneticist
describes efforts to track
humanity’s migratory routes
with DNA. See www.hmns.org
March 11–12
Dig into the past at the
Milwaukee Archaeology Fair.
Go to www.mpm.edu/events
BODY & BRAIN
Older adults who walked
regularly gained volume
in a brain area involved in
memory, while those who
didn’t walk experienced
shrinking. Read “Aerobic
exercise boosts memory.”
More than half of the
195,000-plus snow
shovel–related injuries treated in U.S.
emergency rooms
from 1990 to 2006
were from overexertion, often affecting
the lower back, a
recent study found.
About 63 percent
of injuries were
sustained by 18- to
54-year-olds.
Science Stats | TROWELING ALONG
Causes of snow shovel–related
medical mishaps, 1990–2006
Cardiac-related
6.7%
Other
4.4%
SOURCE: D.S. WATSON ET AL/
AMER. J. OF EMER. MED. 2011
MATTER & ENERGY
Physicists discover why a
swinging pendulum speeds
up in an unusual ultracold
liquid. See “Quantum pendulum trick explained.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: XAVIER ROSSI; G. ILLINGWORTH, R. BOUWENS, THE HUDF09 TEAM, NASA, ESA; T. DUBÉ; SNOWFLAKES: ONION/ISTOCKPHOTO, GRAPH: T. DUBÉ
For Daily Use
Teaching kids to read well may help their spatial skills. An international
team of researchers reports online January 14 in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology that kindergartners scored higher on a visual
spatial relationships test when they were good readers. The researchers
tested children with training in one of four types
of writing: alphabetic (Spanish), abjad (Hebrew),
logography (Chinese) and syllabary (Korean). Chinese and Korean readers also performed better
on the test than Spanish and Hebrew readers, perhaps, the researchers claim, because Chinese and
Korean have more characters and are more “
visually dense” — only small differences distinguish the
two Korean words at left, for example.
Sand
Day after tomorrow
