19 | Why Humans Have No Fur -- Explained Emily Sohn Jun 11, 2010 | - A key region of human evolution in East Africa has been really hot for millions of years.
- The discovery supports the theory that heat shaped many features of the human body.
- Some of these features include upright posture and little body hair.
Heat might explain why we lost our fur and now strike an upright and slim (in theory, anyway) pose. If our ancestors lived somewhere really hot, the theory goes, it would have made sense for us to lose body hair, start sweating more, become slender and even walk upright -- to create distance between our bodies and the hot ground. | 20 | Plastic Designer Molecules May Boost Immune System Zoё Macintosh 14 June 2010 | Plastic molecules made to mimic the body’s natural disease-fighters and injected into living animals behaved like antibodies, latching onto foreign molecules and launching an attack against them in the bloodstream. The breakthrough is a step toward the medical use of these custom-fabricated particles for targeted attacks on viruses and other harmful antigens, researchers said in a statement. Antigens are objects foreign to an organism's bloodstream, such as viruses, a wide range of bacteria, and allergens such as house dust and plant pollen. Otherwise known as antibodies, the class of proteins responsible for recognizing antigens disables them through diverse shapes that bind with their surfaces like a key in a lock. Deprived of its surface reactivity, the harmful molecule is effectively neutralized. | 21 | Shooting for 400 MPH on an Electric Motorcycle Dave Eyvazzadeh June 15, 2010 | Eva Håkansson dreams of building a 400-mph streamliner motorcycle with a twist — it’ll be electric. Who’s to say she can’t do it? She’s already built her own electric street bike, her father is a mechanical genius and her husband is the guy behind Killacycle, the quickest EV on the planet. But we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. First we have to go to Pikes Peak. By way of Sweden. Håkansson became immersed in the world of business and environmental science at Malardalen University in Sweden. It was there that she grasped the beauty of electric vehicles. They’re quick, they’re clean and they’re efficient. | 22 | CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics Brad Reagan December 18, 2009 |
Forensic science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established forensic practices are coming under fire. PM takes an in-depth look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind bars.
On Jan. 11, 1992, the jury in the murder trial of Roy Brown heard from a dentist named Edward Mofson. To establish his credentials, Dr. Mofson testified that he was certified in forensic odontology, belonged to six related professional organizations and did forensic consulting throughout New York state. He then explained that several months earlier he was called to the morgue in Cayuga County, New York, to analyze the body of 49-year-old Sabina Kulakowski. Kulakowski's corpse was found by a volunteer firefighter on a dirt road some 300 yards from the farmhouse where she lived, which had burned to the ground in the night. She was severely beaten and stabbed, and there were multiple bite marks on her body. Brown was a natural suspect in the grisly murder. The week before the crime, the hard-drinking 31-year-old had been released from jail on charges of threatening to "wipe everybody out" at the social services office where Kulakowski worked; the agency had put his daughter into foster care. In addition to the motive, the district attorney at trial produced other circumstantial evidence, including testimony from Brown's two ex-wives that he had bitten them. But Mofson, now deceased, was the centerpiece of the prosecution. | 23 | A fraction too much friction causes physics fisticuffs Chris Lee June 14, 2010 | Quick, out behind the bike shed, Professors Pendry and Leonhardt are having a fight over a completely hypothetical situation. If we hurry, we should catch the end of round three. Science: it is exactly like that all the time. It's just that, most of the time, the participants keep their disapproval of each other much more hidden. So what am I talking about? The story takes place in an area of physics that has been long-neglected: friction. Everyone knows it exists, engineers have a bunch of empirical formulas to calculate it, but no one gave much thought to what actually causes friction. Physicists started to pay serious attention about 10 years ago and, since that time, a lot of heat seems to have been generated. There seems to be considerable disagreement between physicists at the moment, with each having their own pet theory, their own predictions, and absolutely nothing in the way of experimental data to back any of them up. Our protagonists are two theoretical physicists, one at Imperial College London and the other at St. Andrews in Scotland. The heart of their disagreement boils down to trying to decide what happens in a seemingly simple situation. Imagine two perfectly smooth plates of material at a temperature of absolute zero, sitting in a perfect vacuum. The plates are separated from each other by a small distance and one is moving past the other at a constant rate. The big question: do these plates experience friction? | 24 | Top 10 Most Dangerous Plants in the World Chris Sweeney June 7, 2009 | Over millions of years, plants have developed some crafty ways to fend off hungry animals. Deadly neurotoxins, thorns capable of puncturing car tires, and powerful digestive enzymes are just a few. Following the recent discovery of Nepenthes attenboroughii, a giant pitcher plant large enough to digest rodents, PM tracked down poison-plant aficionado Amy Stewart to discuss some of the world's deadliest plants. Stewart, who is the author of Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities, lives in Eureka, Calif., where she tends a garden that contains more than 30 different species of poisonous plants. 1. Most likely to eat a rat 2. Most likely to be in your garden now | 25 | World's Oldest Fig Wasp Discovered
15 June 2010 | The world's oldest known example of a fig wasp has been identified from the Isle of Wight. Dating back 34 million years, the fossil wasp looks almost identical to the modern species, suggesting the specialized insect has remained virtually unchanged for at least that long. |
This fig wasp is dated to 34 million years ago. The pocket where the pollen is stored has been arrowed. Copyright: Natural History Museum, London. | 26 | Are we there yet? Daisy Yuhas
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| Years of effort and roughly 10,000 people have made the Large Hadron Collider the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. This collaborative feat of technology promises to change the way we understand the universe. Now the world is watching, waiting to see what so much effort will yield. Even at an initial collision energy of 7 trillion electronvolts–half its full capacity–the LHC is in a position to make important discoveries. Deep below the Swiss-French border, protons race around its 27-kilometer ring at nearly the speed of light and collide billions of times per second. Each collision produces a spray of particles, which are so elusive that physicists glimpse them only indirectly by the patterns they leave in the detectors as they decay. | |