#1: PROTEIN PLUGS GAPS IN GUM DISEASE Gum tissue eaten away by disease can now be restored by using a gel that rebuilds teeth's vital supporting tissue. The gel, which is simple to apply during routine surgery, contains amelogenin, a structural protein which reawakens the processes that govern the growth of teeth in infants. Page 29 ORDER
#2: MIXED MESSAGES FEED EATING DISORDERSts. Page 29 Efforts to prevent and treat eating disorders among young women in the US may be doing more harm than good. The problem, according to a new study of a typical American programme, is that women are being given two conflicting messages. Page 6 ORDER
#3: SUPERMAGNET IS BIG ON ATTRACTION The most powerful magnet in the world has been built at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. A superconducting coil made of niobium-tin alloy, the magnet is 250,000 times as strong as the Earth's magnetic field and 22 per cent more powerful than the previous record holder, a Dutch magnet constructed in 1995. Page 16 in 1995. Page 16 ORDER
#4: SELLAFIELD LEAVES ITS MARK ON THE FROZEN NORTH Radioactivity from Britain's Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria has spread through the Arctic Ocean into the waters of northern Canada. The contamination, which has never before been picked up so far from Britain, is having a bigger impact on the Arctic than the Chernobyl accident, according to new Canadian data. Page 14 ORDER
#5: PUTTING RANDOMNESS IN ORDER
A big question has often dogged experimental scientists - how random is a series of observations? Now a group of mathematicians has come up with a way to pin this down by measuring the disorder in a series of numbers. Their approach has already uncovered clues that "the male menopause" may exist, and could help in analysing everything from brain scans to financial markets. Page 22 ORDER
#6: EMOTIONS NEED 40 WINKSs to financial markets. Page 22 Miss some sleep, and all too often you become an irritable, antisocial, indecisive wreck. But why? A new slant on our puzzling need for sleep comes from a Belgian team, who claim that the parts of the brain dealing with behaviour and emotions need more rest than others - and so feel the lack more keenly. Page 20 ORDER
#7: DEAD STAR SENDS US HIGH-SPEED DEBRISe lack more keenly. Page 20 The origin of cosmic rays - high energy particles that travel at close to the speed of light - has long been a mystery. Now astronomers in Britain and Russia say that at least some are coming from the remains of a star, within a few hundred light years of Earth, that died in a supernova explosion. Page 21 ORDER
#8: TWINNING TECHNIQUES TO MAP THE MINDva explosion. Page 21 Mapping neural connections in live human brains is poised to take a great leap forward. For the first time researchers have married two technologies that together could produce a detailed plan of the wiring between different functional areas in the brain. The research may shed light on the possible role of faulty wiring in disorders such as schizophrenia, and on how patients recover from a stroke or brain injury. Page 26 ORDER
#9: PULLING THE TRIGGER ON TOUGH TUMOURS By a particularly nasty irony, cancers that have been all but eradicated by conventional treatment can often regrow into incurable tumours. The hardy cells that survive anti-cancer drugs and radiation often produce aggressive cancers. Now geneticists in Britain have hit upon a method of targeting these ultra-resistant cells. Page 27 ORDER
#10: PAY ATTENTION ROVER
Successful drug detecting dogs do not have a particularly acute sense of smell but unswerving concentration, says the Australian customs service which has discovered how to breed dogs with this characteristic. Pages 30-33 ORDER
#11: WHO KILLED FRANK OLSON?characteristic. Pages 30-33 Did the CIA murder an American biochemist when secret experiments with psychedelic drugs went horribly wrong? The original verdict when Frank Olson fell from the 13th floor of a New York hotel in 1953 was suicide. But forensic scientists have reexamined the evidence and discovered that it may tell a different story. ORDER
#12: COLASSAL ADVENTURESnd discovered that it may tell a different story. An ex-MI5 man has rebuilt Colossus, the world's first electronic computer which was used to crack German codes during the war. The machine works more quickly than a Pentium chip but has remained secret for more than 50 years because the codes it employed were still in use. Pages 38-43 ORDER
#13: OUR FLEXIBLE FRIENDse. Pages 38-43 A new type of concrete could be used to construct the next generation of cars, circuit boards and even toothbrushes, say researchers in the US. The new treatment could even be applied to old concrete to toughen up and waterproof everything from houses to motorways. Pages 44-48 -ENDS-ouses to motorways. Pages 44-48
May 6, 1997 to motorways. Pages 44-48
Please remember to credit New Scientist with any resulting stories. Thanks. For fax copies of full stories or to arrange an interview, please contact Barbara Thurlow at [email protected] or on 202 452 1178.
In Europe please contact Lucy Banwell, IPC Press Office Tel: (0171) 261 6415 or e-mail: [email protected]
New Scientist is the recipient of 23 major awards including the 1996 UTNE Reader's Alternative press Award in the "Emerging Issues" category. Planet Science provides Internet users with news, features, reviews and comment drawn weekly from the pages of New Scientist magazine, as well as extra material exclusive to the web site. The site can be found at http://www.newscientist.com "
RSS