Category: Why Doesn’t Acid Hurt the Naked Mole Rat?

The naked mole rat is highly sensitive to touch, but when it comes to chili peppers or acid, the hairless, sausage-like creatures are immune to the sting. That resistance has raised hopes that the animals might hold clues about how to treat chronic pain in humans, reports Charles Q. Choi in LiveScience.com.
Found in oxygen-starved […]

Global warming hasn’t stopped, as a prominent science writer claimed recently in the New Statesman, a generally liberal British weekly. In fact, the pace of climate change has accelerated, and saying otherwise misleads readers and gives unnecessary ammunition to conspiracy theorists, declares Mark Lynas, the magazine’s environmental correspondent.
Mr. Lynas takes on a controversial article […]

The U.S. government so badly mishandled the findings on Iran’s uranium-enrichment program that the world now faces a far greater risk of nuclear-weapons proliferation, the Economist says.
In a cover story some two months after U.S. intelligence services concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, the British newsweekly says the report undid five […]

Can artificial glaciers help compensate for the disappearance of naturally forming ones? Scientists and aid agencies are studying communities in mountainous regions of India and Pakistan that have a long tradition of assembling glaciers by grafting together ice and snow masses, reports the New Scientist. In these areas, glaciers serve as a regular and reliable […]

Policewomen in Iraq have won back their right to carry guns, although Tina Susman warns in the Los Angeles Times that the victory does little to advance equality in police ranks.
Late last year, she reported on a little-noticed order for policewomen to give up their guns, which Iraqi officials said was necessary to prevent women […]

Some U.S. nuclear secrets would be more valuable if they were shared among law-enforcement officials, allies and even some enemies, says Michael Levi in science magazine Seed. Blanket security was a sensible approach when no one knew the basic principles that could be used to build a nuclear bomb. But today, scientists overestimate how much […]

Do cafeteria patrons waste food because of the ubiquitous food tray?
That is the conclusion of some university administrators, who have found that removing trays from dining halls cuts down on the amount of food and drink that gets thrown in the trash. The idea is that without the convenience and space that trays afford, students […]

As the novel loses out to the ever-declining attention spans of the digital age, perhaps it’s time for serious literature to hitch itself to the novella, says Jean Hannah Edelstein on the Guardian’s books blog.
With a length somewhere between a short story and a novel, the novella can deliver a sophisticated read without draining the […]

Why were searchers unable to locate millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett’s lost plane despite huge advances in information technology? Tools like Google Earth satellite imaging and GPS locators can come up short, especially in mountainous places like Nevada. Successful searches still depend largely on volunteer pilots’ stamina, sharp eyes and high tolerance for motion sickness, as […]

The naked mole rat is highly sensitive to touch, but when it comes to chili peppers or acid, the hairless, sausage-like creatures are immune to the sting. That resistance has raised hopes that the animals might hold clues about how to treat chronic pain in humans, reports Charles Q. Choi in LiveScience.com.
Found in oxygen-starved […]