Friday, 25 May, 2012

Study: Drug companies advertise new diseases to push their product. How do journalists respond to the media blitz? How have newspapers reported on restless leg syndrome?

As weapons proliferate, we wonder: exactly how do you make a nuke? How many nations have this ability? How can we track proliferators?

Are software filters for the Internet censorship — or common sense? How do filters work? We take a filter for a test drive and ask, what are the intellectual stakes?

An international team of scientists selected the Homestake goldmine to be the world’s deepest underground lab, but the project may sink.

African science produces cancer drug, dust, rain and desertification and linguist Joseph Greenberg.

Coprolites — fossilized feces — are an important tool for archeology — and they don’t even smell!

Birdsong: Inspiration for Mozart? The chorus of frogs. Playing an ancient flute

How to restore the Dead Sea Scrolls? What if your treasure was a bunch of fading, brittle scrolls, written in three ancient languages, and that now exist on 100,000 fragments of dead-animal skin and papyrus? What if those scrolls contained the earliest written versions of the Old Testament?

Scientific kites are back, flying payloads high into the atmosphere and delivering data at a fraction of the cost of satellites and specialized planes.

How do we find and produce oil and natural gas? Give credit to the ancient plants that make oil and natural gas. Why do oil companies whack the Earth? What is a horizontal drill good for?