On:

We’ve been writing stories about using hydrogen fuel in order to get past the oil shortage and avoid the pollution that comes with burning fossil fuels. But hydrogen is only the start?what we REALLY need is to run our engines with antimatter! But almost every fuel has its downside, and antimatter is no exception.

Bill Steigerwald reports from NASA that space scientists are counting on antimatter fuel to power future space exploration. A piece of antimatter the size of an M&M could send a spacecraft to Mars. But antimatter reactions produce blasts of gamma rays, which are super strong X-rays that are unhealthy to be around, because they can cause cancer. Breathing in car exhaust fumes is bad enough for us?exposure to cars giving off gamma rays would be lethal.
read more

On:

Why do Asians do much better at math?both in school, and afterwards? (They also have less dyslexia). It may have to do with the structure of their written languages.

Roxanne Khamsi writes in New Scientist that the language you speak may help to determine how your brain circuits develop and thus how your brain solves math problems. Asian languages use characters that are based on drawings, so people for whom this was their first language?even if they speak a Western language now?use the VISUAL parts of the brains to solve ALL problems.
read more

On:

As more and more children in third world countries are immunized against polio, scientists are discovering something strange: new forms of the disease are cropping up, as the new forms of the virus are mutating into existence in places where the disease should have been eliminated. In other words, polio is becoming a kind of superbug.

The number of confirmed cases of polio in Namibia has hit 19, and 150 more cases of the disease are suspected. Until this recent outbreak, the disease had been eradicated there for over a decade. The new outbreak has affected mostly adults and the new version of the disease is much more virulent than the old one was. These adults were probably never vaccinated.
read more

On:

From October of 1985 to October of 1997, I was in almost constant contact with people who did not appear to be human. In Transformation and Breakthrough, I wrote about the period of relatively formal encounters that ended in 1990. But I have never written about what happened after that. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I couldn’t figure out how to do it most usefully. The second is that I didn’t feel that I could gain a receptive audience beyond the community of people who have had close encounters, of which there appear to be about a million in the United States.
read more