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Features

Understanding the AIDS Pandemic

Mathematical models help to reveal how the AIDS virus infects individuals and communities. They sometimes produce results that upset simple intuition

By Robert M. May ، Roy M. Anderson

Biological Roles of Nitric Oxide

This previously elusive and obscure chemical is proving to be of vital physiological significance. Nitric oxide may be the first of a novel class of neurotransmitters

By David S. Bredt and Solomon H. Snyder

Planetary Nebulae

These fluorescent clouds of gas represent the last gasp of dying, sunlike stars. They are helping astronomers understand stellar evolution and even the ultimate fate of the universe

By Noam Soker

Blind Spots

Investigating how the visual system compensates for gaps in perception is helping researchers to elucidate how the brain processes images

By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Binary Optics

This marriage of optics and microelectronics has already produced useful lenses one fortieth the thickness of this page and arrays of 10,000 telescopes each the diameter of a human hair

By Wilfrid B. Veldkamp and Thomas J. McHugh

Why American Songbirds are Vanishing

An avian chorus still heralds the beginning of spring in North America, but the number of singers has declined sharply of late. The trend will be difficult to reverse

By John Terborgh

Heisenberg, Uncertainty and the Quantum Revolution

At 32, Werner Heisenberg was one of the youngest scientists to receive the Nobel Prize. Ambition and fierce competitiveness inspired him to formulate one of the best-known principles of science

By David C. Cassidy

Eloquent Remains

Nucleic acids and proteins trapped in ancient mummies and still more ancient bones can serve as time capsules of history. Molecular biologists are beginning to unlock their secrets.

By Philip E. Ross

Departments

  • 50 and 100 Years Ago: May 1992

  • Better Care, Less Care

  • Is it History or just E-Mail?

  • Forbidden Light

  • Born Yesterday

  • Life in a Test Tube?

  • Mutable Mutation

  • Trying Transmutation

  • Japan, Cold Fusion and Lyndon LaRouche

  • The Builder of Bridges

  • Electric Car Pool

  • Relative Lightweights

  • Frothing a Raindrop

  • Demonic Toxin

  • Business at Rio

  • Village Pharmacy

  • Letters

    Letters to the Editors, May 1992

  • Recommended

    Book Reviews, May 1992

  • Amateur Scientist

    Watching the Death of a Star

  • Departments

    Overcoming the Short-Term Syndrome

  • Metaphor in the Language of Science

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May 1992