麻豆传媒

Making Water Work: A dammed fine mess – Large reservoirs meet much of the world’s demand for water and power. But they are clogging up with silt and, within two decades, could be useless

The World of Liquid Crystals

Sensing satellites – who calls the tune?: What to do with the deluge of data

Sensing satellites – who calls the tune?: Satellites can provide essential data about global climate change, but only if governments give climatologists a say in their design

Look who’s talking now: Do apes hold the key to the origin of human language? Ape-language studies with one chimpanzee suggests they just might

Europe’s orbiting ocean plotter: Next week the European Space Agency is scheduled to launch its first remote sensing satellite. ERS-1 is designed to provide oceanographers with unprecedented detail for studying the seas

Is cannibalism too much to swallow?: The gruesome idea of cannibalism lives on. But archaeologists and anthropologists are increasingly hard pressed to find evidence that people ever indulged in the custom

AIDS vaccines – what chance of a fair trial?: Human trials of AIDS vaccines are likely to begin in the developing world within five years. But before they do, researchers must confront a host of ethical and practical problems

Gold rush threatens Australia’s green dreams: Miners want to dig for gold in Kakadu National Park. At a time of recession, government must decide for conservation and Aboriginal rights or industrial growth

Platonic relationships in the Universe?: Some scientists follow the Platonic tradition, seeing the Universe as basically simple and symmetrical. Others take the Aristotelian view that it is complicated and random. Who is right?

Humans

Avebury revisited: Archaeologists rethink ancient site’s true purpose

New Zealand’s restoration ecology:

Health

An ill wind from Chernobyl

The legacy of Chernobyl: Five years after the worst accident in the history of civilian nuclear power, people in the Ukraine still live in restricted zones and daily run the risk of exposure to high levels of radiation