"A lot of the guys who were doctors during the Civil War were pretty cutting-edge," she says; many were medical-school professors or were supervised by them. "These were guys who knew their stuff. . . . Some of the treatments they used aren't necessarily that far off [from what we'd use today]."

For example, contradicting our modern perception, anesthesia was used amply and effectively. "Doctors would give [soldiers] just enough anesthesia so they weren't feeling pain but not enough that they were completely relaxed, so they would thrash and moan and people would have to hold them down," Schroeder-Lein says. "It would look like they were having their amputation without anesthesia, but in fact they woke up not remembering anything."

With nearly 13 million online users, the rapidly expanding virtual world Second Life is a risk for children, who could be sexually exploited, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said Monday. Kirk sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer-alert warning about its dangers.

On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

Many local residents see Dow as a lifeline in region plagued by plant closings and layoffs. But all along the two wide streams that cut through this old industrial town, signs warn people to keep off dioxin-contaminated riverbanks and to avoid eating fish pulled from the fast-moving waters. Officials have taken the swings down in one riverside park to discourage kids from playing there. Men in rubber boots and thick gloves occasionally knock on doors, asking residents whether they can dig up a little soil in the yard.

Albert Hofmann, a scientist who discovered and created the drug Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938, has died today at the age 102.

StopTheDrugWar.com reports that Hofmann's [sic] died of a heart attack in his house located in Basel, Switzerland.

After discovering LSD, he set it aside for five years, until April 16, 1943, when Hofmann decided to take another look at it. While re-synthesizing the LSD, he accidentally consumed a small sample and serendipitously discovered its powerful effects. Three days later, on April 19, Hofmann deliberately consumed 250 micrograms of LSD before his bicycle ride home.

He is now known as the first person to experience a 'trip' from taking it. Since then, LSD aficionados around the world unofficially proclaimed April 19, 1943 as Bicycle Day. Despite that, Hofmann denounced the illegal use of the drug which became popular in the 1960's. He was also said to be disappointed that further research was not conducted on it at the time.

No matter how powerful a conventional lens, it cannot focus light down to more than about half its wavelength, the "diffraction limit". This limits the amount of data that can be stored on a CD, and the size of features on computer chips.

What does a coral reef look like 50 years after being nuked? Not so bad, it seems. Coconuts growing on Bikini Atoll haven't fared so well, however.

An analysis of the DNA of farmer ants traced them back to an original ancestor — a sort of adam ant, at least for the types that raise their own food, according to a paper in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

A European space mission called Cluster detected a "soliton" wave, a phenomenon similar to the self-contained solitons that can travel along optical fibres and channels of water on Earth. This is the first known soliton in space.

A soliton is a single, well-defined wave that can travel for a long distance holding the same shape. In water, for example, a soliton can be shaped like a hump or a kink, where the level of water suddenly rises or drops.

According to an analysis of Cluster data from 2002, the soliton wave started about 50,000 kilometres from Earth, and travelled towards the planet at about 8 kilometres per second. The authors think it was generated by turbulence in the magnetopause, the edge of the magnetosphere.

Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, Russia, points out that if all dark matter, is black holes they would likely pass through the asteroid belts in our galactic backyard. Since a metre-sized primordial black hole can have the mass of the Earth, it would need only to pass near an asteroid to knock it out of a safe orbit and towards our planet

The formula involves the angle that the spacecraft's incoming and outgoing trajectories make with respect to Earth's equator. It accurately predicts the change in speed observed in the flybys so far.

Could the flyby anomaly be connected somehow to the Pioneer anomaly? Although there is no proof of a link, Anderson says he would be surprised if radio tracking of spacecraft had revealed two completely independent anomalies. "I suspect they are connected somehow," he says.

"If research is conducted on a wide scale, the planet is likely to be discovered in less than 10 years," it said.

Planet X — so called by scientists as it is yet unfound — would have an oblong elliptical solar orbit and circle the sun every thousand years, the team said, estimating its radius was 15 to 26 billion kilometres.

The study comes two years after school textbooks had to be rewritten when Pluto was booted out of the list of planets.

His team figured out how to grow the nanowires on a strand of Kevlar fibre instead of a flat surface, so that the wires stick out from the fibre like the bristles on a pipe-cleaner.

When two of the bristly fibres rub against one another, the nanowires deform, causing a current to flow through a thin layer of metal coating on one of the fibres.