Word: factor
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When buying a digital camera, many people focus on just one factor: megapixels, the more the better. But that's not the whole story. Lens quality, image-processing capability and even the size of the pixels can all have a greater effect on how your pictures turn out. "The number of megapixels," says Bob Sobol, an image scientist at Hewlett-Packard, "is relatively unimportant." What the quantity of megapixels (each one equals 1 million pixels) does determine is how big you should make your prints. For most consumers, a bottom-of-the-line, 2-megapixel model is just fine...
...real battle, though, is being fought in the arena of Taiwan politics. Newspapers reported that military sources leaked the results on purpose. The simulation also looked to be stacked in China's favor: for a start, it didn't factor in likely U.S. involvement. Why would Taiwan's military profess to be so vulnerable? Possibly because they are eager to buy expensive weapons from the U.S., such as diesel-electric subs and Patriot-3 antimissile systems?and a crushing defeat at the hands of a virtual People's Liberation Army makes a compelling case for such an expense. Chen...
...LOSING PROTESTANTS OR SIMPLY FLOODED WITH NON-PROTESTANT IMMIGRANTS? The latter has been suggested, disapprovingly, by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. But NORC STUDY CO-AUTHOR TOM W. SMITH SAYS, "immigration is a factor, but it's not the major thing." More important are a falling away of adult believers and a declining number of Protestant children who keep the faith. The Catholic proportion of the population has held steady at 23%. Neither Jews nor Muslims top 4%. The category that has really jumped (from 8% to 14%) in the past decade is people who say they don't subscribe...
...body weight comes from muscle). He packs the IGF-1 gene into a harmless cold virus and injects the entire package directly into muscle. Once the IGF-1 gene inserts itself into the genome of the muscle cell, it begins to churn out the insulin-like growth factor that activates muscle expansion. Muscles in mice injected this way grew up to 30% larger than in normal animals, even when the mice didn't exercise. And as the animals aged, their muscles remained strong, as vigorous as if they belonged to far younger mice. In the coming months, Sweeney plans...
...major strategies hold the most promise: boosting levels of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which encourages muscle repair; and removing myostatin, the body's natural check on uncontrolled muscle growth. Versions of IGF-1 are already available at pharmacies and nutritional-supplement stores, where they are marketed as muscle boosters, but scientists know that taking this oral form of the hormone does very little for building muscle and can have harmful effects on the heart. That hasn't stopped some athletes from trying it. "I'm convinced that some athletes are using a combination...