Facts before fiction

Asbestos: facts and fiction.

Asbestos: Facts and Fiction I appreciate the opportunity to address the omissions, inaccuracies, and innuendos in the position paper by David P. Rall, "Media and Science: Harmless Dioxin, Benign CFCs, and Good Asbestos" (EHP 102:10). Unfortunately, Rail not only misinterprets the conclusions of our 1990 Science article by Mossman et al. (1) but he fails to mention the database, scientific panel...

Leprosy: Facts and Fiction

Teething: facts and fiction.

Learning facts from fiction

People s knowledge about the world comes from many sources, including fictional ones such as movies and novels. In three experiments, we investigated how people learn and integrate information from fictional sources with their general world knowledge. Subjects read a series of short stories that contained information about the real world. After a short delay, all participants took a general kno...

Artificial muscle: facts and fiction.

Mechanical devices are sought to support insufficient or paralysed striated muscles including the failing heart. Nickel-titanium alloys (nitinol) present the following two properties: (i) super-elasticity, and (ii) the potential to assume different crystal structures depending on temperature and/or stress. Starting from the martensite state nitinol is able to resume the austenite form (state of...