Science News

[Duke of Buckingham]

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop
Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material
Jun 3, 2014 |By Cindi May


The old fashioned way works better.
Credit: Szepy via iStock

“More is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Doubt Grows about Gravitational Waves Detection
Two analyses suggest that the signal of big bang ripples announced earlier this year was too weak to be significant
Jun 2, 2014 |By Ron Cowen and Nature magazine


Preliminary data from the Planck probe on how galactic dust scatters microwave radiation, presented at an April 2013 meeting, are now being used to evaluate the strength of signals from the primordial Universe.
Credit: Planck Collaboration (ESLAB2013)

The astronomers who this spring announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun because they did not take into proper account a confounding effect of galactic dust, two new analyses suggest. Although further observations may yet find the signal to emerge from the noise, independent experts now say they no longer believe that the original data constituted significant evidence.

Researchers said in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the Big Bang’s afterglow, using a South Pole-based radio telescope called BICEP2. This pattern, they said, was evidence for primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time generated in the early Universe (see 'Telescope captures view of gravitational waves'). The announcement caused a sensation because ...

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The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us to Disaster
So-called ecopragmatists say we can have a “good Anthropocene.” They’re dead wrong
Jun 19, 2014 |By Clive Hamilton
SA Forum ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/section/online-forum/ ) is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology.

The argument absolves us all of the need to change our ways, which is music to the ears of political conservatives.
Credit: Doc Searls via Flickr

Fourteen years ago, when a frustrated Paul Crutzen blurted out the word “Anthropocene” at a scientific meeting in Mexico, the famous atmospheric chemist was expressing his despair at the scale of human damage to Earth. So profound has been the influence of humans, Nobelist Crutzen and his colleagues later wrote, that the planet has entered a new geologic epoch defined by a single, troubling fact: The “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large ...

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Higgs Boson Looks “Standard,” but Upgraded LHC May Tell a Different Tale
A new run at the Large Hadron Collider in 2015 could show whether the Higgs boson matches the Standard Model of particle physics or opens the door to new theories
Jun 26, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz


A proton-proton collision at LHC's CMS experiment shows a candidate Higgs boson decaying into two photons (dashed yellow lines).
Credit: CMS/CERN

If it looks like a Higgs, and acts like a Higgs, it’s probably a standard Higgs boson. That’s the drift from the latest measurements at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where physicists have been carefully characterizing the new particle they discovered in 2012. So far, every test at the Geneva accelerator confirms that the new particle closely resembles the Higgs boson described by the Standard Model of particle physics. These results resoundingly confirm the Higgs theory first put forward in 1964 by Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs—and helped win the latter two the Nobel prize last year. (Brout died in 2011, making him ineligible for the award.)

Scientists are eager to detect deviations...

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Politics Derail Science on Arsenic, Endangering Public Health
A ban on arsenic-containing pesticides was lifted after a lawmaker disrupted a scientific assessment by the EPA
Jun 30, 2014 |By David Heath and Center for Public Integrity


Wendy Brennan's granddaughter, Abigail Begin, near the family's water well.
Credit: Amy Temple

This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. It is part of a collaboration among the Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting and Michigan Radio. It was featured on Reveal, a new program from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.

MOUNT VERNON, Maine—Living in the lush, wooded countryside with fresh New England air, Wendy Brennan never imagined her family might be consuming poison every day. But when she signed up for a research ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Extensive Gene Transfers Occur in Complex Cells Way More than Expected
Multiple independent gene transfers are now documented to occur in the evolutionary history of eukaryotic life, not just among prokaryotes
Jul 2, 2014 |By Brian Owens and Nature magazine


Bacteria frequently trade genes back and forth with their neighbors, gaining abilities and traits that enable them to adapt quickly to new environments.
Credit: Peter G. Werner via Wikimedia Commons

A single gene from bacteria has been donated to fungi on at least 15 occasions. The discovery shows that an evolutionary shortcut once thought to be restricted to bacteria is surprisingly common in more complex, eukaryotic life.

Bacteria frequently trade genes back and forth with their neighbors, gaining abilities and traits that enable them to adapt quickly to new environments. More complex organisms, by contrast, generally have to make do with the slow process of gene duplication and mutation.

There are a few examples of gene swapping ...
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Experiment Triggers Superhot Plasma Outbursts to Untangle Solar Flare Mystery
Re-creating conditions on the sun’s surface inside a laboratory plasma chamber, scientists find surprising insights into solar outbursts
Jul 10, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz


The Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab can re-create the plasma eruptions on the sun in miniature.
Credit: Clara Moskowitz/Scientific American

The sun is an alien place where matter in a state rarely encountered on Earth roils and twines and sometimes erupts into space. Despite decades of telescope monitoring, scientists lack a fundamental understanding of how and why these outbursts happen. In the past couple of decades physicists have tried re-creating the situation on the sun’s surface in the controlled setting of the laboratory. One study recently wrapped up at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is turning up intriguing results.

About five kilometers north of the main Princeton campus in New Jersey the plasma lab is a complex of ... Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20140711

[Duke of Buckingham]

Proton Spin Mystery Gains a New Clue
Physicists long assumed a proton’s spin came from its three constituent quarks. New measurements suggest particles called gluons make a significant contribution
Jul 21, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Protons have a constant spin that is an intrinsic particle property like mass or charge. Yet where this spin comes from is such a mystery it’s dubbed the “proton spin crisis.” Initially physicists thought a proton’s spin was the sum of the spins of its three constituent quarks. But a 1987 experiment showed that quarks can account for only a small portion of a proton’s spin, raising the question of where the rest arises. The quarks inside a proton are held together by gluons, so scientists suggested perhaps they contribute spin. That idea now has support from a pair of studies analyzing the results of proton collisions inside the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Physicists often explain spin as a particle’s rotation, but ...

Read more on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20140725

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Rats Experience Feelings of Regret
New study reveals rat’s remorse — another way other animals are like humans
Jul 29, 2014 |By Fikri Birey


Why did I ever do that?... Credit: Thinkstock

What’s the difference between you and a rat? The list is unsurprisingly long but now, we can cross a universal human experience — feelings of regret — off of it.

A new study shows for the first time that rats regret bad decisions and learn from them. In addition to existentialist suggestions of a rat’s regret — and what that takes away from, or adds to, being “human” — the study is highly relevant to basic brain research. Researchers demonstrated that we can tap into complex internal states of rodents if we hone in on the right behavior and the right neurons. There is a significant literature on what brain regions are representative of certain states, like reward predictions and value calculations, but the study ...

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Cross-Border Ebola Outbreak a First for Deadly Virus
Weeks ahead remain fraught with uncertainty as pathogen jumps borders and appears in Africa’s largest city
Jul 30, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

William Fischer pictured in front of temporary Ebola treatment center in Guinea.
Credit: Andreas Kurth, courtesy of Fischer

When the physicians found the nine-year-old boy he was scared and barely had a pulse. He had been locked in a house with his mother for four days by community members in a corner of southwest Guinea, the hotbed of Africa’s current Ebola crisis.

The boy’s neighbors were frightened of contracting the virus that causes the highly lethal illness (which kills between 50 and 90 percent of its victims) and did not want to risk coming into contact with either of them.

By the time that Doctors Without Borders came upon their village ...

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When Will We Have a Vaccine for Ebola Virus?
The deadly Ebola outbreak in west Africa highlights the urgent need for a vaccine, and researchers say one may be available in a few years
Jul 29, 2014 |By Annie Sneed

Color-enhanced electron micrograph of Ebola virus particles
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/PLoS Pathogens

The latest outbreak of Ebola virus in west Africa is the worst ever—as of Monday, it had infected more than 1,200 people and claimed at least 672 victims since this spring. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone all have confirmed cases. An official at Doctors Without Borders has declared the outbreak as “totally out of control,” according to NBC News. Unfortunately, doctors have no effective vaccines or therapies. Health care workers can only attempt to support patients’ immune systems (regulating fluids, oxygen levels, blood pressure and treating other infections) to help the afflicted fight off the virus as best they can.

A vaccine to help battle future Ebola outbreaks may be just a few years away, however. During the past decade researchers have ...

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