Science News

[Duke of Buckingham]

Alien Yet Familiar: Following Curiosity Across Mars
By Caleb A. Scharf | November 28, 2014 |

822 Martian days after landing, NASA’s Curiosity rover, carrying the Mars Science Laboratory, continues on its extraordinary journey across landscapes that are both utterly alien, and remarkably familiar. Here’s a small update. On November 18th 2014 the rover was in the center of this region (within the Pahrump Hills), continuing across the base area of Mount Sharp, the 18,000 foot central peak within Gale Crater:


Curiosity at the center. Image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

In the next image you can get an idea of the planned route as it was back in September 2014 (with an improved, slightly more efficient path) – this map also gives a better indication of where Curiosity has come from since its touchdown at Bradbury Landing, and an inkling of the scale of Mount Sharp (insert).


(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

But the grander perspective comes from seeing Mount Sharp in its full glory, as shown here from a NASA/JPL release in September 2014. The scope of the rover’s journey and ambition is impressive, to say the least.

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...y-across-mars/


Parsing the Science of Interstellar with Physicist Kip Thorne
By Lee Billings | November 28, 2014 | Comments36


The supermassive black hole and one of its planets in 'Interstellar.' Credit: Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros.

In an earlier blog post about Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar, I lauded the film for its ambition, its visuals and the strong performances of its cast. However, I also criticized it for its depiction of interstellar travel and a plot filled with details that didn’t seem to make much sense.

Perhaps because I called some of its science “laughably wrong,” my post drew the attention of Kip Thorne, the Caltech physicist who served as science advisor on the film. Thorne sent me a copy of his new book, The Science of Interstellar, and encouraged me to read it and reconsider my criticisms. The book tells ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...st-kip-thorne/

[Duke of Buckingham]

Launch of Orion Paves the Way for NASA’s Return to Human Spaceflight
The first human-rated U.S. spacecraft since the space shuttle took an unmanned trial run on Friday
December 5, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz


The Orion capsule lifts off on a Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. December 5, 2014.
Clara Moskowitz/Scientific American

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.— A crowd of thousands on Florida’s Space Coast watched the world’s largest rocket launch the new Orion capsule on its first trip to space. NASA’s replacement for the space shuttle, Orion could one day carry people to an asteroid and even to Mars. Today, however, it flew without a crew on a trial run that should send it around Earth twice, reaching a peak altitude of 5,800 kilometers (15 times higher than the International Space Station)—farther than any human-rated spacecraft has gone in 40 years. The capsule is due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean about four-and-a-half hours after its launch, which took place Friday, a day late after wind, a wayward boat and a fuel valve glitch prevented a first launch attempt on Thursday. Orion finally lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station this morning at 7:05 a.m. EST.

“We haven’t had this feeling in a while, since the end of the shuttle program,” Orion flight director Mike Sarafin of the Johnson Space Center in Houston said Wednesday before the liftoff. “We’re launching an American spacecraft from American soil and beginning something new and exploring deep space.” Since the last space shuttle landed in 2011 ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20141205

[Duke of Buckingham]

U.S. Ebola Vaccine Clears Safety Test
The candidate drug will be tested next to see how well it can help prevent infection
December 1, 2014 |By Ewen Callaway and Nature magazine


Study participant receives NIAID/GSK candidate ebola vaccine
Credit: NIAID via Flickr

An experimental vaccine against Ebola virus seems to be safe and commands a strong immune response against the virus, according to tests in 20 healthy people in the United States. The results of the phase 1 trial are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“All in all, I would say it was a successful phase 1 study,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which co-developed the drug with the London-based drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). “The next steps are to move ahead with a larger efficacy trial in West Africa.”

The vaccine is similar to one that is on track to be tested in larger trials in West Africa, which are likely begin early next year. In these phase 2 and phase 3 trials, thousands of people who are ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20141208


Rooftop Solar Cost Competitive with the Grid in Much of the U.S.
Can solar power compete with fossil fuels?
December 1, 2014


The cost of electricity derived from residential rooftop solar panels could achieve "price parity" with fossil-fuel-based grid power in 47 U.S. states by 2016 according to a new report from Deutsche Bank.
Credit: Courtesy 64MM, Flickr CC

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that the price of getting solar panels installed on a home is lower than ever, but has it gotten to the point anywhere in the U.S. where it’s actually cheaper than traditional grid power yet?
--Lester Milstein, Boston, MA

Rooftop solar panels on have always been the province of well-to-do, eco-friendly folks willing to shell out extra bucks to be green, but that is all starting to change. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the cost of putting solar panels on a typical American house has fallen by some 70 percent over the last decade and a half. And a recent report from Deutsche Bank shows that solar has already achieved so-called “price parity” with fossil fuel-based grid power in 10 U.S. states. Deutsche Bank goes on to say that solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in all but three states by 2016—assuming,that is, that the federal government maintains the 30 percent solar investment tax ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20141208

[Duke of Buckingham]

How House Calls Slash Health Care Costs
A MacArthur “genius” grant winner is now formally studying how hot-spotting method cuts expensive emergency room visits and delivers better care
December 5, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron


Credit: Getty

Even the most trivial of emergency-room trips can quickly add up. Going in for an upper respiratory infection averages more than $1,000. A urinary tract infection can set patients back thousands of dollars. But before Obamacare came on the scene, New Jersey physician Jeffrey Brenner was already working on innovative ways to slash health-care costs. He scoured health-care billing data at local hospitals and discovered that a small number of “super utilizers” clustered in certain geographic areas were responsible for the bulk of health-care costs in Camden, N.J. He brought together a team of social workers and medical professionals, who made regular house calls to those patients, accompanied them to doctor’s appointments ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20141209


Ebola Infections Fewer Than Predicted by Disease Models
Improvements in health care and other uncertainties make accurate forecasts difficult
December 8, 2014 |By Seema Yasmin


Modelers are forced to build some assumptions into their programs because of a lack of data. That’s especially true at the beginning of an epidemic when efforts to stop the outbreak take precedence over accurate data collection and communication.
Credit: USAID via flickr

A few months ago the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that up to 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone could become infected with Ebola by mid-January. In a recent address to the Senate, CDC director Tom Frieden said that worst-case scenario would not pan out.

That is partly because health care workers in the Ebola hot zone are engaged in a battle to contain the epidemic. It is also because of assumptions about human and viral behavior that are built into the mathematical models used to predict the spread of infectious diseases. Assumptions are inherent in these models. “You take islands of data from different places and build bridges of assumptions that link up all these islands,” says Martin Meltzer, senior health economist at the CDC. Meltzer’s model, which predicted ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20141209

[Duke of Buckingham]

Can Fear Be Erased?
Hormone and gene therapies for anxiety and PTSD could be on the way
December 4, 2014 |By Bret Stetka


Give oxytocin to people with certain anxiety disorders, and activity in the amygdala—the primary fear center in human and other mammalian brains, two almond-shaped bits of brain tissue sitting deep beneath our temples—falls.
Credit: Amber Rieder, Jenna Traynor, & Geoffrey B Hall via Wikimedia Commons

When University of Bonn psychologist Monika Eckstein designed her latest published study, the goal was simple: administer a hormone into the noses of 62 men in hopes that their fear would go away. And for the most part, it did.

The hormone was oxytocin, often called our “love hormone” due to its crucial role in mother-child relationships, social bonding, and intimacy (levels soar during sex). But it also seems to have a significant antianxiety effect. Give oxytocin to people with certain anxiety disorders, and activity in the amygdala—the primary fear center in human and other mammalian brains, two almond-shaped bits of brain tissue sitting deep beneath our temples—falls.

The amygdala normally buzzes with activity in response to potentially threatening stimuli. When an organism repeatedly encounters ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_MB_20141210


Practice Doesn't Always Make Perfect
Science does not bear out the popular idea that nearly anyone can succeed with enough practice
Oct 16, 2014 |By Nathan Collins


JASON LEE

It takes many thousands of hours of hard work to get to the top—yet time alone is not enough if you lack the other attributes necessary in your discipline, according to a study published online in July in Psychological Science.

In 1993 psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues argued that success was not a matter of talent but rather what they termed deliberate practice, an idea that Malcolm Gladwell popularized as the “10,000-hour rule” in his book Outliers. Still, the role of deliberate practice—activities designed with the goal of improving performance—remained controversial. To try to sort things out, psychologist Brooke N. Macnamara of Princeton University and her colleagues reviewed 157 experimental results connecting total time spent practicing to ability in sports, music, education and other areas. On average, practice time accounted for ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_MB_20141210

[Duke of Buckingham]

What Is This “Atmospheric River” That Is Flooding California?
By Mark Fischetti | December 11, 2014 | Comments5



The San Francisco Bay Area is getting flooded with relentless rain and strong winds, just like it did a week ago, and fears of rising water are now becoming very serious. Major news stations, weather channels, Web outlets and social media are all suddenly talking about the “atmospheric river” that is bringing deluge after deluge to California, as well as the coast of Washington. What is this thing? How rare is it? And how big of a threat could it be? Here are some answers. And see our graphics, below, taken from a brilliant and prescient feature article written by Michael Dettinger and Lynn Ingram in Scientific American in January 2013.

Not interested? In 1861 an atmospheric river that brought storms for 43 days turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, 800,000 cattle drowned and the state went bankrupt. A similar disaster today ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...ng-california/


2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past
New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe
December 8, 2014 |By Lee Billings


In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past.
Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Physicists have a problem with time.

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_SPC_20141211

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mysterious Seafloor Methane Begins to Melt Off Washington State Coast
Researchers probe the oceans off the west coast and see signs of the meltdown of icy methane similar in size to the BP oil spill
December 10, 2014 |By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire


Warming of the Pacific Ocean off Washington state could destabilize methane deposits on the seafloor and trigger a release of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.
Credit: Sam Beebe via Flickr

Warming of the Pacific Ocean off Washington state could destabilize methane deposits on the seafloor and trigger a release of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

In the worst-case scenario, if oceans warm by up to 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100, the volume of methane release every year by 2100 would quadruple the amount by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the study estimates.

At issue are methane hydrates, which are complexes of methane trapped in frozen ice buried in ocean beds. The hydrates are found throughout the world's oceans and are maintained by cool water and immense pressures. But as the oceans warm, the hydrates get destabilized and methane is released.

Methane is a significant greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential 86 times as potent as CO2 on a 20-year time scale. Some scientists worry that ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20141215


Bed Bugs, Kissing Bugs Linked to Deadly Chagas Disease in U.S.
Risk may still be low, but findings lead scientists to call for better studies
December 10, 2014 |By Jennifer Frazer


Triatoma gerstaeckeri collected in Southeast Texas.
Credit: Rodion Gorchakov

Every year, the hearts of millions of Central and South Americans are quietly damaged by parasites. During the night, insects called kissing bugs emerge by the hundreds from hiding places in people’s mud and stick homes to bite their sleeping victims. The bugs defecate near the punctured skin and wriggling wormlike parasites in this poop may enter the wound and head for their victims' hearts. There, in about a third of victims, they damage the organs for decades before causing potentially lethal heart disease. Around 12,000 people worldwide die each year from the ailment, called Chagas disease.

Scientists thought Americans were safe in their sturdier houses. Now some are not so sure. Chagas-infected kissing bugs do enter at least some southern U.S. dwellings and bite people living there, recent studies suggest. And a new study published two weeks ago raises the specter ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20141215

[Duke of Buckingham]

What Rare Disorder Is Hiding in Your DNA?
As comprehensive genetic tests become more widespread, patients and experts mull how to deal with unexpected findings
Dec 16, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron


Skip Sterling

Last spring Laura Murphy, then 28 years old, went to a doctor to find out if a harmless flap of skin she had always had on the back of her neck was caused by a genetic mutation. Once upon a time, maybe five years ago, physicians would have focused on just that one question. But today doctors tend to run tests that pick up mutations underlying a range of hereditary conditions. Murphy learned not only that a genetic defect was indeed responsible for the flap but also that she had another inherited genetic mutation.

This one predisposed her to long QT syndrome, a condition that dramatically increases the risk of sudden cardiac death. In people with the syndrome ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20141216


Exercise Counteracts Genetic Risk for Alzheimer's
Regular physical activity may correct the brain's metabolism to stave off dementia
Oct 16, 2014 |By Emilie Reas


THINKSTOCK

If you carried a gene that doubled your likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease, would you want to know? What if there was a simple lifestyle change that virtually abolished that elevated risk? People with a gene known as APOE e4 have a higher risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in old age. Even before behavioral symptoms appear, their brains show reduced metabolism, altered activity and more deterioration than those without the high-risk gene. Yet accumulating research is showing that carrying this gene is not necessarily a sentence for memory loss and confusion—if you know how to work it to your advantage with exercise.

Scientists have long known that exercise can help stave off cognitive decline. Over the past decade evidence has mounted suggesting that this benefit is even greater for those at higher genetic risk for Alzheimer's. For example, two studies by a team in Finland and Sweden found that exercising at least twice a week in midlife lowers one's chance of getting dementia more than 20 years later, and this protective effect is stronger in people with the APOE e4 gene. Several others reported that frequent exercis ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20141216

[Duke of Buckingham]

NASA Rover Finds Mysterious Methane Emissions on Mars
New results suggest evidence for extraterrestrial life could be near at hand
December 16, 2014 |By Lee Billings


NASA's Curiosity rover, seen here in a self-portrait from spring 2014, has found conclusive evidence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. The gas is a potential sign of alien life, though it could also be produced through abiotic mechanisms.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Is there life on Mars? The answer may be blowing in the wind.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected fluctuating traces of methane – a possible sign of life – in the thin, cold air of the Martian atmosphere, researchers announced today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Across Mars and within Gale Crater, where Curiosity is slowly climbing a spire of sedimentary rock called Mount Sharp, the methane exists at a background concentration of slightly less than one part per billion by volume in the atmosphere (ppb). However, for reasons unknown, four times across a period of two months the rover measured much higher methane abundances, at about ten times the background level. Further in-situ studies of the methane emissions could help pin down whether Mars has life, now ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_SPC_20141218


Fact or Fiction?: The Explosive Death of Eta Carinae Will Cause a Mass Extinction
We almost certainly have nothing to fear from one of the largest and brightest stars in the sky
December 16, 2014 |By Lee Billings


The star system Eta Carinae is nearing its death as a supernova.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

When we think about “existential” threats, things that could potentially end the lives of everyone on Earth, most of the possibilities come from right here on our own planet—climate change, global pandemics and atomic warfare. Turning a paranoid gaze to the skies, we typically worry about asteroid strikes or perhaps some perilously massive burp from our sun.

But if you trust everything you read on the fringe regions of the internet, you may think the most fearsome heavenly threat may not only be extraterrestrial, but also extrasolar. Some 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina a star called Eta Carinae, at least a hundred times more massive than our own sun, is approaching the point where it will detonate as a supernova. Simply put, Eta Carinae is ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_SPC_20141218

[Duke of Buckingham]

Will Cuba Now Embrace U.S. Technology?
The president is offering Cuba something the Castro government never asked for: access to U.S.-backed telecommunications services and gadgets
December 18, 2014 |By Larry Greenemeier


Image of Cuba’s Communist Party headquarters, courtesy of Marco Zanferrari, via Flickr.

Pres. Barack Obama made good Wednesday on a years-old promise to begin to normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba. An authorization for U.S. companies to increase telecommunications connections between the two countries is a key component of the new U.S. policy.

The administration foreshadowed these changes in April 2009 when Obama directed the secretaries of State, Treasury and Commerce to “take the steps required” to let U.S. network providers cut deals to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite links between the U.S. and Cuba. Assuming the Castro regime ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20141222


For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal
An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities
December 17, 2014 |By Charles Seife


In the past few years signs of foul play in the peer-reviewed literature have cropped up across the scientific publishing world
Credit: Mike Watson Images/Thinkstock

Klaus Kayser has been publishing electronic journals for so long he can remember mailing them to subscribers on floppy disks. His 19 years of experience have made him keenly aware of the problem of scientific fraud. In his view, he takes extraordinary measures to protect the journal he currently edits, Diagnostic Pathology. For instance, to prevent authors from trying to pass off microscope images from the Internet as their own, he requires them to send along the original glass slides.

Despite his vigilance, however, signs of possible research misconduct have crept into some articles published in Diagnostic Pathology. Six of the 14 articles in the May 2014 issue, for instance, contain suspicious repetitions of phrases and other irregularities. When Scientific American informed ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20141222