Science News

[Duke of Buckingham]

Molecular Clocks throughout Body, Not Just Brain, Keep Tissues Humming
Genes in the liver, pancreas and other tissues (not just the brain) keep the various parts of the body in sync. Timing miscues may lead to diabetes, depression and other illnesses
By Keith C. Summa and Fred W. Turek

Anyone who has ever flown east or west at 500 knots for more than a few hours has experienced firsthand what happens when the body's internal clock does not match the time zone in which it finds itself. Up to a week may be needed to get over the resulting jet lag—depending on whether the master clock, which is located deep inside the brain, needs to be advanced or slowed to synchronize when the body and brain want to sleep with when it is dark outside. Over the past several years, however, scientists have learned, much to our surprise, that, in addition to the master clock in the brain, the body depends on multiple regional clocks located in the liver, pancreas and other organs, as well as in the body's fatty tissue. If any one of these peripheral clocks runs out of sync with the master clock, the disarray can set the stage for obesity, diabetes, depression or other complex disorders.

The two of us have dedicated ourselves to exploring the ins and outs of ...

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As Cuba–U.S. Relations Thaw, Medical Researchers Still Struggle to Connect
The economic embargo is still in place, so warming connections between the countries can only take biomedicine so far, scientists say
January 28, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron

When Sergio Jorge Pastrana has big files to download he waits until he leaves his island nation. As foreign secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences he has a front-row seat to cutting edge research, but the country’s limited bandwidth capability is a constant reminder of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba which has hobbled the import of computer technology along with modern medical research tools.

The embargo, dating back to the Kennedy-era, is still in place but scientists in both nations are carefully tracking Pres. Barack Obama’s recent comments on the thawing relationship between the two countries. Obama has already moved to normalize relations and establish an embassy in Havana, but overturning the embargo ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_MB_20150128

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Weird X-Rays Spur Speculation about Dark Matter Detection
Scientists must now decide whether the anomalous signal is truly exotic or has a more mundane provenance
January 26, 2015 |By Matthew R. Francis


When astronomers recently discovered x-rays with no obvious origin, it sparked an exciting hypothesis.
Credit: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Many major discoveries in astronomy began with an unexplained signal: pulsars, quasars and the cosmic microwave background are just three out of many examples. When astronomers recently discovered x-rays with no obvious origin, it sparked an exciting hypothesis. Maybe this is a sign of dark matter, the invisible substance making up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. If so, it hints that the identity of the particles is different than the prevailing models predict.

The anomalous x-rays, spotted by the European Space Agency’s orbiting XMM–Newton telescope, originate from two different sources: the Andromeda Galaxy and the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The challenge is to determine what created those x-rays, as described ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_SPC_20150129


Planet Hunters Bet Big on a Small Telescope to See Alien Earths
By Lee Billings | January 27, 2015 | Comments1


Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star system, hangs over Saturn's horizon in this image from the Cassini orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft briefly looked back from its journey out of the solar system, capturing a view of the faraway Earth. Carl Sagan called it the “pale blue dot.” From more than 6 billion kilometers away, beyond the orbit of Pluto, it seemed remarkable that our planet was even visible. But the most remarkable thing about the image was what one could learn about the Earth, even from so far away. Lingering over that pale blue dot, measuring its fluctuating brightness and color, a clever observer could discern that our planet had clouds, oceans, continents, and perhaps even a living, breathing biosphere.

As small and faint as the Earth is in that iconic image, if it were observed across the much greater distances of interstellar space it would be far smaller and fainter still, and almost lost in the ten-billion-times-brighter glare of the sun – a bit like a firefly fluttering next to a gigantic searchlight. Astronomers have found nearly all of the thousands of exoplanets now known through more indirect means, watching for stars that periodically wobble or dim from unseen retinues of worlds.

To actually distinguish those planetary fireflies ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-alien-earths/

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Big Gap between What Scientists Say and Americans Think about Climate Change
But the gap may be closing between scientists and the public on global warming
January 30, 2015 |By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire


On controversial topics such as climate change, a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology.
Credit: Mikael Miettinen

There is good and bad news for climate scientists. The good news: Most Americans (79 percent) say that science and scientists are invaluable.

The bad news: On controversial topics such as climate change, a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology, which are reflected in their level of education, to decide whether humans are driving planetary warming.

This comes from a public opinion poll released yesterday by Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The poll captured a significant split between what scientists and the general public believe on climate change.

In 2014, the vast majority (87 percent) of scientists said ...

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As Cuba–U.S. Relations Thaw, Medical Researchers Still Struggle to Connect
The economic embargo is still in place, so warming connections between the countries can only take biomedicine so far, scientists say
January 28, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron


Credit: Fancy/ Punchstock/ Getty Images

When Sergio Jorge Pastrana has big files to download he waits until he leaves his island nation. As foreign secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences he has a front-row seat to cutting edge research, but the country’s limited bandwidth capability is a constant reminder of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba which has hobbled the import of computer technology along with modern medical research tools.

The embargo, dating back to the Kennedy-era, is still in place but scientists in both nations are carefully tracking Pres. Barack Obama’s recent comments on the thawing relationship between the two countries. Obama has already moved to normalize relations and establish an embassy in Havana, but overturning the embargo would require an act by the U.S. Congress. In his State of the Union speech on January 20 the president urged Congress to “begin the work of ending the embargo.” Lifting the ban, scientists say, would usher in a new era of opportunities, especially in medicine.

The embargo has crippled Cuba’s medical sector since ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20150202

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Memcomputers: Faster, More Energy-Efficient Devices That Work Like a Human Brain
New types of electronic components, closer to neurons than to transistors, are leading to tremendously efficient and faster “memcomputing”
By Massimiliano Di Ventra and Yuriy V. Pershin

When we wrote the words you are now reading, we were typing on the best computers that technology now offers: machines that are terribly wasteful of energy and slow when tackling important scientific calculations. And they are typical of every computer that exists today, from the smartphone in your hand to the multimillion-dollar supercomputers humming along in the world's most advanced computing facilities.

We were writing in Word, a perfectly fine program that you probably use as well. To write “When we wrote the words you are now reading,” our computer had to move a collection of 0's and 1's—the machine representation of a Word document—from a temporary memory area and send it to another physical location, the central processing unit (CPU), via a bunch of wires. The processing unit transformed the data into ...

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Blood Type Matters for Brain Health
People with AB blood type are at higher risk for age-related cognitive decline
Dec 18, 2014 |By Andrea Anderson and Victoria Stern


GETTY IMAGES

Blood type may affect brain function as we age, according to a new large, long-term study. People with the rare AB blood type, present in less than 10 percent of the population, have a higher than usual risk of cognitive problems as they age.

University of Vermont hematologist Mary Cushman and her colleagues used data from a national study called REGARDS, which has been following 30,239 African-American and Caucasian individuals older than 45 since 2007. The aim of the study is to understand the heavy stroke toll seen in the southeastern U.S., particularly among African-Americans. Cushman's team focused on information collected twice yearly via phone surveys that evaluate cognitive skills such as learning, short-term memory and executive function. The researchers zeroed in on 495 individuals who showed significant declines on at least two of the three phone survey tests.

When they compared that cognitively declining group with 587 participants whose mental muster remained robust, researchers found ...

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http://meetings.aaas.org/registratio...am15livestream


Energy, Water and Food Problems Must Be Solved Together
Our future rides on our ability to integrate how we use these three commodities
By Michael E. Webber

n July 2012 three of India's regional electric grids failed, triggering the largest blackout on earth. More than 620 million people—9 percent of the world's population—were left powerless. The cause: the strain of food production from a lack of water. Because of major drought, farmers plugged in more and more electric pumps to draw water from deeper and deeper belowground for irrigation. Those pumps, working furiously under the hot sun, increased the demand on power plants. At the same time, low water levels meant hydroelectric dams were generating less electricity than normal.

Making matters worse, runoff from ...

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Vertical Gardens Beat Soil Made Salty by Climate Change
Saltwater is shrinking Bangladesh’s arable land, but a simple approach of planting crops in containers shows surprising success
January 30, 2015 |By Amy Yee


SALT FREE: Containers made from plastic sacks and sheets are filled with soil collected after the monsoon season.
Credit: Amy Yee

KHULNA, BANGLADESH—The soil in Chandipur village in southwest Bangladesh has become increasingly salty because of incursions of seawater. The situation became particularly acute in the aftermath of Cyclone Aila in 2009, which brought storm surges that broke embankments and flooded farmland. After 2009 vegetable crops planted in the ground there yielded only meager returns—if they didn’t fail completely.

But for the past three years hundreds of villagers have ...

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When Will “3-Parent Babies” Come to the U.S.?
Action in the U.K. Parliament is raising questions about the future of a new reproductive technique in America
February 6, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron


Credit: Thinkstock/ImageSource

The U.K. has taken a first step toward approval of a controversial technique that enables the birth of a child carrying genetic material from three parents. British legislators in the lower chamber of parliament green-lighted the procedure this week even as U.S. regulators have adopted a go-slow approach. The question now is how or if London’s action may influence U.S. plans about how to proceed with this complex reproductive method.

The approach, mitochondrial replacement, is designed to allow moms to give birth to genetically related offspring without passing on diseases that stem from rare mutations in maternal mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria, the cell’s battery packs, contain a small amount of ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20150209


Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet
A new set of search tools called Memex, developed by DARPA, peers into the “deep Web” to reveal illegal activity
February 8, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


Hidden in Plain Sight: Investigators are using DARPA's Memex technology pull information from the so-called "deep Web" that can be used to find and prosecute human traffickers.
Courtesy of PhotoDisc/ Getty Image.

In November 2012 a 28-year-old woman plunged 15 meters from a bedroom window to the pavement in New York City, a devastating fall that left her body broken but alive. The accident was an act of both desperation and hope—the woman had climbed out of the sixth-floor window to escape a group of men who had been sexually abusing her and holding her captive for two days.

Four months ago the New York County District Attorney’s Office sent Benjamin Gaston, one of the men responsible for the woman’s ordeal, to prison for 50-years-to-life. A key weapon in the prosecutor’s arsenal, according to the NYDA’s Office: an experimental set of Internet search ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet
A new set of search tools called Memex, developed by DARPA, peers into the “deep Web” to reveal illegal activity
February 8, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


Hidden in Plain Sight: Investigators are using DARPA's Memex technology pull information from the so-called "deep Web" that can be used to find and prosecute human traffickers.
Courtesy of PhotoDisc/ Getty Image.

In November 2012 a 28-year-old woman plunged 15 meters from a bedroom window to the pavement in New York City, a devastating fall that left her body broken but alive. The accident was an act of both desperation and hope—the woman had climbed out of the sixth-floor window to escape a group of men who had been sexually abusing her and holding her captive for two days.

Four months ago the New York County District Attorney’s Office sent Benjamin Gaston, one of the men responsible for the woman’s ordeal, to prison for 50-years-to-life. A key weapon in the prosecutor’s arsenal, according to the NYDA’s Office: an experimental set of Internet search tools the U.S. Department of Defense is developing to help catch and lock up human traffickers.

Although the Defense Department and the prosecutor’s office had not publicly acknowledged using ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150210


Nanotech Pioneer Langer Wins Award by Thinking Small
M.I.T.’s Robert Langer is being recognized for his efforts to fight cancer and other diseases by melding nanoscale engineering with science and medicine
February 10, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


Scientific American spoke with M.I.T.'s Robert Langer shortly after he was named as the recipient of this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
Courtesy of the 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

Bioengineer Robert Langer has spent his career looking for the next not-so-big thing. He’s had much success thinking small, pioneering breakthroughs in nanoscale medicine to fight cancer, administer drugs with precision and replace damaged tissue. These and his various other achievements received recognition from across the Atlantic last week [on February 3] when Langer was awarded the £1-million (roughly $1.5-million) 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Previous recipients of the prize include Tim Berners-Lee and other co-creators of the World Wide Web.

Langer’s path through chemistry, engineering, medicine and entrepreneurship began more than four decades ago working with biomedical researcher, the late Judah Folkman, on a breakthrough that helped ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150210


Spreading Measles Outbreak Also Takes Heavy Economic Toll
The virus is squeezing finances in affected communities—and diverting funds and resources from other health care priorities
February 5, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron


Credit: CDC/ Dr. Edwin P. Ewing, Jr.

The measles outbreak hopscotching across seven states may have started near Dumbo the Flying Elephant. Or maybe it began during a Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Then again, a hapless individual may have breathed in aerosolized measles virus last December during a shared Indiana Jones Adventure ride.

No one knows exactly what triggered this Disney-linked measles outbreak, but officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it was most likely thanks to an overseas traveler visiting Disneyland Park in California late last year while infectious. The genetic fingerprints from nine patients in the growing outbreak are all identical to the measles B3 virus that fueled the massive 2014 measles outbreak in the Philippines. But still CDC cannot pinpoint where the virus stems from because that strain of measles is present in other countries as well.

More than a month after the first wave of ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20150210

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Nuclear Blasts May Prove Best Marker of Humanity's Geologic Record [in Photos]
When did the Anthropocene begin?
February 10, 2015 |By David Biello


The cesium and plutonium from weapons testing will last for millions of years, providing a record in rock of new globe-spanning impacts.

When the world-girdling ice came at the end of the Ordovician period roughly 440 million years ago, only a few species of graptolite survived the mass extinction. Graptolites, whose name means written in rock, were tiny animals that lived in colonies of little cuplike structures known as theca. The graptolites built many theca together to form a branching structure that then drifted in ancient seas and therefore can be found in sedimentary rocks of a certain vintage all around the world. And their geologically abrupt disappearance makes them the perfect fossil to mark the end of the Ordovician, or so think geologists like Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester who has spent much of his professional life studying the beautiful shapes left behind by these long-gone animals.

There is a golden spike hiding in a rock face outside the village of Moffat in Scotland that marks the end of the Ordovician, denoted by ...

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“Bionic Leaf” Makes Fuel from Sunlight
Biology paired with machines turns carbon dioxide back into fuel or other useful molecules
February 9, 2015 |By David Biello


BIONIC LEAF: Ralstonia eutropha, pictured here, makes fuel using the hydrogen produced via catalysts powered by electric current from a photovoltaic panel.
Courtesy of Christopher Brigham, MIT

Here's a new way to make fuel from sunlight: starve a microbe nearly to death, then feed it carbon dioxide and hydrogen produced with the help of voltage from a solar panel. A newly developed bioreactor feeds microbes with hydrogen from water split by special catalysts connected in a circuit with photovoltaics. Such a batterylike system may beat either purely biological or purely technological systems at turning sunlight into fuels and other useful molecules, the researchers now claim.

"We think we can do better than plants," says Joseph Torella of Boston Consulting Group, who helped lead the work published February 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The process started in 2009 with the cheap, water-splitting catalysts developed by ...

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Al Gore Weighs In on a Long-Delayed Earth Observatory Launch
The Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite will provide a much-needed perspective on our home planet
February 6, 2015 |By Al Gore

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology.


Credit: NASA via Wikimedia Commons

This week, we will finally see the launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. Long delayed, DSCOVR is an observational mission to the Lagrangian point 1, or “L1,” a unique point between the sun and Earth (approximately 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, toward the sun) where the gravitational pull of each sphere is equally balanced by the other. As it co-orbits the sun with Earth, DSCOVR will have a constant view of the Earth with the hemisphere facing the satellite fully illuminated by the sun as Earth rotates. From this unique vantage point, DSCOVR will capture and beam back to Earth a continuous stream of images of our planet similar to the historic image taken on December 7, 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission – which remains the only such image we have more than 42 years later. Not coincidentally, it is still the most published photograph in history.

More importantly from a scientific point of view, DSCOVR will provide critical new insights into our rapidly changing climate, and will give scientists—for the first time—the ability to accurately measure the energy balance of our planet. Earth’s “energy budget” can be calculated with a simple arithmetical formula: take the total amount of energy that ...

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New Particles Found at Large Hadron Collider
Two new “baryons” made of three quarks each are an exotic twist on normal protons and neutrons
February 12, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz


The LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
CERN

Two new particles made of exotic types of quarks have appeared inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The particles are never-before-seen species of baryons—a category of particles that also includes the familiar protons and neutrons inside atoms. The new baryons had been long predicted to exist, but their specific characteristics, such as their mass, were unknown until they were discovered in the flesh. The new measurements serve to confirm and refine the existing theory of subatomic particles and help pave the way for a deeper theory that could include even more exotic particles.

Scientists at the collider’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment reported the discovery of ...

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Strange Stars Pulsate According to the "Golden Ratio"
Astronomers have discovered variable stars that periodically dim and brighten at frequencies close to the famed golden mean
February 9, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz


A Hubble Space Telescope image of a variable star called RS Puppis.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-Hubble/Europe Collaboration

Scholars have seen the golden ratio in nautilus shells, the Parthenon, da Vinci paintings and now in stars. A new study of variable stars observed by the Kepler space telescope found four stars that pulsate at frequencies whose ratio is near the irrational number 0.61803398875, known as the Greek letter phi, or the golden ratio (which is also sometimes referred to as the inverse of that number, 1.61803398875…).

The golden ratio had not turned up in the celestial sphere before astronomer John Linder of The College of Wooster in Ohio and his colleagues analyzed the Kepler data. The researchers looked at a class of stars called RR Lyrae that are known for their variability. Unlike the sun, which shines at a near constant brightness (a good thing for life on Earth!), these stars brighten and dim as their atmospheres expand and contract due to periodic pressure changes. Each star pulses with ...

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Crows Understand Analogies
What birds can teach us about animal intelligence
February 10, 2015 |By Leyre Castro and Ed Wasserman


Brilliant bird
Credit: Thinkstock

People are fascinated by the intelligence of animals. In fact, cave paintings dating back some 40,000 years suggest that we have long harbored keen interest in animal behavior and cognition. Part of that interest may have been practical: animals can be dangerous, they can be sources of food and clothing, and they can serve as sentries or mousers.

But, another part of that fascination is purely theoretical. Because animals resemble us in form, perhaps they also resemble us in thought. For many philosophers—including René Descartes and John Locke—granting intelligence to animals was a bridge too far. They especially deemed abstract reasoning to be uniquely human and to perfectly distinguish people from “brutes.” Why? Because animals do not speak, they must have no thoughts.

Nevertheless, undeterred by such pessimistic pronouncements, informed by Darwin’s theory of evolution ...

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4 Years after the Meltdown, Investigating Fukushima’s Ecological Toll
We know surprisingly little about what low-dose radiation does to organisms and ecosystems. Four years after the disaster in Fukushima, scientists are beginning to get some answers
By Steven Featherstone

Until a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded on April 26, 1986, spreading the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs of fallout across the entire Northern Hemisphere, scientists knew next to nothing about the effects of radiation on vegetation and wild animals. The catastrophe created a living laboratory, particularly in the 1,100 square miles around the site, known as the exclusion zone.

In 1994 Ronald Chesser and Robert Baker, both professors of biology at Texas Tech University, were among the first American scientists allowed ...

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