Science News

[Duke of Buckingham]

Here's What a Cyber Warfare Arsenal Might Look Like
Stuxnet was just the beginning, as malware becomes the new nuclear option
By Larry Greenemeier | May 6, 2015


New Weapons of War: Defense Secretary Ash Carter delivers a lecture, "Rewiring the Pentagon: Charting a New Path on Innovation and Cybersecurity," at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., April 23, 2015.
DoD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Clydell Kinchen.

The Pentagon has made clear in recent weeks that cyber warfare is no longer just a futuristic threat—it is now a real one. U.S. government agency and industry computer systems are already embroiled in a number of nasty cyber warfare campaigns against attackers based in China, North Korea, Russia and elsewhere. As a counterpoint, hackers with ties to Russia have been accused of stealing a number of Pres. Barack Obama’s e-mails, although the White House has not formally blamed placed any blame at the Kremlin’s doorstep. The Obama administration did, however, call out North Korea for ordering last year’s cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The battle has begun. “External actors probe and scan [U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)] networks for vulnerabilities millions of times each day, and over 100 foreign intelligence agencies continually attempt to infiltrate DoD networks,” Eric Rosenbach, assistant secretary for homeland defense and global security, testified in April before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. “Unfortunately, some incursions—by both state and nonstate entities—have succeeded.”

After years of debate as to how the fog of war will extend to the Internet, Obama last month signed an executive order declaring ...

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Astronomers Seek Super-Size Hubble Successor to Search for Alien Life
Controversy swirls around a bold proposal for a bigger, better—and expensive—replacement for NASA’s premier space telescope
By Lee Billings | May 4, 2015


The proposed High-Definition Space Telescope could resemble this artist's rendition when and if it is built and launched. Composed of multiple hexagonal segments, the central primary mirror would span some 10 meters, and would be protected by a vast "sunshield." The unrivaled light-gathering power of such a large space telescope would offer revolutionary possibilities for many areas of astronomy.
Credit: NASA/GSFC

On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rode a space shuttle into low Earth orbit to become the most productive observatory in history. A quarter-century on, the universe may be the same but our understanding of it is not, forever transformed by the pristine ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared vistas revealed by the Hubble’s 2.4-meter mirror high above Earth’s atmosphere. Peering across the cosmos, Hubble mapped dark matter and helped discover dark energy, the mysterious force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. Closer to home, it snapped pictures of giant exoplanets orbiting other stars, found new moons around Pluto and spied watery plumes bursting from the subsurface ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa. Almost everywhere it looked, Hubble made major discoveries. It became NASA’s premiere “flagship” observatory, and the agency supported it by replacing and upgrading obsolete components during five space shuttle servicing missions.

But Hubble’s time is running out; the space shuttles are no longer flying, and no more servicing missions are planned. Sooner or later Hubble’s crucial components will degrade and fail. Eventually its orbit will decay, turning the multibillion-dollar telescope into tumbling chunks of slag that burn in the atmosphere and splash into the ocean. Astronomers, ever hopeful, plan to continue using Hubble for several years to come, potentially into the 2020s, but know all too well that its days are numbered.

“When Hubble goes, it goes,” says John Mather, a Nobel laureate astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “And we don’t have ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Physicists Are Philosophers, Too
In his final essay the late physicist Victor Stenger argues for the validity of philosophy in the context of modern theoretical physics
By Victor J. Stenger, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian | May 8, 2015


The ongoing feud between physicists and philosophers cuts to the heart of what science can tell us about the nature of reality.

Editor’s Note: Shortly before his death last August at the age of 79, the noted physicist and public intellectual Victor Stenger worked with two co-authors to pen an article for Scientific American. In it Stenger and co-authors address the latest eruption of a long-standing historic feud, an argument between physicists and philosophers about the nature of their disciplines and the limits of science. Can instruments and experiments (or pure reason and theoretical models) ever reveal the ultimate nature of reality? Does the modern triumph of physics make philosophy obsolete? What philosophy, if any, could modern theoretical physicists be said to possess? Stenger and his co-authors introduce and address all these profound questions in this thoughtful essay and seek to mend the growing schism between these two great schools of thought. When physicists make claims about the universe, Stenger writes, they are also engaging in a grand philosophical tradition that dates back thousands of years. Inescapably, physicists are philosophers, too. This article, Stenger’s last, appears in full below.

In April 2012 theoretical physicist, cosmologist and best-selling author Lawrence Krauss was pressed hard in an interview with Ross Andersen for The Atlantic titled “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?” Krauss's response to this question dismayed philosophers because he remarked, “philosophy used to be a field that had content,” to which he later added,

“Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics whatsoever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened—and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.”

Later that year Krauss had a friendly discussion with ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Nuclear Power Seems Doomed to Dwindle in the U.S. [Infographic]
The transformer fire at Indian Point Energy Center on the Hudson River is just the latest incident plaguing the U.S. nuclear industry
By David Biello | May 13, 2015

After another transformer fire at the Indian Point nuclear facility on May 9, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo would like to see the power plant shut down for good. The aging nuclear power plant is in the midst of its application to the federal government for a license renewal, which would allow the two reactors on site to continue to harness fission to boil water for electricity generation for another 20 years. But with local, well-connected opposition like the governor, Indian Point's days as a nuclear facility may be numbered no matter what federal regulators decide.

Indian Point is not unique in heading toward shutdown, although the circumstances of each reactor's closing are as unique as the reactors themselves. In the past few years five nuclear reactors from Florida to California have shut down permanently—despite license renewals. The reactors at San Onofre in California and Crystal River in Florida ceased operations over botched repairs that caused safety concerns. The Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin closed early because its ability to make money by selling electricity was undercut by cheap natural gas and renewables like wind power and similar economic woes shuttered Vermont Yankee. Several currently operating reactors face the same challenges: Without financial support from Illinois's government, the slew of reactors in that state may shut down, too. And unlike Indian Point, which makes money selling electricity to power-hungry New York City, nuclear reactors in other parts of the state face economic challenges.

There are currently four reactors under construction in the U.S., and one new reactor—conceived in the 1970s and taking decades to complete—will open soon at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar power plant in Tennessee. But that will not be enough to replace ...

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How to Prevent More Deaths When the Earth Quakes
The solutions are simple but not easy to adopt, as the Nepal example shows
By David Biello | May 12, 2015


A Nepalese woman stands carrying her child outside her house damaged in last month’s earthquake on the outskirts of Lalitpur, Nepal. The April 25 earthquake killed more than 8,000 people and left thousands more homeless, as it flattened mountain villages and destroyed buildings in the Himalayan region.
(AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Many of the hundreds of thousands of homes that gave way in the earthquakes that have rocked Nepal in April and May shared one common feature: heavy roofs. Building collapse in Kathmandu and surrounding areas contributed to a death toll now rising toward 10,000. The destruction of buildings sharing the same flaw helped kill 200,000 in the 2010 quake in Haiti, more than 80,000 in China in 2008 and at least 80,000 in Pakistan in 2005, to name just the most recent deadly disasters.

In contrast, only around 500 people died in Chile when it was struck in 2010 by a temblor 10 times stronger than the one that shook Nepal. The difference was simple: Chile spent more money on better construction technology and ensured that people built appropriately following a disastrous earthquake in 1960. Chile's approach shows that it is possible to build structures that can dramatically reduce the loss of life in a strong quake, but implementing such methods remains a challenge in much of the world.

"Human nature seems pretty universally to favor quicker and cheaper, particularly when considering ...

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Train Tragedies and Transformations
Derailments, fires and crashes continue as the U.S.’s rail infrastructure decays and technology solutions lie fallow
May 14, 2015


The Daily Climate
Train Deaths Rise Amid Energy-Driven Rail Transformation
Fatalities reach seven-year high as railroads embark on a record expansion

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Bacteria May Be Remaking Drugs in Sewage
Microbes that clean water may also be piecing some pharmaceuticals back together
By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News | May 14, 2015


Credit: eutrophication&hypoxia/Flickr

Wastewater treatment plants not only struggle removing pharmaceuticals, it seems some drugs actually increase after treatment.

When researchers tested wastewater before and after treatment at a Milwaukee-area treatment plant, they found that two drugs—the anti-epileptic carbamazepine and antibiotic ofloxacin—came out at higher concentrations than they went in. The study suggests the microbes that clean our water may also piece some pharmaceuticals back together.

Carbamazepine and ofloxacin on average increased by 80 percent and 120 percent, respectively, during the treatment process. Such drugs, and their metabolites (formed as part of the natural biochemical process of degrading and eliminating the compounds), get into the wastewater by people taking them and excreting them. Flushing drugs accounts for some of the levels too.

“Microbes seem to be making pharmaceuticals out of what used to be pharmaceuticals,” said lead author Benjamin Blair, who spearheaded the work as a PhD. student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Blair is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado-Denver.

Blair and colleagues found 48 out of 57 pharmaceuticals they were looking for ...

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These 4 Chemicals May Pose the Most Risk for Nail Salon Workers
Besides the questionable labor practices that surround the shops, glues, lacquers and dust in the workplace create their own risks for nail technicians
By Dina Fine Maron | May 12, 2015


Credit: Flickr/Angie Chung

As the nation’s 375,000 nail technicians buff, polish and file our fingers and toes, that workplace exposure to chemicals in the polish and glue can pose a real threat. But it’s not just the amount of those substance that can turn them toxic, it is also the way they get into workers’ bodies.

Workplace conditions in certain nail salons, expertly laid out last week in an investigation by The New York Times’s Sarah Maslin Nir, can alleviate or exacerbate these issues. Chemicals inside of the glues, removers, polishes and salon products—which technicians are often exposed to at close proximity and in poorly ventilated spaces—can be hazardous individually. When combined, however, they could potentially cause even greater harm. Yet it is difficult to know how these chemicals affect the body because current evaluations do not look at these substances comprehensively. There are also few reports looking at how each compound individually affects nail workers.

The risks are many: Dust shavings from filed nails can settle on the skin like pollen and cause irritation or can be inhaled (and those small particles could contain chemicals from the polishes or acrylics). Technicians could also inhale harmful vapors or mists from the chemicals in the shop. The compounds could also settle into workers’ eyes. Moreover, these substances could be swallowed while eating, drinking or puffing on a cigarette during a break.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which sets workplace safety standards, cites a laundry list of ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Where Is Avian Flu Hiding?
Three strains of the virus are decimating poultry farms across the country, but how they’re being transmitted remains unclear
By Dina Fine Maron | May 18, 2015


Credit: Wikimedia commons/Fcb981

It was still winter in Minnesota when state officials first heard about turkeys on a large farm that seemed to be a bit off. Some of the birds were unusually quiet, drank and ate little and seemed to have trouble moving. Within two weeks of exhibiting this odd behavior they were dying. The cause, laboratory tests soon confirmed, was H5N2, a mixed-origin avian flu that had never been seen in the U.S. before this year.

For the nation’s number-one turkey-producing state, this was horrible news. In states including California and Washington the virus and its close cousins had led to more than 250,000 poultry deaths (by disease or depopulation) in the prior three months. Officials in Minnesota ...

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Microbial DNA in Human Body Can Be Used to Identify Individuals
The influence of the “microbiome” on our health has become a hot topic in recent years but privacy issues are now being raised
By Ewen Callaway and Nature magazine | May 13, 2015


Human-genomics researchers have grappled with privacy concerns for years.
Credit: NIAID/Flickr

Call it a ‘gut print’. The collective DNA of the microbes that colonize a human body can uniquely identify someone, researchers have found, raising privacy issues.

The finding, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 11, suggests that it might be possible to identify a participant in an anonymous study of the body’s microbial denizens—its microbiome—and to reveal details about that person’s health, diet or ethnicity. A publicly available trove of microbiome DNA maintained by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, already contains potentially identifiable human DNA, according to a study published in Genome Research on April 29.

The papers do not ...

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Moore's Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations
It’s a mystery why Gordon Moore’s “law,” which forecasts processor power will double every two years, still holds true a half century later
By Annie Sneed | May 19, 2015


Credit: Jon Sullivan/Wikimedia Commons

SAN FRANCISCO—Personal computers, cellphones, self-driving cars—Gordon Moore predicted the invention of all these technologies half a century ago in a 1965 article for Electronics magazine. The enabling force behind those inventions would be computing power, and Moore laid out how he thought computing power would evolve over the coming decade. Last week the tech world celebrated his prediction here because it has held true with uncanny accuracy—for the past 50 years.

It is now called Moore’s law, although Moore (who co-founded the chip maker Intel) doesn’t much like the name. “For the first 20 years I couldn’t utter the term Moore’s law. It was embarrassing,” the 86-year-old visionary said in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at the gala event, held at Exploratorium science museum. “Finally, I got accustomed to it where now I could say it with a straight face.” He and Friedman chatted in front of a rapt audience, with Moore cracking jokes the whole time and doling out advice, like how once you’ve made one successful prediction, you should avoid making another. In the background Intel’s latest gadgets whirred quietly: collision-avoidance drones, dancing spider robots, a braille printer—technologies all made possible via advances in processing power anticipated by Moore’s law.

Of course, Moore’s law is not really a law like those describing gravity or the conservation of energy. It is a prediction that the number of transistors ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Fact or Fiction?: A "Base Tan" Can Protect against Sunburn
Studies of sunshine-denied human buttocks help settle the matter
By Dina Fine Maron | May 22, 2015


A “base tan” does not fool the sun or a tanning bed.
Credit: Creative Commons/Flickr

As the weather warms, many of us would prefer to look like we passed our winter days lounging by the pool instead of hunched before a computer screen or lab bench. But soaking up the rays to acquire a so-called “base tan” does not fool the sun or a tanning bed. Simply put, the benefits of being sun-kissed are not even skin-deep.

Scientists came to this conclusion after studying the tanned buttocks of dozens of volunteers. In study after study they have found that a base tan affords almost no protection against future ultraviolet exposure. In fact, it actually puts otherwise pale people at risk of developing skin cancers. A base tan only provides an SPF, or sun protection factor, of 3 or less, according to the U.S. surgeon general. For beachgoers, that means if a person would normally turn pink after 10 minutes in the sun, an SPF 2 base tan would theoretically buy her another 10 minutes—or 20 minutes in total—before she burns. That, says David Leffell, the chief of dermatologic surgery and cutaneous oncology at Yale University School of Medicine, is “completely meaningless” in terms of providing protection.

The studies that helped solidify these ...

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How Smart Should the President Be?
A historical analysis suggests a link between IQ and performance
By David Z. Hambrick | May 26, 2015


It goes without saying that IQ isn't the only predictor of success in this job. Many other factors matter, including experience, personality, motivation, interpersonal skill, and perhaps above all else, luck.
Credit: Sam Boulton Sr. via Wikimedia Commons

Do the smartest presidents make the best presidents? This question invariably emerges as a topic of spirited debate when the U.S. presidential election approaches. In 2004, former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines asked, “Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush?” Citing Bush’s and Kerry’s scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—an IQ-like test that the military uses to determine whether a recruit is qualified for enlistment—the conservative pundit Steve Sailer countered that there was no doubt that, in fact, Bush had the higher IQ. And the chatter about IQ has begun for next November’s election. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton is “smart enough to handle the job” and “may have a higher IQ than Bill”, while among Republican hopefuls, Jeb Bush is the “smart brother” and Ted Cruz “towers as the smartest presidential candidate”. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker may not be the smartest candidate but “our most intelligent presidents have often been our worst presidents” anyway.

There are three basic views on the relationship between IQ and success in the Oval Office. The first view says the smarter the president ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

BPA May Prompt More Fat in the Human Body
New research suggests that humans transform the chemical into a compound linked to obesity
By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News | May 29, 2015


People are exposed to BPA throughout the day, mostly through diet, as it can leach from canned goods and plastic storage containers into food, but also through dust and water.
Credit: Tony Alter via flickr

A new study suggests the long-held industry assumption that bisphenol-A breaks down safely in the human body is incorrect. Instead, researchers say, the body transforms the ubiquitous chemical additive into a compound that might spur obesity.

The study is the first to find that people’s bodies metabolize bisphenol-A (BPA) — a chemical found in most people and used in polycarbonate plastic, food cans and paper receipts — into something that impacts our cells and may make us fat.
The research, from Health Canada, challenges an untested assumption that our liver metabolizes BPA into a form that doesn’t impact our health.

“This shows we can’t just say things like ‘because it’s a metabolite, it means it’s not active’,” said Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved in the study. “You have to do a study.”

People are exposed to BPA throughout ...

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Laser Weapons Get Real
Long a staple of science fiction, laser weapons are edging closer to the battlefield, thanks to optical fibers
By Andy Extance and Nature magazine | May 28, 2015


Laser weapons have long fascinated weapons developers—most notably during the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, in the 1980s and 1990s.
andrea.pacelli/Flickr

Silently, the drone aircraft glides above the arid terrain of New Mexico—until it suddenly pivots out of control and plummets to the ground.

Then a mortar round rises from its launcher, arcs high and begins to descend towards its target—only to flare and explode in mid-flight.

On the desert floor, on top of a big, sand-coloured truck, a cubic mechanism pivots and fires an invisible infrared beam to zap one target after another. This High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) is a prototype laser weapon developed for the US Army by aerospace giant Boeing of Chicago, Illinois. Inside the truck, Boeing electrophysics engineer Stephanie Blount stares at the targets on her laptop's screen and directs the laser using a handheld game controller. “It has a very game-like feel,” she says.

That seems only natural: laser weapons are a ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Large Hadron Collider Starts Doing Science Again
Particle collisions at record energies will push the boundary of human knowledge
By Elizabeth Gibney | June 3, 2015


The LHC is smashing protons together at a higher energy than ever before.
Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

The highest-energy collisions ever seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are now producing data for science.

Teams at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have spent two years upgrading what was already the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. At 10.40 local time on June 3 they officially set the newly supercharged collider running.

Physicists can now smash together bunches of protons at a record energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) and will soon collide a billion pairs of protons per second—almost double the previous rate. The machine was switched off on 14 February 2013 after an initial period—dubbed run 1—marked by the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The first beams of protons following the shutdown circled around the 27-kilometer ring in early April, but at low energies. Since then, physicists have worked to check mechanisms designed to protect the machine and to calibrate the beams, before increasing the LHC's energy and bringing its four main experiments fully online.

On June 3, the collisions started in earnest, with all four detectors collecting data for analysis. "At this stage, the actual number of colliding bunches is ...

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On Mauna Kea, Astronomers and Hawaiians Can Share the Skies
The Thirty Meter Telescope can revolutionize astronomy and become a part of the holy mountain’s rich cultural heritage
By Michael West | May 28, 2015


Illustration by Julian Callos

“The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers,” wrote Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last reigning monarch, in 1897. Kilo hōkū, or “star watchers,” were among the most esteemed members of Hawaiian society. Sadly, all is not well with astronomy in Hawaii today. Protests have erupted over construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a giant observatory that promises to revolutionize humanity’s view of the cosmos.

At issue is the TMT’s planned location on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano revered by some Hawaiians as the piko, or “umbilical cord,” that connects the Hawaiian Islands to the heavens. But Mauna Kea is also home to some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Perched in the Pacific Ocean, Mauna Kea’s peak rises above the bulk of our planet’s dense atmosphere, where conditions allow telescopes to obtain images of unsurpassed clarity. This makes Mauna Kea the premier astronomical site in the Northern Hemisphere, if not the world. Building the TMT elsewhere, as some opponents have suggested, would be like clipping the wings of Mauna Kea’s indigenous palila bird, limiting its ability to soar.

Opposition to telescopes on Mauna Kea is nothing new. A small but vocal group of Hawaiians and ...

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