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[Duke of Buckingham]

*Sigh*

Originally Posted by Scientific American
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Sometimes I have no alternative on what I can use Mumps (that they sent me to my Email) but this one seem interested for us anyway.

[John P. Myers]

*Sigh*

Indium gallium arsenide ftw!

That's my best guess for a silicon replacement anyway...

[Duke of Buckingham]

Is the Gaze from Those Big Puppy Eyes the Look of Your Doggie's Love?
Research finds that sustained eye contact between a dog and its owner causes oxytocin to spike in both—but not so in wolves. What it means remains to be seen
April 16, 2015 |By Julie Hecht


One of the students playing with Hook, a Labrador Retriever. His gazing behavior increased his owner’s urinary oxytocin (experiment 1) but his gazing behavior did not increase after administered oxytocin (experiment 2).
Credit: Mikako Mikura

Unlike porcupines, dogs are a relatively hands-on (actually, paws-on) species, both with one another and with us. YouTube has numerous videos of dogs essentially saying, “Just keep petting me, please. Yes, that’s it…more.”

But this relationship is not one-sided. Many studies find that positive interactions between people and dogs can be beneficial for both species. Increases in β-endorphin (beta-endorphin), oxytocin and dopamine—neurochemicals associated with positive feelings and bonding—have been observed in both dogs and people after enjoyable interactions like petting, play and talking. Essentially, interacting with a dog, particularly a known dog, can have some of the same psychophysiological markers as when two emotionally attached people spend time together.

But do certain types of interactions have an outsized impact? Dogs are incredibly ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150417


SpaceX Faces the Hard Truth about Soft Landings—They’re Tough to Do
With two partially successful landing attempts of its Falcon 9 booster, the private company inches closer to its goal of making a fully reusable rocket
April 14, 2015 |By Lee Billings


SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster is seen touching down on the company's autonomous robotic barge in the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly afterward, the booster tilted over and crashed, making SpaceX's second soft-landing attempt only a partial success.
Credit: SpaceX

After launching a payload into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla. this afternoon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket almost landed in the history books when its first stage hit a bull's-eye, vertically landing on a robotic barge in the Atlantic Ocean. The trouble was, the booster hit the bull's-eye too hard, according to tweets from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shortly after the launch.

The company had been hoping for a softer vertical landing so that the Falcon 9 booster could be refurbished and reused, a strategy that Musk has said could reduce launch costs “by as much as a factor of a hundred.” Despite such landings being a longtime staple of science fiction, to date no rocket has ever managed the feat. SpaceX's previous attempt, in January of this year, also ended in a Falcon 9 booster crashing into its barge.

The launch’s primary purpose was not to test rocket recycling but rather to send the company’s Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. The launch was the sixth of twelve such resupply missions SpaceX is sending to ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150417

[Duke of Buckingham]

Scientists Warn of Hormone Impacts from Common Solvents
Researchers warn that benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene may disrupt people’s hormone systems at levels deemed “safe” by feds
April 15, 2015 |By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News


The chemicals have been linked to reproductive, respiratory and heart problems, as well as smaller babies.
Credit: BDXX/Wikipedia

Four chemicals present both inside and outside homes might disrupt our endocrine systems at levels considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to an analysis released today.

The chemicals—benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene—are ubiquitous: in the air outside and in many products inside homes and businesses. They have been linked to reproductive, respiratory and heart problems, as well as smaller babies. Now researchers from The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, say that such health impacts may be due to the chemicals’ ability to interfere with people’s hormones at low exposure levels.

“There’s evidence of connection between the low level, everyday exposures and things like asthma, reduced fetal growth,” said Ashley Bolden, a research associate at TEDX and lead author of the study. “And for a lot of the health effects found, we think it’s disrupted endocrine-signaling pathways involved in these outcomes.”

Bolden and colleagues—including scientist, activist, author and TEDX founder Theo Colborn who passed away last December—pored over more than 40 studies on the health impacts of low exposure to the chemicals.

(Colborn also co-authored "Our Stolen Future" along with Dianne Dumanoski and Pete Myers, founder of Environmental Health News and chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences.)

They looked at exposures lower than ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20150420


Have We Passed the Point of No Return on Climate Change?
Greenhouse gas cuts must begin soon or it could be too late to halt global warming
April 13, 2015 |By EarthTalk


If we don't get our carbon emissions in check soon, it could be too late for the polar bear and many other species impacted by global warming.
Credit: Gregory "Slobirdr" Smith, FlickrCC

Dear EarthTalk: What is the best way to measure how close we are to the dreaded "point of no return" with climate change? In other words, when do we think we will have gone too far? — David Johnston, via EarthTalk.org

While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return”—when no amount of cutbacks on greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic global warming—climate scientists warn we may be getting awfully close. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average global temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Most climatologists agree that, while the warming to date is already causing environmental problems, another 0.4 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, representing a global average atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 450 parts per million (ppm), could set in motion unprecedented changes in global climate and a significant increase in the severity of natural disasters—and as such could represent the dreaded point of no return.

Currently the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (the leading greenhouse gas) is approximately 398.55 parts per million (ppm). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal scientific agency tasked with monitoring the health of ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20150420

[Duke of Buckingham]

Battery-Free Video Cam Grabs Pix—and Power—from Same Light [Video]
Miniature camera could be self-sustaining in smartphones and for surveillance
April 15, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


Pixel Power: Columbia University's self-powered camera system includes a sensor array (the green board to the rear of the unit) and a lens with an effective F-number N = 3:5.
Courtesy of Computer Vision Laboratory, Columbia Engineering

The video is simple enough. A man changes facial expressions before moving his head up and down then side-to-side in a clip that looks a bit like a moving daguerreotype captured more than a century and a half ago. The camera used to capture this head shot is cutting edge, however, using a new light-powered technology, which could lead to battery-free cameras that never shut down.

That concept includes combining a camera image sensor’s ability to collect and measure light with a photovoltaic cell’s capacity to convert some of that light into energy. The result, at least at this stage, is a crude yet self-sufficient digital camera developed at Columbia University. During each image capture cycle the pixels in the sensor first record and produce an image then harvest energy and charge the sensor’s power supply.

As cameras become critical parts of networks ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150421


Fateful Phone Call Spawned Moore’s Law [Excerpt]
Nobel laureate physicist William Shockley recruited Gordon Moore to help advance transistor technology, kicking off the creation of Silicon Valley and the digital revolution itself
April 17, 2015 |By Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones


Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary, by Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones.
Courtesy of Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group

In their new book, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary, authors Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones chronicle the life and career of Intel co-founder and microprocessor prophet Gordon Moore. Trained as a chemist, Moore would rise from humble beginnings to develop the seminal “Moore’s law” based on the prediction that silicon transistors within microchips would double and redouble relentlessly—with ever-increasing use in an ever-proliferating array of products—even as their cost tumbled across the decades.

In this excerpt from the book’s prelude the authors recount the evening Nobel laureate physicist William Shockley recruited Moore to ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150421

[Duke of Buckingham]

Celebrating 25 years of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

On the 24 April 2015 the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will celebrate 25 years since its launch.

During the 1970s, NASA and ESA began planning for a space telescope that could transcend the blurring effects of the atmosphere and take clearer images of the Universe than ever before. In 1990 the idea finally became a reality and, despite a flaw in the main mirror which was quite swiftly corrected, Hubble has since far exceeded expectations.

It has delved deeper into the early years of the Universe than was ever thought possible, played a critical part in the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and probed the atmospheres of planets around distant stars.

To commemorate this quarter century of success in engineering, science and culture ESA/Hubble will run a series of projects to involve the public in the celebrations. Details of these projects will appear below as the projects commence.

Read much more on http://spacetelescope.org/projects/Hubble25/

and on http://www.nasa.gov/hubble25-social/#.VTmGD8u37z8

[Duke of Buckingham]

Why Almost Everything Dean Ornish Says about Nutrition Is Wrong
When it comes to good eating habits, protein and fat are not your dietary enemies
April 22, 2015 |By Melinda Wenner Moyer


There’s little evidence to suggest that we need to avoid protein and fat.
Credit: TheBusyBrain/Flickr

Last month, an op–ed in The New York Times argued that high-protein and high-fat diets are to blame for America’s ever-growing waistline and incidence of chronic disease. The author, Dean Ornish, founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, is no newcomer to these nutrition debates. For 37 years he has been touting the benefits of very low-fat, high-carbohydrate, vegetarian diets for preventing and reversing heart disease. But the research he cites to back up his op–ed claims is tenuous at best. Nutrition is complex but there is little evidence our country’s worsening metabolic ills are the fault of protein or fat. If anything, our attempts to eat less fat in recent decades have made things worse.

Ornish begins his piece with a misleading statistic. Despite being told to eat less fat, he says, Americans have been doing the opposite: They have “actually consumed 67 percent more added fat, 39 percent more sugar and 41 percent more meat in 2000 than they had in 1950 and 24.5 percent more calories than they had in 1970.” Yes, Americans have been eating more fat, sugar and meat, but we have also been eating more vegetables and fruits (pdf)—because we have been eating more of everything.

What’s more relevant to the discussion is this fact ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150424


Agony and Ecstasy: Hubble's Top Moments and Near-Death Episodes
Scientists and astronauts recall the telescope’s finest hours as well as threats to its 25-year existence
April 24, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz


NASA released this Hubble Space Telescope picture of the star cluster Westerlund 2 to commemorate the observatory's 25th anniversary.
NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team

The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most successful and most beloved science experiments of all time, is 25 years old this week. But its lifetime has been full of drama. It ended up launching seven years late in April 1990, costing significantly more than expected. When NASA engineers first turned it on, its images were blurry, caused by a flaw introduced in manufacturing its primary mirror. The telescope and the space agency that launched it were redeemed when seven astronauts flew onboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 1993 to install a new camera and a package to fix the instrument’s optics. That visit was followed by four more shuttle servicing missions to upgrade and repair the observatory, allowing it to remain a cutting-edge tool for astronomy for a quarter century and counting.

In wonderful interviews with Scientific American, scientists, engineers and astronauts who worked on Hubble recall its ups and downs. Edited excerpts appear below.

The optimistic early years
David Leckrone, former senior project scientist for Hubble at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland:
I started working on Hubble in 1976 and ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150424

[Duke of Buckingham]

Adaptive Headlights Could Help Drivers Avoid Hitting Bambi [Video]
Robotics researchers are building a headlight that quickly adjusts to changing conditions, allowing drivers to see through rain and snow, follow GPS directions and dodge roadway obstacles
April 24, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier


DEER IN THE (SMART) HEADLIGHTS: A smart headlight system being developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is designed to provide an early visual warning of obstacles in the roadway.
Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute

Today’s car guts are pretty smart, with dozens of computers that monitor and adjust mechanical and electrical systems on the fly. Headlights, however, are still pretty dumb. Their light sources have evolved from acetylene and oil lamps to tungsten filaments to LEDs in the past century but—outside of advanced headlights available in a handful of luxury vehicles—they simply light whatever is in front of them.

That limitation sometimes causes problems, as indiscriminant illumination reflects light off of snow and rain during storms and creates glare for oncoming drivers, even in dry weather. The so-called adaptive headlights coming to market in select Audis, BMWs, Mercedes and a few other pricey vehicles feature automatic dimmers, motors that reorient the headlights as the vehicle turns or lighting arrays that change beam patterns to avoid shining in other drivers’ eyes. Unfortunately even these smart headlight systems typically have only one of these capabilities.

Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute researchers are trying to push beyond these boundaries with ...

Read More On http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150428


Can the U.S. Go All-Electric?
By David Biello | April 22, 2015 |

New homes wired with the latest smart gadgets cluster together around shared park spaces. Blue-black panels that transform sunshine into electricity grace a majority of roofs. Electric cars or hybrids glide silently to rest in garages. This is not some distant future; this is life today in Mueller—an innovative suburb of Austin, Tex., and just one of the pioneering places I visit in the next episode of “Beyond the Light Switch,” premiering tonight in Detroit.

From how better batteries can make a better soldier to the race to invent those better batteries, this episode picks up where the previous award-winning shows left off—what would happen if the U.S. went electric? What would be the economic, environmental and national ...

Read More On http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-all-electric/

[Duke of Buckingham]

How The Deadly Nepal Earthquake Happened [Infographic]
Saturday's terrible earthquake was the latest result of an ongoing collision of giant pieces of our planet, a slow-moving disaster that started about 50 million years ago.
April 27, 2015 |By Josh Fischman



Between 55 million and 40 million years ago, the northern edge of what is now India began to slam into the giant slab of Earth's crust that today carries Nepal and Tibet. This ancient collision had a terrible after-effect this past Saturday: The deadly earthquake, centered in Nepal, which had an estimated death toll of nearly 4,000 people as of Monday evening.

India bulled its way under Nepal those many millions of years ago, shoving the northern land skyward. That move began to create the towering Himalaya, including Mt. Everest. The collision is still going on, as India moves several centimeters north each year, and this has created an unstable fissure in the planet's crust, known as the Himalayan frontal thrust fault. This boundary zone, shown below, continues to release enormous earthquakes. Saturday's magnitude 7.8 disaster appears to overlap a segment that released a 8.1 magnitude quake in 1934, according to Susan Hough, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, California. That quake killed an estimated 10,700 people.

Here are illustrations that show, first, how the initial collision occured, then how the thrust fault is continuing to ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...GYSUS_20150430


How Microbes Helped Clean BP's Oil Spill
The microscopic organisms bloomed in the wake of the Macondo well disaster
April 28, 2015 |By David Biello



Like cars, some microbes use oil as fuel. Such microorganisms are a big reason why BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not far worse.

"The microbes did a spectacular job of eating a lot of the natural gas," says biogeochemist Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The relatively small hydrocarbon molecules in natural gas are the easiest for microorganisms to eat. "The rate and capacity is a mind-boggling testament to microbes," he adds.

As Reddy suggests, the microbes got help from the nature of the oil spilled—so-called Louisiana light, sweet crude mixed with natural gas, as opposed to bitumen or other heavy, gunky oils. "It's a whole lot easier to degrade," says Christopher D'Elia, a biologist at Louisiana State University and dean of the School of the Coast and Environment. "The bacteria had something that was more tractable."

More than 150 different molecules make up the toxic stew of hydrocarbons that ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...GYSUS_20150430

[Duke of Buckingham]

Experts Calculate New Loss Predictions for Nepal Quake
Independent statistics specialists say the death toll may reach 10,000, but with less destruction in Kathmandu than predicted
April 29, 2015 |By Christina Reed



When calamities like the Nepal earthquake hit, people look for numbers to help calculate the toll of destruction. That puts the spotlight on operations like earthquake-report.com, which is world’s largest independent Web site for earthquake data. The site has a rapid earthquake-loss estimation model, so that within 30 minutes of an event, anywhere in the world, they can offer a prediction about fatalities and economic loss. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) also has a prediction Web site; the models differ in how they determine an event’s impact, the economic inputs used and the databases they draw from. Earthquake-report.com has a narrower estimate of deaths, up to 10,000, whereas the USGS gives a much broader spread, estimating that between 10,000 and 100,000 fatalities are most likely.

Earthquake-report co-founder James Daniell, a civil and structural engineer at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s Center for Disaster Management and ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150501


Can Astronomical Tidal Forces Trigger Earthquakes?
Recent studies have suggested a link between oceanic tides and some earthquake activity, but proof the gravitational tug of the moon and sun can set off temblors remains elusive
April 29, 2015 |By Robin Wylie


Credit: Shepard4711/Flickr

The motion of the ocean is rocking our world, or at least helping to give it a vigorous shake in some locations when the conditions are right, a team of seismologists says.

The idea that celestial bodies can cause earthquakes is one of the oldest theories in science. In 1687 Newton’s universal law of gravitation revealed ocean tides are caused by the attraction of the sun and moon. And in the 1700s scientists started to wonder if these same distant bodies might also affect geologic faults. This idea flourished in the 19th century. The eminent French seismologist Alexis Perrey spent decades searching for a link between earthquakes and the phases of the moon. Scientific American published an 1855 article on his work. Even Charles Darwin mused on the subject (page 259).

At the end of the 20th century the notion the heavens could have a hand in earthquakes seemed to have been discounted. Despite many attempts, researchers had repeatedly ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20150501