Science News

[DrBackJack]

"combating climate change"? Climate is constantly changing, and always has. The Thames used to freeze over, and parties were held on the ice, for example. Most of us have see the painting of GW crossing the Delaware river with ice chunks. Google "The Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period". All that radical climate change happened long before the industrial age. The primary influences on climate are the giant fireball in the sky (and its belches) and volcanic activity (and its belches). Trying to stop the changing climate is hubris and futile in the long run. Reduce pollution where it's convenient and not an economic disaster, and get on with your lives.

Yep.

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Drink Up: Discern Fact from Fiction for Popular Health Beverages
Learn what the science says about some popular claims regarding the cognitive effects of certain drinks
Dec 18, 2014 |By Victoria Stern

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THINKSTOCK

1. Pomegranate juice enhances memory: Probable. Many studies support the connection, including a recent brain-imaging study that showed that volunteers with age-related memory issues who consumed this antioxidant-rich drink performed better on memory tasks than those who drank a red placebo drink.

2. Red wine staves off cognitive decline: Possible. A growing body of research continues to support the health benefits of drinking wine. One study, which followed a group of men and women over seven years, found that ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drink-up-discern-fact-from-fiction-for-popular-health-beverages/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150113


Beef from Former Mad Cow Epicenter Could Hit U.S. Shelves This Year
By Philip Yam | January 8, 2015 |

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Credit: Ysangkok/Wikimedia Commons

After nearly 16 years, the U.S. has agreed to import beef from Ireland—the first European country to get the go-ahead since the epidemic of mad cow disease swept the continent In the 1980s and 1990s. The move—which may extend to the rest of the British Isles later this year—serves as a milestone in the history of the disease, which can destroy not only the brains of cows, but also those of the humans who eat them.

The epidemic exploded because of the way British farmers raised their bovines. Instead of eating grass or grain, the animals consumed feed made from their dead brethren. Coupled with money-saving changes that did not fully cleanse the feed during processing, the forced cannibalism ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2015/01/08/beef-from-former-mad-cow-epicenter-could-hit-u-s-shelves-this-year/

[Duke of Buckingham]

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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Astronauts Evacuate U.S. Side of Space Station
An alarm suggesting a potentially toxic ammonia leak on the International Space Station early Wednesday, but it might have been a false alarm
January 14, 2015 |By Miriam Kramer and SPACE.com

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The station's six-person crew, which includes two Americans, three Russians and an Italian astronaut, took refuge in the station's Russian-built segment.
Credit: NASA

An alarm suggesting a potentially toxic ammonia leak on the International Space Station early Wednesday (Jan. 14) forced astronauts to evacuate the U.S. side of the orbiting lab, but NASA says there is no proof such a scary leak actually occurred. It might have beeen a false alarm.

The station's six-person crew, which includes two Americans, three Russians and an Italian astronaut, took refuge in the station's Russian-built segment, isolating themselves from modules built by NASA, Europe and Japan due to the leak alarm at 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT). NASA astronautsBarry "Butch" Wilmore, Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti are ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronauts-evacuate-from-u-s-side-of-international-space-station/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20150115


SpaceX Dragon Capsule Delivers Fresh Supplies to Space Station
The capsule was carried January 10 atop a Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from Cape Canaveral. After launch the rocket came down as planned on a drone ship but hit a bit too hard
January 12, 2015 |By Mike Wall and SPACE.com

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The rocket stage came down on target but hit the drone ship too hard Saturday. SpaceX will try the bold maneuver again on future launches, company representatives said.
Credit: NASA TV

SpaceX's robotic Dragon resupply spacecraft has arrived at the International Space Station after a two-day orbital chase.

NASA astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore, commander of the station's current Expedition 42, grappled Dragon using the orbiting outpost's huge robotic arm at 5:54 a.m. EST (1054 GMT) on Monday (Jan. 12). The capsule was installed on the Earth-facing port of the station's Harmony module three hours later.

The astronauts can now begin offloading the 5,200 pounds (2,360 kilograms) of food, spare parts and scientific experiments that Dragon brought up on this mission, the fifth of 12 unmanned cargo flights SpaceX plans ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dragon-capsule-delivers-fresh-supplies-to-space-station/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20150115

[Duke of Buckingham]

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First footage captured of rare ‘Type D’ orcas
By Bec Crew | January 9, 2015 | Comments1


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i7fLDYT0PM0

As they were tracking a Nigerian poaching vessel through the South Indian Ocean on Boxing Day last year, Australian conservationists aboard the SSS Bob Barker saw something pretty incredible – a pod of 13 Type D orcas. These orcas are so rare, they’ve only been seen on 13 recorded occasions. This footage is believed to be the first time this type of orca has ever been recorded alive.

“The crew watched in awe as the 13 killer whales, including a small juvenile and a large male, used the six-meter swell to surf across the bow,” chief engineer of the Bob Barker, Erwin Vermeulen, said in a statement. “For almost an hour, the surf-show continued and was accompanied by bow riding, tail-slaps and breaches.”

In the southern hemisphere, the orca population is ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2015/01/09/first-footage-captured-of-rare-type-d-orcas/


Giant Squid and Whale Sharks Not as Big as People Think
A study reveals that people's "fish stories" are usually exaggerated when compared with scientific reports of body sizes for marine creatures
January 14, 2015 |By Tanya Lewis and LiveScience

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A diver is dwarfed by a giant jellyfish.
Credit: Yomiuri Shimbun

When it comes to determining the size of giant squid and other large sea animals, humans have a tendency to exaggerate, a new study suggests.

A team of researchers compared scientific and popular media reports of body sizes for 25 species of marine creatures, including whales, sharks, squids, and other giant ocean dwellers, and found that most of the animals were smaller than what was reported.

"It's human nature to tell a 'fishing story,'" said Craig McClain ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/giant-squid-and-whale-sharks-not-as-big-as-people-think/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150116

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Manhattan Project Plutonium, Lost to Obscurity, Recovered by Scientists
Radioactive signatures identify one of the first pieces of plutonium seen by human eyes
January 15, 2015 |By Andy Extance

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Nagasaki atomic bomb blast.
Credit: Library of Congress

“Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, carried about 6.2 kilograms of enriched plutonium, roughly the size of a softball. The origin of that deadly hunk of metal can be traced back via a tiny sliver weighing less than three millionths of a gram, created in the labs of Manhattan Project researchers. It is a historic fragment, embodying both stunning scientific achievement and deep tragedy—that one bomb killed and wounded at least 64,000 people (estimates vary) as well as hastened Japan’s surrender. And in 2007 this historic sample, the first plutonium ever seen by researchers, vanished from the public eye.

Now it has resurfaced in a plastic box in a windowless, secure six-foot by six-foot room in the University of California, Berkeley’s Hazardous Material Facility. The tiny lump, derived from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn Seaborg’s original discovery ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/manhattan-project-plutonium-lost-to-obscurity-recovered-by-scientists1/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150119


Humans Cross Another Danger Line for the Planet
By Mark Fischetti | January 15, 2015 |

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Disappearing Forests: Green are sustainable for now, yellow and red are past the safe limit.

Five years go an impressive, international group of scientists unveiled nine biological and environmental “boundaries” that humankind should not cross in order to keep the earth a livable place. To its peril, the world had already crossed three of those safe limits: too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, too rapid a rate of species loss and too much pouring of nitrogen into rivers and oceans—primarily in the form of fertilizer runoff.

Now we have succeeded in transgressing a fourth limit: the amount of forestland being bulldozed or burned out of existence (see map below). Less and less forest reduces the planet’s ability to absorb some of that carbon dioxide and to produce water vapor, crucial to plant life. And the ongoing loss alters how much of the sun’s energy is absorbed or reflected across wide regions, which itself can modify climate.

Details about the fourth transgression, and updates on how well the planet is faring on all nine boundaries, are being published today online in Science. Another international team ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2015/01/15/humans-cross-another-danger-line-for-the-planet/

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Coral Reefs Show Remarkable Ability to Recover from Near Death
Scientists have identified key factors that enable corals to recover from bleaching events brought on by global warming
January 15, 2015 |By David Biello

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REEF RELIEF: This coral reef in the Seychelles has largely recovered from bleaching in 1998 thanks to the complexity of its shape and the depth of the water.
Courtesy of Nick Graham

As the planet heats up so do the world's waters, and that means more coral bleaching. But now a new study reveals that some corals can bounce back from such near death experiences.

The heat death of a reef reveals itself as whitening, dubbed coral bleaching, which results when corals expel the tiny plants that provide food and are responsible for the rainbow of reef colors. In 2014, coral bleaching happened in the northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Hawaiian Islands and even the Florida Keys. Severe bleaching has now happened two years in a row off Guam and overheated waters have now appeared off the Pacific island nations of Kiribati and Nauru and are also pooling near the Solomon Islands.

"The odds seem good for 2014 to be only the third recorded global scale mass bleaching," says Mark Eakin ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coral-reefs-show-remarkable-ability-to-recover-from-near-death/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20150119


The Neandertal Mystique
Our heavy-browed cousin remains the most fascinating member of the human family
Jan 20, 2015 |By Kate Wong

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Giordano Polini

For the cover story of the February Scientific American I return to one of my favorite subjects: our mysterious cousins the Neandertals. This time I take stock of recent findings that bear on the question of how the cognitive abilities of Neandertals compare with anatomically modern humans. It’s an intriguing area of research, not least because in addition to illuminating the Neandertal mind, such investigations can help reveal what factors allowed anatomically modern humans—our kind—to succeed where other members of the human family failed.

Just as fascinating is the long history of Neandertal studies, which date back to the 19th century. Indeed the Neandertals are the best known ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neandertals-the-neandertal-mystique/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20150119

[Duke of Buckingham]

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The Dog and Cat Wing: Hospital Sets Up a Scanner Center for Pets
A hospital looks to the four-legged to pad its bottom line while improving care for our furry companions
January 20, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron

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A dog patient relaxes near a MRI machine.
Credit: Rebecca Krimins

BALTIMORE—Down the hall from the hospital waiting room where patients await their turn to get medical scans, a middle-aged patient was undergoing an MRI of her lower back. That she had arrived at the hospital in a cage is only the first clue this was no ordinary MRI procedure. There’s the pulse-reading clip normally affixed to a finger that instead was clamped to her tongue. And the disposable bubble wrap tucked under her front paws to keep her warm.

Having our furry friends like eight-year-old Glacier, a Boxer, undergo a pricey medical scan may come as no surprise to devoted pet owners. But with few exceptions most veterinary centers lack the expensive scanners, so four-legged patients must use the ones originally meant for two-legged ones. The new animal medical-imaging center at The Johns Hopkins Hospital ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dog-and-cat-wing-hospital-sets-up-a-scanner-center-for-pets/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150120


Paralyzed Rats Walk Again with Flexible Spinal Implant
Elastic material bridges gaps, relays nerve impulses, in damaged spinal cords
January 20, 2015 |By Josh Fischman

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The e-dura soft spinal impant helps transmit nerve impulses.
Courtesy EPFL

A rubbery ribbon of silicone, laced with cracked bits of gold that transmit nerve signals, has been spliced into the broken spinal cords of paralyzed rats, restoring their ability to move. The implant may be the first step towards helping paralyzed people in the same way.

Injuries that cause paralysis are like cuts in a telephone cable. Signals that start in the brain are supposed to travel down nerves in the spinal cord to muscles, but breaks in the nerves interrupt them. Patching the breaks with new wires, jumping over the cut in the phone line, should restore communication.

But it is an unfortunate paradox that, in people who cannot move, their spines still can. The nerves stretch and bend. Rigid wires implanted next to them rub them raw, creating scars ...

Read more on ... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/paralyzed-rats-walk-again-with-flexible-spinal-implant/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150120

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Discovery: Fish Live Beneath Antarctica
Scientists find translucent fish in a wedge of water hidden under 740 meters of ice, 850 kilometers from sunlight
January 21, 2015 |By Douglas Fox

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Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Project

Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life.

A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-fish-live-beneath-antarctica1/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150123


Ancient Viruses Gain New Functions in the Brain
Once thought to be little more than genetic junk, retroviruses lurking within host genomes have acquired new roles that may be involved in brain development, a recent study suggests
January 19, 2015 |By Andrea Alfano

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About 8 percent of our genetic material is made up of absorbed forms of retroviruses.
Credit: National Cancer Institute

If thinking about the billions of bacteria taking up residence in and on your body gives you the willies, you probably won’t find it comforting that humans are also full of viruses. These maligned microbes are actually intertwined in the very fibers of our being—about 8 percent of our genetic material is made up of absorbed forms of retroviruses, the viral family to which HIV, the pathogen that causes AIDS, belongs.

Our intimate relationship with these so-called endogenous retroviruses may be distressing to think about but a study published last week in Cell Reports suggests that they may help shape that thinking by participating in brain development. By manipulating mice genetics, researchers found evidence that ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-viruses-gain-new-functions-in-the-brain/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150123

[Duke of Buckingham]

One for you zombie67. :D

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Ebola Epidemic Takes a Toll on Sierra Leone’s Surgeons
Twenty percent of the nation’s surgical practitioners have been killed by Ebola
January 22, 2015 |By Seema Yasmin and Chethan Sathya

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Although the rate of new Ebola infections in Sierra Leone, along with neighboring countries Guinea and Liberia, is finally falling, more than 800 health care personnel have been infected with Ebola in the hot zone and nearly 500 have died since the epidemic began.
Credit: CDC Global via Flickr

Thaim Kamara is 60 years old and would like to retire this year. But he is one of only eight remaining surgeons in Sierra Leone, a west African country of about six million people. Kamara lost two friends to Ebola in 2014—Martin Salia and Thomas Rogers, fellow surgeons at Connaught Hospital in the capital, Freetown. In light of the dire circumstances, Kamara has postponed his plan to retire.

Although the rate of new Ebola infections in Sierra Leone, along with neighboring countries Guinea and Liberia, is finally falling, more than 800 health care personnel have been infected with Ebola in the hot zone and nearly 500 have died since the epidemic began, according to a January report by the World Health Organization. And the toll, along with the continuing deaths of health care workers will have devastating implications for the long-term health of these nations.

Salia’s death in November was especially devastating for Sierra Leone. The talented surgeon was not only a precious commodity, he was an ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ebola-epidemic-takes-a-toll-on-sierra-leone-s-surgeons/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150127


Self-Propelled Micromotors Take Their First Swim in the Body
Microsized tubes can now zip around in a mouse’s stomach and deliver cargo, suggesting the potential for improved functions of nanoparticle drug carriers and imaging agents
January 23, 2015 |By Katherine Bourzac and Chemical & Engineering News

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In 2012, Wang and his colleagues made micromotors fueled by acids, which offered the potential to run the devices on bodily fluids, such as gastric juices.
Credit: ACS Nano

The idea sounds like something out of a science-fiction novel: Tiny medical machines zooming around the body delivering drugs, taking tissue samples, or performing small surgical repairs. But, now, for the first time, researchers have demonstrated a simple micromotor that can propel itself inside the body (ACS Nano 2014, DOI: 10.1021/nn507097k). When introduced into a mouse’s stomach, the micromotor swims to the stomach lining and delivers cargo.

The study is an important landmark, says Thomas E. Mallouk, who develops nanomotors and micromotors at Pennsylvania State University. It shows the potential of motorized particles to possibly improve the functions of nanoparticle drug carriers and imaging agents.

In recent years, researchers have designed microsized motors ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/self-propelled-micromotors-take-their-first-swim-in-the-body/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150127

[Duke of Buckingham]

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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 ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molecular-clocks-scattered-throughout-your-body-not-just-in-the-brain-keep-your-tissues-humming/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150128


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/article/as-cuba-u-s-relations-thaw-medical-researchers-still-struggle-to-connect/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150128

[Duke of Buckingham]

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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

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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/article/weird-x-rays-spur-speculation-about-dark-matter-detection/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20150129


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

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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/observations/2015/01/27/planet-hunters-bet-big-on-a-small-telescope-to-image-alien-earths/

[Duke of Buckingham]

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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

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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 ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-gap-between-what-scientists-say-and-americans-think-about-climate-change/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150202


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

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/7118FC5B-76A6-4CAD-915C727B47C8CC18_article.jpg?C70AC
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/article/as-cuba-u-s-relations-thaw-medical-researchers-still-struggle-to-connect/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150202

[Duke of Buckingham]

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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

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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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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

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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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[Duke of Buckingham]

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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]

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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

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/AD9D2992-7969-488B-893547CD7A3676D4_article.jpg?81ED1
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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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

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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

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BIONIC LEAF: Ralstonia eutropha, pictured here, makes fuel using the hydrogen produced via catalysts powered by electric current from a photovoltaic panel.
[I]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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[Duke of Buckingham]

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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.

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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

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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

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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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[Duke of Buckingham]

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

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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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[Duke of Buckingham]

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World's Oceans Clogged by Millions of Tons of Plastic Trash
The world's oceans are clogged with the equivalent of five grocery bags full of plastic trash on every 30 centimeters of every nation's coastline around the globe
February 12, 2015 By Will Dunham

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WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - The world's oceans are clogged with plastic debris, but how much of it finds its way into the seas annually? Enough to place the equivalent of five grocery bags full of plastic trash on every foot (30 cm) of every nation's coastline around the globe.

That's according to scientists who released research on Thursday estimating that a staggering 8 million metric tones of plastic pollution enter the oceans each year from the world's 192 coastal countries based on 2010 data.

Based on rising waste levels, they estimated that more than 9 million tons would end up in the oceans in 2015.

Experts have sounded the alarm in recent years over how ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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Mutation Order in Tumor Genes Affects Cancer Outcome
Findings could one day lead to more personalized treatment decisions
February 11, 2015 |By Christine Gorman

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The experiment hinges on being able to look at single cells of a tumor.
Credit: Vonschonertagen/Thinkstock

For the first time, researchers have proved that the order in which cancer genes mutate affects the type of malignancy that results and its response to treatment. Although the findings are specific to a particular group of preleukemic disorders known as myeloproliferative neoplasms, they suggest that scientists studying other types of tumors should start taking into account the timing of the underlying genetic mutations as a potentially critical factor in establishing an accurate diagnosis as well as in making choices about treatment. The study, which was conducted by investigators in the U.K., Spain and Germany, was published in the February 11 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Myeloproliferative neoplasms are particularly compelling cancers to study, from a scientific point of view, for two reasons: as disorders of ...

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With Liver Donors in Short Supply, Cell Transplants Offer New Options
For many liver disease patients, implantation of a few new cells from a healthy organ may buy time or avoid a full transplant altogether
February 17, 2015 |By Jessica Wapner

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A new approach may provide a stopgap or, in time, an entirely new alternative. Called hepatocyte transplantation, the technique replaces approximately 10 percent of the liver with healthy cells from a deceased donor.
Credit: Nephron via Wikimedia Commons

Every year more than 6,000 people with liver disease or facing liver failure receive whole-organ transplantations in the U.S. Although the procedure is relatively safe and effective, problems remain: Demand outpaces supply; whereas the current U.S. waiting list stands at more than 15,000 only about 6,000 donations are made yearly. The procedure can cost more than $300,000 and immunosuppressants, drugs that prevent the immune system from rejecting the new organ, can lead to dangerous infections and uncontrolled bleeding.

A new approach may provide a stopgap or, in time, an entirely new alternative. Called hepatocyte transplantation, the technique replaces approximately 10 percent of the liver with healthy cells from a deceased donor. The patient’s organ is not removed, decreasing recovery time, complications and cost. With fewer than 150 U.S. recipients so far, the approach is in its early days.

If certain hurdles—such as the limited supply of cells and ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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U.S. Droughts Will Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
The Southwest and central Great Plains will dry out even more than previously thought
February 12, 2015 |By Mark Fischetti

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The dryness of soil, basically measured as a balance between precipitation and evaporation, is predicted to drop steadily in the U.S. central Great Plains and Southwest, during the second half of this century.
Credit: Unprecedented 21st Century Drought Risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains. Benjamin Cook et. al in Science Advances, Feb. 12, 2014.

SAN FRANCISCO—Several independent studies in recent years have predicted that the American Southwest and central Great Plains will experience extensive droughts in the second half of this century, and that advancing climate change will exacerbate those droughts. But a new analysis released today says the drying will be even more extreme than previously predicted—the worst in nearly 1,000 years. Some time between 2050 and 2100, extended drought conditions in both regions will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries. Tree rings and other evidence indicate that those medieval dry periods exceeded anything seen since, across the land we know today as the continental U.S.

The analysis “shows how exceptional future droughts will be,” says Benjamin Cook, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and lead author of the study. The work was published ...

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A Stormy Arctic Is the New Normal [Excerpt]
The Arctic is changing fast
February 13, 2015 |By Edward Struzik

From Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge, by Edward Struzik. Copyright © 2015, Island Press.

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Along the west coast of Hudson Bay, polar bears are producing fewer cubs and fewer are surviving beyond the first year of life.
© Edward Struzik

In the summer of 2000, Canadian national park warden Angus Simpson and his colleagues were camped along the north coast of the Yukon Territory near the Alaskan border, conducting a survey of archeological sites along the coast. The sea was dead calm at the time. But they could see in the inky blue sky over the Beaufort Seas the telltale signs of a storm advancing. An hour or so after they turned in that night, the first big gust of wind blew in, completely flattening their tent and forcing them to take refuge in the cubbyhole of their boat.

It was just the beginning of a summer storm that some people in the western Arctic of Alaska, Yukon and Northwest Territories remember as the worst they had seen before the Great Cyclone of 2012 ripped through the region. At the height of this gale in 2000, dozens of Inuvialuit people camped on low-lying land along the Arctic coast had to be airlifted out by helicopter. The park wardens, exposed on the same ...

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Sorry State: U.S.’s Nuclear Reactor Fleet Dwindles
A falloff in construction of new nuclear power plants will make climate change requirements harder to meet
Feb 17, 2015 |By David Biello

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PETER BAKER Getty Images

The U.S.'s nuclear reactor fleet dipped below 100 for the first time in decades, when, at the tail end of 2014, Vermont Yankee shuttered its operations. The 604-megawatt power plant's termination did not come as a surprise: it had logged a slew of safety issues in recent years, including burst pipes, leaks and misplaced fuel rods. Nevertheless, it provided up to 4 percent of New England's power and one third of Vermont's. Its owner, Entergy, just did not have enough money to make the necessary upgrades, especially at a time of low electricity prices. The loss means more natural gas will be burned to meet New England's electricity needs, which undermines U.S. policy to move away from reliance on fossil fuels and control climate change.

This year is expected to be a bad one for the nuclear energy industry in the U.S., with several reactors, including a handful in Illinois and New York, at risk of shutting down. Yet the dwindling number still produce roughly 70 percent of the electricity in the country that does not exacerbate global warming.

The International Energy Agency's most recent blueprint for holding global warming to two degrees Celsius requires an expansion of nuclear power in every region of the world by 2040. Yet only 14 countries plan to build new reactors ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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The Universe's Oldest Stars Were Late Bloomers
The Planck satellite reveals the universe's first stars formed more than a hundred million years later than previously believed
February 17, 2015 |By Lee Billings

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The cosmic microwave background (CMB) as seen by the Planck Satellite across the entire sky. The color scale shows temperature differences in the CMB, while the texture maps the direction of polarized light. Some of Planck's CMB polarization measurements have yielded a new estimate for the formation of the universe's first stars.
ESA and the Planck Collaboration

If you could see the universe as it was about 13.8 billion years ago, it would look like a flame. Back then it was just a hot ionized fog—a plasma—still glowing from its birth in the big bang at the dawn of time. But when it was still in its infancy, a youthful 370,000 years old, everything changed. Slowly cooling as it expanded, the universe grew chilly enough for electrons in the plasma to combine with protons, forming hydrogen gas. When the opaque plasma transformed into see-through gas, the plasma's last, fiery light was suddenly freed to flash through a newly transparent universe.

That ancient, relic light washes over us even now, diminished by the intervening eons to a faint all-sky microwave glow: the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This light gives cosmologists their earliest possible glimpse of the infant universe, providing crucial evidence for its origins, age and composition. But besides being the ultimate cosmic baby picture, the CMB also provides snapshots of the universe as it has grown up. Passing through billions of light-years of expanding space on its way to us, the CMB has been subtly altered by interactions with coalescing cosmic structures. It encodes the story of how a nearly featureless soup of matter and radiation came to be our orderly cosmos of galaxies, stars and planets.

Now, cosmologists using CMB maps from ...

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Jupiter, as Aliens Might See It
A view of the gas giant as if it were an exoplanet cross-checks methods for studying worlds outside our solar system
February 17, 2015 |By Elizabeth Gibney and Nature magazine

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Comparing the spectrum of that light with what astronomers already know about the gas giant gives scientists a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for translating results about distant alien worlds.
Credit: E. Karkoschka(Univ. of Arizona)/ESA/NASA

Astronomers have observed Jupiter for centuries. But a study that looks at the gas giant as if it were an exoplanet could help to make more reliable interpretations of the atmospheres of bodies orbiting stars hundreds of light years away. The results largely confirm the conventional picture of Jupiter, but also reveal some surprises—including clouds of ice crystals previously unheard of on the planet.

The hundreds of planets now known to orbit stars other than our own are almost never directly visible in telescopes. In a handful of cases, however, astronomers have been able to learn about their make-ups, by interpreting how starlight filters through their atmospheres as it skirts the planets while they cross between their parent stars and Earth.

But low resolution and experimental noise mean that ...

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NASA Probe Captures Images of Pluto and Its Moon Charon [Video]
The New Horizons spacecraft is set to make the first flyby of Pluto this July
February 13, 2015 |By Mike Wall and LiveScience

A NASA spacecraft speeding toward an epic Pluto encounter this summer has captured a new movie of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon.

The new Pluto-Charon video was shot by NASA's New Horizons probe, which will make the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14. The time-lapse movie consists of a series of images taken by New Horizons' long-range camera from Jan. 25 to Jan. 31.

That's just long enough to cover one day on these icy, distant worlds; Pluto and Charon both rotate once every 6.4 Earth days. The two objects also complete one orbit around their common center of mass, or barycenter, in the same amount of time. (Pluto and Charon are tidally locked to each other, with one body always showing the other the same face.) [Photos from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Probe]

"These images allow the New Horizons navigators to ...

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How Will the Fight over Public ISPs and Net Neutrality Play Out?
The FCC will soon vote on the spread of high-speed municipal broadband services and ISPs’ rights to discriminate against certain Web traffic
February 18, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier

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END GAME: On February 26, the FCC will vote on the issues of publicly supported high-speed broadband networks and Net neutrality, after years of contentious debate.
Courtesy of PhotoDisc/Getty Images.

Several years of contentious debate over the Internet’s future come to a head next week. On February 26 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will decide whether local communities can take a more active role in upgrading their access to high-speed broadband. During the same session, the regulatory agency will vote on the so-called “Net neutrality” issue that would ban paid prioritization of Internet traffic as well as the blocking and throttling of online content and services.

The idea of local governments taking it upon themselves to improve community broadband speeds has caught on in recent years, particularly in towns and cities that host major universities craving greater network bandwidth. In 2011 a group of universities and their surrounding municipalities formed the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, commonly referred to as Gig.U. The project’s goal has been to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks in the U.S. by encouraging researchers—students and professors alike—to develop new applications and services that can make use of ultrafast data-transfer rates.

Pres. Barack Obama has come down in favor of municipal broadband services as ...

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Pros and Cons of 5 E-Mail Alternatives
As messaging services eat into e-mail, what are we losing—and gaining?
Feb 17, 2015 |By David Pogue

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Two key aspects of e-mail are changing: the store-and-forward routine (I send you a message, which waits until you come and get it) and the fact that these communications are typed.
Credit: Thinkstock

In my Scientific American column this month I noted that humanity's flood of e-mail seems to be subsiding. The quantity has dropped 10 percent in the last few years, and among young people it's dropped a staggering 60 percent.

But that doesn't mean that written communications are dead—far from it. It means that we've found better, quicker, more targeted channels for sending messages, thanks to our trusty smartphones and tablets. With the rise of these new apps and channels, two key aspects of e-mail are changing: the store-and-forward routine (I send you a message, which waits until you come and get it) and the fact that these communications are typed.

Here's a rundown of the messaging channels that ...

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How to Get More Parents to Vaccinate Their Kids
A look at the financial and behavioral nudges that can provide incentives for change
February 19, 2015 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Credit: Thinkstock/Dmitry Naumov

Four years ago schools and day cares in western Washington embarked on an experiment. Too many kids in the state were going without needed vaccines that protect them against measles, whooping cough and other preventable diseases. Part of the problem, public health officials believed, was that parents lacked accurate medical information and held misguided beliefs that the vaccines were not necessary.

So they drafted some help—specifically, other parents who were trained by public health workers to answer common questions about vaccines’ risks and benefits. Armed with that knowledge and paid small stipends, these advocates went out to educate other parents. Many of the trained parents took to Facebook to spread the pro-vaccine word; others set up information booths at school and community events. “Over a period of three years we worked in a total of 21 sites including elementary schools, child care and preschools,” says Mackenzie Melton, immunization coordinator at WithinReach, a nonprofit that helped organize the program.

In the U.S. it was one of the only recent efforts to audition new methods for getting more parents to ...

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When High IQs Hang Out
“Genius” societies offer a social network for the top tier of test takers
Jan 1, 2015 |By Lena Groeger

Kevin Langdon was writing several books and designing an inside-out clock. Karyn Huntting Peters was organizing a global problem-solving network. Alfred Simpson juggled multiple Web-programming projects in his free time. These three people might not have had much in common—except for their unusually high IQs.

All three belong to exclusive high-IQ societies. Mensa International, whose members’ test scores must land above the 98th percentile (or one in 50), may be the most popular, but it is just one option for the discerning test taker. The Triple Nine Society demands an IQ in the 99.9th percentile, whereas the Mega Society cuts off at the 99.9999th percentile (one in one million). The memberless Grail Society claims to accept one in 100 billion people—no one has applied so far.

Although members of IQ societies do not ...

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Higgs Boson Could Explain Matter’s Dominance over Antimatter
A new theory suggests the Higgs field varied in the early universe, offering matter a chance to split off from antimatter
February 20, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz

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Computer simulation of particle tracks from an LHC collision that produced a Higgs boson.
CERN

The stars, the planets and you and I could just as easily be made of antimatter as matter, but we are not. Something happened early in the universe’s history to give matter the upper hand, leaving a world of things built from atoms and little trace of the antimatter that was once as plentiful but is rare today. A new theory published February 11 in Physical Review Letters suggests the recently discovered Higgs boson particle may be responsible—more particularly, the Higgs field that is associated with the particle.

The Higgs field is thought to pervade all of space and imbue particles that pass through it with mass, akin to the way liquid dye gives Easter eggs color when they are dunked in. If the Higgs field started off with a very high value in the early universe and decreased to its current lower value over time, it might have briefly differentiated the masses of particles from their antiparticles along the way—an anomaly, because antimatter today is characterized by having the same mass but opposite charge as its matter counterpart. This difference in mass, in turn, could have made matter particles more likely to form than antimatter in the cosmos’ early days, producing the excess of matter we see today. “It is a nice idea that ...

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Star Buzzed Our Solar System during Human Prehistory
A faint star with an even fainter companion came close enough some 70,000 years ago to perturb distant comets in our solar system
February 21, 2015 |By Ron Cowen and Nature magazine

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The discovery is surprising because stars are expected to come close to the outer Solar System only about once every 9 million years, yet this encounter occurred recently.
Credit: NASA

A recently discovered stellar neighbour of the Sun penetrated the extreme fringes of the Solar System—the closest encounter ever documented—at around the time that modern humans began spreading from Africa into Eurasia.

During occasional flare-ups that may have lasted minutes to hours, the dim interloper might even have been bright enough for our ancestors to see.

The red dwarf star, which has a mass about 8% that of the Sun and is orbited by a 'brown dwarf' companion—a body with too little heft to sustain the thermonuclear reactions that enable stars to shine—was discovered in 2013 in images recorded by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. It is relatively nearby, at about 6 parsecs (19.6 light years) away.

Astronomer Eric Mamajek at the University of Rochester in New York became intrigued by it when he learned that ...

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Net Neutrality Prevails in Contentious FCC Vote
Broadband Internet access will be reclassified as a telecom service under a modified set of rules. Court battles and more Congressional hearings to follow
February 26, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier

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THE AYES HAVE IT: The FCC has voted to regulate the Internet as a utility, despite much opposition. This is hardly the end of the Net neutrality story, so stay tuned.
Courtesy of Camilo Sanchez, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved its Net neutrality policy by a vote of three to two on Thursday. This unsurprising outcome follows years of contentious debate over the best way to ensure that Internet service providers (ISPs) treat all online data and services equally, without favoring one type of content over another.

Rhetoric on both sides had been remarkably similar in recent months as the vote approached but was punctuated by mutual mistrust. By the end of Thursday’s debate—which is by no means the end of the matter—the parties agreed on the Net neutrality approach, although through different means. Expect the FCC’s decision to regulate the Internet as a utility to be challenged in the courts, through additional Congressional hearings and, ultimately, through legislation that would mitigate the agency’s authority to regulate broadband providers.

The route to Net neutrality involves a governmental reclassification of Internet access under Title II of the Communications Act. Those in support claim to be promoting “innovation” and “openness” online by preventing ...

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Tar Sands Pipeline Vetoed, Climate Threat Marches On
By David Biello | February 25, 2015 | Comments15
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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A map of Canada's network of pipelines to transport liquids, included diluted bitumen from Alberta's tar sands. The dotted blue line cutting diagonally down from Alberta to Oklahoma is the Keystone XL pipeline while the dotted blue line headed east is the leading alternative, known as Energy East. Courtesy of Canadian Energy Pipeline Association

Pres. Barack Obama vetoed a bill to approve construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline on February 24—not because of climate change, not because of low oil prices and not because of the risks from leaking diluted bitumen from the tar sands. Obama vetoed the pipeline bill “because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures.” In other words Obama used the third veto of his presidency to preserve the prerogatives of his office, in this case evaluating cross-border pipelines and the ever-vague “national interest.”

Veto aside, the Obama administration still might find Keystone XL is in the national interest, once the Department of State completes its six-years-and-counting review. Approval appears to hinge on whether the pipeline is judged to “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” as the president put it in a speech in 2013. State has said no it won’t in the past, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among others, say yes it will.

There is little doubt that oil made from the bitumen stuck to sand buried beneath Alberta is among the dirtiest kinds of oil found on the planet. Interestingly, about the only worse type of petroleum is the heavy crude from Venezuela that refineries on ...

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Why Julianne Moore and Taylor Swift See That Dress Differently
By Stephen L. Macknik | February 27, 2015 | Comments31

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http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

As a visual neuroscientist I think a lot about how we see the world around us. And so I’ve found the scientific and celebrity controversy around #thedress to be especially fun and exciting. Most of the scientific pundits have concluded that the dress is black-and-blue, and they have offered up an illusions-in-the-brain explanation of why some people see the dress instead as white-and-gold. Yet after thinking thoroughly about this photo, looking at it on a number of different screens, and speaking with some of my lab partners, I’d like to offer my point of view. Yes, there is an illusion at play here that affects our brains, but no, it is not that illusion that causes it to look differently to different people: that difference is caused by a mundane photographic effect.

First, the illusory explanation (it’s black-and-blue but only appears white-and-gold) arises from what we scientists call “color constancy.” It’s the process by which we can recognize the same object under different light sources. My favorite example of this effect is from Dale Purves’s lab, and is shown in the image of the Rubik’s Cube. You see the brown central chip on the top and the orange central chip on the front-face? In fact they are identical in color and only ...

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Alien Life Prefers Circles
Solar systems with many planets are more likely to feature the circular orbits that could foster intelligent life
Feb 17, 2015 |By Ken Croswell

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Credit: SKY2014/Thinkstock

If intelligent life is out there, it probably resides in a solar system with many planets. The more planets a star has, a recent study found, the more circular the orbits tend to be. Because planets on circular orbits do not move toward or away from their star, their climates may be stable enough to foster advanced life.

Our own solar system fits that pattern. The sun has eight or nine planets (depending on how you count), and most of them have fairly circular paths. Earth's orbit, for example, has an eccentricity of just 1.7 percent. (Eccentricity ranges from 0 percent for a perfect circle to nearly 100 percent for extreme ellipses.) Mercury and Pluto pursue oval-shaped orbits, with eccentricities of 21 and 25 percent, respectively, but even Pluto—whose planetary status is controversial—seems tame when compared with many of the planets orbiting other stars, where eccentricities can exceed 60, 70, even 80 percent.

As far as we know, such wild worlds exist only in solar systems with one or two planets, say astronomers Mary Anne Limbach and Edwin L. Turner of Princeton University, who conducted the study. In contrast, solar systems with ...

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Why People "Fly from Facts"
Research shows the appeal of untestable beliefs, and how it leads to a polarized society
March 3, 2015 |By Troy Campbell and Justin Friesen

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The truth can be uncomfortable
Credit: Jo Naylor via flickr

“There was a scientific study that showed vaccines cause autism.”

“Actually, the researcher in that study lost his medical license, and overwhelming research since then has shown no link between vaccines and autism.”

“Well, regardless, it’s still my personal right as a parent to make decisions for my child.”

Does that exchange sound familiar: a debate that starts with testable factual statements, but then, when the truth becomes inconvenient, the person takes a flight from facts.

As public debate rages about issues like immunization, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, many people try to use science to bolster their arguments. And since it’s becoming easier to test and establish facts—whether in physics, psychology, or policy—many have wondered why bias and polarization have not been defeated. When people are confronted with facts, such as the well-established safety of immunization, why do these facts seem to have so little effect?

Our new research, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined a slippery way by which people get ...

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Complex Societies Evolved without Belief in All-Powerful Deity
The emergence of politically sophisticated societies may be assisted by faith in supernatural spirits but does not require "big god" religion
March 6, 2015 |By Philip Ball and Nature magazine

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Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, wanted evidence to examine the idea that "big Gods" drive and sustain the evolution of big societies.
Credit: Arian Zwegers/Flickr

All human societies have been shaped by religion, leading psychologists to wonder how it arose, and whether particular forms of belief have affected other aspects of evolved social structure. According to one recent view, for example, belief in a "big God"—an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions—has been instrumental in bringing about social and political complexity in human cultures.

But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia—the network of small and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island—challenges that theory. In these states, a more general belief in supernatural punishment did tend to precede political complexity, the research finds, but belief in supreme deities emerged after complex cultures have already formed.

Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who worked on the study, wanted evidence to ...

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Dawn Spacecraft Arrives at Ceres, Becomes First to Orbit a Dwarf Planet
By Lee Billings | March 6, 2015 | Comments3

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NASA's Dawn spacecraft captured this image of a crescent Ceres from 48,000 kilometers away as it prepared to enter orbit around the dwarf planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Shortly after 7:30 am Eastern time this morning, a seven-year space voyage at last reached its final destination: NASA’s Dawn mission entered orbit around Ceres, a small, icy world orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Confirmation of Dawn’s arrival came about an hour later, via the spacecraft’s radio signal to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres home,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn’s mission director and chief engineer at JPL.

Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres has mystified astronomers and defied easy categorization. It’s been called a planet, then an asteroid, and most recently a “dwarf planet” akin to Pluto. Unlike an asteroid, which is typically misshapen and lumpy, Ceres is round like a planet. It is small as far as worlds go: at nearly 950 kilometers in diameter, it’s approximately the size of Texas. Even so, it contains ...

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Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2015
By Mariette DiChristina | March 4, 2015 | Comments9

What innovations are leaping out of the labs to shape the world in powerful ways? Identifying those compelling innovations is the charge of the Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, one of the World Economic Forum’s network of expert communities that form the Global Agenda Councils, which today released its Top 10 List of Emerging Technologies for 2015. This year, our Meta-Council chair is Bernard Meyerson, chief innovation officer of IBM; I serve Vice-Chair.

You can also see a conversation ...

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Mass Deaths in Americas Start New CO2 Epoch
A new proposal pegs the start of the Anthropocene to the little ice age and the Columbian Exchange
March 11, 2015 |By David Biello

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Mass deaths after Europeans reached the Americas may have allowed forests to regrow, reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and kicking off a proposed new Anthropocene geologic epoch.
Courtesy of NASA

The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations of the most prominent greenhouse gas and start a little ice age. Based on that dramatic shift, 1610 should be considered the start date of a new, proposed geologic epoch—the Anthropocene, or recent age of humanity—according to the authors of a new study.

"Placing the Anthropocene at this time highlights the idea that colonialism, global trade and the desire for ...

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Solar Plane Takes Flight to Circle Globe in 180 Days
Advanced aircraft flies around the world on a wing and a sunbeam
March 9, 2015 |By David Biello | Véalo en español

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The Solar Impulse 2 will attempt to fly around the world powered solely by electricity generated with sunshine.
[I]Courtesy of Solar Impulse

A pioneering flight around the world will use nothing but sunshine for fuel. In the dusty peach dawn of a desert day the Solar Impulse 2 airplane took flight at 11:12 PM Eastern time on March 8 from the United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi on the first leg of a bid to fly around the world exclusively powered by electricity generated from sunlight.

At a top speed of 45 kilometers-per-hour the single-seat airplane flew to Muscat in neighboring Oman over roughly 10 hours, touching down at roughly 2:13 PM Eastern time, after a few hours spent circling and waiting for the right weather conditions to land. The plane is an upgraded version of the original Solar Impulse, which flew across the U.S. in 2013; both planes were built by the Solar Impulse group, led by Swiss adventurers Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg.

Borschberg piloted this first leg of at least 12 that will circle the planet, and either he or Piccard will ...

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The Pi Day of the Century
The first five digits of pi, 3.1415, is being celebrated on March 14, 2015, with a day for math fun, circular logic and, of course, pie eating
Mar 13, 2015

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Merchants of Doubt about Global Warming Hope to Strike Back
Climate change deniers look to file lawsuits against those exposing their actions
March 9, 2015 |By Evan Lehmann and ClimateWire

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The tactics discussed - like lawsuits and grievances - reflect previous efforts to constrain critics of Singer and others through legal attacks, or the threat of them, several people involved with the movie say.
Credit: Film Festivals and Indie Films via Youtube

Before the release this Friday of the documentary "Merchants of Doubt," S. Fred Singer sought the advice of nearly 30 climate skeptics about their chances of halting the movie and whether he should sue Naomi Oreskes, who co-authored the book on which it's based.

"Has she finally gone too far?" asked Singer.

The discussion is outlined in a chain of emails initiated last fall by the 90-year-old physicist, who is featured in the film for his work questioning the amount of influence people have on rising temperatures. His request reached a mix of academics and others who have been mostly antagonistic toward mainstream climate findings. ClimateWire obtained the emails from a source who received them as a forwarded message.

Perhaps the strongest response came from James Enstrom, an epidemiologist who has challenged ...

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Arctic Sea Ice Dwindles toward Record Winter Low
Arctic sea ice continues to thin and recede
March 11, 2015 |By Andrea Thompson and Climate Central

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Sea ice extent is crucial to the Arctic's ecology and economy.
Credit: Polar Cruises/Flickr

While balmy hints of spring melt piles of snow in the eastern U.S., the impending end of winter marks peak season for Arctic sea ice. But this year, that winter maximum area is currently on track to hit a record low since satellite records began in 1979.

What that low-ice mark means for the spring and summer melting seasons is unclear, but the milestone would still be notable in the global warming-fueled cycle of Arctic sea ice decline.

“The fact that we're starting the melt season with low—maybe record low—winter extents cannot be good,” Jennifer Francis, a Rutgers University Arctic researcher, said in an email.

Sea ice extent is crucial to the Arctic's ecology and economy, affecting wildlife habitats, weather patterns ...

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DNA Editing of Human Embryos Alarms Scientists
A call by scientists to halt to precision gene-editing of DNA in human embryos would allow time to work out safety and ethical issues
March 13, 2015 |By David Cyranoski and Nature magazine

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Sperm cell fertilizing an egg.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Amid rumors that precision gene-editing techniques have been used to modify the DNA of human embryos, researchers have called for a moratorium on the use of the technology in reproductive cells.

In a Comment published on March 12 in Nature, Edward Lanphier, chairman of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine in Washington DC, and four co-authors call on scientists to agree not to modify human embryos — even for research.

“Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications. We are concerned that a public outcry about such an ethical breach could hinder a promising area of therapeutic development,” write Lanphier and his colleagues, who include Fyodor Urnov, a pioneer in gene-editing techniques and scientist at Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California. Many groups, including Urnov's company, are already using gene-editing tools to develop therapies that correct genetic defects in people (such as by editing white blood cells). They fear that attempts to produce ‘designer babies’ by applying the methods to embryos will create a backlash against all use of the technology.

Known as germline modification, edits to embryos, eggs or sperm are of particular concern because a person created using ...

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Three Biotech Solutions for Knee Repair
New techniques in orthopedic surgery aim to unleash the body's own healing power
Feb 17, 2015 |By Claudia Wallis

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Logan Faerber

If you look very carefully at the C-curved squiggle taking shape on a 3-D printer at Columbia University Medical Center, you just might spot the future of knee repair. Layer by layer, the machine's tiny needle squirts out a bead of white polymer, matching a virtual blueprint of a meniscus—the semicircular band of tough, fibrous cartilage that serves as the knee's shock absorber. A bioprinter in the laboratory of Jeremy Mao can churn out three menisci in just under 16 minutes.

These particular parts are destined for sheep, the test animal for a new method of correcting a torn meniscus, one of the most common of all human joint injuries. Surgeons will substitute the manufactured part for a sheep's own damaged meniscus to serve as a scaffold for healing. Once the device is in place, specialized proteins embedded in it will attract stem cells that will rebuild the meniscus as the polymer breaks down. A study published in December 2014 found ...

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A Hug a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Research demonstrates cold fighting power of hugging
March 17, 2015 |By Kasley Killam

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A study published earlier this month suggests that, in addition to making us feel connected with others, all those hugs may have prevented us from getting sick.
Credit: Thinkstock

During my final semester of undergrad, I made two signs that read, “Feeling stressed about exams? Have a free hug!” Then I recruited a friend and we stood in the entrance of the campus library, held up the signs, and waited. Passerbys had one of two reactions: Either they quickly looked down at their phones and awkwardly shuffled by, or their faces lit up as they embraced us. Most people were enthusiastic. Some exclaimed, “You made my day!” or “Thank you. I needed this.” One leapt into my arms, nearly toppling me over. After two hours of warm interactions, my friend and I couldn’t believe how energized and happy we felt.

A study published earlier this month suggests that, in addition to making us feel connected with others, all those hugs may have prevented us from getting sick. At first, this finding probably seems counterintuitive ...

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Believing Beauty Is Attainable Causes Pain
For traits such as intelligence, believing you can change yourself for the better is a good thing. Not so for appearance
Feb 12, 2015 |By Tori Rodriguez

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ALAMY

Believing that we can change a trait for the better tends to be self-fulfilling, and vice versa. People who contend that intelligence or creativity cannot be improved, for example, tend to develop less in these areas than those who think these facets are malleable. This finding holds in a variety of settings [see box below], which has led many to conclude that having a growth mind-set is an unconditionally good thing. Yet beliefs about beauty have now emerged as the first notable exception to this trend, according to two studies reported last October in Social Cognition.

Researchers at Oklahoma State University found that women with malleable beliefs about beauty—for instance, believing they could become more beautiful with effort—had a higher risk for appearance-related anxiety and were more likely to base their self-worth on their looks, as compared with those who have fixed beauty beliefs. They were also more likely to express interest in cosmetic surgery. The effects were not found among men.

Whether a malleable belief is beneficial or not may depend on how realistic the pursuit is. Beauty ideals typically presented ...

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Only China Can Save the Seas [Commentary]
Unless the world’s largest consumer of seafood adopts more sustainable practices, we can say good-bye to ocean life as we know it
March 17, 2015

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Sea cucumbers grow in a Chinese ocean farm.
Photo by Dominic Bracco for Scientific American

The oceans are in crisis. Next to climate change, disappearing ocean life is probably the world’s greatest environmental calamity. And unlike most of our other global woes, the free-falling populations of sea creatures are not related to pollution or industrialization or development. We are just eating all the fishes.

This is not news for most biologists, and neither are the long-proposed solutions: more catch limits on fisheries, new tools to limit by catch, and publicity campaigns to encourage the eating of only sustainable fishes. Unfortunately, none of that matters. Well, okay, every little bit matters; we should also recycle and turn off lights when we leave a room. But these steps are a mere drop in the oyster bucket. When it comes to the future of our seas, all that matters today is China.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (whose data on global fishing admittedly is rough but is also ..

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Air Quality in Bed Is a Nightmare
Pillows, bedding and tossing and turning all influence what you inhale while fast asleep
Mar 17, 2015

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Credit: James Woodson/Thinkstock

If the average American lives to be 78 years old, roughly a third of those years are spent lying on a mattress. Brandon Boor, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, studies air pollutants in the sleep microenvironment. In his most recent study, detailed in the journal Indoor Air, Boor covered a twin mattress with 225-thread-count sheets and seeded the bed with artificial dust as a proxy for the microorganisms, fungal spores and skin cells that routinely collect there. Volunteers dressed in clean suits then sat and spun around on the bed—all inside a sealed chamber—while instruments measured the particles that were kicked up and could be inhaled by the subjects. The concentrations are minute, measured in parts per million, but could affect us because we spend eight hours every day in “uncustomary proximity” to bedding and mattresses. The time spent under roofs in general has led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conclude that ...

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11 Natural Wonders to See before They Are Gone
Global warming may transform these places beyond recognition
March 20, 2015 |By David Biello

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Global warming is already transforming some of the places humans hold most dear.
Credit: Daniel Nepstad

The world changes a little faster these days. As concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tick up year over year, more and more of the sun's heat gets trapped. That heat affects the planet in a variety of ways: raising global average temperatures, melting ice, increasing downpours, lengthening droughts and more. And this global warming is already transforming some of the places humans hold most dear.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization keeps a list of what it deems world heritage sites: human-made or natural places of "outstanding universal value," from the Palace of Versailles in France to the Sundarbans mangrove forest in Bangladesh. There are more than 1,000 such places now—and many of them may be changed beyond recognition by global warming.


>>View slide show of natural wonders threatened by climate change on http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow/11-natural-wonders-to-see-before-they-are-gone-slide-show/

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Fact or Fiction?: Dark Matter Killed the Dinosaurs
A new out-of-this-world theory links mass extinctions with exotic astrophysics and galactic architecture
March 25, 2015 |By Lee Billings

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The 100-kilometer-wide Manicougan Crater in Canada was produced by a 5-kilometer-wide space rock smacking into Earth about 215 million years ago. A similar larger impact some 66 million years ago is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Some researchers believe giant impacts cyclically occur, driven by our solar system's movement through a disk of dark matter in the Milky Way.
Credit: NASA

Every once in a great while, something almost unspeakable happens to Earth. Some terrible force reaches out and tears the tree of life limb from limb. In a geological instant, countless creatures perish and entire lineages simply cease to exist.

The most famous of these mass extinctions happened about 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out in the planet-wide environmental disruption that followed a mountain-sized space rock walloping Earth. We can still see the scar from the impact today as a nearly 200-kilometer-wide crater in the Yucatan Peninsula.

But this is only one of the “Big Five” cataclysmic mass extinctions recognized by paleontologists, and not even the worst. Some 252 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction wiped out an estimated nine of every ten species on the planet—scientists call this one “the Great Dying.” In addition to the Big Five, evidence exists for ...

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Bright Spots on Ceres Could Be Active Ice
Early data from the Dawn spacecraft could clear up a mystery about the dwarf planet
March 18, 2015 By Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine

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Ceres is believed to be made of at least one-quarter ice.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

A pair of bright spots that glimmer inside an impact crater on the asteroid Ceres, mystifying scientists, could be coming from some kind of icy plume or other active geology.

New images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show the spots, known as ‘feature number 5’, at changing angles as the asteroid rotates in and out of sunlight. The pictures reveal the spots even when they are near the edge of Ceres, when the sides of the impact crater would normally block the view of anything confined to the bottom. The fact that something is visible at all suggests that the feature must rise relatively high above the surface.

“What is amazing is that you can see the feature while the rim is still in the line of sight,” said Andreas Nathues, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. Nathues, who leads the team for one of the ...

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Explained: The Supertide That Swallowed a French Abbey
The moon, sun and some shenanigans between them brought a 14-meter tide to the coast of France
March 23, 2015 |By Mark Fischetti

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A supertide envelopes Mont Saint-Michel.
Associated Press

A stunning photo went viral over the weekend, revealing a supertide that turned an 11th-century French abbey that is usually surrounded by sheep into an island swallowed by the sea. The image, from AP, is shown here.

Similar photos from other news agencies also ran rampant on the Web. Thousands of people arrived on the coast of Normandy to watch the spectacular 14-meter-high surge of water envelop Mont Saint-Michel, the enclave around the abbey—usually accessible only by a causeway, which was overtopped by the tide.

The articles that accompanied such photos failed to explain why this supertide happened, or made vague references to the sun, or the moon, or the alignment of the sun and moon, or the eclipse that occurred the same day—and without attribution to any expert or scientific institution. Many also referred to the March 20-21 event as the “tide of the century,” even though it arises every 18 years. The previous occurrence was in March 1997, and the next one will be in March 2033.

So what caused the supertide? A strong clue is the repeat of “March” in the dates. Tides are ...

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NASA Chooses a Boulder as the Next Destination for Its Astronauts
The agency's controversial Asteroid Redirect Mission no longer calls for redirecting an asteroid into high lunar orbit
March 26, 2015 |By Lee Billings

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This artist's rendition shows part of the plan for NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission to robotically pluck a boulder off an asteroid and ferry it to high lunar orbit. Astronauts would then visit the boulder as early as 2025.
Image Credit: NASA

In the 2020s, NASA’s human spaceflight program will revolve around sending astronauts to high lunar orbit to study a small boulder robotically plucked from the surface of a large asteroid, agency officials announced yesterday. The announcement is a crucial milestone for the agency’s nascent Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which is intended to set the stage for future missions sending humans to Mars and other deep-space destinations.

NASA’s decision comes after months of delays as two separate teams investigated how to best achieve ARM’s objectives. The original ARM proposal, dubbed Option A, called for a “grab and bag” approach, in which a robotic space tug captures a small asteroid whole and wraps it in a protective sheath before guiding it into a stable lunar orbit. Though the boulder-snatching concept, Option B, is projected to cost $100 million more than Option A, it won out because it offers more operational flexibility, said NASA associate administrator Robert Lightfoot.

During a conference call with reporters, Lightfoot noted that ...

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Why Don't Animals Get Schizophrenia (and How Come We Do)?
Research suggests an evolutionary link between the disorder and what makes us human
March 24, 2015 |By Bret Stetka

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Though psychotic animals may exist, psychosis has never been observed outside of our own species; whereas depression, OCD, and anxiety traits have been reported in many non-human species.
Credit: IG_Royal/Thinkstock

Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We've also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all sorts of questionable psychological ills to our pawed companions. But the science does suggest that numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate. And that thing when your dog woefully watches you pull out of the driveway from the window—that might be DSM-certified separation anxiety. "Every animal with a mind has the capacity to lose hold of it from time to time" wrote science historian and author Dr. Laurel Braitman in "Animal Madness."

But there’s at least one mental malady that, while common in humans, seems to have spared all other animals: schizophrenia. Though psychotic animals may exist, psychosis has never been observed outside of our own species; whereas depression, OCD, and anxiety traits have been reported in ...

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Widely Used Herbicide Linked to Cancer
The World Health Organization's research arm declares glyphosate a probable carcinogen. What's the evidence?
March 25, 2015 |By Daniel Cressey and Nature magazine

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Glyphosate is the world’s most widely produced herbicide, by volume. It is used extensively in agriculture and is also found in garden products in many countries.
Credit: Chafer Machinery via Flickr

The cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization last week announced that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, is probably carcinogenic to humans. But the assessment, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, has been followed by an immediate backlash from industry groups.

On March 23, Robb Fraley, chief technology officer at the agrochemical company Monsanto in St Louis, Missouri, which sells much of the world’s glyphosate, accused the IARC of “cherry picking” data. “We are outraged with this assessment,” he said in a statement. Nature explains the controversy.

What does the IARC report say?
The IARC regularly reviews the carcinogenicity of industrial chemicals, foodstuffs and even jobs. On March 20, a panel of international experts convened by the agency reported the findings of a review of five agricultural chemicals in a class known as organophosphates. A summary of the study was published in The Lancet Oncology.

Two of the pesticides — tetrachlorvinphos and parathion — were rated as ...

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Poverty Shrinks Brains from Birth
Studies show that children from low-income families have smaller brains and lower cognitive abilities
March 31, 2015 |By Sara Reardon and Nature magazine | Véalo en español

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Researchers have long suspected that children’s behaviour and cognitive abilities are linked to their socioeconomic status, particularly for those who are very poor.
Credit: BerSonnE/Thinkstock

The stress of growing up poor can hurt a child’s brain development starting before birth, research suggests—and even very small differences in income can have major effects on the brain.

Researchers have long suspected that children’s behaviour and cognitive abilities are linked to their socioeconomic status, particularly for those who are very poor. The reasons have never been clear, although stressful home environments, poor nutrition, exposure to industrial chemicals such as lead and lack of access to good education are often cited as possible factors.

In the largest study of its kind, published on March 30 in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by neuroscientists Kimberly Noble from Columbia University in New York City and Elizabeth Sowell from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, California, looked into the biological underpinnings of these effects. They imaged the brains of ...

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Human Brain Project Needs a Rethink
The European Human Brain Project's effort to simulate the entire brain in a supercomputer is premature, a new report says
March 28, 2015 |By Nature magazine

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The brain project is failing and must be fixed.
Credit: BULIEKOV ROSTYSLAV/Thinkstock

Just like the human brain itself, the European Commission’s billion-euro Human Brain Project (HBP) defies easy explanation. Launched 18 months ago, the massive project is complex and, to most observers, confusing. Many people—both scientists and non-scientists—have thus accepted a description of the project that emerged from its leaders and its publicity machine: the aim of simulating the entire human brain in a supercomputer and so find cures for psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Like many simplistic explanations of the brain, that characterization of the project provoked a backlash from neuroscientists. This climaxed in a full-scale uprising last summer, when hundreds of researchers signed a critical open letter to the commission (www.neurofuture.eu). Autocratic management, they complained, was running the project off its scientific course and exaggerating its clinical reach.

An independent committee was established to investigate and ...

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Jupiter, Destroyer of Worlds, May Have Paved the Way for Earth
Careening toward the sun, Jupiter cleared the way for Earth to form—with help from Saturn, too
April 1, 2015 |By Lee Billings

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Jupiter may have paved the way for Earth's formation early in our solar system's history.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In Greco-Roman mythology Jupiter is the king of the gods, a deity who destroyed an older race of titans to become the jealous and vengeful lord of heaven and Earth.

Strange though it may seem, scientific theory lends credence to this historical fiction. As the largest, heaviest object orbiting our sun, Jupiter’s namesake world is the lord of planets, a dominant force in the solar system. Eons ago, while flinging leftover debris from planetary formation out of our solar system, Jupiter probably also tossed some down toward our primordial globe, delivering some of the water that now fills our oceans. Jupiter still shepherds swarms of asteroids, occasionally sending some whizzing harmlessly into interstellar space or on destructive collision courses with Earth and other planets. Jupiter may have even played a role in the asteroid-linked extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, an event that ushered in the reign of our mammalian ancestors. Without Jupiter, humans might not exist.

A new study, however, suggests that without Jupiter ...

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NASA Assures Skeptical Congress That the James Webb Telescope Is on Track
The program will not repeat past mistakes, officials vow, and will launch as planned in 2018
March 30, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz

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A telescope project that has become notorious for its ballooning cost and repeated delays has lately been operating on schedule and within budget, NASA officials told Congress last week. One of the most ambitious and powerful observatories ever built, the $8.8-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on track to launch in 2018, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor hired to build the telescope, has lately been troubleshooting a problem with the “cryocooler” meant to stop heat from interfering with the telescope’s sensitive infrared camera, which requires frigid temperatures to see such long wavelengths. The issue raised fears in Congress that the observatory would be delayed, or worse—that it might not work, just as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, failed to operate properly at first and had to be repaired by shuttle astronauts. Unlike Hubble, however, James Webb is not designed ...

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Power structure
A power structure is an overall system of influence relationships between any individual and every other individual within any selected group of people. A description of a power structure would capture the way in which power or authority is distributed between people within groups such as a government, nation, institution, organization, or a society. Such structures are of interest to various fields, including sociology, government, economics, and business. A power structure may be formal and intentionally constructed to maximize values like fairness or efficiency, as in a hierarchical organization wherein every entity, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. Conversely, a power structure may be an informal set of roles, such as those found in a dominance hierarchy in which members of a social group interact, often aggressively, to create a ranking system. A culture that is organised in a dominance hierarchy is a dominator culture, the opposite of an egalitarian culture of partnership. A visible, dominant group or elite that holds power or authority within a power structure is often referred to as being the Establishment. Powers structures are fluid, with change occurring constantly, either slowly or rapidly, evolving or revolutionary, peacefully or violently.


Plutocracy
Plutocracy (from Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, meaning "wealth", and κράτος, kratos, meaning "power, dominion, rule") or plutarchy, defines a society or a system ruled and dominated by the small minority of the wealthiest citizens. The first known use of the term was in 1652. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.


Plutonomy
In three reports for super-rich Citigroup clients published in 2005 and 2006, a team of Citigroup analysts elaborated on their thesis that the share of the very rich in national income of plutonomies had become so large that what is going on in these economies and in their relation with other economies cannot be properly understood any more with reference to the average consumer: "The rich are so rich that their behavior – be it negative savings, or just very low consumption of oil as a % of their income – overwhelms that of the ‘average’ consumer."

The authors of these studies predicted that the global trend toward plutonomies would continue, for various reasons, including "capitalist-friendly governments and tax regimes". They do, however, also warn of the risk that, since "political enfranchisement remains as was – one person, one vote, at some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich."


Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of government. Juan Linz, whose 1964 description of authoritarianism is influential, characterised authoritarian regimes as political systems by four qualities: "limited, not responsible, political pluralism"; that is, constraints on political institutions and groups (such as legislatures, political parties and interest groups), a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency; neither "intensive nor extensive political mobilization" and constraints on the mass public (such as repressive tactics against opponents and a prohibition of anti-regime activity) and "formally ill-defined" executive power, often shifting or vague.


Biopower
"Biopower" (or biopouvoir in French) is a term coined by French scholar, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault. It relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". Foucault first used the term in his lecture courses at the Collège de France, but the term first appeared in print in The Will To Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. In Foucault's work, it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation, among many other regulatory mechanisms often linked less directly with literal physical health. It is closely related to a term he uses much less frequently, but which subsequent thinkers have taken up independently, biopolitics.


Hierarchy
A hierarchy (in Greek: Ιεραρχία; this comes from ιερός-hieros, sacred, and άρχω-arkho, rule) is a way of ranking and organizing things or people. Beneath the top of the hierarchy, each part of it is below some other part. This turns out to be like a pyramid. It is a system to decide who can make decisions, and who is forced to comply with those decisions.

An example with people would be the structure of a company. There is the top manager, and there are a few levels of middle and lower management. At the bottom are the common workers. Another example would be an army that might have a general, followed by colonels, corporals, and sergeants, then privates.

In democracy this is done by educating people in the issues and then voting - in an election to choose leaders, or a referendum to actually choose one option from several. Competing power networks each form a political party and each offers only one leader or one option to the public, to simplify the issues to make decisions possible. After the decision, they typically do not fight it to the point of civil war, but wait for the next election.

In dictatorship this is done by asking one powerful person to make the decision and then agreeing to force everyone to follow it. Any who will not are exiled, imprisoned, or killed, even if the decision is not very important, since the refusal to follow is taken as a challenge to the power structure itself. There is only one power network and all others are forced to become part of it, or fight it. Civil war is much more common in a dictatorship than in a democracy.

In these examples, people who are higher up have more authority and power than people below them.


Anarchism
Anarchism is a political belief that is against the domination of one group or person over another, believing that people can organize themselves without needing state, government or other hierarchy in power, and emphasizing that such organizations can be easily used for evil. Anarchists also believe that participation should never be forced by other people.

Anarchism is "a cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary." The term "anarchism" derives from the Greek αναρχία, "without archons" which means "without rulers", not "without rule"; it is also occasionally translated as "without government". In the common language, the word anarchy is often used to describe chaos or anomie. However, anarchists usually do not promote this. Rather, they define "anarchy" as a way of relations between people. They believe that, once put into place, these relations work on their own.

Individual freedom, voluntary association, and opposition to the state are important beliefs of anarchism. There are also big differences between anarchist philosophies on things like whether violence can be used to bring anarchy; the best type of economy; the relationship between technology and hierarchy; the idea of equality; and the usefulness of some organization. Anarchists are not against authority (eg. the authority of someone skilled in self-defence over someone that wants to learn self-defence), they are only against unjust human domination.

There are many anarchists who reject capitalism and support socialism or communism (but in another sense, without a totalitarian state or power), they are called anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists. Also, there are some people called anarcho-capitalists who oppose domination, but support capitalism (but in another sense, neither corporatist government nor state capitalism), although many of them are okay with socialism between consenting participants, as long as they don't force them into the socialist system. Other anarchists say that they are not really anarchists, because anarchism is traditionally a socialist philosophy. Finally, there are "anarchists without adjectives" who hold that because people will be free in an anarchy to pursue voluntarily any economic structures they want (including communes, worker co-ops, and capitalist-owned firms). Anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists believe that people can voluntarily participate in socialist/communist systems without having to be forced to, unlike their authoritarian counter-parts that believe everyone should be forced into their system whether they like it or not.

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think
The great divide between our beliefs, our ideals, and reality
March 31, 2015 |By Nicholas Fitz

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According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard.
Credit: Allan Danahar via Thinkstock

In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, "Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets." The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become.

In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What percentage of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans? How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have?

The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution ...

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Did the Anthropocene Begin in 1950 or 50,000 Years Ago?
Scientists debate whether hunting, farming, smallpox or the nuclear bomb define the start of irreversible human impacts on our planet
April 2, 2015 |By David Biello

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Rice terraces in Yunnan show just how radically humans can change the surface of the planet.
Courtesy of Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org

There are no more woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos or giant ground sloths. Around 50,000 years ago the biggest land animals in the world began to disappear. The number-one suspect: Homo sapiens. Hunting combined with the burning of landscapes in places like Australia seem to be the main reason there are no more giant kangaroos, along with these other big animals.

The lethal pairing of hunting and burning is just one of the ways humans have been changing the world for millennia. Another is planting crops such as corn or wheat, which now cover most of the world's arable land. Chickens, cows and pigs have become the dominant megafauna, thanks to ranching and herding. Forests have been cleared to make room for agriculture and the mass expansion of the rice paddy may have led to enough greenhouse gas emissions to stave off a long cool-down into an ice age starting 5,000 years ago.

Each of these world-changing actions should be considered when ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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Thought-Controlled Genes Could Someday Help Us Heal
Scientists combined a brain–computer interface with an optogenetic switch to create the first-ever brain–gene interface
Feb 12, 2015 |By Simon Makin

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STUART BRIERS

People can control prosthetic limbs, computer programs and even remote-controlled helicopters with their mind, all by using brain-computer interfaces. What if we could harness this technology to control things happening inside our own body? A team of bioengineers in Switzerland has taken the first step toward this cyborglike setup by combining a brain-computer interface with a synthetic biological implant, allowing a genetic switch to be operated by brain activity. It is the world's first brain-gene interface.

The group started with a typical brain-computer interface, an electrode cap that can register subjects' brain activity and transmit signals to another electronic device. In this case, the device is an electromagnetic field generator; different types of brain activity cause the field to vary in strength. The next step, however, is totally new—the experimenters used the electromagnetic field to trigger protein production within human cells in an implant in mice.

The implant uses a cutting-edge technology known as optogenetics. The researchers inserted bacterial genes into human kidney cells, causing ...

Read ,ore on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thought-controlled-genes-could-someday-help-us-heal/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150408


What Should Lufthansa Have Done to Prevent the Germanwings Tragedy?
Someone with a prior history of depression but who has been effectively treated and is no longer symptomatic should not be prohibited from working
April 3, 2015 |By Jeffrey Lieberman, MD

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Did Lufthansa conduct adequate medical surveillance of its employees and particularly its pilots, including their psychiatric status?
Credit: Juergen Lehle/Wikipedia

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

Since the Germanwings plane crash, speculation has focused on the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, and what role mental illness might have played in this horrible tragedy. This question has been magnified by the emergence of information that he had a past history of psychiatric or psychological treatment for what was reported to be depression and suicidal ideation and that his doctors had recently recommended that he take medical leave from work for as yet undisclosed ailments—advice he apparently disregarded. His employer, Lufthansa, acknowledged that it had been aware that Lubitz had experienced a serious depressive episode prior to his completion of pilot training in 2009. It is also clear that his obscene behavior was premeditated and planned and was not an impulsive or spontaneous act.

This information has raised four key questions: What was the nature of Lubitz’s mental disturbance? What was its relevance to his murderous act? What should Lufthansa have done in light of their knowledge of his situation? And what were his doctors’ responsibilities?

First, it should be said that ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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Cryptocurrency Exchanges Emerge as Regulators Try to Keep Up
Trust issues plague bitcoin and other digital currencies. Licensed exchanges could change that
April 8, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier | Véalo en español

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The U.S. has approached cryptocurrency regulation cautiously, meanwhile 80 percent of all Bitcoin volume is exchanged into and out of Chinese yuan, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
Image courtesy of Zach Copley, via Flickr

Digital cryptocurrencies—including bitcoin and litecoin, along with dozens of others—have struggled to win mainstream acceptance in the U.S. Interest in this so-called “Internet money” is not going away, however, which is why regulators are developing rules that that they hope can avert a repeat of last year’s Mt. Gox meltdown, when the world’s largest bitcoin exchange unexpectedly shut down after losing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in a cyber attack.

The U.S. government has largely sat on the sidelines, leaving states to regulate digital cryptocurrency exchanges. The exchanges, with names such as BitPay and Coinbase, are Web sites for buying, selling and exchanging digital currency. Bitcoin and its ilk are referred to as cryptocurrencies for their use of cryptography to secure transactions and mint new virtual coins.

More than a dozen states and Puerto Rico already issue licenses for bitcoin exchanges, which represent the lion’s share of the world’s cryptocurrency transactions. California is working out the details of its own licensing guidelines while New York State’s Department of Financial Services plans to finalize its BitLicense regulatory framework in the coming weeks. Other countries are likewise ...

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Watch the First Artificial Gravity Experiment
By Caleb A. Scharf | April 6, 2015 |

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High above Baja California, the first artificial gravity experiment (Credit: NASA)

Gravity, as the old joke goes, sucks.

It drags us down, pulls on our weary limbs, makes our feet tired, makes parts of us droop. But it’s also a critical factor for our long term well-being. Astronauts and cosmonauts circling the Earth over the past 60 years have discovered that zero-g, or microgravity, is really not very good for you.

The human body has evolved in a piece of curved space-time where objects experience a close to uniform 9.81 meters per second per second acceleration. Blood and fluids are pressurized accordingly and arteries and veins are squeezed by muscles, so as not to all pool inconveniently in our feet. Eyeballs are tensioned so as to retain an optically proper shape. And our microbiome is adapted to an environment with a definite up and down – especially when it comes to digestion.

Put one of us in zero-g or microgravity, and things get tricky. Our cardiovascular system gets confused quickly, and so fluids accumulate in places they don’t usually – hence the puffy faced appearance that spacefarers can get. Eyes have to accommodate to unfamiliar forces. And to further confound things ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2015/04/06/watch-the-first-artificial-gravity-experiment/

[Duke of Buckingham]

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The Brontosaurus Is Back
Decades after scientists decided that the famed dinosaur never actually existed, new research says the opposite
April 7, 2015 |By Charles Choi | Véalo en español

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How researchers see Brontosaurus today—with a Diplodocus-like head.
Credit: Davide Bonadonna/Creative Commons

Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed.

The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1903, however, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that Brontosaurus was apparently the same as the genus Apatosaurus, which Marsh had first described in 1877. In such cases the rules of scientific nomenclature state that the oldest name has priority, dooming Brontosaurus to another extinction.

Now a new study suggests resurrecting Brontosaurus. It turns out the original Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brontosaurus-is-back1/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20150413


Farmers Urge Return of Jaguars to Protect Crops
The big cats could return to do the job they once did in Brazil's grassland—hunt a growing population of wild pig relatives, called peccaries, that decimates crop yields
April 9, 2015 |By Brendan Borrell and Mongabay.org

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Read the article on Mongabay.com
Leandro Silveira, president of the Jaguar Conservation Fund, is in discussions with farmers and with Odebrecht—a Brazilian petroleum, engineering and agriculture conglomerate that owns much of the cropland—to embrace a “jaguar-friendly” certification scheme.
Credit: paulisson miura/Flickr

Margie Peixoto was driving her pickup across her farm in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul one February afternoon when she spotted some broken corn stalks and a trio of white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) ambling along the red-clay road as if they owned it. The moment these wild pig relatives spotted the truck, they snorted, snarled and disappeared into the head-high crop, where dozens more likely hid.

“Every year the group gets bigger and bigger, and every year the damage to the crop is greater,” said Peixoto, a fit middle-aged woman from Zimbabwe, who met her Brazilian husband while traveling in Africa, and immigrated here to farm more than 30 years ago.

Peixoto estimates that wild peccaries destroyed as much as 10 percent of her crop last year, amounting to losses of 250,000 Brazilian reals ($100,000). One peccary attacked and killed the family dog.

She is not alone in her concern. Marcos Da Silva Cunha, the director of the nearby Emas National Park, said ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/farmers-urge-return-of-jaguars-to-protect-crops/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20150413

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Why Is Cell Phone Call Quality So Terrible?
Blame your service provider—and mobile video
April 9, 2015 |By Elena Malykhina

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Emerging technologies that enhance voice and stifle background noise are on the way, but the rush to cash in on mobile video has slowed progress.
Image Source/TODD WARNOCK

In the age of social media, texting, mobile e-commerce and video streaming it’s easy to overlook an experience hasn’t gotten better for smartphone users: talking on the phone.

Despite sophisticated smartphones and networks, many mobile users are not satisfied with call clarity. None of the 100-plus smartphones in Consumer Reports’ 2014 phone ratings earned better than a good score for voice quality. A large number of smartphones rated only as “fair.”

In larger part that is because device makers often shrink, flatten and cover speakers in plastic to improve their phones’ overall functionality. Even on a high-end smartphone that uses several microphones and noise-cancellation algorithms, a caller is not guaranteed clear sound, especially in noisy environments.

Change is happening slowly but there are promising new technologies are ...

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The Billion-Dollar Race to Reinvent the Computer Chip
With the end of Moore's law in sight, chip manufacturers are spending billions to develop novel computing technologies
By John Pavlus

In a tiny, windowless conference room at the R&D headquarters of Intel, the world's dominant microprocessor and semiconductor manufacturer, Mark Bohr, the company's director of process architecture and integration, is coolly explaining how Moore's law, as it is commonly understood, is dead—and has been for some time. This might seem surprising ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-billion-dollar-race-to-reinvent-the-computer-chip/?WT.mc_id=SA_TECH_20150414

[Mumps]

The Billion-Dollar Race to Reinvent the Computer Chip
With the end of Moore's law in sight, chip manufacturers are spending billions to develop novel computing technologies
By John Pavlus

In a tiny, windowless conference room at the R&D headquarters of Intel, the world's dominant microprocessor and semiconductor manufacturer, Mark Bohr, the company's director of process architecture and integration, is coolly explaining how Moore's law, as it is commonly understood, is dead—and has been for some time. This might seem surprising ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-billion-dollar-race-to-reinvent-the-computer-chip/?WT.mc_id=SA_TECH_20150414

*Sigh* :(


THIS IS A PREVIEW. Buy this digital issue, or subscribe to access the full article.

[Duke of Buckingham]

*Sigh*:(


Originally Posted by Scientific American
THIS IS A PREVIEW. Buy this digital issue, or subscribe to access the full article.


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]

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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

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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/article/is-the-gaze-from-those-big-puppy-eyes-the-look-of-your-doggie-s-love/?WT.mc_id=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

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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/article/spacex-faces-the-hard-truth-about-soft-landings-they-re-tough-to-do/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150417

[Duke of Buckingham]

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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/article/have-we-passed-the-point-of-no-return-on-climate-change/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150420

[Duke of Buckingham]

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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

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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/article/battery-free-video-cam-grabs-pix-and-power-from-same-light-video/?WT.mc_id=SA_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

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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 ...

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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

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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

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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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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

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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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Nuclear Power Seems Doomed to Dwindle in the U.S.
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

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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.
[I](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

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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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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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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Has Maternal Mortality Really Doubled in the U.S.?
Statistics have suggested a sharp increase in the number of American women dying as a complication of pregnancy since the late 1980s, but a closer look at the data hints that all is not as it seems
By Dina Fine Maron | June 8, 2015

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Answers about the increases in U.S. maternal mortality are hard to pin down.
Getty Images/Thinkstock

There is no charity walk to raise awareness about the 700 to 800 women that die each year during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth in the U.S. There are no dedicated colored-plastic wristbands. But statistics in recent years have revealed a worrisome trend: the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past few decades. Whereas 7.2 women died per 100,000 births in 1987, that number swelled to 17.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2009 and 2011. The uptick occurred even as maternal mortality dropped in less-developed settings around the world. Now women giving birth in the U.S. are at a higher risk of dying than those giving birth in China or Saudi Arabia. The reason for this disturbing trend has eluded researchers, however.

So what exactly is it about being in a family way that is getting worse in America? According to some experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ...

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Supercharged Large Hadron Collider Tackles Universe's Big Questions
Check out this graphical guide to the science ahead at the LHC in Europe
By Elizabeth Gibney and Nature magazine | June 4, 2015

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Credit: CERN

Ramped up in power after a two-year upgrade, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator is once again doing science. Following its official restart on June 3, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, can smash protons together faster and with higher energies than during its first run, which ended in February 2013. Our graphical guide illuminates the discoveries that could lie ahead in the next run of the LHC.

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The first run began in earnest in November 2009. The LHC collided particles—mainly protons, but also heavier particles such as lead ions—at high enough energies to confirm the existence of ...

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Too Much Praise Promotes Narcissism
The first longitudinal study in children supports the theory that parents with unrealistically positive views of their kids foster narcissistic qualities
By Andrea Alfano | May 19, 2015

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Thomas Fuchs

Sometimes it's cute when kids act self-centered. Yet parenting styles can make the difference between a confident child and a narcissistic nightmare, psychologists at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University in the Netherlands concluded from the first longitudinal study on the origins of intense feelings of superiority in children.

Two prominent but nearly opposing schools of thought address how narcissism develops. The first attributes extreme self-love to a lack of affection from parents; the other implicates moms and dads who place their children on a pedestal by lavishing them with praise. Over the course of 18 months, 565 kids aged seven through 11 took multiple surveys designed to measure self-esteem, narcissism and their parents' warmth, answering questions about how much they identify with statements such as “kids like me deserve something extra.” The parents filled out reciprocal surveys about their approach to child rearing.

In a March issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the Dutch researchers report that ...

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Beautiful Minds
How Is Creativity Differentially Related to Schizophrenia and Autism?
By Scott Barry Kaufman | June 10, 2015

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"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." -- Salvador Dali

For some reason, the general public is fascinated by the link between madness and genius. A new paper, which has been garnering a lot of media attention, has stoked the flames once again on this age-old debate.

The paper shows a link between artistic engagement and the genes underlying schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. To be sure, the effects are really small (the genes explain less than 1% of the variation in choosing an artistic profession), and the results do not mean that if one has a mental illness they are destined for creativity (or that creative people are destined for mental illness). Nevertheless, the results are consistent with other solid studies showing there is a real and meaningful link between the schizophrenia spectrum and artistic creativity (see here, here, here, and here). Indeed, the supplemental data shows that the strongest relationships are between the genes underlying schizophrenia and engagement with music, the visual arts, and writing.

So there's something here worth exploring. But what exactly is going on?

This past year, I conducted a relevant study with a stellar ...

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How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin's Environmental Legacy
As governor of Wisconsin, the likely Republican presidential nomination-seeker consistently dismissed science and sided with polluters
By Siri Carpenter | June 17, 2015

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Scott Walker speaking at CPAC 2015 in Washington, DC.
Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

When Wisconsin’s new state treasurer Matt Adamczyk took office in January, his first act was to order a highly symbolic change in stationery. Adamczyk, a Republican and one of three members of the board that oversees a small public lands agency, “felt passionately” that Tia Nelson, the agency’s executive secretary, should be struck from the letterhead. As soon became clear, his principal objection to Nelson, daughter of former Wisconsin governor and environmentalist-hero Gaylord Nelson, was that in 2007–08 she had co-chaired a state task force on climate change at the then-governor’s request. Adamczyk insisted that climate change is not germane to the agency’s task of managing timber assets, and that Nelson’s activities thus constituted “time theft.” When he couldn’t convince the two other members of the agency’s board to remove Nelson from the letterhead, he tried to get her fired. When that motion failed, he moved to silence her. In April the board voted 2–1 to ban agency staff from working on or discussing climate change while on the clock. The climate censorship at the public lands agency made national headlines.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has kept his distance from Adamczyk. It is easy to see why: Walker is widely expected to ...

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Pope Francis Backs Science, Warns of Climate Risk
The pope’s encyclical Laudato Si warns of global warming's human causes and grave implications
By Scott Detrow and ClimateWire | June 18, 2015

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Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han)/Wikimedia Commons

In a historic document addressed to “every person living on this planet,” Pope Francis warns that climate change and other forms of environmental degradation have reached a crisis point.

Francis frames “Laudato Si’,” the first papal encyclical devoted solely to ecological issues, as an “urgent appeal ... for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet.” Encyclicals are among the highest forms of Catholic teaching a pontiff can publish.

“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” Francis writes, pinning the majority of the blame for rising temperatures on man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades,” Francis writes, arguing that the global poor are more likely to live in environmentally vulnerable areas, depend on natural resources for their incomes and lack the resources to “adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited.”

“There is an urgent need to ...

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Navajo Generating Station Powers and Paralyzes the Western U.S.
The latest in ProPublica’s “Killing the Colorado” series looks inside the power plant fueling America’s drought
By Abrahm Lustgarten and ProPublica | June 16, 2015

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Navajo Generating Station about 4 miles east of Page, Arizona; viewed northwest from SR 98.
Wolfgang Moroder/Wikipedia

A couple of miles outside the town of Page, three 775-foot-tall caramel-colored smokestacks tower like sentries on the edge of northern Arizona’s sprawling red sandstone wilderness. At their base, the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest power-generating facility, thrums ceaselessly, like a beating heart.

Football-field-length conveyors constantly feed it piles of coal, hauled 78 miles by train from where huge shovels and mining equipment scraped it out of the ground shortly before. Then, like a medieval mortar and pestle machine, wheels crush the stone against a large bowl into a smooth powder that is sprayed into tremendous furnaces — some of the largest ever built. Those furnaces are stoked to 2,000 degrees, heating tubes of steam to produce enough pressure to drive an 80-ton rod of steel to spin faster than the speed of sound, converting the heat of the fires into electricity.

The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water—lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles—has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand.

This achievement in moving water, however, is gained at an enormous cost. Every hour the Navajo’s generators spin ...

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Meteorite Thefts Pose a Problem in Ancient Impact Field
The largest meteorite in the Americas, along with some 30 related craters, is located on farmland in Argentina, but the specimens are being illegally taken
By Lucas Viano | June 19, 2015

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Caption: Alejandro López with El Chaco, the second-largest meteorite in the world.
Photo courtesy of Alejandro López

Argentina’s Chaco Province, a vast plain once covered by dense forest, is today home to farmland. The flat terrain, however, is not a typical agrarian landscape but rather is studded with enormous metallic meteorites and craters created by pieces of the same source rock. The region is referred to as Campo del Cielo (Field of Heaven or Field of the Sky), unique in the world for its trove of well-preserved objects from space.

Campo del Cielo features 1,350 square kilometers of meteorite impacts formed 4,000 years ago when a huge metallic fireball struck Earth at almost a right angle, as if trying to make a graceful landing, at a speed of 14,000 kilometers per hour. The result was a shower of meteorites ranging in size from small stones weighting only a few grams to El Chaco, a behemoth weighing in at 37 tons and the second-largest intact meteorite in the world. Its size is second only to Hoba, a 66-ton rock that fell in Namibia no earlier than 80,000 years ago.

NASA scientists have investigated the site on two occasions. Now local researchers are raising concerns about weak protection for the region’s space rock heritage.

Chaco Province passed a law in 1990 to declare ...

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Your Facial Bone Structure Has a Big Influence on How People See You
New research shows that although we perceive character traits like trustworthiness based on a person’s facial expressions, our perceptions of abilities like strength are influenced by facial structure
By Jessica Schmerler | June 18, 2015

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We can alter our facial features in ways that make us look more trustworthy, but don't have the same ability to appear more competent. A face resembling a happy expression, with upturned eyebrows and upward curving mouth, is likely to be seen as trustworthy while one resembling an angry expression, with downturned eyebrows, is likely to be seen as untrustworthy. However, competence judgments are based on facial structure, a trait that cannot be altered, with wider faces seen as more competent.
Image courtesy of Jonathan Freeman and Eric Hehman

Selfies, headshots, mug shots — photos of oneself convey more these days than snapshots ever did back in the Kodak era. Most digitally minded people continually post and update pictures of themselves at professional, social media and dating sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Match.com and Tinder. For better or worse, viewers then tend to make snap judgments about someone’s personality or character from a single shot. As such, it can be a stressful task to select the photo that conveys the best impression of ourselves. For those of us seeking to appear friendly and trustworthy to others, a new study underscores an old, chipper piece of advice: Put on a happy face.

A newly published series of experiments by cognitive neuroscientists at New York University is reinforcing the relevance of facial expressions to perceptions of characteristics such as trustworthiness and friendliness. More importantly, the research also revealed the unexpected finding that perceptions of abilities such as physical strength are not dependent on facial expressions but rather on facial bone structure.

The team’s first experiment featured photographs of 10 different people presenting five different facial expressions each. Study subjects rated how friendly, trustworthy or strong the person in each photo appeared. A separate group of subjects scored each face on an emotional scale from “very angry” to “very happy.” And three experts not involved in either of the previous two ratings to avoid confounding results calculated ...

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Social Media Cyber Bullying Linked to Teen Depression
Victims tend to suffer in silence, making it difficult for parents to identify and address the problem
By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience | June 23, 2015

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LLoyd Morgan/Flickr

Cyberbullying on social media is linked to depression in teenagers, according to new research that analyzed multiple studies of the online phenomenon.

Victimization of young people online has received an increasing level of scrutiny, particularly after a series of high-profile suicides of teenagers who were reportedly bullied on various social networks. In 2013, for example, a spate of suicides was linked to the social network Ask.fm, where users can ask each other questions anonymously. The deaths of teens who had been subject to abuse on the site prompted Ask.fm (which was acquired by Ask.com in 2014) to launch new safety efforts. Twitter, likewise, announced plans in April to filter out abusive tweets and suspend bullying users.

Social media use is hugely common among teenagers, said Michele Hamm, a researcher in pediatrics at the University of Alberta, but ...

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Does a Multiverse Fermi Paradox Disprove the Multiverse?
By Caleb A. Scharf | June 23, 2015

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Having just orbited our way through another summer solstice, it feels like time to let slip some more speculative ideas before the hot days of the northern hemisphere shorten too much again and rational thinking returns.

So, grasping a fruity alcoholic beverage in one hand, consider the following thought experiment.

The so-called ‘Fermi Paradox’ has become familiar fodder for speculations on the nature of life in the universe, so I’m not going to repeat it in any great detail here. Instead, take a look at this nice description by Adam Frank, and remember that the basic premise is: if life in the universe is not incredibly rare, it should have already shown up on our proverbial doorstep. The fact that is hasn’t is therefore interesting.

But the universe is such a paltry thing. Hordes of physicists are telling us ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/does-a-multiverse-fermi-paradox-disprove-the-multiverse/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20150625


Cosmic Turbulence May Spawn Monster Magnetic Fields
Galactic collisions replicated in the lab help researchers investigate the origins of vastly amplified magnetic fields in the universe
By Maria Temming | June 23, 2015

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Laboratory astrophysicist Jena Meinecke with experimental setup
Stephen Kill, STFC

Our universe is highly magnetized, but no one knows exactly why. The current theory is that cosmic turbulence amplified tiny “seed” magnetic fields to create the powerful ones that govern galaxies today. Astrophysicists are still working to fully understand this process but a recent lab experiment mimicking galactic collisions might bring scientists one step closer to figuring out the mysterious origins of cosmic magnetism.

The matter in our universe forms a web of densely populated galaxy clusters and connecting filaments separated by vast voids, interrupted only by the occasional stray galaxy. When astronomers first started to observe magnetic fields in space, they noticed something peculiar: The universe is magnetized. Scientists had expected to find magnetism in active regions, where plasma currents such as those inside stars might spawn magnetic fields. But apparently even the most vacant cosmic stretches, where scientists expected very little to be happening, are threaded with magnetism. Cosmic magnetic fields are key players in governing the motion and evolution of stars and galaxies, so scientists are keen on understanding how they were born and how they became so strong.

Astrophysicists suspect that intergalactic magnetism originated as ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-turbulence-may-spawn-monster-magnetic-fields/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20150625

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What Is the Big Secret Surrounding Stingray Surveillance?
State and local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are setting up fake cell towers to gather mobile data, but few will admit it
By Larry Greenemeier | June 25, 2015

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Stung: Law enforcement agencies sometimes use a device called a stingray to simulate a cell phone tower, enabling them to gather international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), location and other data from mobile phones connecting to them. Pictured here is an actual cell tower in Palatine, Ill.
Courtesy of Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Given the amount of mobile phone traffic that cell phone towers transmit, it is no wonder law enforcement agencies target these devices as a rich source of data to aid their investigations. Standard procedure involves getting a court order to obtain phone records from a wireless carrier. When authorities cannot or do not want to go that route, they can set up a simulated cell phone tower—often called a stingray—that surreptitiously gathers information from the suspects in question as well as any other mobile device in the area.

These simulated cell sites—which collect international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), location and other data from mobile phones connecting to them—have become a source of controversy for a number of reasons. National and local law enforcement agencies closely guard details about the technology’s use, with much of what is known about stingrays revealed through court documents and other paperwork made public via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

One such document recently revealed that the Baltimore Police Department has used a cell site simulator ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-big-secret-surrounding-stingray-surveillance/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150629


The Problem with Female Superheroes
From helpless damsel to powerful heroine, but still hypersexualized
By Cindi May | June 23, 2015

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A woman dressed as Wonder-Woman at Comic-Con in San Diego.
Credit: The Conmunity via Wikimedia Commons

What do you want to be when you grow up? When pondering this question, most kids have given at least passing consideration to one fantastical if improbable calling: superhero. There is an understandable allure to the superhero position — wearing a special uniform (possibly with powerful accessories), saving the world from evil, and let's not forget possessing a wickedly cool special power like x-ray vision or the ability to fly.

But new research by Hillary Pennell and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz at the University of Missouri suggests that, at least for women, the influence of superheroes is not always positive. Although women play a variety of roles in the superhero genre, including helpless maiden and powerful heroine, the female characters all tend to be hypersexualized, from their perfect, voluptuous figures to their sexy, revealing attire. Exposure to this, they show, can impact beliefs about gender roles, body esteem, and self-objectification.

Consider, for example, superhero movies like Spider-man or Superman. These action-packed films typically feature a strong, capable, intelligent man fighting a villainous force. The goal of course is to save humanity, but ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-female-superheroes/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20150629

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The Anesthesia Dilemma
Researchers are trying to determine if chemicals used to knock out young children during surgery can have long-term repercussions on memory and development
By Dina Fine Maron | June 30, 2015

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PhotoDisc/Getty Images

The game is a contemporary of the original Nintendo but it still appeals to today’s teens and lab monkeys alike—which is a boon for neuroscientists. It offers no lifelike graphics. Nor does it boast a screen. Primate players—whether human or not—are simply required to pull levers and replicate patterns of flashing lights. Monkeys get a banana-flavored treat as a reward for good performance whereas kids get nickels.

But the game's creators are not really in it for fun. It was created by toxicologists at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the 1980s to study how chronic exposure to marijuana smoke affects the brain. Players with trouble responding quickly and correctly to the game’s commands may have problems with ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-anesthesia-dilemma/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150630


Supreme Court Protects Health Care Tax Subsidies for Millions of Americans
In a 6–3 decision the high court ruled in favor of the Obama administration and the status quo
By Dina Fine Maron | June 25, 2015

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Credit: Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that a key provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka “Obamacare,” is legal, thereby allowing millions of Americans to keep the tax credit subsidies that help them afford health insurance coverage.

The Court’s 6–3 decision will enable individuals living in states with online health insurance marketplaces run either by their state or the federal government to be eligible for tax subsidies that help slash the cost of health insurance. Challengers to the health care law had maintained in their case against the federal government that only the states that had set up their own state-run insurance marketplaces were allowed to secure the subsidies under the language of the law. The subsidies had been available since January 2014 to help individuals buy insurance.

In the Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices wrote that ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-court-protects-health-care-tax-subsidies-for-millions-of-americans/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150630

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Wearable health trackers have quickly moved into the mainstream. What if you could monitor your alcohol intake as easily as you track your physical activity?

This is the $300,000 challenge issued by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health, to help design a better alcohol biosensor, one that improves on current technology by providing real-time monitoring in an inconspicuous device.

Current wearable alcohol monitors are bulky and give readings only every 30 minutes. A personal device that measures blood alcohol levels in real time would be invaluable not just to individuals looking to track their drinking habits but also to scientists who study alcohol use.

The winner of this contest will design a discreet, wearable working prototype that provides blood alcohol monitoring in real time. It could be a wristband, jewelry, or item of clothing. Creative approaches are encouraged. The device must be able to measure blood alcohol level, interpret the data, and store or transmit it wirelessly to a smartphone or other device.

Submissions are due by December 1, 2015. Winners will be announced in February 2016. The best design will receive $200,000. Second prize is $100,000.

Up to the challenge? See the Federal Register ( https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/03/02/2015-04254/announcement-of-requirements-and-registration-for-a-wearable-alcohol-biosensor-challenge ) announcement for details, or email NIAAAChallengePrize@NIH.gov.

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Super-Muscular Pigs Created by Small Genetic Tweak
Researchers hope the genetically engineered animals will be approved for human consumption
By David Cyranoski and Nature magazine | July 1, 2015

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These meaty pigs could become the first genetically engineered animals to be approved for human consumption.
Xi-jun Yin

Belgian Blue cattle are hulking animals that provide unusually large amounts of prized, lean cuts of beef, the result of decades of selective breeding. Now, a team of scientists from South Korea and China says that it has created the porcine equivalent using a much faster method.

These ‘double-muscled’ pigs are made by disrupting, or editing, a single gene—a change that is much less dramatic than those made in conventional genetic modification, in which genes from one species are transplanted into another. As a result, their creators hope that regulators will take a lenient stance towards the pigs—and that the breed could be among the first genetically engineered animals to be approved for human consumption.

Jin-Soo Kim, a molecular biologist at Seoul National University who is leading the work, argues that his gene ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/super-muscular-pigs-created-by-small-genetic-tweak/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150703


As Earth's Spin Slows, Clocks Get Another Leap Second
The history of the leap second reveals a curious pattern of decreasing frequency since its adoption 43 years ago
By Amanda Montañez | June 30, 2015

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Beth Scupham/Flickr

Due to a complex interplay of Earth’s and the moon’s gravitational fields, our planet’s rotation has gradually slowed over the millennia. It hasn’t been the designated length of one solar day—the time it takes Earth to make a full rotation, or slightly more than 86,400 seconds—since about 1820.

As a result, our global standard of time, known as Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, occasionally becomes misaligned with UT1—the marker used to measure the actual length of one mean solar day. UT1 is determined ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-earth-s-spin-slows-clocks-get-another-leap-second/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150703

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Developing Brains Fold Like Crumpled Paper to Get Their Convolutions
A single mathematical function explains how both a sheet of paper and a developing brain folds
By Sabrina Imbler | July 7, 2015

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The growing mammalian brain folds just like any sheet of office paper, governed by a single mathematical function.
Suzana & Luiza Herculano-Houzel

A brain and a crisp sheet of office paper may seem to have little in common. But if someone crumples the paper into a ball, they’re holding the solution to one of the most longstanding mysteries of brain development, according to a study published July 2 in Science. As it turns out, the growing mammalian brain folds just like any sheet of office paper, governed by a single mathematical function.

The “brilliant study” represents a significant advance in scientists’ understanding of how the brain develops, says neurologist Arnold Kriegstein of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not part of the study. The research also casts light on the mechanisms behind certain structural disorders of the brain and could inform future efforts to ease those ailments.

Cryptic cortices
The human brain cortex—its outer layer—is an intricately furrowed landscape with ridges called gyri and valleys called sulci. There is a clear advantage to such cortical folding. Having a thinner, folded cortex means ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/developing-brains-fold-like-crumpled-paper-to-get-their-convolutions1/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150708


The Problem of Artificial Willpower
The ethical threat posed by Adderall and other drugs that improve motivation
By Hazem Zohny | July 7, 2015

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What do we risk by using substances that enhance our enjoyment and interest in certain pursuits – say, a university major or career – which we would otherwise find meaningless and alienating?
Credit: FtWashGuy via Wikimedia Commons

For the avid coffee drinker bound to a monotonous desk job, there is a moment – perhaps two thirds of the way through a cup – when the unbearably tedious task at hand starts to look doable. Interesting, even. Suddenly, data entry is not something that merely pays the rent, it’s something you’re into. A caffeine-triggered surge of adrenaline and dopamine works to enhance your motivation, and the meaninglessness of it all fades as you are absorbed into your computer screen.

At least until the effect wears off. Then it’s time for another caffeine hit. Except, several thousand of those hits later, you find yourself middle-aged and struggling with a sense that you haven’t quite spent your life as you would have liked.

Unlikely as this may sound, it illustrates a reasonable possibility: drugs like caffeine can positively alter ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-of-artificial-willpower/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150708

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Discovery: Fish Live beneath Antarctica
Scientists find translucent fish in a wedge of water hidden under 740 meters of ice, 850 kilometers from sunlight
By Douglas Fox | January 21, 2015 |

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Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Projectl

Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life.

A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean. The remote water they tapped sits beneath the back corner of the floating shelf, where the shelf meets what would be the shore of Antarctica if all that ice were removed. The spot sits 850 kilometers from the outer edge of the ice shelf, the nearest place where the ocean is in contact with sunlight that allows tiny plankton to grow and sustain a food chain.

“I’m surprised,” says Ross Powell, a 63-year old glacial geologist from Northern Illinois University who co-led the expedition with two other scientists. Powell spoke with ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-fish-live-beneath-antarctica/?WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20150709


Greenland Experiences Sudden Onset of Melt Season
Two maps show Greenland's sudden, rapid meltdown
By Brian Kahn and Climate Central | July 7, 2015

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Temperatures in the upper 30s and low 40s are still doing a number on Greenland’s ice sheet.
Doc Searls/Flickr

It appears that Greenland’s melt season is making up for lost time.

After a cool spring kept Greenland’s massive ice sheet mostly solid, a (comparatively) warm late June and early July have turned half the ice sheet’s surface into liquid, well outside the range of normal for this time of year.

Despite the ice sheet’s remote location, its slushy fingers reach across the globe, influencing sea levels and how fast the Gulf Stream current moves. As temperatures rise, its influence could grow larger as major summer melt events become regular occurrence. Recent warming has already contributed to ice loss in some areas previously thought to be stable and sped the trip of some glaciers into the sea.

Persistent high pressure has been ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greenland-experiences-sudden-onset-of-melt-season/?WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20150709

[Duke of Buckingham]

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Super-Magnetic Stars Forged in High-Energy Blasts
Scientists find that the biggest, brightest bursts of light herald the creation of the universe’s most magnetic objects
By Maria Temming | July 10, 2015

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Artist's impression of a magnetar
NASA

Magnetars certainly know how to make an entrance. A recent study suggests that these highly magnetized stars make their cosmic debut amid the brightest flares of radiation in the universe, called ultralong-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). This discovery ties together some of the most magnetic and energetic phenomena in the cosmos and sheds light on the mysterious origins of ultralong-duration GRBs.

GRBs are blasts of gamma-ray radiation that typically fade after a few seconds, but on rare occasions can last up to a half hour. The majority of these events are “long-duration” GRBs. Whereas normal GRBs are likely formed by the merging of two neutron stars, scientists think that long GRBs are forged in the explosive deaths of massive stars called supernovae, says lead author Jochen Greiner, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

When a massive star explodes, part of its material is ejected into space whereas the rest collapses into a remnant neutron star or black hole. This violent death spawns two jets of ...

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Supreme Court Decision Aside, Lethal Injection Looks Increasingly Unsustainable
Pharma companies—and maybe, eventually, the Supreme Court—will ensure that it only becomes harder to execute people with drugs in America
By Dina Fine Maron | July 9, 2015

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PhotoDisc/Getty Images

Filling an order for a lethal drug cocktail has been getting harder for quite some time. Four years ago companies in the European Union stopped shipping pharmaceuticals to the U.S. when they would be used for executions, leading to a shortage of sodium thiopental, a once-common general anesthetic. Then there were issues getting pentobarbital—a backup drug that is also a staple in many animal euthanasia mixes.

The drug at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross, which the high court ruled on last month, was the sedative midazolam—a backup for the backup. The Court ruled that Oklahoma could continue using the drug but it left most big questions about capital punishment in the U.S. unanswered. No matter what the court said, however, it is only going to become harder to obtain drugs for use in executions, largely because the pharmaceutical companies that make them are increasingly refusing to sell them for that purpose.

By the time Glossip v. Gross reached the court there had already been several botched executions using the drug. In Ohio, where the execution drug replacement was not tested before ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-court-decision-aside-lethal-injection-looks-increasingly-unsustainable/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150710

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Why the FBI Wants "Special Access" to Your Smartphone
And why security experts warn that this is a terrible idea
By Larry Greenemeier | July 9, 2015

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Encryption Tug-of-War: FBI Director Comey took his concerns about the widespread use of encryption in consumer tech to Congress Wednesday, one day after some of the world’s top cybersecurity experts and computer scientists weighed in on the contentious issue.
Courtesy of Thinkstock.

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the federal government was increasingly concerned about the widespread use of data encryption in consumer technology, implying—although not explicitly demanding—that tech companies give law enforcement easier access to cryptographically scrambled customer data. Comey’s testimony came one day after some of the world’s top cybersecurity experts and computer scientists issued a report arguing that the government’s call for special access to encrypted information is technically unfeasible and unworkably vague. Law enforcement officials need to get specific about what they want, the report’s authors argued, instead of simply waving their hands and hoping for a technological unicorn that gives them on-demand access to personal information while also protecting user privacy and securing data.

And this is where the debate gets complicated. Here’s what each side wants and what might happen next:

What is FBI director Comey asking for?

Comey called for a “front-door” approach to customer data access in an October 2014 speech but he was unclear about how ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-fbi-wants-special-access-to-your-smartphone/?WT.mc_id=SA_TECH_20150714


At Pluto, the End of a Beginning
By Lee Billings | July 14, 2015

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Taken at 4pm Eastern time on July 13, this is the final, most detailed view of Pluto beamed home by New Horizons before its closest approach. The spacecraft was 766,000 kilometers from the surface.
NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

Early this morning, if all has gone well, the first golden age of interplanetary exploration will have come to a close. At 7:49 Eastern time, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was slated to reach its primary target, Pluto and its moons, concluding what some call the preliminary reconnaissance of the known solar system.

Though it was conceived in the late 1980s, New Horizons wasn’t launched until 2006, after long years of delays, redesigns, and even near-death cancellations. Its unlikely five-billion-kilometer voyage to Pluto has been the work of decades. And yet today, at the climax of its mission, the spacecraft was expected to traverse the expanse of Pluto in less than three minutes, whizzing 12,500 kilometers above the surface at nearly 50,000 kilometers per hour. From the start, the spacecraft was custom-built for speed. Carrying enough fuel to crash into orbit at Pluto would have made New Horizons too bulky, expensive, and slow to even launch in the first place, so instead it will flyby and continue outward, on an endless journey into interstellar night.

During its brief close encounter, New Horizons will be ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/at-pluto-the-end-of-a-beginning/?WT.mc_id=SA_TECH_20150714

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Zero Carbon or Bust
Scientists remind policy makers that CO2 pollution must end--and soon
By Larry Greenemeier | By David Biello | July 13, 2015

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NO CARBON: Scientists reminded policymakers that CO2 pollution must be eliminated this century to prevent dangerous climate change.
© INRA / C. Maitre.

On July 10 in Paris a gathering of nearly 2,000 scientists and academics reaffirmed what most climate scientists have been saying for decades: The cost of making cuts in greenhouse gas pollution rises with every day of delay and zero emissions must be the goal for this century. Such was the outcome of the Our Common Future under Climate Change conference held in Paris from July 7–10 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known by its acronym, UNESCO, and meant to advise the upcoming international negotiations to curb global warming in Paris this December.

The dangers include sea level rise of more than six meters at an unknown rate, more downpours, heat waves, wildfires and droughts as well as the loss of ice everywhere, among other challenges. To avoid global warming of as much as 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the scientists suggested ...

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70 Years Since the First A-Bomb, Humanity Still Lives in Its Afterglow
Iran’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons will not be the last challenge faced in a journey that began with the world’s first fission bomb test during World War II
By David Biello | July 16, 2015

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U.S. Department of Energy

The nuclear problem with Iran started 70 years ago in the desert of New Mexico. July 16, 1945, was a day with two dawns: the latter powered by hydrogen atoms fusing at a comfortable remove of 150 million kilometers. The earlier one entailed a blinding flash of white light fading away as the Trinity test of an atomic bomb exploded at 5:29 A.M. local time—“Up n' atom,” as the slogan for kids went from a little later in the new Atomic Age.

One dawn means a sky smeared with pink clouds drifting in a baby blue sky, accompanied by a chorus of birds singing in a wide flat valley carved by the Rio Grande and its tributaries. The other means a deafening roar that follows in the wake of a blinding flash and the world's first nuclear mushroom cloud.

The Trinity site within the White Sands Missile Range looks ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

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Important Link between the Brain and Immune System Found
The new line of communication prompts rethinking of neurologic disease
By Bret Stetka | July 21, 2015

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T-cells present in vessels separate from arteries and veins confirm that the brain does in fact have a lymphatic system linking it directly the peripheral immune system.
Credit: lixuyao via Thinkstock

When the ancient Egyptians prepared a mummy they would scoop out the brain through the nostrils and throw it away. While other organs were preserved and entombed, the brain was considered separately from the rest of the body, and unnecessary for life or afterlife. Eventually, of course, healers and scientists realized that the three pounds of entangled neurons beneath our crania serve some rather critical functions. Yet even now the brain is often viewed as somewhat divorced from the rest of the body; a neurobiological Oz crewing our bodies and minds from behind the scenes with unique biology and unique pathologies.

Perhaps the most commonly cited division between body and brain concerns the immune system. When exposed to foreign bacteria, viruses, tumors, and transplant tissue, the body stirs up a torrent of immune activity: white blood cells devour invading pathogens and burst compromised cells; antibodies tag outsiders for destruction. Except, that is, in the brain. Thought to be too vulnerable to host an onslaught of angry defensive cells, the brain was assumed to be protected from this immune cascade. However research published this month reported a previously unknown line of communication between our brains and immune systems, adding to a fast-growing body of research suggesting that the brain and body are more connected than previously thought. The new work could have important implications for understanding and treating disorders of the brain.

As early as 1921 scientists recognized that the brain is different, immunologically speaking. Outside tissue grafted into most parts of the body often results in immunologic attack; tissue grafted into the central nervous system on the other hand sparks a far less hostile response. Thanks in part to ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/important-link-between-the-brain-and-immune-system-found/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150722


Why Nobody Intervened in the July 4 Metro Murder
By R. Douglas Fields | July 17, 2015

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A Red Line train on the Washington D.C. underground at Metro Center in 2004.
Photo: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia Commons

On Saturday, July 4 a group of people traveling on a Red Line Metro train headed to Fourth of July festivities in Washington, D.C. watched as one young man brutally murdered another, but no one intervened. Widespread criticism of the “apathetic” response of onlookers, who reportedly did nothing to help the victim, erupted in the press and on social media. From the perspective of brain science, however, this scorn is misguided.

The attack occurred when a man boarded the train and snatched a cell phone from 24-year-old Kevin Joseph Sutherland. During the struggle the robber viciously beat, kicked and stabbed the life out of the young man, inflicting 30 to 40 knife wounds. Passengers fled to opposite ends of the car and watched Sutherland die. At the next stop the blood-spattered murderer walked casually off the train and escaped into the crowd. Police later arrested 18-year-old Jasper Spires in connection with the crime based on evidence recovered from the scene.

Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak contrasted the inertia of ...

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Fossil Fuels Must Be Phased Out to Avoid Drowned Coastlines
New research suggests rising oceans could swamp the world’s coasts by the end of the century—sooner than previously anticipated
By David Biello | July 20, 2015

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ICE FRONT: Ice shelves and glaciers in Antarctica could collapse if action is not taken quickly to restrain greenhouse gas emissions.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine

The world's ice is in trouble. Based on paleoclimate records, observations of the world today and computer models, a warming ocean is speeding the meltdown of massive ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. This new finding, by climatologist James Hansen of Columbia University and colleagues, suggests that sea levels could rise at least five meters—and possibly as much as nine meters—within 50 to 100 years, a rate both faster than and six times as deep as previous estimates. And such dramatically rising seas and stronger storms followed during past periods when the global annual average temperature was only roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer than today, the team found. An outcome of that magnitude could doom most of the megalopolises lining today's coastlines, the team says. And the extent of current efforts to combat climate change are nowhere near what will be required to prevent the submersion of thousands of kilometers of coastline.

Already, freshwater flooding into the oceans from ice sheet meltdowns in Antarctica and Greenland has slowed the circulation of seawater—the upwelling and downwelling that draws both heat and CO2 out of the atmosphere. The cold freshwater flooding into the oceans has ...

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How to Build a Better Ocean Sensor Far from the Sea
Montana–based Sunburst Sensors will help scientists monitor rise in ocean acidity more widely and precisely
By David Biello | July 21, 2015

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ACID TEST: The finalists of the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE are lowered on a rosette deep into the Pacific Ocean.
Courtesy of XPRIZE

Montana is about as far from the sea as it gets, and has been since at least 60 million years ago. And yet when it comes to measuring the acidity of ocean water, a group from Missoula has proved to be the best at building both a cheap and durable sensor, capable of accurately measuring changes in pH, or degree of acidity/alkalinity, while plumbing depths of 3,000 meters. That's how Sunburst Sensors came to win both of the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZEs, as announced at a gala on July 20.

"It's so much easier to fly by Pluto than to get data out of the oceans," says Wendy Schmidt, who funded the prizes to help develop technologies to solve real-world problems. "But one is our lungs, and one isn't. One gives us food and one doesn't."

Schmidt has previously funded an XPRIZE that developed ...

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Kepler Mission Discovers a Near-Twin of Earth Orbiting Sunlike Star
The planet, Kepler 452 b, is likely rocky and orbits in its star’s habitable zone where liquid water can exist
By Lee Billings | July 23, 2015

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An artist's rendition of Kepler 452b. The newfound planet is estimated to be 60 percent larger than Earth, and resides in a year-long orbit in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star some 1,400 light-years away.
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Since rocketing into space in 2009, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 4,500 confirmed or candidate worlds, in the process reshaping our entire view of the prospects for life in the universe. Thanks to Kepler, we can now conjecture that planets circle essentially every star in the sky, perhaps 10 percent of those might be habitable, and our solar system’s familiar architecture of small inner worlds and outer giants is rather rare in the cosmos.

And yet despite all these revolutionary results, Kepler’s most sought-after quarry—a mirror Earth around another sunlike star—has proved elusive. At least, that is, until now. At a NASA press conference today that also unveiled more than 500 other new candidate planets, Kepler’s mission scientists announced they have finally found and confirmed what looks to be the mission’s long-sought holy grail, a near-twin of Earth called Kepler 452 b. The discovery is detailed in a paper to be published in The Astronomical Journal. “Yes, this is the first small, possibly rocky planet in the habitable zone of a sunlike star,” says lead author Jon Jenkins, an astronomer and 20-year veteran of the Kepler mission at the NASA Ames Research Center. Kepler 452 b is estimated to be 1.6 times the size of our own world, and resides in a clement, life-friendly orbit around a star in the constellation of Cygnus some 1,400 light-years away that is eerily similar to our own sun.

The discovery marks the end of a long road. Before reaching the launch pad, Kepler endured decades of developmental woes as ...

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Can Police Use Data Science to Prevent Deadly Encounters?
As part of Obama's Police Data Initiative, researchers and police are studying "predictive analytics" to improve existing officer early warning systems
By Larry Greenemeier | July 22, 2015

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Law enforcement and academia are working together to find ways of improving early warning systems meant to flag bad police behavior before it becomes a problem. (Image for illustration purposes only.)
Courtesy of Thinkstock.

Several high-profile cases of law enforcement officers using deadly force against civilians within the past year have politicians, police and researchers looking for ways to prevent such incidents. This search includes a closer look at the computerized early warning systems that many large police departments have used for years to identify officers who are most likely to overreact violently during stressful situations. The main challenge: it is difficult to say with certainty how well or even if these systems actually work.

Early warning systems debuted in large police departments—those with more than 1,000 officers—decades ago as a way to identify those officers whose unprofessional behavior could cause problems in the communities they served. Departments programmed these systems to flag recurring complaints against officers and notify supervisors when certain thresholds were reached, such as a certain number of use-of-force complaints over a given period of time. Early systems’ predictive abilities were crude, primarily because they were capable of basing their analyses only on individual data sources—such as formal complaints—rather than combining information from various police databases that could provide context for an officer’s behavior. This might include the officer’s level of experience, whether the officer responded to an incident alone as well as the time and location of the event.

Pres. Barack Obama’s recently announced Police Data Initiative seeks to ...

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Poverty Disturbs Children's Brain Development and Academic Performance
Delayed brain development predicts lower tests scores in low-income children
By Diana Kwon | July 22, 2015

Income inequality is growing in the U.S., and the problem is much worse than most people believe. For children, growing up poor hinders brain development and leads to poorer performance in schools, according to a study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics.

It has long been known that low socioeconomic status is linked to poorer performance in school, and recent research has linked poverty to smaller brain surface area. The current study bridges these converging lines of evidence by revealing that up to 20 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income children may be explained by differences in brain development.

Using a sample of 389 healthy children and adolescents from age four to 22, psychologist Seth Pollak and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison compared scores on academic achievement tests with tissue volume in select areas of the brain. Researchers placed subjects in a magnetic resonance imaging machine to scan and measure gray matter volume in the temporal lobes, frontal lobes and hippocampus—brain areas that are critical to cognitive processes required for academic success and vulnerable to a person’s early environment. Some of the individuals came back for reassessment after 24 months and returned for follow-ups over a period of up to six years.

The researchers found that children who ...

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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
Milner, a tech start-up entrepreneur and philanthropist, is partnering with scientists around the world to search for life among the stars
By Lee Billings | July 20, 2015

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The Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and one of three telescopes Breakthrough Listen will use extensively in its groundbreaking search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Geremia

SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—has been one of the most captivating areas of science since its inception in 1960, when the astronomer Frank Drake used an 85-foot radio telescope in the first-ever attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions sent by beings outside our solar system. Yet despite its high public visibility and near-ubiquity in blockbuster Hollywood science fiction, throughout most of its 55-year history SETI has languished on the fringes of scientific research, garnering relatively scant funding and only small amounts of dedicated observation time on world-class telescopes.

Today, in a live webcast originating from London and set for 6:30 am Eastern, the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, along with the physicist Stephen Hawking, is announcing ...

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New Horizons Finds Nitrogen Glaciers and Hazy Air on Pluto
Astronomers astounded by the dwarf planet's active geology and atmosphere
By Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine | July 24, 2015 |

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Mountains, plains and glaciers are found in and around Pluto's heart, Tombaugh Regio.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Pluto has nitrogen glaciers flowing down from its distinctive, icy heart. And the dwarf planet's thin atmosphere may have begun to freeze out onto its surface—a change long expected, as Pluto moves farther away from the Sun, but never before seen.

Scientists with NASA's New Horizons mission unveiled the findings, and a raft of new images, at a press conference on July 24, just ten days after the spacecraft flew by Pluto.

A radio-science instrument aboard the New Horizons probe measured the surface pressure at Pluto for the first time, in what amounts to a measure of the mass of the atmosphere above it. What scientists found puzzled them.

“The mass of Pluto's atmosphere has decreased by a factor of ...

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Deadly SpaceShipTwo Crash Caused by Co-Pilot Error: NTSB
A pilot error was responsible for the crash that killed one person and seriously injured another last October
By Tariq Malik and SPACE.com | July 28, 2015

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Virgin Galactic/Mark Greenberg/Wikipedia

The fatal breakup and crash of Virgin Galactic's first SpaceShipTwo space plane last year was caused by a co-pilot error, as well as the failure of the spacecraft's builders to anticipate such a catastrophic mistake, federal safety investigators say.

SpaceShipTwo crashed in October when co-pilot Michael Alsbury unlocked the commercial space plane's re-entry "feathering" system too early during a test flight over California's Mojave Desert, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said in a hearing today (July 28).

The aerospace company Scaled Composites, which built the spacecraft, also "set the stage" for the accident through its "failure to consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle," NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said as he read the board's findings. [Video: SpaceShipTwo Co-Pilot Error Led to Crash, NTSB Says]

"It is our hope that ...

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How to Move a Forest of Genes
Sally Aitken of the University of British Columbia is using state-of-the art genomics and climate-mapping technologies to match trees to rapidly changing climates
By Josh Fischman | August 1, 2015

That trees need to match their habitats may sound obvious. But those habitats are changing as the planet warms—and trees can’t exactly get up and walk to a new home. If a species cannot keep pace with a changing climate, it is doomed. Because the trees themselves cannot relocate, scientists are exploring a novel solution: relocating the plants’ DNA.

Sally N. Aitken, director of the ’s Center for Forest Conservation Genetics at the University of British Columbia, believes that ...

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Little Creatures of the Deep [Slide Show]
A new robot successfully traps the larvae of exotic species living in the extremely deep ocean
By Mark Fischetti | July 29, 2015

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The larvae of some nectochaetes have more elaborate setae. In this case, the larva was rolling up into a ball with setae pointing outward, perhaps for protection from perceived predators.
Credit: Laurel Hiebert

At more than 2,150 meters deep in the ocean, the water pressure is a crushing 220 kilograms per square centimeter. Oceanographers who have tried to snag samples of life in these pitch-black, frigid and high-pressure places have had to suck in water at high speed and try to filter out organisms, often damaging them in the process. But a team led by Duke University, the University of Oregon and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week snatched up the intact larvae of 16 different animals.

The scientists used a new sampler, called SyPRID, which was carried to great depths by an autonomous underwater vehicle named Sentry. For more than eight hours engineers steered the robot in a precise and slow pattern. The maneuvering itself marked an achievement by barely disturbing the water in front of the craft—a common complication that pushes the tiny larvae out of a vehicle’s path before an instrument can pull them in. The long, cylindrical sampler processed large volumes of water every hour, yet did it slowly enough to not harm the fragile creatures, which are only a few hundred microns across. The final trick, according to an e-mail from Carl Kaiser, the vehicle program manager at Woods Hole, “is getting most of the larvae down to a relatively still area where they are further protected from the moving water.”

Scientists are eager to have ...

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Simple Cooking Method Flushes Arsenic out of Rice
Preparing rice in a coffee machine can halve levels of the naturally occurring but toxic substance
By Emily Sohn and Nature magazine | July 27, 2015

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Cooking rice by repeatedly flushing it through with fresh hot water can remove much of the grain’s stored arsenic, researchers have found—a tip that could lessen levels of the toxic substance in one of the world’s most popular foods.

Billions of people eat rice daily, but it contributes more arsenic to the human diet than any other food. Conventionally grown in flooded paddies, rice takes up more arsenic (which occurs naturally in water and soil as part of an inorganic compound) than do other grains. High levels of arsenic in food have been linked to different types of cancer, and other health problems.

Andrew Meharg, a plant and soil scientist at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, wondered whether cooking the grain ...

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Young Scientist Makes Jet Engines Leaner and Cleaner with Plasma
By Melissa C. Lott | July 31, 2015

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Photo Credit: FGC Plasma Solutions

When Felipe Gomez was in high school, he became interested in how you could improve the safety and efficiency of jet engines. He began studying the phenomena of plasma-assisted fuel injection and exploring how the process worked in his garage. Gomez built his first prototype system using a Bunsen burner from school and propane from his family’s gas grill.

Four years later, Gomez is double-majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering and is the sole inventor behind two patented plug-and-play, plasma-assisted fuel injection systems. Though technically a junior at Case Western Reserve Univeristy, Gomez is already taking graduate classes and conducting research – all while clocking 20 hours in the pool each week as a NCAA swimmer.

His company, FGC Plasma Solutions LLC, now owns both of Gomez’s patents and has gained national attention by winning ...

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The 70th Anniversary of the Summer of The Bomb
After seven decades should we be optimistic or pessimistic?
By Michael Shermer | August 6, 2015

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July 16. August 6. August 9. September 2. The 70th anniversary of the summer of The Bomb is upon us, marking the dates of the first test detonation of “The Gadget” in the New Mexico desert, the dropping of the Little Boy bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima the explosion of the Fat Man bomb over Nagasaki, and the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

The results were unlike anything witnessed in human history. The Trinity plutonium bomb was detonated July 16 atop a 30-meter-high steel tower with an energy equivalence of about 20 kilotons (18,100 metric tons) of TNT that lofted a mushroom cloud 12 kilometers into the atmosphere (about the height that modern commercial jets fly), left a crater 76 meters wide filled with radioactive glass called trinitite (melted quartz grained sand), and could be heard as far away as El Paso, Texas. The Little Boy gun-type uranium 235 bomb detonated August 6 at an altitude of about 530 meters with an energy equivalence of around ...

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Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction
We need an international agreement to prevent the development of autonomous weapons before they threaten global security
By Peter Asaro | August 7, 2015

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Vladislav Ociacia/Thinkstock

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

Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those who know the most about ...

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War in Space May Be Closer Than Ever
China, Russia and the U.S. are developing and testing controversial new capabilities to wage war in space despite their denial of such work
By Lee Billings | August 10, 2015

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Anti-satellite missile tests, like this one conducted by the U.S. Navy in February 2008, are part of a worrisome march toward military conflict in outer space.
U.S. Navy

The world’s most worrisome military flashpoint is arguably not in the Strait of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any map of Earth, even though it is very easy to find. To see it, just look up into a clear sky, to the no-man’s-land of Earth orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name.

The emptiness of outer space might be the last place you’d expect militaries to vie over contested territory, except that outer space isn’t so empty anymore. About 1,300 active satellites wreathe the globe in a crowded nest of orbits, providing worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance. For militaries that rely on some of those satellites for modern warfare, space has become the ultimate high ground, with the U.S. as the undisputed king of the hill. Now, as China and Russia aggressively seek to challenge U.S. superiority in space with ambitious military space programs of their own, the power struggle risks sparking a conflict that could cripple the entire planet’s space-based infrastructure. And though it might begin in space, such a conflict could easily ignite full-blown war on Earth.

The long-simmering tensions are now approaching a boiling point due to ...

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Can Police Use Data Science to Prevent Deadly Encounters?
As part of Obama's Police Data Initiative, researchers and police are studying "predictive analytics" to improve existing officer early warning systems
By Larry Greenemeier | July 22, 2015

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Law enforcement and academia are working together to find ways of improving early warning systems meant to flag bad police behavior before it becomes a problem. (Image for illustration purposes only.)
Courtesy of Thinkstock.

Several high-profile cases of law enforcement officers using deadly force against civilians within the past year have politicians, police and researchers looking for ways to prevent such incidents. This search includes a closer look at the computerized early warning systems that many large police departments have used for years to identify officers who are most likely to overreact violently during stressful situations. The main challenge: it is difficult to say with certainty how well or even if these systems actually work.

Early warning systems debuted in large police departments—those with more than 1,000 officers—decades ago as a way to identify those officers whose unprofessional behavior could cause problems in the communities they served. Departments programmed these systems to flag recurring complaints against officers and notify supervisors when certain thresholds were reached, such as a certain number of use-of-force complaints over a given period of time. Early systems’ predictive abilities were crude, primarily because they were capable of basing their analyses only on individual data sources—such as formal complaints—rather than combining information from various police databases that could provide context for an officer’s behavior. This might include the officer’s level of experience, whether the officer responded to an incident alone as well as the time and location of the event.

Pres. Barack Obama’s recently announced Police Data Initiative seeks ...

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Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe
Intuition can encourage opinions that are contrary to the facts
By Stefaan Blancke | August 18, 2015

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In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”. The popular term “Frankenfood” captures what is at stake: by going against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring enormous disaster upon ourselves.
Credit: ImageSource.com (MARS)

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have met with enormous public opposition over the past two decades. Many people believe that GMOs are bad for their health – even poisonous – and that they damage the environment. This is in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that proves that GMOs are safe to eat, and that they bring environmental benefits by making agriculture more sustainable. Why is there such a discrepancy between what the science tells us about GMOs, and what people think? To be sure, some concerns, such as herbicide resistance in weeds and the involvement of multinationals, are not without basis, but they are not specific to GMOs. Hence, another question we need to answer is why these arguments become more salient in the context of GMOs.

I recently published a paper, with a group of Belgian biotechnologists and philosophers from Ghent University, arguing that negative representations of GMOs are widespread and compelling because they are intuitively appealing. By tapping into intuitions and emotions that mostly work under the radar of conscious awareness, but are constituent of any normally functioning human mind, such representations become easy to think. They capture our attention, they are easily processed and remembered and thus stand a greater chance of being transmitted and becoming popular, even if they are untrue. Thus, many people oppose GMOs, in part, because it just makes sense that they would pose a threat.

In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people’s perception of GMOs. Psychological essentialism, for instance, makes us think of DNA as an ...

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Lyme Disease May Linger for 1 in 5 Because of "Persisters"
A new theory about long-lasting Lyme disease symptoms suggests treatment options
By Melinda Wenner Moyer | Aug 18, 2015

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A colorized micrograph of a black-legged tick, which can carry up to five diseases.
GETTY IMAGES

Lyme disease is a truly intractable puzzle. Scientists used to consider the tick-borne infection easy to conquer: patients, diagnosed by their bull's-eye rash, could be cured with a weeks-long course of antibiotics. But in recent decades the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has realized that up to one in five Lyme patients exhibits persistent debilitating symptoms such as fatigue and pain, known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and no one understands why. The problem is growing. The incidence of Lyme in the U.S. has increased by about 70 percent over the past decade. Today experts estimate that at least 300,000 people in the U.S. are infected every year; in areas in the Northeast, more than half of adult black-legged ticks carry the Lyme bacterial spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi. Although the issue is far from settled, new research lends support to the controversial notion that the disease lingers because these bacteria evade antibiotics—and that timing drug treatments differently could eliminate some persistent infections.

These ideas stem from the observation of a few rogue bacterial cells. Kim Lewis, director of the antimicrobial discovery center at Northeastern University, and his colleagues grew B. burgdorferi in the laboratory, treated them with various antibiotics and found that whereas most of the bacteria died within the first day, a small percentage—called persister cells—managed to survive the drug onslaught. Scientists first discovered persister cells in 1944 in ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lyme-disease-may-linger-for-1-in-5-because-of-persisters/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20150818

[Duke of Buckingham]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/includes/themes/sciam/images/logo.jpg
Vaccine against Middle East Mystery Disease Shows Promise
MERS inoculation triggers response in monkeys and camels, raising hopes for future human use
By Dina Fine Maron | August 19, 2015

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/863B25B9-DE94-44F5-BE7CF3EAC9D77AB0_article.jpg?5B902
Credit: NIAID/Flickr

When the mystery virus was first detected in Saudi Arabia three years ago, researchers did not know quite what to make of it. The virus causing Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, it turns out, is a cousin of the bug behind severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and has been responsible for the deaths of more than 500 people, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. Researchers on August 19, however, are reporting that a vaccine has begun to show promise against the disease—at least in monkeys, mice and camels. The vaccine, at both low or high doses, managed to protect monkeys from becoming ill with MERS.

The international team of researchers plans to test whether the vaccine will also prove effective in humans. Even without that assurance, however, the researchers hope that if the experimental vaccine were deployed during an outbreak, it could tamp down disease in camels and potentially break the chain of transmission to humans. “I think this result is very exciting. I was very impressed they looked in diverse animals,” says Trish Perl, an infection control expert from Johns Hopkins University who has worked to help contain MERS in Saudi Arabia. Perl was not involved in this new research, published in Science Translational Medicine.

The new vaccine, injected multiple times five weeks before exposure to the virus, protected eight rhesus macaques from developing the disease. Four nonimmunized monkeys, meanwhile ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccine-against-middle-east-mystery-disease-shows-promise/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150821


Do "Fat Letters" Help Kids Lose Weight?
Schools are grading children’s body masses, but the data on such programs is scant
By Dina Fine Maron | August 19, 2015

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/64F5468A-41AC-4DC0-B309B1BE8CAE171A_article.jpg?4EFC8
Annual reports informally dubbed "fat letters" are designed to help nudge parents of overweight or obese children to make some healthy changes.
Credit: Thinkstock/Wavebreakmedia Ltd

Once a year many kids come home from school gripping a different kind of report card. The missives do not list “A’s,” “B’s” or something less. Instead, the reports, informally dubbed “fat letters,” rate how children’s body mass indexes (BMIs) compare with those of other kids their age.

Many children are receiving poor marks. That’s not too surprising when you consider that more than one third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. The fat letters are designed to help nudge parents of these children to make some healthy changes. There is some evidence that the letters may increase parents’ awareness of the importance of health and weight issues. Yet solid proof is lacking that the reports help obese children lose pounds.

That absence of good data continues to irk critics who say ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-fat-letters-help-kids-lose-weight/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150821

[Duke of Buckingham]

2249
Back to the Future, Part II Predicted Techno-Marvels of October 21, 2015
Mr. Fusion aside, this 1989 time-traveling comedy was spot-on about many devices that we now take for granted
By Kat Long and Jess Schmerler | October 8, 2015

“The encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could…destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario.”—Doc Brown

October 21, 2015, was a long way off when Back to the Future, Part II hit movie theaters in November, 1989. That October day was the destination for the film’s time-traveling teen Marty McFly, inventor Dr. (Doc) Emmett Brown, and their flux capacitor–equipped DeLorean car/time machine as they tried to fix a future mess caused by Marty’s nemesis, Biff. Leaping forward 26 years let the makers of the cinematic blockbuster show us a dazzling array of technology—flat TVs! flying vehicles! cold fusion! artificial intelligence!—all of which seemed quite radical in the 1980s. But here we are in 2015 (getting here the slow way, by aging) and it’s time for a reality check on the movie’s speculations. A surprising amount of Back to the Future tech really is a part of our everyday lives—although when it comes to flying cars and cold fusion, not so much.

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-future-is-now-again-for-back-to-the-future-part-ii/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20151009

[Duke of Buckingham]

2249
World's Grandest Canyon May Be Hidden Beneath Antarctica
Newly discovered giant rifts and lakes mean that ice sheets could become surprisingly unstable as climate changes[/B]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/A98815DF-601C-4935-B0727CD0D6347541.png?w=590&h=395
[COLOR="#808080"]New discoveries point to giant lakes and canyons under Antarctic glaciers.
Courtesy Stewart Jamieson

[SIZE=4]Tucked beneath East Antarctica’s vast ice sheet is a frozen world, complete with subglacial lakes, rivers, basins, volcanoes and mountains. But roughly 91 percent of Antarctica—nearly twice the size of Australia—is unmapped, and the largest unsurveyed region on the icy continent is a region called Princess Elizabeth Land. Now a team of geologists has scoured that area to reveal a massive subglacial lake and a series of canyons, one of which—more than twice as long as the Grand Canyon—could rank as Earth’s largest. The findings indicate the ice sheets are less stable than previously thought, and could be strongly affected by climate change.

Stewart Jamieson from Durham University in England and his colleagues made the discovery by looking for ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/world-s-grandest-canyon-may-be-hidden-beneath-antarctica/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20160128

[Mumps]

http://www.nature.com/news/computer-sharing-loses-momentum-1.14666


Many projects offer scoreboards and awards such as virtual titles or badges to mark progress; some people have become so devoted that they have had the badges tattooed on their bodies.

Ok, which of you Badgers was involved in that article??? :D

[Duke of Buckingham]

2249
Pluto's Wonders Come into Focus
NASA’s New Horizons mission has delivered a treasure trove of data from the dwarf planet

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/19F004A4-3567-47EC-BE26FC9A2C478FF2.png?w=590&h=395
A color image of Sputnik Planum, Pluto’s frozen “heart” of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pluto-s-wonders-come-into-focus/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20160325

[Duke of Buckingham]

2249
Special Report
Combating Terrorism with Science

From the psychology of violent extremism to cracking encrypted communications, counterterrorism efforts rely on the latest scientific research

http://www.scientificamerican.com/report/combating-terrorism-with-science1/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20160401

One interesting reading with a lot of articles

[Duke of Buckingham]

https://snt147.mail.live.com/Handlers/ImageProxy.mvc?bicild=&canary=lBe%2fDgA50Ux7XxiHOKbvJDjR%2f48fn5hYa3aPbJI B5WQ%3d0&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.scientificamerican.com%2fasse ts%2fImage%2fnewsletter%2flogo_main_final.jpg
Neurological Health
New Clues Show Out-of-Control Synapse Pruning May Underlie Alzheimer's

A study in mice shows that the normal process by which the brain prunes excess synapses during development may be hijacked early on in the progression of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases

By Jordana Cepelewicz on March 31, 2016
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-clues-show-out-of-control-synapse-pruning-may-underlie-alzheimer-s/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160406

[Duke of Buckingham]

Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice

Creators are not mere experts. Instead of deliberately practicing down an already existing path, they often create their own path for others to follow

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/creativity-is-much-more-than-10-000-hours-of-deliberate-practice/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160420

[Duke of Buckingham]

The Mystery of Phantom Galaxies May Soon Be Solved

A new theory says these mysterious “ultradiffuse” oddball galaxies are dwarfs born in a whirl

By Ken Croswell on April 22, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-phantom-galaxies-may-soon-be-solved/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20160428

[Duke of Buckingham]

Wolves Howl in Local Dialects

By Benjamin Meyers, Jason G. Goldman on April 26, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/E9041AA9-C46C-45D5-A56D478A98351EC7_agenda.jpg?w=450&h=253

http://www.scientificamerican.com/video/wolves-howl-in-local-dialects/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20160429

[Duke of Buckingham]

Why Kenya Is Burning 100 Tons of Elephant Ivory

Paleontologist-turned-politician Richard Leakey talks with Scientific American about his efforts to save Kenya’s wildlife

By Richard Schiffman on April 27, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-kenya-is-burning-100-tons-of-elephant-ivory/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20160502

[Duke of Buckingham]

How NASA's Next Big Telescope Could Take Pictures of Another Earth

A “starshade” flying alongside the WFIRST observatory could deliver images of potentially habitable worlds decades ahead of schedule

By Lee Billings on May 2, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nasa-s-next-big-telescope-could-take-pictures-of-another-earth/?WT.mc_id=SA_TECH_20160503

[Mumps]

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3065661/hardware/ibms-quantum-computing-processor-comes-out-of-hiding.html


A quantum computer for the people isn't just a theoretical dream; IBM is trying to make it a reality.

IBM has built a quantum processor with five qubits, or quantum bits. Even better, IBM isn't hiding the quantum processor in its labs -- it will be accessible through the cloud for the public to run experiments and test applications.

[John P. Myers]

It's available now. You can sign up here for an invitation: https://quantumexperience.mybluemix.net/

After you sign up you can use the web service called Composer to create an algorithm by dragging and dropping different quantum logic gates.

[scole of TSBT]

Qubit assembly language programming will become the new computer science freshman flunk out class.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Neuroscience

Why Trump and Clinton Voters Won’t Switch: It’s in Their Brains

Neural images show it takes more than logic and facts to win a political argument

By Natalie Jacewicz on May 3, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-trump-and-clinton-voters-won-t-switch-it-s-in-their-brains/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160504

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/5A2DAAE2-D3C6-40CF-8B51CAEF137CE3AD.jpg?w=590&h=395

[Duke of Buckingham]

Weather

Drought-Ridden L.A. Tries Rainmakers to Tap Storm Clouds

As hoped-for precipitation from El Niño falls short, Los Angeles resorts to a controversial method to reap water from the sky

By David Biello on May 5, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drought-ridden-l-a-tries-rainmakers-to-tap-storm-clouds/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20160506

[Duke of Buckingham]

Neurological Health

Does Zapping Your Brain Increase Performance?

The evidence for neurostimulation is decidedly mixed

By Hazem Zohny on May 10, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-zapping-your-brain-increase-performance/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160511

[Duke of Buckingham]

Automotive

Electric Cars Are Not Necessarily Clean

Your battery-powered vehicle is only as green as your electricity supplier

By David Biello on May 11, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-cars-are-not-necessarily-clean/?WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20160512

[Duke of Buckingham]

Space

Hunt for Big Bang Gravitational Waves Gets $40-Million Boost

The nonprofit Simons Foundation will fund a new observatory to search for signs of stretching in the very early universe

By Clara Moskowitz on May 12, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hunt-for-big-bang-gravitational-waves-gets-40-million-boost/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20160513

[John P. Myers]

IBM Creates A Molecule That Could Destroy All Viruses

http://www.popsci.com/macromolecule-developed-by-ibm-could-fight-multiple-viruses-at-once

[Duke of Buckingham]

Public Health

How Zika Spiraled Out of Control

The virus was a tiny, barely known annoyance. Scientists now think environmental changes made Zika explode into a global crisis

By Dina Fine Maron on May 24, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-zika-spiraled-out-of-control1/?WT.mc_id=SA_HLTH_20160524

[Duke of Buckingham]

Space
Juno Arrives at Jupiter

After a do-or-die engine burn the second spacecraft ever to orbit Jupiter is preparing to revolutionize our view of the giant planet

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/juno-arrives-at-jupiter1/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20160708

[Duke of Buckingham]

A physicist disappears into a mini black hole created by the CERN particle accelerator (Switzerland – Geneva)

Can that be true?

http://www.scienceinfo.news/physicist-disappears-mini-black-hole-created-cern-particle-accelerator/

[STMahlberg]

A physicist disappears into a mini black hole created by the CERN particle accelerator (Switzerland – Geneva)

Can that be true?

http://www.scienceinfo.news/physicist-disappears-mini-black-hole-created-cern-particle-accelerator/


ScienceInfo.news is an English version of ScienceInfo.fr; the following is taken from the latter.


"Here, you just have to be a little curious and click on this link to find out that this site Scientific Information publishes totally false information or archifausses and more, not even true.

Let it be said once and for all: the site ScienceInfo.fr is a parody site, satirical, anxiety and inconsiderate.

All information set out is, unfortunately for some and fortunately for others fabrications.

In short, everything is false. This will names and quotes attributed to imaginary people or companies imagined.

When the actions and quotes attributed to real people - and the facts about them - they are obviously false and devised to strengthen the grotesque character articles.

In short, do not believe everything they tell you and more so all you read on the internet. Be vigilant ... and remember to smile."

[nanoprobe]

While he's in there maybe he can find my car keys. =))

[Duke of Buckingham]

No justice, I should read things more carefully.

I hope the guy will find nanoprobe car keys in between. [-O<

[Duke of Buckingham]

Chemistry

Can Chemists Turn Pollution into Gold?

Scientists are trying to convert carbon dioxide emissions into something of value—without using too much energy
http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/B60DD5CC-E86D-4FD0-80D1132A54181717.jpg?w=590&h=395&9375B989-8891-4806-AEF5E3C46764B380
Carbon dioxide is a stable molecule, and doesn't store much energy in its chemical bonds. To use it, chemists have to add energy, often through heating, which usually requires electricity. Much of that comes from power plants that burn coal or natural gas—emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, even more than was captured. Credit: Zirafek/Thinkstock (MARS)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-chemists-turn-pollution-into-gold/?WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20160728

[Mumps]

Chemistry

Can Chemists Turn Pollution into Gold?

Scientists are trying to convert carbon dioxide emissions into something of value—without using too much energy
http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/B60DD5CC-E86D-4FD0-80D1132A54181717.jpg?w=590&h=395&9375B989-8891-4806-AEF5E3C46764B380
Carbon dioxide is a stable molecule, and doesn't store much energy in its chemical bonds. To use it, chemists have to add energy, often through heating, which usually requires electricity. Much of that comes from power plants that burn coal or natural gas—emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, even more than was captured. Credit: Zirafek/Thinkstock (MARS)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-chemists-turn-pollution-into-gold/?WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20160728

Are we there yet?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0801/Scientists-flip-energy-equation-with-solar-leaf-that-converts-CO2-into-fuel


Scientists flip energy equation with solar leaf that converts CO2 into fuel

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago say the fuel from carbon dioxide can remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, and provides a sustainable type of fuel that is as cheap as a gallon of gas.

[nanoprobe]

And when they remove all the CO2 we all die. :rolleyes:

[Duke of Buckingham]

https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f3d1b99a743ffa4142d9d7f1978d9686.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.c om/files/104556/area14mp/image-20151206-29724-1i18qc4.jpg
I hope that will make you more easy about co2.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Did the Universe Boot Up with a “Big Bounce?”

The cosmos may have rebounded from an earlier contraction and “big crunch” into a “big bang” that started it all over again

By Clara Moskowitz on August 3, 2016

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/D051601C-271F-464C-BC434F058C15B485.jpg?w=590&h=395&820A073B-B39F-4E05-A536A91822AF0C5A
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-the-universe-boot-up-with-a-big-bounce/?WT.mc_id=SA_SPC_20160804