Science News

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When a Medical Test Reveals an Unwelcome Surprise
A White House bioethics commission calls for standards on “incidental findings”
By Dina Fine Maron

In a split second someone can be transformed into a patient-in-waiting.

A genetic scan ordered to test for one suspected condition picks up an elevated risk for a different, unexpected disease. Or a brain scan for a concussion detects a suspicious shadow. There’s no guarantee that those abnormalities may develop into something. There may not even be a treatment or therapy for the resulting condition. The pressing question then is: Should the patient be told about ...

More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...a-medical-test

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Booster of Red Blood Cells Synthesized for First Time
The technical feat involved stringing together all the amino-acid building blocks in erythropoietin, but it's unclear if the team produced a properly folded form
By Brendan Borrell and Nature magazine

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In a tour de force of biological chemistry, scientists have pieced together an entire protein hormone from scratch, and demonstrated that it works just as well in mice as the natural version. If verified, the complete synthesis of erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, would mark a new stage in the production and study of biological therapeutics.

No one is more pleased with the achievement—a decade in the making—than Samuel Danishefsky, a biological chemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who ...

More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...red-blood-cell

Neanderthal Woman's Genome Reveals Unknown Human Lineage
By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor | December 18, 2013 01:01pm ET

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The existence of a mysterious ancient human lineage and the genetic changes that separate modern humans from their closest extinct relatives are among the many secrets now revealed in the first high-quality genome sequence from a Neanderthal woman, researchers say.

The Neanderthal woman whose toe bone was sequenced also reveals ...

More on: http://www.livescience.com/42056-nea...sequenced.html

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Iconic Apollo 8 "Earthrise" Photo Re-created 45 Years Later [Video]
A new video simulation helps viewers experience the moments when the image was captured and what it was like inside the spacecraft at the time
By Robert Z. Pearlman and LiveScience
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It is one of the most famous photos ever taken — the Earth rising over the moon's horizon as seen firsthand by the 1968 Apollo 8 crew. And yet, more than four decades later, details about how the photo was captured are still being uncovered.

Four days shy of the photo's 45th anniversary, NASA on Friday (Dec. 20) released a new simulation of the events that led to the creation of the image known as "Earthrise." The new video was created using topographic data from ...

More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...45-years-later

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"Earthrise," as photographed by the Apollo 8 crew on Christmas Eve 1968, laid over NASA's 2013 re-creation using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) data. Image: NASA/GSFC

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The 13 Most Obvious Scientific Findings of 2013
Here's a sampling of the unsurprising research of 2013—with a few notes on why scientists bothered
By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience

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Common sense is no replacement for science; plenty of "everyone knows" knowledge has had its legs cut out from under it by a well-designed study. Nevertheless, some research turns up results that don't exactly shock and awe.

Such no-duh research usually has a serious underlying purpose, from the study of why people cheat to the roots of racism. Researchers have to understand the basics of everyday phenomena in order to understand them, after all.

Here's a sampling of the unsurprising research of 2013 — with a few notes on why scientists bothered.

More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...vious-findings

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What You Should and Shouldn’t Worry about after the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdowns
Fresh meltdowns at the devastated nuclear facility are unlikely but years of slow, dangerous labor to repair the existing damage are guaranteed
By David Biello

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The old saying goes where there's smoke, there's fire, but steam is a different story, even in the case of a nuclear power plant that suffered multiple meltdowns. Despite fresh worries about a new meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in Japan, the steam that set off this concern is merely a result of atmospheric conditions—and a reactor that is still hot from having melted down in 2011.

Think of it as seeing your breath in cold weather. The damaged reactors at Fukushima are still hot, nearly three years after the disaster, thanks to the ongoing radioactive decay of the damaged nuclear fuel. This is why used nuclear fuel sits...

More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...clear-disaster

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Our Brains Have a Map for Numbers
It is as if there is a number line in our heads
By Emilie Reas

“Come on. Get out of the express checkout lane! That’s way more than twelve items, lady.”

Without having to count, you can make a good guess at how many purchases the shopper in front of you is making. She may think she’s pulling a fast one, but thanks to the brain’s refined sense for quantity, she’s not fooling anyone. This ability to perceive numerosity – or number of items – does more than help prevent express lane fraud; it also builds the foundation for our arithmetic skills, the economic system and our concept of value.

Until recently, it’s remained a puzzle how the brain ...

More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...AT_MB_20140115

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Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, the theorized dramatic expansion of the universe that put the "bang" in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, new research suggests.

If it holds up, the landmark discovery — which also confirms the existence of hypothesized ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves — would give researchers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.


"If it is confirmed, then it would be the most important discovery since the discovery, I think, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who is not a member of the study team, told Space.com, comparing the finding to a 1998 observation that opened the window on mysterious dark energy and won three researchers the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.


A team led by John Kovac, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is announcing the results today (March 17), unveiling two manuscripts that have not yet been submitted to peer-reviewed journals. Nature released a video describing the cosmic inflation discovery earlier

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Gravitational Waves from Big Bang Detected
A curved signature in the cosmic microwave background light provides proof of inflation and spacetime ripples
Mar 17, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the big bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today. The finding is direct proof of the theory of inflation, the idea that the universe expanded extremely quickly in the first fraction of a nanosecond after it was born. What’s more, the signal is coming through much more strongly than expected, ruling out a large class of inflation models and potentially pointing the way toward new theories of physics, experts say. More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_BS_20140321

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Proof of gravitational waves created by cosmic inflation is shown here in this image of the cosmic microwave background radiation collected by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole. The proof comes in the form of a signature called B-mode polarization, a curling of the orientation, or polarization, of the light, denoted by the black lines on the image. The color indicates small temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background that correspond to density fluctuations in the early universe.
BICEP2 Collaboration

Well then - The perfect storm is brewing - National topics with everything at once and with the last 3 weeks, interesting times ; it has been such a fast escalating.

"Public forums are having a field day debating why NASA has suddenly made the announcement that they are shutting down the live feed to the international space station (ISS) in two weeks. Speaking of the Vatican and dark matter, our videographer asks if something is coming our way that they don’t want us to see. Is this shutdown because of all the UFO’s recently seen on ISS livestream (2nd vid below)? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the ISS is jointly run between the US and Russia?"

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