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Blood-Red Moon: Total Lunar Eclipse Photos from Readers
Scientific American readers snapped these views of the October 8 total lunar eclipse from the United States and Australia
October 12, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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Petra de Ruyter · 8 days ago
Lunar Eclipse 8:10:2014 Albury Australia
Awesome experience! Is almost the same experience that you have viewing a total eclipse of the sun. Reminds me of how early astronomers discovered that the Earth was round. Beautiful to see the curvature of the Earth on the Moon.

A coppery moon graced skies around the world early Wednesday morning, and many Scientific American readers got a great view. Below are some of the best reader photos of the October 8, 2014 total lunar eclipse, when the moon briefly passed into the shadow Earth cast. During a total lunar eclipse, the sun and moon are 180 degrees apart, on either side of our planet. The sun's bending rays travel through our atmosphere to reach the darkened moon, giving it a reddish hue. These impressive photos came from around the United States and Australia.

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Quarantines and Travel Bans: Could They Work to Thwart Ebola?
What rules are in place to prevent pandemics?
October 16, 2014 |By David Biello

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TRAVEL BAN: Should those suspected of harboring Ebola be prevented from traveling?
Courtesy of NASA

Thomas Eric Duncan’s family has been imprisoned in a borrowed home for a few weeks now, purportedly under police guard. This quarantine is an attempt to keep any Ebola virus from spreading further after their loved one died of the disease on October 8.

That quarantine has not been applied to hospital workers who came into contact with Duncan on either ...

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Why Have Our Brains Started to Shrink?
—via e-mail
Oct 16, 2014

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Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist and research leader on human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, replies:

Indeed, skeletal evidence from every inhabited continent suggests that our brains have become smaller in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years. How can we account for this seemingly scary statistic?

Some of the shrinkage is very likely related to the decline in humans' average body size during the past 10,000 years. Brain size is scaled to body size because ...

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What’s Your Favorite Vintage Gadget?
Share your nostalgia for a long-obsolete device with other Scientific American readers
October 15, 2014 |By Larry Greenemeier

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Atari 800 XL Rijeka P&P
Wikimedia Commons/Roberta F.

Few technologies of the past 25 years have had more of an impact on our lives than the cell phone. Twenty years ago, a friend offered to lend me hers because I was having car trouble. She was worried I would get stuck on the side of the highway on my way home from work with no way of calling for help. Such concern about being unable to communicate now seems quaint. Like many people, I’m rarely without my smartphone these days, and it does a whole lot more than call for roadside assistance.

Such progress makes me nostalgic for the gadgets of yesterday that once ...

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Did Jesus Save the Klingons?
If or when we make contact with extraterrestrials, the effect on our religious sensibilities will be profound, says astronomer David Weintraub
October 16, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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The discovery of life beyond Earth would be a triumph for science but might wreak havoc on certain religions. Some faiths, such as evangelical Christianity, have long held that we are God’s favorite children and would not easily accommodate the notion that we would have to share the attention; others, such as Roman Catholicism, struggle with thorny questions such as whether aliens have original sin.

Now that researchers have discovered more than 1,500 exoplanets beyond the solar system, the day when scientists detect signs of life on one of them may be near at hand. Given this new urgency, Vanderbilt University astronomer David Weintraub decided to find out what ...

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Are U.S. Hospitals Prepared for the Next Ebola Case?
Health care emergency management expert Kristin Stevens tells us what went wrong in Dallas, and how we can do better
October 23, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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CDC Global via <a href=https://www.flickr.com/photos/cdcglobal/14723720857/in/set-72157646018355339>Flickr</a>

The first U.S. Ebola patient who walked into an emergency room last month posed a major test for the chosen hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. The hospital made some now-notorious missteps, including failing to diagnose Ebola virus the first time the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, arrived as well as allowing two nurses who treated him to become infected.

In the aftermath of the case the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated its guidelines for health care workers’ protective gear, called personal protective equipment (PPE), which was probably at fault for the nurses’ infections. Hospitals around the country are on alert for more cases of the Ebola virus, which has ..

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The Hobbit: 10 Years Later
In October 2004 paleontologists announced a new human species called Homo floresiensis. Ever since then debate has raged on whether it truly is a new species or merely a diseased Homo sapiens
Oct 23, 2014

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New analyses reveal the mini human species to be even stranger than previously thought and hint that major tenets of human evolution need revision

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How to Silence Cyberbullying
Cyberbullies take advantage of the unique psychology of online communities to attack, intimidate and hurt others. Here is what makes trolls tick— and how to stop them
By Elizabeth Svoboda

When 25-year-old Caitlin Seida dressed up as Lara Croft from the movie Tomb Raider one Halloween, she posted a picture of herself enjoying the night's festivities on Facebook. At most, she figured a few friends might see the photograph and comment.

The picture remained in Seida's social circle for more than three years. Then one day in 2013 a friend sent Seida a link with a cryptic note: “You're Internet famous.” Clicking the link took her to a site called the International Association of Haters, where her Halloween photo—which she had posted publicly by mistake—bore the oversized caption “Fridge Raider.” Hundreds of commenters dragged Seida through the mud for wearing a skimpy costume ...

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Motor Chills EV Drivers’ Anxiety about Going the Distance
By Larry Greenemeier | October 22, 2014 | Comments2

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Lead developer Satheesh Kumar holds components of his team's 2-in-1 electric motor. Image courtesy of Nanyang Technological University.

An air-conditioned cabin is the best way to drop a car’s fuel efficiency on a hot day. This is true of electric vehicles (EV) as much as it is for gas-guzzlers. Researchers in Singapore, who know something about hot-weather driving, say they’ve found a way to help an EV to run up to 20 percent longer between recharges during air-conditioning use.

Their idea: a “2-in-1 electric motor” that consolidates the air-conditioning compressor into the same housing as the main traction motor powering the vehicle’s wheels. This creates efficiencies and frees up additional space for auxiliary batteries to power ...

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Not Everyone Wants to Be Happy
Americans are obsessed with happiness, but other cultures see things differently
October 28, 2014 |By Jennifer Aaker and Emily Esfahani Smith

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Don't worry, be unhappy
Credit: Thinkstock

Everyone wants to be happy. It's a fundamental human right. It's associated with all sorts of benefits. We, as a society, spend millions trying to figure out what the key to personal happiness is. There are now even apps to help us turn our frowns upside down. So everyone wants to be happy—right?

Well, maybe not.

A new research paper by Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers from Victoria University of Wellington, argues that the desire for personal happiness, though knitted into the fabric of American history and culture, is held in less esteem by other cultures. There are many parts of the world that are more suspicious of personal happiness ...

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Cocoa Constitutents Fend Off Senior Moments—the Memory of a 30-Year-Old?
By Gary Stix | October 26, 2014 | Comments4

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Memory dust?

Scott Small, a professor of neurology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, researches Alzheimer’s, but he also studies the memory loss that occurs during the normal aging process. Research on the commonplace “senior moments” focuses on the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved with formation of new memories. In particular, one area of the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus, which helps distinguish one object from another, has lured researchers on age-related memory problems.

In a study by Small and colleagues published Oct. 26 in Nature Neuroscience, naturally occurring chemicals in cocoa increased dentate gyrus blood flow. Psychological testing showed that the pattern recognition abilities of a typical 60-year-old on a high dose of the cocoa phytochemicals in the 37-person study matched those of a 30-or 40-year old after three months. The study received support from ...

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Evidence Builds for Dark Matter Explosions at the Milky Way’s Core
Unexplained gamma rays streaming from the galactic center may have been produced by dark matter, but more mundane explanations are also possible
October 28, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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This Fermi map of the Milky Way center shows an overabundance of gamma-rays (red indicates the greatest number) that cannot be explained by conventional sources.
T. Linden, Univ. of Chicago

So far, dark matter has evaded scientists’ best attempts to find it. Astronomers know the invisible stuff dominates our universe and tugs gravitationally on regular matter, but they do not know what it is made of. Since 2009, however, suspicious gamma-ray light radiating from the Milky Way’s core—where dark matter is thought to be especially dense—has intrigued researchers. Some wonder if the rays might have been emitted in explosions caused by colliding particles of dark matter. Now a new gamma-ray signal, in combination with those already detected, offers further evidence that this might be the case.

One possible explanation for dark matter is that it is made of theorized “weakly interacting massive particles,” or WIMPs. Every WIMP is thought to be both matter and antimatter, so when two of them meet ...

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Unmanned Supply Rocket Explodes Seconds after Liftoff
Orbital Sciences’s Antares rocket burst into flames mere moments into its mission to send a cargo-carrying spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station. NASA reported no injuries to personnel
October 28, 2014 |By Mike Wall and SPACE.com

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An Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded shortly after lifting off on a private cargo mission to the International Space Station, on October 28, 2014, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
NASA TV

A private Orbital Sciences-built cargo launch to the International Space Station ended in a fiery explosion just seconds after liftoff Tuesday night (Oct. 28).

Orbital's unmanned Antares rocket exploded in a brilliant fireball shortly after launching from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 6:22 p.m. EDT (2222 GMT), crashing back down to the launch pad in a flaming heap. The Antares was carrying Orbital's unmanned Cygnus spacecraft, which was toting 5,000 pounds (2,268 kilograms) of food, scientific experiments and other supplies on this flight — the third cargo mission to the space station under a $1.9 billion contract the company holds with NASA. You can see photos of the Antares rocket explosion here.

A NASA spokesman described the explosion as a "catastrophic anomaly" during a NASA TV webcast. While the assessment and investigation ...

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The Science of Death and Zombies
Forget about eating braaains—there's no coming back from the dead. But it's possible for minds to be taken over
Oct 30, 2014

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Ask the Experts
Can You Escape Zombies If You Smell Like Death?
A chemist explains why a "death cologne" could protect you if the ravenous undead attack this Halloween.

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Inside the 4 U.S. Biocontainment Hospitals That Are Stopping Ebola [Video]
Four small but well-equipped wards across the U.S. provide a front line of treatment for highly infectious diseases and bioterrorism attacks
October 24, 2014 |By Katherine Harmon Courage

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A hospital ICU room.
Credit: Quinn Dombrowski via flickr

When a new, highly infectious disease lands on U.S. shores, four unique treatment centers stand ready to contain and treat it. Sprinkled across the east coast, Midwest and Rocky Mountain west, these "biocontainment units" inside larger facilities have been funded and tapped by the federal government to take patients who could otherwise fuel a devastating epidemic.

These centers made the news in August as Ebola patients began to arrive in the U.S. Of these, three patients have been treated at Emory University Hospital (Kent Brantly, Nancy Writebol and a doctor who ...

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Let’s Talk about Ebola Survivors and Sex
As more patients recover from the infection, what risk do they pose to their sexual partners?
October 31, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Credit: Flickr/Peachy92

Wear a condom: That has been the standard—and strong—advice from public health officials trying to thwart the spread of HIV or syphilis. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has spent decades trying to get people to put them on. But now health workers are pushing the latex prophylactic for a different reason: Ebola recovery.

People are surviving the disease. Doctors Without Borders, which oversees many Ebola clinics in west Africa, is sending home recovered Ebola patients with a stack of condoms, and health workers are urging them to only engage in protected sex for at least three months after recovery. The virus has been found in the semen and vaginal fluids of convalescents for weeks or ...

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Anarchic Autism Genetics Gain a Touch of Clarity
By Gary Stix | October 30, 2014 |

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Two new studies demonstrate the promise and pitfalls of the industrial-scale gene-processing technologies that define the meaning of the much-ballyhooed Big Data.

Bad news first. One of the two reports published in Nature provided a four-digit estimate of the number of genes involved with autism. [I’m obligated to break here to say that Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.]

My science skeptic friends would say that this is also ...

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The Philosophical Implications of the Urge to Urinate
The state of our body affects how we think the world works
November 4, 2014 |By Daniel Yudkin

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Are we truly free?
Credit: thegreekphotoholic via Thinkstock

If one thing’s for sure, it’s that I decided what breakfast cereal to eat this morning. I opened the cupboard, Iperused the options, and when I ultimately chose the Honey Bunches of Oats over the Kashi Good Friends, it came from a place of considered judgment, free from external constraints and predetermined laws.

Or did it? This question—about how much people are in charge of their own actions—is among the most central to the human condition. Do we have free will? Are we in control of our destiny? Do we choose the proverbial Honey Bunches of Oats? Or does the cereal—or some other mysterious force in the vast and unknowable universe—choose us?

The Greek playwright Sophocles ...

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How the Brain Creates a Chronology of Consciousness
Several brain structures contribute to “mind time,” organizing our experiences into chronologies of remembered events
By Antonio Damasio

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DAVID MUIR Getty Images

We wake up to time, courtesy of an alarm clock, and go through a day run by time—the meeting, the visitors, the conference call, the luncheon are all set to begin at a particular hour. We can coordinate our own activities with those of others because we all implicitly agree to follow a single system for measuring time, one based on the inexorable rise and fall of daylight. In the course of evolution ...

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New Experiment Aims to Crack Neutrino Mass Mystery
These particles should not have mass, but they do. By sending neutrinos through the ground from Illinois to Minnesota, physicists hope to learn why
November 4, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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A 50-foot-square block of the NOvA far detector is pivoted at the laboratory in Ash River, Minnesota, where it will detect oscillating neutrinos.
Fermilab

Neutrinos are everywhere in the universe, but we cannot see them or feel them and can almost never stop them. They stream through our bodies by the trillions every second, flitting through the spaces between our atoms with nary a collision. These ghostly particles were created in abundance during the big bang, and stars like the sun pump out more all the time. Yet for all their plentitude, neutrinos may be the most mysterious particles in the cosmos.

For decades physicists thought neutrinos weighed nothing, and they were shocked in 1998 to discover that the particles do have very small, but nonzero, masses. Exactly how much mass they have ...

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Crash Analysis: How SpaceShipTwo’s Feathered Tails Work
By Clara Moskowitz | November 3, 2014 | Comments6

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Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo in its "feathered" configuration, with tails upright. Credit: Virgin Galactic

The cause of the deadly crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo on Friday remains unknown, but the commercial spaceplane’s feathered reentry system looks to have been involved. Investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the vehicle’s copilot moved a lever to “unlock” the feather system earlier than planned, and two seconds after the feathers deployed, the spacecraft disintegrated.

The details of how or why this happened are still unclear. The feather system is normally used after SpaceShipTwo has already climbed to the peak of its parabolic flight path and begun to descend, to help the vehicle slow down and stabilize as it flies back to Earth. In fact, the design was one of ...

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Science Research Needs an Overhaul
The current incentive structure often leads to dead-end studies—but there are ways to fix the problem
November 3, 2014 |By John P. A. Ioannidis

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

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It will take a concerted effort by scientists and other stakeholders to fix this problem.
Credit: Kseniya Ragozina via Thinkstock

Earlier this year a series of papers in The Lancet reported that 85 percent of the $265 billion spent each year on medical research is wasted. This is not because of fraud, although it is true that retractions are on the rise. Instead, it is because too often absolutely nothing happens after initial results of a study are published. No follow-up investigations ensue to replicate or expand on a discovery. No one uses the findings to build new technologies.

The problem is not just what happens after publication—scientists often have trouble choosing the right questions and properly designing studies to answer them. Too many neuroscience studies test too few subjects ...

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Fracking Threatens to Crack Politics
Divisions within Colorado highlight a long-term political issue that affects many states
November 3, 2014 |By David Biello

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Courtesy of USGS

The city of Boulder wants to block fracking in the Rocky Mountain state. The liberal enclave has banned the combination of directional drilling and cracking subterranean rock with high-pressure fluids known as fracking within its city limits. And local Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Polis wanted to enable other communities in Colorado to follow suit. He began collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would have vested authority in municipalities to enact their own fracking regulations, no matter what the state as a whole decides, to control the controversial practice that frees more oil and gas. For good measure, the Democrat also wanted to ...

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NASA's Plan to Visit an Asteroid Faces a Rocky Start
America's keystone human spaceflight mission for the next decade may be over before it begins
November 10, 2014 |By Lee Billings

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In this artist's rendition, a spacewalking astronaut prepares to retrieve samples from a captured asteroid in high lunar orbit as part of NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission concept.
Credit: NASA

NASA’s next vehicle designed to carry astronauts to space is set to launch early next month atop a trusty Delta 4 rocket for a crewless test flight. Current plans call for a piloted flight in the new Orion spacecraft in the mid-2020s, when the vehicle will ride atop a new NASA heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time in a half-century. What’s far less certain in the post–space shuttle era is where they’ll go from there.

If the Obama administration and NASA have their way, the astronauts will be visiting a small asteroid that will have been nudged by a solar-powered robotic probe into a high, stable lunar orbit. During the monthlong mission the astronauts will rendezvous with the asteroid, perform spacewalks to gather samples and then return to Earth. The target asteroid has yet to be announced ...

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New Type of More Problematic Mosquito-Borne Illness Detected in Brazil
A second form of the painful chikungunya virus has appeared in Brazil—one that could more easily spread, including to the U.S.
November 4, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Aedes albopictus mosquito
Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

When a mosquito-borne disease first arrived in the Western Hemisphere last year, humans were relatively lucky. The disease, which causes crippling joint pain persisting for weeks or even months and for which there is no known therapy or vaccine, hopscotched from the Caribbean islands to eventually land in the U.S. and the rest of the Americas. But the type of chikungunya creeping across the region then was one that could only readily spread via Aedes aegypti, a mosquito that is uncommon in the U.S.

That ecological happenstance provided some modicum of protection. Chikungunya spread by bites from Aedes aegypti was first detected in Saint Martin last year and in the U.S. this summer. ...

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The Rise of All-Purpose Antidepressants
Doctors are increasingly prescribing SSRIs to treat more than just depression
Oct 16, 2014 |By Julia Calderone

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Antidepressant use among Americans is skyrocketing. Adults in the U.S. consumed four times more antidepressants in the late 2000s than they did in the early 1990s. As the third most frequently taken medication in the U.S., researchers estimate that 8 to 10 percent of the population is taking an antidepressant. But this spike does not necessarily signify a depression epidemic. Through the early 2000s pharmaceutical companies were aggressively testing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the dominant class of depression drug, for a variety of disorders—the timeline below shows the rapid expansion of FDA-approved uses.

As the drugs' patents expired, companies stopped funding studies for official approval. Yet doctors have continued ...

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Dark Matter Black Holes Could Be Destroying Stars at the Milky Way’s Center
If dark matter comes in both matter and antimatter varieties, it might accumulate inside dense stars to create black holes
November 10, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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NASA

Dark matter may have turned spinning stars into black holes near the center of our galaxy, researchers say. There, scientists expected to see plenty of the dense, rotating stars called pulsars, which are fairly common throughout the Milky Way. Despite numerous searches, however, only one has been found, giving rise to the so-called “missing pulsar problem.” A possible explanation, according to a new study, is that dark matter has built up inside these stars, causing the pulsars to collapse into black holes. (These black holes would be smaller than the supermassive black hole that is thought to lurk at the very heart of the galaxy.)

The universe appears to be teeming with invisible dark matter, which can neither be seen nor touched, but nonetheless exerts a gravitational pull on regular matter. Scientists have several ideas for what dark matter might be made of ...

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Lander Stable on Comet, for Now
The Philae lander settled atop the “head” of the rubber duck–shaped object despite trouble with systems designed to secure the probe to the comet
November 12, 2014 |By Lee Billings

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Philae's primary landing site from 30 km
Credit: ESA

After more than a decade of careful planning and hours of nail-biting tension, this morning an emissary from Earth made history’s first soft landing on a comet. The European Space Agency’s dishwasher-size Philae lander touched down on the craggy surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko shortly after 10:30 A.M. Eastern time, after being released seven hours earlier from its mother ship, the Rosetta orbiter.

“We are there. We are sitting on the surface. Philae is talking to us,” said Philae lander manager Stephan Ulamec during a live Webcast of the landing. “We are on the comet.” The lander seems to be fully operational, ready to begin its unprecedented ...

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Everything You Need to Know about the U.S.–China Climate Change Agreement
A turning point has been reached in the world's bid to curb global warming
November 12, 2014 |By David Biello

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HISTORIC AGREEMENT: President Obama's visit to Beijing has yielded a pact to cut greenhouse gas pollution from the world's two biggest emitting nations.
Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

The presidents of the world's two most polluting nations agree: something should be done about climate change. And they're just the leaders to do it, per the terms of what President Barack Obama called a "historic agreement" announced November 12 between the U.S. and China. Although neither country has plans to stop burning coal or oil in the near future, both countries now have commitments to reduce the greenhouse gases that result.

"As the world's two largest economies, energy consumers and emitters of greenhouse gases, we have a special responsibility to lead the global effort against climate change," said Obama in a ...

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Ethanol Scheme to Clean Air in Billions of Kitchens Goes Up in Smoke
An effort to build a scheme involving crop rotation, ethanol and clean cookstoves in Mozambique was defeated by bad roads, old trucks, slow carbon credits, civil unrest and tradition
November 11, 2014 |By David Biello

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CLEANER COOKING: The clean cookstove pictured here burning ethanol proved popular in Mozambique, but unsustainable.
Courtesy of Novozymes

In Mozambique, as in much of the world, people cook with charcoal. The dirty fuel causes smoke and soot to billow into their homes. As a result, cardiovascular and lung diseases are rampant from breathing such smoky indoor air—a problem that kills at least two million people worldwide prematurely every year, primarily women and children. Burning charcoal to cook exacerbates pneumonia, emphysema, tuberculosis and even low intelligence, among other human health issues. To solve the problem in the capital city of Maputo, Danish enzyme-maker Novozymes and its partners, like many before them, wanted to introduce a cleaner cookstove.

The ambition did not stop there. Novozymes hoped to bring an entire bio-based economy to the southeast African nation, starting with improved crop rotations that would allow farmers to grow excess cassava. The cassava in turn would be fed to a donated ethanol-brewing facility, built in the town of Dondo. The ethanol would be the fuel in cookstoves, burning ...

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Dark Matter Black Holes Could Be Destroying Stars at the Milky Way’s Center
If dark matter comes in both matter and antimatter varieties, it might accumulate inside dense stars to create black holes
November 10, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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NASA

Dark matter may have turned spinning stars into black holes near the center of our galaxy, researchers say. There, scientists expected to see plenty of the dense, rotating stars called pulsars, which are fairly common throughout the Milky Way. Despite numerous searches, however, only one has been found, giving rise to the so-called “missing pulsar problem.” A possible explanation, according to a new study, is that dark matter has built up inside these stars, causing the pulsars to collapse into black holes. (These black holes would be smaller than the supermassive black hole that is thought to lurk at the very heart of the galaxy.)

The universe appears to be teeming with invisible dark matter, which can neither be seen nor touched, but nonetheless exerts a gravitational pull on regular matter. Scientists have several ideas for what dark matter might be made of, but none have been proved. A leading option suggests ...

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A High-Flying Web May Catch the Beginning of Time
This winter an airborne experiment named Spider will probe the earliest remnants of the universe
November 12, 2014 |By Dan Falk

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SPIDER with all of its focal planes installed, in Antarctica in November.
Credit: Jon Gudmundsson

When searching for clues about the physics of the early universe, one has to aim high—and a balloon-borne telescope array known as Spider, set to soar over Antarctica this winter, may succeed where a highly publicized ground-based experiment fell short.

Physicists working on that earthbound experiment, known as BICEP2, announced several months ago that they had found evidence for primordial gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space itself, dating back to the universe’s earliest moments. The finding made headlines around the world. After further analysis, however, they admitted their data was inconclusive. The signal they detected could just as likely have been caused by interstellar dust as by the much-sought-after gravitational waves. Scientists working with Spider believe ...

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Mind-Blowing Fossil Preserves Tiny Horse Carrying Unborn Foal
By Kate Wong | November 11, 2014 | Comments2

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Extraordinary 48 million-year-old fossil of a Eurohippus messelensis mare and fetus from Messel, Germany. Imag

BERLIN: The former oil shale mining site of Messel, near Frankfurt, Germany, is well known for its spectacular fossils of organisms that lived between 47 million and 48 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch. But a fossil of the early horse species Eurohippus messelensis, described at this year’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Berlin, stands out even in that illustrious company.

The tiny specimen—full grown, Eurohippus was about the size of a modern fox terrier–preserves a mare and her unborn foal (circled in the image above) in exquisite detail, with many of the bones in anatomical position. Also visible are parts of the uterus, including the placenta and the so-called broad ligament that attaches the uterus to the mare’s lumbar vertebrae and helps support the fetus. The soft tissue is not preserved directly, but as images formed by the ...

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Next Wave of U.S. Supercomputers Could Break Up Race for Fastest
National Labs are now collaborating, not competing, to make the fastest supercomputers, which should enable new types of science to model everything from climate change to materials science to nuclear-weapons performance
November 17, 2014 |By Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine

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The Titan system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will soon be surpassed as the fastest supercomputer in the United States.
Credit: OLCF

Once locked in an arms race with each other for the fastest supercomputers, US national laboratories are now banding together to buy their next-generation machines.

On November 14, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that they will each acquire a next-generation IBM supercomputer that will run at up to 150 petaflops. That means that the machines can perform 150 million billion floating-point operations per second, at least five times as fast as the current leading US supercomputer, the Titan system at the ORNL.

The new supercomputers, which together will cost $325 million, should ...

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5 Hard Questions about Emerging Technologies We Can’t Afford Not to Ask
In the near future access to information and new technology may make profits and privacy obsolete, and force us to redefine the boundaries between humanity and machines
November 12, 2014 |By Kristel van der Elst

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Which economic systems will be most successful in providing equal access to the social and economic benefits of technology?
Credit: U.S. Marine Corps via flickr

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

Editor’s note: This week the World Economic Forum is holding its Global Agenda Council meetings in Dubai. More than 1,000 experts (including Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina) have gathered to discuss big world problems such as climate change, poverty, water shortages, energy and innovation. This is the last in a series of articles by WEF’s Kristel van der Elst, head of Strategic Foresight, on discussions that have taken place in the past year under the Forum’s auspices about ...

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What Impact Will Emerging Technologies Have on Geopolitics?
By Fred Guterl | November 12, 2014 |

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The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council meetings are going on this week in Dubai. More than 1000 experts (including Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina) have gathered to discuss big world problems such as climate change, poverty, water shortages, energy and innovation. Here we are publishing a series on discussions that have taken place in the past year under the Forum’s auspices about emerging technologies, written by WEF’s Kristel van der Elst, Head of Strategic Foresight (her first was this article on impacts to society). Here is her piece on impacts to geopolitics.

Four geopolitical questions we can’t avoid when we think about emerging technologies

by Kristel van der Elst, World Economic Forum

Not so far in the future, resources might no longer be closely linked to territories, it might be possible to visualize another person’s thoughts and predict the actions and decisions of world leaders before they act. What would this mean for our geopolitical landscape? ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...n-geopolitics/

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Tongue Shocks Hasten Healing
Electrically stimulating the tongue may help repair neural damage
Oct 16, 2014 |By Esther Hsieh

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RADIO

A little-known fact: the tongue is directly connected to the brain stem. This anatomical feature is now being harnessed by scientists to improve rehabilitation.

A team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recently found that electrically stimulating the tongue can help patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) improve their gait. MS is an incurable disease in which the insulation around the nerves becomes damaged, disrupting the communication between body and brain. One symptom is loss of muscle control.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuro-Engineering and Rehabilitation, Wisconsin neuroscientist ...

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Learning About Your Family’s Elevated Alzheimer’s Risk—as Early as Age 8
By Gary Stix | November 15, 2014 |

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Hugo, a participant in a pioneering Colombian drug trial, along with two nieces, Mariana and Daniela.

A Colombian university is providing regular workshops on brain basics and genetics to grade schoolers from families who face a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s in the prime of life from a rare genetic mutation. The “talleres” set up by the University of Antioquia in Medellin attempt to prepare these youngsters for the all-too-frequent possibility of a mother or father starting to lose their memories just before the age of 50, marking the beginning of a relentless decline that results in their deaths 10 years or so later.

In the course of these educational sessions, the youngsters also learn the unsettling information that they, too, risk becoming the next generation of patients. The Colombian department of Antioquia has the largest group in the world of relatives at risk for familial Alzheimer’s. In this form of the disease, inheritance of a genetic mutation from even one parent means that a person is virtually destined to get Alzheimer’s at an early age. The so-called paisa genetic mutation—nicknamed for the people of Antioquia and surrounding areas—changes the way ...

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7 Solutions to Climate Change Happening Now
Even as the world continues to spew more carbon pollution, change has begun—and is accelerating
November 17, 2014 |By David Biello

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Clean Energy Boom: Big dams and little solar panels like these in China are helping produce electricity with less greenhouse pollution, one of several solutions to climate change advancing around the world.
© David Biello

A man who once flew all the way to Copenhagen from Washington, D.C., just to tell journalists that climate change wasn't that big a deal is likely now to return to lead (or at least strongly influence) the environment committee of the U.S. Senate. As Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.) said at that time, in December 2009, he came to Copenhagen to "make sure that nobody is laboring under the misconception that the U.S. Senate is going to do something" about climate change. His thinking likely will not change by 2015; in fact, Inhofe has already decried the new U.S.–China climate agreement as a "nonbinding charade."

Even though the U.S. is responsible for the largest share of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the country will not be able to ...

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A Wacky Jet Stream Is Making Our Weather Severe
Extreme summers and winters of the past four years could become the norm
By Jeff Masters

From November 2013 through January 2014, the jet stream took on a remarkably extreme and persistent shape over North America and Europe. This global river of eastward-flowing winds high in the atmosphere dipped farther south than usual across the eastern U.S., allowing the notorious “polar vortex” of frigid air swirling over the Arctic to plunge southward, putting the eastern two thirds of the country into a deep freeze. Ice cover on the Great Lakes reached ...

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Neutrinos on Ice: How to Build a Balloon
By Katie Mulrey | November 15, 2014 | Comments2

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Panorama view of Mount Erebus. (Photo credit: Christian Miki)

Editor’s Note: Welcome to ANITA, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna! From October to December, Katie Mulrey is traveling with the ANITA collaboration to Antarctica to build and launch ANITA III, a scientific balloon that uses the entire continent of Antarctica for neutrino and cosmic ray detection. This is the third installment in a series, “Neutrinos on Ice,” documenting that effort.

It has officially been two weeks since we’ve seen the sun set! It’s been surprisingly easy to get into a routine here. We work seven days a week to make sure ANITA will be ready on time ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...ild-a-balloon/


A Day in the Life of an Ebola Worker
Denial, violence and fear make it difficult to stamp out Ebola in west Africa
November 21, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Community health workers and volunteers are an essential part of the Ebola response in Liberia.
Credit: Morgana Wingard/ UNDP/Flickr

Rebecca Robinson does not wear gloves on the job. A misstep while removing them, she says, could increase the risk of infecting herself with Ebola. Instead, she dons a rain jacket and boots and clutches a bottle of hand sanitizer as she travels by motorbike from house to house in Liberia's capital city of Monrovia. Her objective: to help trace the complex web of Ebola’s spread and to instruct apparently healthy people who may have had contact with an infected person to stay home for 21 days. Such quarantines, the Liberian government says, are a precautionary step to keep the virus from potentially moving even farther afield.

Robinson is one of the thousands of people working to quell the Ebola epidemic in west Africa through an age-old public health practice called contact tracing. She interviews people who may have potentially been exposed to others infected with the virus and ...

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Hydrogen May Prove Fuel of the Future
Will the most common molecule in the universe make for pollution-free cars?
November 18, 2014 |By Julia Pyper and ClimateWire

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Hyundai ix35 hydrogen fuel cell car.
Credit: Revolve Eco-Rally via flickr

First of a three-part series.

Humans have harnessed hydrogen for a variety of applications, from blasting rockets into space to making common household products like toothpaste. Now, after decades of development, hydrogen is about to find its way into the family car.

In June, Hyundai Motor Co. began leasing its Tucson Fuel Cell and has pledged to produce 1,000 units globally by 2015. Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. will start sales of their next-generation fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) next year. Yesterday, Toyota released a video showing the Mirai, its first commercial fuel cell car.

Several other automakers are aiming to release fuel cell cars in 2017.

One benefit is that FCVs ...

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4 Workers Killed at DuPont Chemical Plant
Methyl mercaptan leak appears to be responsible for the deaths at the industrial accident site in Texas
November 18, 2014 |By Andrea Widener and Chemical & Engineering News

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The DuPont facility, located east of Houston, uses methyl mercaptan to manufacture insecticides and fungicides, according to CSB. However, the chemical is more widely known as the additive in natural gas that gives it a distinctive rotten cabbage smell.
Credit: KHOU TV

Investigators from the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) are in Texas probing an apparent chemical leak that killed four workers and injured a fifth at a DuPont plant in La Porte, Texas.

The workers probably died from exposure to methyl mercaptan while responding to a valve leak around 4 AM on Nov. 15, DuPont said in a statement. The community around the plant was not at risk, the company adds.

“Our goal in investigating this accident is to determine the root cause and make recommendations to prevent any similar accidents throughout the industry,” CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso says.

Methyl mercaptan is a ...

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Can China Cut Coal?
By David Biello | November 25, 2014 | Comments2

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An old coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Yangtze River. © David Biello

On a visit to China a few years back, I asked a local official about pollution controls after enjoying my first sour, gritty taste of the country’s air. China’s new coal-fired power plants and other industrial boilers often came equipped with expensive scrubbers to clean acid rain and smog-forming sulfur dioxide out of the hot mix of gases that went up and out the smokestack. But the scrubbers required energy to run, this official noted, and therefore were shut off except on days when dignitaries (or foreign journalists) visited.

According to Hu Tao, an ecologist and environmental economist who directs the China program ...

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Cities to the Rescue
As nations dither on meaningful steps to combat climate change, localities are stepping in with their own measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases
Nov 18, 2014 |By David Biello

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The People's Climate March in New York City brought thousands to the streets.
GETTY IMAGES

In the city that never sleeps, the lights burn all night. And New York City needs energy for those lights, as well as for heating, air-conditioning and many other services. To meet these demands, the Big Apple belched nearly 60 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2005.

Eight years later, despite a rise in population and new construction, emissions of greenhouse gas pollution had dropped by more than 11 million metric tons. How did Gotham manage to go so green? By banning the dirtiest oil used for heating and benefiting from a switch to natural gas for generating electricity.

New York is not alone in taking climate change seriously. Cities across the globe are ...

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Electron Beam Points to Origins of Teotihuacan Stone Faces
New microscope analysis of artifacts from the ancient city also can find fakes in museums
November 20, 2014 |By Josh Fischman

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Courtesy Smithsonian

Dramatic stone masks, iconic finds in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan, were supposed to be made from a jadelike stone. Many researchers also thought the large faces were made on the site of the pre-Columbian metropolis. Instead, they seem to have been made in workshops a great distance to the south of the city. And they are made of softer stone like serpentinite and polished with quartz. Quartz does not appear around Teotihuacan, bolstering the notion that the masks were made far away. “Almost everything that has been written about the making of the Teotihuacan masks is untrue,” says Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

New details about the manufacture of these old and valuable masks are coming to light, thanks to modern technology: a special analytical scanning electron microscope that can identify the atoms and minerals that make up the stone, and show ...

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The Secret to a Successful Thanksgiving: Free Will
Psychologists examine where gratitude comes from
November 25, 2014 |By Piercarlo Valdesolo

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I appreciate that you had a choice
Credit: Thinkstock

Google “successful Thanksgiving” and you will get a lot of different recommendations. Most you’ve probably heard before: plan ahead, get help, follow certain recipes. But according to new research from Florida State University, enjoying your holiday also requires a key ingredient that few guests consider as they wait to dive face first into the turkey: a belief in free will. What does free will have to do with whether or not Aunt Sally leaves the table in a huff? These researchers argue that belief in free will is essential to experiencing the emotional state that makes Thanksgiving actually about giving thanks: gratitude.

Previous research has shown that our level of gratitude for an act depends on three things: ...

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DNA Can Survive Reentry from Space
Genetic blueprints attached to a rocket survived a short spaceflight and later passed on their biological instructions
November 26, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Credit: Stockbyte Royalty Free Photos

If a cascade of meteors struck Earth billions of years ago, could they have deposited genetic blueprints and forged an indelible link between Earth and another planet?

Perhaps. Although that puzzling question remains unanswered, scientists have uncovered a new clue that suggests it is possible for DNA to withstand the extreme heat and pressure it would encounter when entering our atmosphere from space.

In a new study published today in PLOS ONE, a team of Swiss and German scientists report that they dotted the exterior grooves of a rocket with fragments of DNA to test the genetic material’s stability in space. Surprisingly, they discovered that ...

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DNA Can Survive Reentry from Space
Genetic blueprints attached to a rocket survived a short spaceflight and later passed on their biological instructions
November 26, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Credit: Stockbyte Royalty Free Photos

If a cascade of meteors struck Earth billions of years ago, could they have deposited genetic blueprints and forged an indelible link between Earth and another planet?

Perhaps. Although that puzzling question remains unanswered, scientists have uncovered a new clue that suggests it is possible for DNA to withstand the extreme heat and pressure it would encounter when entering our atmosphere from space.

In a new study published today in PLOS ONE, a team of Swiss and German scientists report that they dotted the exterior grooves of a rocket with fragments of DNA to test the genetic material’s stability in space. Surprisingly, they discovered that ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._HLTH_20141202


Is the Blood of Ebola Survivors an Effective Treatment?
By Dina Fine Maron | December 1, 2014 | Comments2

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Credit: PhotoDisc/ Getty Images

When the World Health Organization recently named blood transfusions from Ebola survivors as its priority experimental therapy for the disease ravaging west Africa there was only one major problem: no data indicating that such transfusions work. Blood plasma from survivors contains antibodies that could potentially trigger an immune system response in patients, which would bolster their ability to fight the virus, but clinical data suggesting it has helped patients beat back the virus does not exist.

In the absence of any other approved therapy or vaccine for Ebola, however ...

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Brain Training Doesn’t Make You Smarter
Scientists doubt claims from brain training companies
December 2, 2014 |By David Z. Hambrick

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Try exercise
Credit: Thinkstock

If you’ve spent more than about 5 minutes surfing the web, listening to the radio, or watching TV in the past few years, you will know that cognitive training—better known as “brain training”—is one of the hottest new trends in self improvement. Lumosity, which offers web-based tasks designed to improve cognitive abilities such as memory and attention, boasts 50 million subscribers and advertises on National Public Radio. Cogmed claims to be “a computer-based solution for attention problems caused by poor working memory,” and BrainHQ will help you “make the most of your unique brain.” The promise of all of these products, implied or explicit, is that brain training can make you smarter—and make your life better.

Yet, according to a statement released by the Stanford University Center on Longevity and the Berlin Max Planck Institute for Human Development, there is no solid scientific evidence to ...

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Photons Double Up to Help Us See Beyond the Visible Light Spectrum
Our little-known ability to see infrared light could occur when pairs of photons combine their energies to appear as one "visible" photon
December 2, 2014 |By Katharine Sanderson and Nature magazine

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Although we do not have X-ray vision like Superman, we have what could seem to be another superpower: we can see infrared light — beyond what was traditionally considered the visible spectrum.
Credit: Sam Bald via Flickr

Although we do not have X-ray vision like Superman, we have what could seem to be another superpower: we can see infrared light — beyond what was traditionally considered the visible spectrum. A series of experiments now suggests that this little-known, puzzling effect could occur when pairs of infrared photons simultaneously hit the same pigment protein in the eye, providing enough energy to set in motion chemical changes that allow us to see the light.

Received wisdom, and the known chemistry of vision, say that human eyes can see light with wavelengths between 400 (blue) and 720 nanometres (red). Although this range is still officially known as the 'visible spectrum', the advent of lasers ...

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Alien Yet Familiar: Following Curiosity Across Mars
By Caleb A. Scharf | November 28, 2014 |

822 Martian days after landing, NASA’s Curiosity rover, carrying the Mars Science Laboratory, continues on its extraordinary journey across landscapes that are both utterly alien, and remarkably familiar. Here’s a small update. On November 18th 2014 the rover was in the center of this region (within the Pahrump Hills), continuing across the base area of Mount Sharp, the 18,000 foot central peak within Gale Crater:

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Curiosity at the center. Image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

In the next image you can get an idea of the planned route as it was back in September 2014 (with an improved, slightly more efficient path) – this map also gives a better indication of where Curiosity has come from since its touchdown at Bradbury Landing, and an inkling of the scale of Mount Sharp (insert).

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(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

But the grander perspective comes from seeing Mount Sharp in its full glory, as shown here from a NASA/JPL release in September 2014. The scope of the rover’s journey and ambition is impressive, to say the least.

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Parsing the Science of Interstellar with Physicist Kip Thorne
By Lee Billings | November 28, 2014 | Comments36

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The supermassive black hole and one of its planets in 'Interstellar.' Credit: Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros.

In an earlier blog post about Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar, I lauded the film for its ambition, its visuals and the strong performances of its cast. However, I also criticized it for its depiction of interstellar travel and a plot filled with details that didn’t seem to make much sense.

Perhaps because I called some of its science “laughably wrong,” my post drew the attention of Kip Thorne, the Caltech physicist who served as science advisor on the film. Thorne sent me a copy of his new book, The Science of Interstellar, and encouraged me to read it and reconsider my criticisms. The book tells ...

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Launch of Orion Paves the Way for NASA’s Return to Human Spaceflight
The first human-rated U.S. spacecraft since the space shuttle took an unmanned trial run on Friday
December 5, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

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The Orion capsule lifts off on a Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. December 5, 2014.
Clara Moskowitz/Scientific American

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.— A crowd of thousands on Florida’s Space Coast watched the world’s largest rocket launch the new Orion capsule on its first trip to space. NASA’s replacement for the space shuttle, Orion could one day carry people to an asteroid and even to Mars. Today, however, it flew without a crew on a trial run that should send it around Earth twice, reaching a peak altitude of 5,800 kilometers (15 times higher than the International Space Station)—farther than any human-rated spacecraft has gone in 40 years. The capsule is due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean about four-and-a-half hours after its launch, which took place Friday, a day late after wind, a wayward boat and a fuel valve glitch prevented a first launch attempt on Thursday. Orion finally lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station this morning at 7:05 a.m. EST.

“We haven’t had this feeling in a while, since the end of the shuttle program,” Orion flight director Mike Sarafin of the Johnson Space Center in Houston said Wednesday before the liftoff. “We’re launching an American spacecraft from American soil and beginning something new and exploring deep space.” Since the last space shuttle landed in 2011 ...

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U.S. Ebola Vaccine Clears Safety Test
The candidate drug will be tested next to see how well it can help prevent infection
December 1, 2014 |By Ewen Callaway and Nature magazine

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Study participant receives NIAID/GSK candidate ebola vaccine
Credit: NIAID via Flickr

An experimental vaccine against Ebola virus seems to be safe and commands a strong immune response against the virus, according to tests in 20 healthy people in the United States. The results of the phase 1 trial are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“All in all, I would say it was a successful phase 1 study,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which co-developed the drug with the London-based drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). “The next steps are to move ahead with a larger efficacy trial in West Africa.”

The vaccine is similar to one that is on track to be tested in larger trials in West Africa, which are likely begin early next year. In these phase 2 and phase 3 trials, thousands of people who are ...

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Rooftop Solar Cost Competitive with the Grid in Much of the U.S.
Can solar power compete with fossil fuels?
December 1, 2014

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The cost of electricity derived from residential rooftop solar panels could achieve "price parity" with fossil-fuel-based grid power in 47 U.S. states by 2016 according to a new report from Deutsche Bank.
Credit: Courtesy 64MM, Flickr CC

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that the price of getting solar panels installed on a home is lower than ever, but has it gotten to the point anywhere in the U.S. where it’s actually cheaper than traditional grid power yet?
--Lester Milstein, Boston, MA

Rooftop solar panels on have always been the province of well-to-do, eco-friendly folks willing to shell out extra bucks to be green, but that is all starting to change. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the cost of putting solar panels on a typical American house has fallen by some 70 percent over the last decade and a half. And a recent report from Deutsche Bank shows that solar has already achieved so-called “price parity” with fossil fuel-based grid power in 10 U.S. states. Deutsche Bank goes on to say that solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in all but three states by 2016—assuming,that is, that the federal government maintains the 30 percent solar investment tax ...

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How House Calls Slash Health Care Costs
A MacArthur “genius” grant winner is now formally studying how hot-spotting method cuts expensive emergency room visits and delivers better care
December 5, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Credit: Getty

Even the most trivial of emergency-room trips can quickly add up. Going in for an upper respiratory infection averages more than $1,000. A urinary tract infection can set patients back thousands of dollars. But before Obamacare came on the scene, New Jersey physician Jeffrey Brenner was already working on innovative ways to slash health-care costs. He scoured health-care billing data at local hospitals and discovered that a small number of “super utilizers” clustered in certain geographic areas were responsible for the bulk of health-care costs in Camden, N.J. He brought together a team of social workers and medical professionals, who made regular house calls to those patients, accompanied them to doctor’s appointments ...

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Ebola Infections Fewer Than Predicted by Disease Models
Improvements in health care and other uncertainties make accurate forecasts difficult
December 8, 2014 |By Seema Yasmin

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Modelers are forced to build some assumptions into their programs because of a lack of data. That’s especially true at the beginning of an epidemic when efforts to stop the outbreak take precedence over accurate data collection and communication.
Credit: USAID via flickr

A few months ago the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that up to 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone could become infected with Ebola by mid-January. In a recent address to the Senate, CDC director Tom Frieden said that worst-case scenario would not pan out.

That is partly because health care workers in the Ebola hot zone are engaged in a battle to contain the epidemic. It is also because of assumptions about human and viral behavior that are built into the mathematical models used to predict the spread of infectious diseases. Assumptions are inherent in these models. “You take islands of data from different places and build bridges of assumptions that link up all these islands,” says Martin Meltzer, senior health economist at the CDC. Meltzer’s model, which predicted ...

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Can Fear Be Erased?
Hormone and gene therapies for anxiety and PTSD could be on the way
December 4, 2014 |By Bret Stetka

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Give oxytocin to people with certain anxiety disorders, and activity in the amygdala—the primary fear center in human and other mammalian brains, two almond-shaped bits of brain tissue sitting deep beneath our temples—falls.
Credit: Amber Rieder, Jenna Traynor, & Geoffrey B Hall via Wikimedia Commons

When University of Bonn psychologist Monika Eckstein designed her latest published study, the goal was simple: administer a hormone into the noses of 62 men in hopes that their fear would go away. And for the most part, it did.

The hormone was oxytocin, often called our “love hormone” due to its crucial role in mother-child relationships, social bonding, and intimacy (levels soar during sex). But it also seems to have a significant antianxiety effect. Give oxytocin to people with certain anxiety disorders, and activity in the amygdala—the primary fear center in human and other mammalian brains, two almond-shaped bits of brain tissue sitting deep beneath our temples—falls.

The amygdala normally buzzes with activity in response to potentially threatening stimuli. When an organism repeatedly encounters ...

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Practice Doesn't Always Make Perfect
Science does not bear out the popular idea that nearly anyone can succeed with enough practice
Oct 16, 2014 |By Nathan Collins

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JASON LEE

It takes many thousands of hours of hard work to get to the top—yet time alone is not enough if you lack the other attributes necessary in your discipline, according to a study published online in July in Psychological Science.

In 1993 psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues argued that success was not a matter of talent but rather what they termed deliberate practice, an idea that Malcolm Gladwell popularized as the “10,000-hour rule” in his book Outliers. Still, the role of deliberate practice—activities designed with the goal of improving performance—remained controversial. To try to sort things out, psychologist Brooke N. Macnamara of Princeton University and her colleagues reviewed 157 experimental results connecting total time spent practicing to ability in sports, music, education and other areas. On average, practice time accounted for ...

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What Is This “Atmospheric River” That Is Flooding California?
By Mark Fischetti | December 11, 2014 | Comments5

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The San Francisco Bay Area is getting flooded with relentless rain and strong winds, just like it did a week ago, and fears of rising water are now becoming very serious. Major news stations, weather channels, Web outlets and social media are all suddenly talking about the “atmospheric river” that is bringing deluge after deluge to California, as well as the coast of Washington. What is this thing? How rare is it? And how big of a threat could it be? Here are some answers. And see our graphics, below, taken from a brilliant and prescient feature article written by Michael Dettinger and Lynn Ingram in Scientific American in January 2013.

Not interested? In 1861 an atmospheric river that brought storms for 43 days turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, 800,000 cattle drowned and the state went bankrupt. A similar disaster today ...

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2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past
New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe
December 8, 2014 |By Lee Billings

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In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past.
Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Physicists have a problem with time.

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” ...

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Mysterious Seafloor Methane Begins to Melt Off Washington State Coast
Researchers probe the oceans off the west coast and see signs of the meltdown of icy methane similar in size to the BP oil spill
December 10, 2014 |By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire

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Warming of the Pacific Ocean off Washington state could destabilize methane deposits on the seafloor and trigger a release of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.
Credit: Sam Beebe via Flickr

Warming of the Pacific Ocean off Washington state could destabilize methane deposits on the seafloor and trigger a release of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

In the worst-case scenario, if oceans warm by up to 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100, the volume of methane release every year by 2100 would quadruple the amount by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the study estimates.

At issue are methane hydrates, which are complexes of methane trapped in frozen ice buried in ocean beds. The hydrates are found throughout the world's oceans and are maintained by cool water and immense pressures. But as the oceans warm, the hydrates get destabilized and methane is released.

Methane is a significant greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential 86 times as potent as CO2 on a 20-year time scale. Some scientists worry that ...

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Bed Bugs, Kissing Bugs Linked to Deadly Chagas Disease in U.S.
Risk may still be low, but findings lead scientists to call for better studies
December 10, 2014 |By Jennifer Frazer

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Triatoma gerstaeckeri collected in Southeast Texas.
Credit: Rodion Gorchakov

Every year, the hearts of millions of Central and South Americans are quietly damaged by parasites. During the night, insects called kissing bugs emerge by the hundreds from hiding places in people’s mud and stick homes to bite their sleeping victims. The bugs defecate near the punctured skin and wriggling wormlike parasites in this poop may enter the wound and head for their victims' hearts. There, in about a third of victims, they damage the organs for decades before causing potentially lethal heart disease. Around 12,000 people worldwide die each year from the ailment, called Chagas disease.

Scientists thought Americans were safe in their sturdier houses. Now some are not so sure. Chagas-infected kissing bugs do enter at least some southern U.S. dwellings and bite people living there, recent studies suggest. And a new study published two weeks ago raises the specter ...

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What Rare Disorder Is Hiding in Your DNA?
As comprehensive genetic tests become more widespread, patients and experts mull how to deal with unexpected findings
Dec 16, 2014 |By Dina Fine Maron

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Skip Sterling

Last spring Laura Murphy, then 28 years old, went to a doctor to find out if a harmless flap of skin she had always had on the back of her neck was caused by a genetic mutation. Once upon a time, maybe five years ago, physicians would have focused on just that one question. But today doctors tend to run tests that pick up mutations underlying a range of hereditary conditions. Murphy learned not only that a genetic defect was indeed responsible for the flap but also that she had another inherited genetic mutation.

This one predisposed her to long QT syndrome, a condition that dramatically increases the risk of sudden cardiac death. In people with the syndrome ...

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Exercise Counteracts Genetic Risk for Alzheimer's
Regular physical activity may correct the brain's metabolism to stave off dementia
Oct 16, 2014 |By Emilie Reas

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THINKSTOCK

If you carried a gene that doubled your likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease, would you want to know? What if there was a simple lifestyle change that virtually abolished that elevated risk? People with a gene known as APOE e4 have a higher risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in old age. Even before behavioral symptoms appear, their brains show reduced metabolism, altered activity and more deterioration than those without the high-risk gene. Yet accumulating research is showing that carrying this gene is not necessarily a sentence for memory loss and confusion—if you know how to work it to your advantage with exercise.

Scientists have long known that exercise can help stave off cognitive decline. Over the past decade evidence has mounted suggesting that this benefit is even greater for those at higher genetic risk for Alzheimer's. For example, two studies by a team in Finland and Sweden found that exercising at least twice a week in midlife lowers one's chance of getting dementia more than 20 years later, and this protective effect is stronger in people with the APOE e4 gene. Several others reported that frequent exercis ...

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NASA Rover Finds Mysterious Methane Emissions on Mars
New results suggest evidence for extraterrestrial life could be near at hand
December 16, 2014 |By Lee Billings

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NASA's Curiosity rover, seen here in a self-portrait from spring 2014, has found conclusive evidence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. The gas is a potential sign of alien life, though it could also be produced through abiotic mechanisms.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Is there life on Mars? The answer may be blowing in the wind.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected fluctuating traces of methane – a possible sign of life – in the thin, cold air of the Martian atmosphere, researchers announced today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Across Mars and within Gale Crater, where Curiosity is slowly climbing a spire of sedimentary rock called Mount Sharp, the methane exists at a background concentration of slightly less than one part per billion by volume in the atmosphere (ppb). However, for reasons unknown, four times across a period of two months the rover measured much higher methane abundances, at about ten times the background level. Further in-situ studies of the methane emissions could help pin down whether Mars has life, now ...

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Fact or Fiction?: The Explosive Death of Eta Carinae Will Cause a Mass Extinction
We almost certainly have nothing to fear from one of the largest and brightest stars in the sky
December 16, 2014 |By Lee Billings

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The star system Eta Carinae is nearing its death as a supernova.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

When we think about “existential” threats, things that could potentially end the lives of everyone on Earth, most of the possibilities come from right here on our own planet—climate change, global pandemics and atomic warfare. Turning a paranoid gaze to the skies, we typically worry about asteroid strikes or perhaps some perilously massive burp from our sun.

But if you trust everything you read on the fringe regions of the internet, you may think the most fearsome heavenly threat may not only be extraterrestrial, but also extrasolar. Some 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina a star called Eta Carinae, at least a hundred times more massive than our own sun, is approaching the point where it will detonate as a supernova. Simply put, Eta Carinae is ...

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Will Cuba Now Embrace U.S. Technology?
The president is offering Cuba something the Castro government never asked for: access to U.S.-backed telecommunications services and gadgets
December 18, 2014 |By Larry Greenemeier

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Image of Cuba’s Communist Party headquarters, courtesy of Marco Zanferrari, via Flickr.

Pres. Barack Obama made good Wednesday on a years-old promise to begin to normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba. An authorization for U.S. companies to increase telecommunications connections between the two countries is a key component of the new U.S. policy.

The administration foreshadowed these changes in April 2009 when Obama directed the secretaries of State, Treasury and Commerce to “take the steps required” to let U.S. network providers cut deals to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite links between the U.S. and Cuba. Assuming the Castro regime ...

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For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal
An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities
December 17, 2014 |By Charles Seife

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In the past few years signs of foul play in the peer-reviewed literature have cropped up across the scientific publishing world
Credit: Mike Watson Images/Thinkstock

Klaus Kayser has been publishing electronic journals for so long he can remember mailing them to subscribers on floppy disks. His 19 years of experience have made him keenly aware of the problem of scientific fraud. In his view, he takes extraordinary measures to protect the journal he currently edits, Diagnostic Pathology. For instance, to prevent authors from trying to pass off microscope images from the Internet as their own, he requires them to send along the original glass slides.

Despite his vigilance, however, signs of possible research misconduct have crept into some articles published in Diagnostic Pathology. Six of the 14 articles in the May 2014 issue, for instance, contain suspicious repetitions of phrases and other irregularities. When Scientific American informed ...

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