Science News

Oil Sands Raise Levels of Cancer-Causing Compounds in Regional Waters

From carcinogens to acid rain, tar sands development is raising levels of industrial pollution across the north

By David Biello

FORT MCMURRAY—Air monitoring equipment litters northern Alberta. From Fort Chipewyan south towards Edmonton there are 17 sites measuring air quality, but here the monitoring outpost sits across the Athabasca River from the highway that connects the mining town with the oil mines to the north, and just down the road from the new multi-million dollar recreation center. Machines, such as the electronic nose or the laser-wielding robot that measures atmospheric ozone 10 kilometers up known as the sun photometer, constantly monitor the concentrations of pollution in the air. Data about acid rain-forming sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides levels feeds into a Web site updated every five minutes. Overseeing all this technology is Kelly Baragar, an air monitoring specialist for more than two decades who has worked in Middle Eastern deserts and Indonesian jungles before arriving here in the cold, boreal forest that is undergoing a rapid transformation into a working landscape of oil extraction.

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AIR POLLUTION: Emissions from oil sands operations, like the mini-refinery pictured here, have raised levels of potentially toxic contamination in regional waters. Image: © David Biello

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How Humans Will Evolve on Multigenerational Space Exploration Missions [Preview]

How future generations will make the voyage from our earthly home to the planets and beyond—and what it means for our species

By Cameron M. Smith

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Image: Tavis Coburn
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The Mind’s Compartments Create Conflicting Beliefs

How our modular brains lead us to deny and distort evidence

By Michael Shermer


If you have pondered how intelligent and educated people can, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, believe that evolution is a myth, that global warming is a hoax, that vaccines cause autism and asthma, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration, conjecture no more. The explanation is in what I call logic-tight compartments—modules in the brain analogous to watertight compartments in a ship.

The concept of compartmentalized brain functions acting either in concert or in conflict has been a core idea of evolutionary psychology since the early 1990s. According to University of Pennsylvania evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban in ...

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Fortified by Global Warming, Deadly Fungus Poisons Corn Crops, Causes Cancer

A carcinogenic mold, its growth exacerbated by the warming climate, reached record highs in 2012

By Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato

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Image: Ewok Jorduman/Flickr

Last year’s drought increased the spread of a carcinogenic mold called aspergillus (Aspergillus flavus), a fungal pathogen that poisons cattle, kills pets and has infected the 2012 corn crop, rendering significant portions of the harvest unfit for consumption.

Whereas the deadly organism mainly affects countries like China and developing African nations, many U.S. states have experienced an increase in corn contamination since 2011. Farmers are likely to see more of ...

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Brains of “Super Agers” Look Decades Younger

A key attention region may underlie some octogenarians' unusual abilities

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

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As people age, their brain tends to shrink and their memory gets worse. But what if this deterioration weren't inevitable? New research suggests not only that some elderly individuals retain sharp memory skills but also that their brain remains unscathed. Although scientists do not yet know what is responsible for this special resiliency—or how to help people acquire it—a brain region involved in attention may offer an important clue.

Researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine identified 12 individuals older than 80 years—whom they ...

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Chaos in the Brain

by Lewis Dartnell

Very interesting reading http://www.amattos.eng.br/CURIOSIDAD..._and_brain.htm

NASA Beams Mona Lisa to Moon with Laser

Scientists beamed a picture of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece to a spacecraft orbiting the moon—the first laser communication of its kind

By Miriam Kramer and SPACE.com

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Image: NASA

Call it the ultimate in high art: Using a well-timed laser, NASA scientists have beamed a picture of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, to a powerful spacecraft orbiting the moon, marking a first in laser communication.

The laser signal, fired from an installation in Maryland, beamed the Mona Lisa to the moon to be received 240,000 miles (384,400 km) away by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009. The Mona Lisa transmission, NASA scientists said, is a major advance in laser communication for interplanetary spacecraft.

"This is the first time anyone has achieved ...

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Eat Less by Altering Your Food Memories

Hunger is affected by how much you think you ate

By Jason Castro

If you made a New Year’s resolution a few weeks ago, you probably decided to get fit or lose weight – two goals that pretty unavoidably involve a pledge to eat less. Perhaps you’ve stuck with it so far, through some combination of brute will, guilt, and the deployment of winning slogans at spots of greatest temptation. But unless you’re one of the rare successful long-term dieters, your assault on adiposity will be short lived. Sooner or later, you’ll find your way back to foods that are sweet, fat, and synthetically tinted.

Why do we eat bad stuff, and too much of it?

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Why Hasn't the Whole Universe Collapsed into an Enormous Black Hole? [video]

Scientific American contributing editor George Musser answers viewer questions submitted to YouTube's Spacelab Channel

By Eric R. Olson


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q5Zk...layer_embedded

Submit your questions on this page http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...T_SPC_20130131
and see it answered by an expert on

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Bright Screens Could Delay Bedtime

Using a tablet or computer in the late evening disrupts the body's melatonin production

By Stephani Sutherland

If you have trouble sleeping, laptop or tablet use at bedtime might be to blame, new research suggests. Mariana Figueiro of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her team showed that two hours of iPad use at maximum brightness was enough to suppress people's normal nighttime release of melatonin, a key hormone in the body's clock, or circadian system. Melatonin tells your body that it is night, helping to make you sleepy. If you delay that signal, Figueiro says, you could delay sleep. Other research indicates that “if you do that chronically, for many years, it can lead to disruption of the circadian system,” sometimes with serious health consequences, she explains.

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About That Overpopulation Problem

Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.

http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...exploding.html