Science News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can also see a conversation ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sperm cell fertilizing an egg.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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Logan Faerber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ALAMY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Credit: James Woodson/Thinkstock

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

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

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

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

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


>>View slide show of natural wonders threatened by climate change on http://www.scientificamerican.com/sl...ne-slide-show/

More about this article on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_EVO_20150323

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A supertide envelopes Mont Saint-Michel.
Associated Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An independent committee was established to investigate and ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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STUART BRIERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, it should be said that ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gravity, as the old joke goes, sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Duke of Buckingham

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

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

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150414

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*Sigh* :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Scientific American

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

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mumps

*Sigh*:(

Quote:

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

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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mumps

*Sigh* :(

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Indium gallium arsenide ftw!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They looked at exposures lower than ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As cameras become critical parts of networks ...

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

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

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

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

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Celebrating 25 years of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Credit: Shepard4711/Flickr

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

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

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

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Here's What a Cyber Warfare Arsenal Might Look Like
Stuxnet was just the beginning, as malware becomes the new nuclear option
By Larry Greenemeier | May 6, 2015

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New Weapons of War: Defense Secretary Ash Carter delivers a lecture, "Rewiring the Pentagon: Charting a New Path on Innovation and Cybersecurity," at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., April 23, 2015.
DoD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Clydell Kinchen.

The Pentagon has made clear in recent weeks that cyber warfare is no longer just a futuristic threat—it is now a real one. U.S. government agency and industry computer systems are already embroiled in a number of nasty cyber warfare campaigns against attackers based in China, North Korea, Russia and elsewhere. As a counterpoint, hackers with ties to Russia have been accused of stealing a number of Pres. Barack Obama’s e-mails, although the White House has not formally blamed placed any blame at the Kremlin’s doorstep. The Obama administration did, however, call out North Korea for ordering last year’s cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The battle has begun. “External actors probe and scan [U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)] networks for vulnerabilities millions of times each day, and over 100 foreign intelligence agencies continually attempt to infiltrate DoD networks,” Eric Rosenbach, assistant secretary for homeland defense and global security, testified in April before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. “Unfortunately, some incursions—by both state and nonstate entities—have succeeded.”

After years of debate as to how the fog of war will extend to the Internet, Obama last month signed an executive order declaring ...

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Astronomers Seek Super-Size Hubble Successor to Search for Alien Life
Controversy swirls around a bold proposal for a bigger, better—and expensive—replacement for NASA’s premier space telescope
By Lee Billings | May 4, 2015

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The proposed High-Definition Space Telescope could resemble this artist's rendition when and if it is built and launched. Composed of multiple hexagonal segments, the central primary mirror would span some 10 meters, and would be protected by a vast "sunshield." The unrivaled light-gathering power of such a large space telescope would offer revolutionary possibilities for many areas of astronomy.
Credit: NASA/GSFC

On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rode a space shuttle into low Earth orbit to become the most productive observatory in history. A quarter-century on, the universe may be the same but our understanding of it is not, forever transformed by the pristine ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared vistas revealed by the Hubble’s 2.4-meter mirror high above Earth’s atmosphere. Peering across the cosmos, Hubble mapped dark matter and helped discover dark energy, the mysterious force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. Closer to home, it snapped pictures of giant exoplanets orbiting other stars, found new moons around Pluto and spied watery plumes bursting from the subsurface ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa. Almost everywhere it looked, Hubble made major discoveries. It became NASA’s premiere “flagship” observatory, and the agency supported it by replacing and upgrading obsolete components during five space shuttle servicing missions.

But Hubble’s time is running out; the space shuttles are no longer flying, and no more servicing missions are planned. Sooner or later Hubble’s crucial components will degrade and fail. Eventually its orbit will decay, turning the multibillion-dollar telescope into tumbling chunks of slag that burn in the atmosphere and splash into the ocean. Astronomers, ever hopeful, plan to continue using Hubble for several years to come, potentially into the 2020s, but know all too well that its days are numbered.

“When Hubble goes, it goes,” says John Mather, a Nobel laureate astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “And we don’t have ...

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Physicists Are Philosophers, Too
In his final essay the late physicist Victor Stenger argues for the validity of philosophy in the context of modern theoretical physics
By Victor J. Stenger, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian | May 8, 2015

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The ongoing feud between physicists and philosophers cuts to the heart of what science can tell us about the nature of reality.

Editor’s Note: Shortly before his death last August at the age of 79, the noted physicist and public intellectual Victor Stenger worked with two co-authors to pen an article for Scientific American. In it Stenger and co-authors address the latest eruption of a long-standing historic feud, an argument between physicists and philosophers about the nature of their disciplines and the limits of science. Can instruments and experiments (or pure reason and theoretical models) ever reveal the ultimate nature of reality? Does the modern triumph of physics make philosophy obsolete? What philosophy, if any, could modern theoretical physicists be said to possess? Stenger and his co-authors introduce and address all these profound questions in this thoughtful essay and seek to mend the growing schism between these two great schools of thought. When physicists make claims about the universe, Stenger writes, they are also engaging in a grand philosophical tradition that dates back thousands of years. Inescapably, physicists are philosophers, too. This article, Stenger’s last, appears in full below.

In April 2012 theoretical physicist, cosmologist and best-selling author Lawrence Krauss was pressed hard in an interview with Ross Andersen for The Atlantic titled “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?” Krauss's response to this question dismayed philosophers because he remarked, “philosophy used to be a field that had content,” to which he later added,

“Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics whatsoever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened—and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.”

Later that year Krauss had a friendly discussion with ...

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Nuclear Power Seems Doomed to Dwindle in the U.S. [Infographic]
The transformer fire at Indian Point Energy Center on the Hudson River is just the latest incident plaguing the U.S. nuclear industry
By David Biello | May 13, 2015

After another transformer fire at the Indian Point nuclear facility on May 9, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo would like to see the power plant shut down for good. The aging nuclear power plant is in the midst of its application to the federal government for a license renewal, which would allow the two reactors on site to continue to harness fission to boil water for electricity generation for another 20 years. But with local, well-connected opposition like the governor, Indian Point's days as a nuclear facility may be numbered no matter what federal regulators decide.

Indian Point is not unique in heading toward shutdown, although the circumstances of each reactor's closing are as unique as the reactors themselves. In the past few years five nuclear reactors from Florida to California have shut down permanently—despite license renewals. The reactors at San Onofre in California and Crystal River in Florida ceased operations over botched repairs that caused safety concerns. The Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin closed early because its ability to make money by selling electricity was undercut by cheap natural gas and renewables like wind power and similar economic woes shuttered Vermont Yankee. Several currently operating reactors face the same challenges: Without financial support from Illinois's government, the slew of reactors in that state may shut down, too. And unlike Indian Point, which makes money selling electricity to power-hungry New York City, nuclear reactors in other parts of the state face economic challenges.

There are currently four reactors under construction in the U.S., and one new reactor—conceived in the 1970s and taking decades to complete—will open soon at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar power plant in Tennessee. But that will not be enough to replace ...

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How to Prevent More Deaths When the Earth Quakes
The solutions are simple but not easy to adopt, as the Nepal example shows
By David Biello | May 12, 2015

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A Nepalese woman stands carrying her child outside her house damaged in last month’s earthquake on the outskirts of Lalitpur, Nepal. The April 25 earthquake killed more than 8,000 people and left thousands more homeless, as it flattened mountain villages and destroyed buildings in the Himalayan region.
(AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Many of the hundreds of thousands of homes that gave way in the earthquakes that have rocked Nepal in April and May shared one common feature: heavy roofs. Building collapse in Kathmandu and surrounding areas contributed to a death toll now rising toward 10,000. The destruction of buildings sharing the same flaw helped kill 200,000 in the 2010 quake in Haiti, more than 80,000 in China in 2008 and at least 80,000 in Pakistan in 2005, to name just the most recent deadly disasters.

In contrast, only around 500 people died in Chile when it was struck in 2010 by a temblor 10 times stronger than the one that shook Nepal. The difference was simple: Chile spent more money on better construction technology and ensured that people built appropriately following a disastrous earthquake in 1960. Chile's approach shows that it is possible to build structures that can dramatically reduce the loss of life in a strong quake, but implementing such methods remains a challenge in much of the world.

"Human nature seems pretty universally to favor quicker and cheaper, particularly when considering ...

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Train Tragedies and Transformations
Derailments, fires and crashes continue as the U.S.’s rail infrastructure decays and technology solutions lie fallow
May 14, 2015

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The Daily Climate
Train Deaths Rise Amid Energy-Driven Rail Transformation
Fatalities reach seven-year high as railroads embark on a record expansion

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Bacteria May Be Remaking Drugs in Sewage
Microbes that clean water may also be piecing some pharmaceuticals back together
By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News | May 14, 2015

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Credit: eutrophication&hypoxia/Flickr

Wastewater treatment plants not only struggle removing pharmaceuticals, it seems some drugs actually increase after treatment.

When researchers tested wastewater before and after treatment at a Milwaukee-area treatment plant, they found that two drugs—the anti-epileptic carbamazepine and antibiotic ofloxacin—came out at higher concentrations than they went in. The study suggests the microbes that clean our water may also piece some pharmaceuticals back together.

Carbamazepine and ofloxacin on average increased by 80 percent and 120 percent, respectively, during the treatment process. Such drugs, and their metabolites (formed as part of the natural biochemical process of degrading and eliminating the compounds), get into the wastewater by people taking them and excreting them. Flushing drugs accounts for some of the levels too.

“Microbes seem to be making pharmaceuticals out of what used to be pharmaceuticals,” said lead author Benjamin Blair, who spearheaded the work as a PhD. student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Blair is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado-Denver.

Blair and colleagues found 48 out of 57 pharmaceuticals they were looking for ...

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These 4 Chemicals May Pose the Most Risk for Nail Salon Workers
Besides the questionable labor practices that surround the shops, glues, lacquers and dust in the workplace create their own risks for nail technicians
By Dina Fine Maron | May 12, 2015

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Credit: Flickr/Angie Chung

As the nation’s 375,000 nail technicians buff, polish and file our fingers and toes, that workplace exposure to chemicals in the polish and glue can pose a real threat. But it’s not just the amount of those substance that can turn them toxic, it is also the way they get into workers’ bodies.

Workplace conditions in certain nail salons, expertly laid out last week in an investigation by The New York Times’s Sarah Maslin Nir, can alleviate or exacerbate these issues. Chemicals inside of the glues, removers, polishes and salon products—which technicians are often exposed to at close proximity and in poorly ventilated spaces—can be hazardous individually. When combined, however, they could potentially cause even greater harm. Yet it is difficult to know how these chemicals affect the body because current evaluations do not look at these substances comprehensively. There are also few reports looking at how each compound individually affects nail workers.

The risks are many: Dust shavings from filed nails can settle on the skin like pollen and cause irritation or can be inhaled (and those small particles could contain chemicals from the polishes or acrylics). Technicians could also inhale harmful vapors or mists from the chemicals in the shop. The compounds could also settle into workers’ eyes. Moreover, these substances could be swallowed while eating, drinking or puffing on a cigarette during a break.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which sets workplace safety standards, cites a laundry list of ...

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Where Is Avian Flu Hiding?
Three strains of the virus are decimating poultry farms across the country, but how they’re being transmitted remains unclear
By Dina Fine Maron | May 18, 2015

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Credit: Wikimedia commons/Fcb981

It was still winter in Minnesota when state officials first heard about turkeys on a large farm that seemed to be a bit off. Some of the birds were unusually quiet, drank and ate little and seemed to have trouble moving. Within two weeks of exhibiting this odd behavior they were dying. The cause, laboratory tests soon confirmed, was H5N2, a mixed-origin avian flu that had never been seen in the U.S. before this year.

For the nation’s number-one turkey-producing state, this was horrible news. In states including California and Washington the virus and its close cousins had led to more than 250,000 poultry deaths (by disease or depopulation) in the prior three months. Officials in Minnesota ...

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Microbial DNA in Human Body Can Be Used to Identify Individuals
The influence of the “microbiome” on our health has become a hot topic in recent years but privacy issues are now being raised
By Ewen Callaway and Nature magazine | May 13, 2015

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Human-genomics researchers have grappled with privacy concerns for years.
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Call it a ‘gut print’. The collective DNA of the microbes that colonize a human body can uniquely identify someone, researchers have found, raising privacy issues.

The finding, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 11, suggests that it might be possible to identify a participant in an anonymous study of the body’s microbial denizens—its microbiome—and to reveal details about that person’s health, diet or ethnicity. A publicly available trove of microbiome DNA maintained by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, already contains potentially identifiable human DNA, according to a study published in Genome Research on April 29.

The papers do not ...

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Moore's Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations
It’s a mystery why Gordon Moore’s “law,” which forecasts processor power will double every two years, still holds true a half century later
By Annie Sneed | May 19, 2015

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Credit: Jon Sullivan/Wikimedia Commons

SAN FRANCISCO—Personal computers, cellphones, self-driving cars—Gordon Moore predicted the invention of all these technologies half a century ago in a 1965 article for Electronics magazine. The enabling force behind those inventions would be computing power, and Moore laid out how he thought computing power would evolve over the coming decade. Last week the tech world celebrated his prediction here because it has held true with uncanny accuracy—for the past 50 years.

It is now called Moore’s law, although Moore (who co-founded the chip maker Intel) doesn’t much like the name. “For the first 20 years I couldn’t utter the term Moore’s law. It was embarrassing,” the 86-year-old visionary said in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at the gala event, held at Exploratorium science museum. “Finally, I got accustomed to it where now I could say it with a straight face.” He and Friedman chatted in front of a rapt audience, with Moore cracking jokes the whole time and doling out advice, like how once you’ve made one successful prediction, you should avoid making another. In the background Intel’s latest gadgets whirred quietly: collision-avoidance drones, dancing spider robots, a braille printer—technologies all made possible via advances in processing power anticipated by Moore’s law.

Of course, Moore’s law is not really a law like those describing gravity or the conservation of energy. It is a prediction that the number of transistors ...

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Fact or Fiction?: A "Base Tan" Can Protect against Sunburn
Studies of sunshine-denied human buttocks help settle the matter
By Dina Fine Maron | May 22, 2015

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A “base tan” does not fool the sun or a tanning bed.
Credit: Creative Commons/Flickr

As the weather warms, many of us would prefer to look like we passed our winter days lounging by the pool instead of hunched before a computer screen or lab bench. But soaking up the rays to acquire a so-called “base tan” does not fool the sun or a tanning bed. Simply put, the benefits of being sun-kissed are not even skin-deep.

Scientists came to this conclusion after studying the tanned buttocks of dozens of volunteers. In study after study they have found that a base tan affords almost no protection against future ultraviolet exposure. In fact, it actually puts otherwise pale people at risk of developing skin cancers. A base tan only provides an SPF, or sun protection factor, of 3 or less, according to the U.S. surgeon general. For beachgoers, that means if a person would normally turn pink after 10 minutes in the sun, an SPF 2 base tan would theoretically buy her another 10 minutes—or 20 minutes in total—before she burns. That, says David Leffell, the chief of dermatologic surgery and cutaneous oncology at Yale University School of Medicine, is “completely meaningless” in terms of providing protection.

The studies that helped solidify these ...

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How Smart Should the President Be?
A historical analysis suggests a link between IQ and performance
By David Z. Hambrick | May 26, 2015

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It goes without saying that IQ isn't the only predictor of success in this job. Many other factors matter, including experience, personality, motivation, interpersonal skill, and perhaps above all else, luck.
Credit: Sam Boulton Sr. via Wikimedia Commons

Do the smartest presidents make the best presidents? This question invariably emerges as a topic of spirited debate when the U.S. presidential election approaches. In 2004, former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines asked, “Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush?” Citing Bush’s and Kerry’s scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—an IQ-like test that the military uses to determine whether a recruit is qualified for enlistment—the conservative pundit Steve Sailer countered that there was no doubt that, in fact, Bush had the higher IQ. And the chatter about IQ has begun for next November’s election. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton is “smart enough to handle the job” and “may have a higher IQ than Bill”, while among Republican hopefuls, Jeb Bush is the “smart brother” and Ted Cruz “towers as the smartest presidential candidate”. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker may not be the smartest candidate but “our most intelligent presidents have often been our worst presidents” anyway.

There are three basic views on the relationship between IQ and success in the Oval Office. The first view says the smarter the president ...

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BPA May Prompt More Fat in the Human Body
New research suggests that humans transform the chemical into a compound linked to obesity
By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News | May 29, 2015

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People are exposed to BPA throughout the day, mostly through diet, as it can leach from canned goods and plastic storage containers into food, but also through dust and water.
Credit: Tony Alter via flickr

A new study suggests the long-held industry assumption that bisphenol-A breaks down safely in the human body is incorrect. Instead, researchers say, the body transforms the ubiquitous chemical additive into a compound that might spur obesity.

The study is the first to find that people’s bodies metabolize bisphenol-A (BPA) — a chemical found in most people and used in polycarbonate plastic, food cans and paper receipts — into something that impacts our cells and may make us fat.
The research, from Health Canada, challenges an untested assumption that our liver metabolizes BPA into a form that doesn’t impact our health.

“This shows we can’t just say things like ‘because it’s a metabolite, it means it’s not active’,” said Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved in the study. “You have to do a study.”

People are exposed to BPA throughout ...

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Laser Weapons Get Real
Long a staple of science fiction, laser weapons are edging closer to the battlefield, thanks to optical fibers
By Andy Extance and Nature magazine | May 28, 2015

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Laser weapons have long fascinated weapons developers—most notably during the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, in the 1980s and 1990s.
andrea.pacelli/Flickr

Silently, the drone aircraft glides above the arid terrain of New Mexico—until it suddenly pivots out of control and plummets to the ground.

Then a mortar round rises from its launcher, arcs high and begins to descend towards its target—only to flare and explode in mid-flight.

On the desert floor, on top of a big, sand-coloured truck, a cubic mechanism pivots and fires an invisible infrared beam to zap one target after another. This High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) is a prototype laser weapon developed for the US Army by aerospace giant Boeing of Chicago, Illinois. Inside the truck, Boeing electrophysics engineer Stephanie Blount stares at the targets on her laptop's screen and directs the laser using a handheld game controller. “It has a very game-like feel,” she says.

That seems only natural: laser weapons are a ...

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Large Hadron Collider Starts Doing Science Again
Particle collisions at record energies will push the boundary of human knowledge
By Elizabeth Gibney | June 3, 2015

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The LHC is smashing protons together at a higher energy than ever before.
Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

The highest-energy collisions ever seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are now producing data for science.

Teams at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have spent two years upgrading what was already the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. At 10.40 local time on June 3 they officially set the newly supercharged collider running.

Physicists can now smash together bunches of protons at a record energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) and will soon collide a billion pairs of protons per second—almost double the previous rate. The machine was switched off on 14 February 2013 after an initial period—dubbed run 1—marked by the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The first beams of protons following the shutdown circled around the 27-kilometer ring in early April, but at low energies. Since then, physicists have worked to check mechanisms designed to protect the machine and to calibrate the beams, before increasing the LHC's energy and bringing its four main experiments fully online.

On June 3, the collisions started in earnest, with all four detectors collecting data for analysis. "At this stage, the actual number of colliding bunches is ...

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On Mauna Kea, Astronomers and Hawaiians Can Share the Skies
The Thirty Meter Telescope can revolutionize astronomy and become a part of the holy mountain’s rich cultural heritage
By Michael West | May 28, 2015

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Illustration by Julian Callos

“The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers,” wrote Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last reigning monarch, in 1897. Kilo hōkū, or “star watchers,” were among the most esteemed members of Hawaiian society. Sadly, all is not well with astronomy in Hawaii today. Protests have erupted over construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a giant observatory that promises to revolutionize humanity’s view of the cosmos.

At issue is the TMT’s planned location on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano revered by some Hawaiians as the piko, or “umbilical cord,” that connects the Hawaiian Islands to the heavens. But Mauna Kea is also home to some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Perched in the Pacific Ocean, Mauna Kea’s peak rises above the bulk of our planet’s dense atmosphere, where conditions allow telescopes to obtain images of unsurpassed clarity. This makes Mauna Kea the premier astronomical site in the Northern Hemisphere, if not the world. Building the TMT elsewhere, as some opponents have suggested, would be like clipping the wings of Mauna Kea’s indigenous palila bird, limiting its ability to soar.

Opposition to telescopes on Mauna Kea is nothing new. A small but vocal group of Hawaiians and ...

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