Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God. They also showed that encouraging people to think intuitively increased people’s belief in God.
Scientific American
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Most Topular Stories
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How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God
Scientific American - Mind Matters1 May 2012 | 10:15 am -
The Scientific Flaws of Online Dating Sites
Scientific American - Mind Matters8 May 2012 | 7:00 amEvery day, millions of single adults, worldwide, visit an online dating site. Many are lucky, finding life-long love or at least some exciting escapades. Others are not so lucky. The industry--eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and a thousand other online dating sites--wants singles and the general public to believe that seeking a partner through their site is not just an alternative way to traditional venues for finding a partner, but a superior way. Is it? [More] -
Mood Drug Can Both Cause and Relieve Anxiety
Scientific American Topic - Depression11 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amIf you have ever jumped at a loud noise and felt an adrenaline rush, you have experienced the effects of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). In the body, this hormone triggers the familiar fight-or-flight response--racing heart, shortness of breath, sweaty palms. In the brain, however, it acts as a chemical messenger, playing a role in anxiety and depression. That role, a new study suggests, is more complex than anyone expected. [More] -
Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
Scientific American16 May 2012 | 1:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north , according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions.The research will be published in Nature on May 17. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More] -
Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
Scientific American - News15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More]
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Scientific American
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Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 1:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north , according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions.The research will be published in Nature on May 17. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More] -
China Is Developing a Grid Better for Coal than Renewables
16 May 2012 | 1:00 pmChina will fail to meet its carbon and energy intensity targets unless it makes dramatic changes to its electricity grid, a groundbreaking new report finds. [More] -
Animal Tracks: Music about Unusual Creatures Features Some Unusual Instruments [Video]
16 May 2012 | 12:27 pmThe dugong, one of Michael Hearst's "unusual creatures." Credit: Julien Willem/Creative Commons Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks . Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record of recipes from Mario Batali, David Chang and other celebrity chefs set to music. [More] -
How Large Stars Die [Animation]
16 May 2012 | 12:00 pm[More] -
Know Your Neurons: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons in the Brain's Forest
16 May 2012 | 10:40 amPreviously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron [More]
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Scientific American - News
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Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More] -
Not-So-Quick Fix: ADHD Behavioral Therapy May Be More Effective Than Drugs in Long Run
15 May 2012 | 6:30 amBefore stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall began their rise to popularity in the 1970s, treatment for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) focused on behavioral therapy. But as concerns build over the mounting dosages and extended treatment periods that come with stimulant drugs, clinical researchers are revisiting behavioral therapy techniques. Whereas stimulant medications may help young patients focus and behave in the classroom, research now suggests that behaviorally based changes make more of a difference in the long-term. [More] -
In Search of the Best (Energy) Ideas: A Q&A with ARPA-E's Arun Majumdar
10 May 2012 | 8:01 pmThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June. [More] -
Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins
10 May 2012 | 2:01 pmAn excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.) [More] -
Climate Forecasting: A Break in the Clouds
10 May 2012 | 11:15 amBy Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine [More]
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Observations
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Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 12:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north, according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions. The research will be published in Nature on May 17. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The tropics—the belt of land around the equator characterized by abundant rainfall and torrid temperatures —have been expanding for at least 40 years. In fact, the tropics have widened by roughly 0.7… -
Animal Tracks: Music about Unusual Creatures Features Some Unusual Instruments [Video]
16 May 2012 | 11:27 amThe dugong, one of Michael Hearst's "unusual creatures." Credit: Julien Willem/Creative Commons Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks. Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record of recipes—from Mario Batali, David Chang and other celebrity chefs—set to music. Now comes Hearst’s Songs for Unusual Creatures, a new album honoring some of the… -
Microbes Annihilate the “Nature vs. Nurture” Debate
16 May 2012 | 9:02 amMost E. coli bacteria found in the body are harmless The latest research into the genetics of the human microbiome is taking to a whole new level the old (and not always fruitful) argument about whether nature or nurture is a more important influence in our lives. In the past few days, Science Express published a paper that demonstrated that friendly (or commensal) bacteria don’t just passively crowd out the disease-causing ones. They actively fight back after an infection by taking advantage of selective pressure to force the disease-causing germs to become less fit and eventually die… -
The Mathematician’s Obesity Fallacy
15 May 2012 | 5:30 pmAs I write, this interview with mathematician Carson C. Chow is the number-one most-emailed story on the New York Times Web site. Chow, a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, had no experience in the health sciences before he came to study the problem of why so many Americans are overweight. “I didn’t even know what a calorie was,” he says. This kind of outsider’s perspective can be invaluable when attacking a problem as difficult and entrenched as the epidemic of obesity in the U.S. Chow relates the story of starting work… -
Searching for the Onset of Autism
15 May 2012 | 2:43 pmDiffusion tensor image shows white matter pathways in infant at risk for autism. Warmer colors represent higher fractional anisotropy, a measure of white-matter organization. (Credit: Image created by Jason Wolff, University of North Carolina.) Early behavioral intervention has shown some promise as a way to help children with autism. But it’s difficult to see the hallmarks of autism before two years of age with today’s diagnostic criteria. Could we find other methods? Seeking to answer that question is Jed Elison at the California Institute of Technology, who is working with Ralph…
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Scientific American - Mind Matters
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Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?
15 May 2012 | 12:50 pmWhat would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and… -
The Scientific Flaws of Online Dating Sites
8 May 2012 | 7:00 amEvery day, millions of single adults, worldwide, visit an online dating site. Many are lucky, finding life-long love or at least some exciting escapades. Others are not so lucky. The industry--eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and a thousand other online dating sites--wants singles and the general public to believe that seeking a partner through their site is not just an alternative way to traditional venues for finding a partner, but a superior way. Is it? [More] -
How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God
1 May 2012 | 10:15 amWhy are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God. They also showed that encouraging people to think intuitively increased people’s belief in God. -
How Creativity Connects with Immorality
24 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amIn the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market share by improving the Macintosh operating system were unsuccessful. After several years of debilitating financial losses, the company chose to purchase a fledgling software company called NeXT. Along with purchasing the rights to NeXT’s software, this move allowed Apple to regain the services of one of the company’s founders, the late Steve Jobs. Under the guidance of… -
The Secrets of Your Brain's Zoom Lens
17 Apr 2012 | 7:10 amNotice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries . For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized attention as akin to a shifting spotlight that “illuminates” regions it shines upon, or as a zoom lens, focusing on things so that we see them in finer detail. These metaphors are commonplace because they capture the intuition that attention illuminates or sharpens things, and thus, enhances our perception of them. [More]
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60-Second Science
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Whales Adjust Their Hearing Sensitivity
15 May 2012 | 8:05 pmWhen warned of a loud noise, a false killer whale reduced its hearing sensitivity in anticipation of the sound. Sophie Bushwick reports -
Hot Jupiters Smarten Search for Other Earths
14 May 2012 | 7:08 pmOne way to limit the search for Earth-like exoplanets is to figure out where they cannot exist and eliminate those systems. Cynthia Graber reports -
Nut-Cracking Chimps Demonstrate Cultural Differences
11 May 2012 | 11:20 pmA chimpanzee's tool choice for cracking nuts depends on its community. Sophie Bushwick reports -
Sharing Opinions Feels at Least as Good as Earning Money
10 May 2012 | 9:53 amDivulging personal details activated the reward center of subjects' brains, a feeling for which they were willing to sacrifice money. Sophie Bushwick reports -
Creepy People Leave You Cold
7 May 2012 | 4:07 pmA socially awkward or inappropriate person can make others feel physically colder. Amy Kraft reports
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Scientific American - 60-Second Mind
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When Pro-Vaccine Messaging Backfires
13 May 2012 | 12:00 amAmericans get a stream of messages telling them to avoid vaccines, from Jenny McCarthy on Oprah to billboard animations shown in Times Square. The responsible solution--fight back with forceful pro-vaccine messaging, right? [More] -
Shut Off E-Mail to Ease Work Stress
7 May 2012 | 5:34 pm“You’ve got mail.” By alerting you as soon as mail arrives, a constantly open e-mail window keeps you on your toes, right? Actually, a new study finds that closing your in-box can boost concentration and ease stress. The research will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Computer-Human Interaction Conference. [Gloria Mark, Stephen Voida and Armand Cardello," 'A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons': An Empirical Study of Work without E-Mail "] [More] -
Keeping Secrets Weighs You Down, Literally
29 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amCan you keep a secret? We refer to keeping secrets as if they are material things. And a new study suggests that when we know a secret, we perceive ourselves as being physically burdened. [More] -
If We Feel Too Busy, It's Probably Due to Having Too Much Free Time
22 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amObjectively time is constant. A minute is a minute. But when we have a lot to do, it usually feels like we have less time. Now a study finds an interesting wrinkle in time: when we busy ourselves with selfless tasks, time seems to expand. The work will be published the journal Psychological Science . [More] -
Men Who Hold a Gun Appear Taller and Stronger
14 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pmHey guys, want to look taller? Just pick up a handgun. Because a study finds that men are more often perceived to be big and strong when they hold a gun. The report is in the journal Public Library of Science ONE . [More]
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60-Second Earth
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Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amMassachusetts may ban big institutions from discarding food in the trash in a bid to cut down on the methane from landfills. David Biello reports -
How to Adapt to Climate Change
6 May 2012 | 10:00 amAs the globe warms, communities across the world are providing examples of how to adapt. David Biello reports -
L.A. Needs to Stop Being Such a Cow Town
29 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amNew research suggests that the waste from dairy farms may be a bigger source of smog in Los Angeles than the region's millions of cars. David Biello reports -
Happy Earth Day! Welcome to the Anthropocene
22 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amScientists are suggesting that the present day is part of a new era in the planet's history. David Biello reports -
Take Me Out to the Renewably Powered Ballgame
15 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amBaseball teams across the country are investing in renewable power for their stadiums. David Biello reports
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Science Talk
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The Football Concussion Crisis Part 1
15 May 2012 | 7:15 pmNFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson joins former NBC anchor Stone Phillips and pathologist Bennet Omalu for a discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players. Recorded May 12th at the Ensemblestudiotheatre.org, site of the new play Headstrong about the brain injury issue. -
Killer Chimps and Funny Feet: Report from the AAPA Conference
27 Apr 2012 | 2:27 pmScientific American editor Kate Wong talks about the recent conference of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Portland, Ore., where subjects included killer chimps, unprecedented fossil sharing among researchers and divergent hominid foot forms -
Getting Guinea Worm Gone: Report from the AHCJ Conference
26 Apr 2012 | 2:16 pmScientific American editor Christine Gorman talks about the recent conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, including Jimmy Carter's efforts against guinea worm and trachoma, and Rosalynn Carter's mental health initiatives -
Food Poisoning's Lasting Legacy
4 Apr 2012 | 7:25 pmScientific American Science of Health columnist Maryn McKenna talks about the new understanding that food poisoning can have long-lasting negative health effects -
Fukushima Anniversary: We Listen Back
11 Mar 2012 | 2:15 pmScientific American editor David Biello takes us through newly released audio from the first week of the nuclear meltdown crisis at Fukushima Daiichi
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Scientific American - SciAm Exclusives Video
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Instant Egghead - What's the Difference Between a Comet and an Asteroid?
15 May 2012 | 7:00 amIf you answered "one of Santa's reindeer" and "a popular video game from the 80s" --this episode of Instant Egghead is for you. Scientific American editor John Matson explains how our favorite space rocks differ. -
Instant Egghead - What's the Longest You Can Hold Your Breath?
8 May 2012 | 8:00 amProfessional 'free divers' have no trouble holding their breath for minutes at a time. What stops us from doing the same? In this episode, Scientific American's Katherine Harmon--and Katherine Harmon--explore the limits of human physiology. -
Instant Egghead - What's the Difference Between Fission and Fusion?
2 May 2012 | 2:00 amIn an energy-hungry world, nuclear fission and fusion are often mentioned as alternatives to fossil fuels. But which one is better? In this episode, Scientific American's Michael Moyer melts down the facts to get at the core of the issue. -
Social Cues in the Brain
28 Feb 2012 | 12:00 amReading the emotions of others is essential for even the most basic social skills. Here s how our brain combines information from multiple senses to decipher another person's mood. -
Illustrating the Lost Continent
16 Feb 2012 | 1:00 amGo behind the scenes with artist James Gurney to see how he created the illustrations for "Dinosaurs of the Lost Continent", a feature article in the March issue of Scientific American.
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Scientific American - Video
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Climate Change Blamed for Fall of Mayan Civilization
16 May 2012 | 2:00 amResearchers in Mexico say the mighty Mayan civilization, which thrived in Central America for 2700 years, was likely brought down by a long period of drought. -
Instant Egghead - What's the Difference Between a Comet and an Asteroid?
15 May 2012 | 7:00 amIf you answered "one of Santa's reindeer" and "a popular video game from the 80s" --this episode of Instant Egghead is for you. Scientific American editor John Matson explains how our favorite space rocks differ. -
Denver Zoo Embraces Dung Power
14 May 2012 | 7:00 amVying to become the 'greenest' zoo in the world, the Denver Zoo has installed a new energy system run entirely on animal dung and garbage. The system uses a process called gasification to turn waste into energy. -
Orangutans Communicate with iPad Autism App
12 May 2012 | 4:30 amOrangutans at the Jungle Island Zoo in Florida are learning to use IPads to identify object like body parts and food. The hi-tech approach to communication is modelled on a system used successfully with autistic children. -
Can Commercial Farming Save the Endangered Mexican Crocodile?
10 May 2012 | 2:00 amA commercial crocodile farm in Mexico is trying to strike a balance between business and conservation to help protect the region's endangered Morelet crocodile.
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Scientific American - Health
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Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 1:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north , according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions.The research will be published in Nature on May 17. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More] -
Writing about patients: lessons from first year
16 May 2012 | 12:55 pmThree years ago, before fully committing myself to the idea of going into medicine, I decided to shadow in a genetics outpatient clinic to help give me a clue of what it was about. When I met twelve -yea r-old Laura (not her real name), she was wearing denim overalls, white sandals, and a floppy green hat. During her evaluation, the resident I was shadowing asked her to remove them so that he could do a routine physical exam. Everything was shed except for the green hat, which she flatly refused to touch. Laura s mother, who was in the room with us, defended her daughter s obstinacy. She… -
Know Your Neurons: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons in the Brain's Forest
16 May 2012 | 10:40 amPreviously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron [More] -
Microbes Annihilate the "Nature vs. Nurture" Debate
16 May 2012 | 10:02 amMost E. coli bacteria found in the body are harmless The latest research into the genetics of the human microbiome is taking to a whole new level the old (and not always fruitful) argument about whether nature or nurture is a more important influence in our lives. [More] -
10 Things Exome Sequencing Can t Do-but Why It s Still Powerful
16 May 2012 | 8:53 amSequencing of the exome the protein-encoding parts of all the genes is beginning to dominate the genetics journals as well as headlines, thanks to its ability to diagnose the formerly undiagnosable.The 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting honored the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel s coverage of a 4-year-old whose intestinal disorder was finally diagnosed after sequencing his exome. Once investigators assigned a gene to his symptoms, a bone marrow transplant saved his life. And a just-published study compared the exomes of 12 children with combinations of developmental delay,…
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Scientific American Topic - Aging and the Elderly
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Obese People May Fail to Buckle Up
30 Apr 2012 | 7:13 pmObese people have higher risks for diabetes, heart disease, arthritis--and injuries in car accidents? Yes, in part because they’re far less likely to wear a seat belt . That’s the finding of a study out of the University of Buffalo that will be presented at an upcoming meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Chicago. [More] -
4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
Triumph of the Titans: How Sauropods Flourished (preview)
30 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amEver since fossils of the behemoth, long-necked dinosaurs known as sauropods surfaced in England nearly 170 years ago, they have awed and confused scientists. Even when the great English anatomist Sir Richard Owen recognized in 1842 that dinosaurs constituted a group of their own, apart from reptiles, he excluded the gigantic bones later classified as sauropods. Instead he interpreted them as belonging to a type of aquatic crocodile, which he had named Cetiosaurus, or “whale lizard,” for the enormous size of its bones. Nearly 30 years later, in 1871, University of Oxford geologist… -
9 Percent of Older Adults Have Osteoporosis
26 Apr 2012 | 3:00 pmNearly one in 10 older adults in the U.S. have osteoporosis, according to a new government report. [More] -
BFF?: Cell Phone Study Shows Evolving Lifetime Relationships in Men and Women
20 Apr 2012 | 6:30 amAn analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages reveal how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes. The researchers argue that women's friendships in particular drive the process of finding a mate and supporting the next generation. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Anxiety and Panic Disorders
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Tetris Shown to Lessen PTSD and Flashbacks
25 Apr 2012 | 4:00 pmLONDON -- A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference. [More] -
Search for Faster, Better Antidepressants Makes Progress (preview)
7 Mar 2012 | 7:00 amA young woman who calls herself blueberryoctopus had been taking antidepressants for three years, mostly for anxiety and panic attacks, when she recounted her struggles with them on the Web site Experience Project. She said she had spent a year on Paxil, one of the popular SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but finally stopped because it destroyed her sex drive. She switched to Xanax, an antianxiety drug , which brought back her libido but at the cost of renewed symptoms. Then Paxil again, then Lexapro (another SSRI), then Pristiq, a member of a related class of… -
Could an Infection Cause Tourette's-Like Symptoms in Teenage Girls?
2 Feb 2012 | 5:05 pmOver the weekend Erin Brockovich made the news yet again as she and her nonprofit team descended on the village of Le Roy, N.Y., determined to test for environmental toxins that might be giving the town's teenagers symptoms of Tourette's syndrome. She has reportedly been stonewalled thus far by local officials, who have already ruled out toxins as the cause of last October's sudden outbreak of tics and involuntary movements in 12 girls who attend Le Roy Junior–Senior High School. An environmental testing company surveyed the air and water and found nothing amiss, and a local… -
Scientists Manipulate and Erase Memories (preview)
26 Jan 2012 | 7:00 amJoël Coutu knelt on the cold cement floor of the pet supply store he managed in Montreal, his wrists bound behind him with telephone wire. He could feel the barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of his neck. “You’re lying!” the gunman screamed. “And I am going to blow your head off.” [More] -
Fearless Youth: Prozac Extinguishes Anxiety by Rejuvenating the Brain
22 Dec 2011 | 1:44 pmOnce adult lab mice learn to associate a particular stimulus--a sound, a flash of light--with the pain of an electric shock, they don't easily forget it, even when researchers stop the shocks. But a new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign. The research may help explain why a combination of therapy and antidepressants is more effective at treating depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than either drugs or…
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Scientific American Topic - Arthritis
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Obese People May Fail to Buckle Up
30 Apr 2012 | 7:13 pmObese people have higher risks for diabetes, heart disease, arthritis--and injuries in car accidents? Yes, in part because they’re far less likely to wear a seat belt . That’s the finding of a study out of the University of Buffalo that will be presented at an upcoming meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Chicago. [More] -
4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
Food Poisoning's Hidden Legacy
29 Mar 2012 | 7:00 amColette Dziadul struggled for years to understand her daughter’s joint problems. Dana, who is now 14 years old, complained from toddlerhood that her knees and ankles hurt. The aches kept her up at night, made her wake her parents to ask for painkillers and forced her to sit out school sports. Nevertheless, two pediatricians and an orthopedist diagnosed the problem as “growing pains” that would fade as she grew older. [More] -
Search for Faster, Better Antidepressants Makes Progress (preview)
7 Mar 2012 | 7:00 amA young woman who calls herself blueberryoctopus had been taking antidepressants for three years, mostly for anxiety and panic attacks, when she recounted her struggles with them on the Web site Experience Project. She said she had spent a year on Paxil, one of the popular SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but finally stopped because it destroyed her sex drive. She switched to Xanax, an antianxiety drug , which brought back her libido but at the cost of renewed symptoms. Then Paxil again, then Lexapro (another SSRI), then Pristiq, a member of a related class of…
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Scientific American Topic - Cancer
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Garlic Compound Fights Food-Borne Bacteria
1 May 2012 | 9:24 pmIt’s more bad news for vampires, but good news for the fight against food-borne illness: a compound in garlic is extremely effective at fighting Campylobacter , bacteria that frequently cause intestinal infections. The work is in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy . [Xiaonan Lu et al., " Antimicrobial effect of diallyl sulphide on Campylobacter jejuni biofilms "] [More] -
Readers Respond to "The Coming Mega Drought" and Other Articles
20 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmSCREENING STATS [More] -
How Hospital Gardens Help Patients Heal
19 Mar 2012 | 7:30 amTo get an inkling of what a well-designed hospital garden can mean to a seriously ill child, watch the home video posted on YouTube last August of Aidan Schwalbe, a three-year-old heart-transplant recipient. The toddler is shown exploring the meandering paths, sun-dappled lawn and gnarled roots of a branching shade tree in the Prouty Garden at Children’s Hospital Boston. “He loves to be out in the garden feeding the birds and squirrels,” wrote Aidan’s grandmother in an August blog entry. “They will all weigh 30 lbs. each by the time we leave here!” [More] -
Blocking HIV's Attack (preview)
15 Mar 2012 | 8:00 amA little more than three years ago a medical team from Berlin published the results of a unique experiment that astonished HIV researchers. The German group had taken bone marrow--the source of the body’s immune cells--from an anonymous donor whose genetic inheritance made him or her naturally resistant to HIV. Then the researchers transplanted the cells into a man with leukemia who had been HIV-positive for more than 10 years. Although treatment of the patient’s leukemia was the rationale for the bone marrow transplant therapy, the group also hoped that the transplant would… -
Search for Faster, Better Antidepressants Makes Progress (preview)
7 Mar 2012 | 7:00 amA young woman who calls herself blueberryoctopus had been taking antidepressants for three years, mostly for anxiety and panic attacks, when she recounted her struggles with them on the Web site Experience Project. She said she had spent a year on Paxil, one of the popular SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but finally stopped because it destroyed her sex drive. She switched to Xanax, an antianxiety drug , which brought back her libido but at the cost of renewed symptoms. Then Paxil again, then Lexapro (another SSRI), then Pristiq, a member of a related class of…
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Scientific American Topic - Depression
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The Rue Age: Older Adults Disengage from Regrets, Young People Fixate on Them
19 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pm"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret," wrote 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in his political novel, Coningsby . Hyperbole aside, he may have mixed things up a bit. The latest research suggests that young people tend to fixate on their regrets, whereas older adults generally learn not to waste time wallowing in remorse about past circumstances they cannot change. A new study demonstrates that these cognitive differences manifest themselves in brain scans and physiological responses, revealing that, unlike healthy adults, both depressed… -
Depression in Teens Could Be Diagnosed with Blood Test
18 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amCan a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression. [More] -
Signs of Psychosis Appear Early (preview)
11 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmFrom the moment he was handed to me in the delivery room, Alex, my firstborn, seemed not happy to be here. His eyes were bottomless, his expression grave. He spent his first three months writhing and screaming inconsolably, the word “colic” wholly insufficient to describe our collective suffering. It wasn’t until his brother, Sammy, arrived that I realized just how different Alex was compared with other babies. Sammy cried only when he was hungry or wet. He made easy eye contact and loved to be stroked, hugged and kissed--all the things Alex recoiled from as an infant. -
Mood Drug Can Both Cause and Relieve Anxiety
11 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amIf you have ever jumped at a loud noise and felt an adrenaline rush, you have experienced the effects of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). In the body, this hormone triggers the familiar fight-or-flight response--racing heart, shortness of breath, sweaty palms. In the brain, however, it acts as a chemical messenger, playing a role in anxiety and depression. That role, a new study suggests, is more complex than anyone expected. [More] -
Everyday Stress Can Shut Down the Brain's Chief Command Center (preview)
9 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amThe entrance exam to medical school consists of a five-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow and even shut down entirely. The experience--known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms--is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer’s block or struggled through a lengthy exam.
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Scientific American Topic - Exercise and Fitness
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Dirty Science: What Makes Soil Become Dense?
26 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amKey concepts [More] -
The Limits of Breath Holding (preview)
12 Apr 2012 | 9:07 amTake a deep breath and hold it. You are now engaging in a surprisingly mysterious activity. On average, we humans breathe automatically about 12 times per minute, and this respiratory cycle, along with the beating of our heart, is one of our two vital biological rhythms. The brain adjusts the cadence of breathing to our body’s needs without our conscious effort. Nevertheless, all of us also have the voluntary ability to deliberately hold our breath for short periods. This skill is advantageous when preventing water or dust from entering our lungs, when stabilizing our chests before… -
Researchers Ferret Out Reasons for Runner's High
26 Mar 2012 | 8:55 pmYou've probably had the feeling. Your running shoes are pounding the pavement--then suddenly your pain fades away, and you're feeling euphoric. The runner's high. But that biological perk may be limited to mammals that evolved for endurance exercise--like us. So says a study in the Journal of Experimental Biology . [David A. Raichlen et al., " Wired to run: exercise-induced endocannabinoid signaling in humans and cursorial mammals with implications for the 'runner's high' "] [More] -
Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil [Excerpt]
23 Mar 2012 | 1:01 pmEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), by Maggie Koerth-Baker. [More] -
Meet Your Goals with Research-Proved Tips and Techniques (preview)
22 Mar 2012 | 8:00 amHave you already abandoned your New Year’s resolution? No need to feel ashamed. Fully a quarter of the people who make resolutions give up by the end of the first week , with many others falling off the wagon in the months to come. It seems to be human nature to aim high and fall short. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Healthy Eating
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For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)
19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.” [More] -
Meet Your Goals with Research-Proved Tips and Techniques (preview)
22 Mar 2012 | 8:00 amHave you already abandoned your New Year’s resolution? No need to feel ashamed. Fully a quarter of the people who make resolutions give up by the end of the first week , with many others falling off the wagon in the months to come. It seems to be human nature to aim high and fall short. [More] -
Make Technology--and the World--Frictionless
21 Mar 2012 | 12:00 amA few months back I was at the main Apple Store in New York City. I wanted to buy a case for my son’s iPod touch--but it was December 23. The crowds were so thick, I envied sardines. [More] -
Something to Chew On: Healthier Hot Dogs Substitute Cellulose for Saturated Fats
19 Mar 2012 | 5:00 pmNot all fats are created equal. Scientists have known since the 1950s that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated ones can have profound health benefits . Diets that are high in solid fats, such as butter and animal fat, lead to elevated risks of cardiovascular disease and high cholesterol. But it has been difficult to phase out saturated fats--not only are they are delicious, they are also important components of a food's structure. Without saturated fat, ice creams are just sugary liquids and a hot dog has the consistency of a pet’s chew toy. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Heart Disease
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4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
The Limits of Breath Holding (preview)
12 Apr 2012 | 9:07 amTake a deep breath and hold it. You are now engaging in a surprisingly mysterious activity. On average, we humans breathe automatically about 12 times per minute, and this respiratory cycle, along with the beating of our heart, is one of our two vital biological rhythms. The brain adjusts the cadence of breathing to our body’s needs without our conscious effort. Nevertheless, all of us also have the voluntary ability to deliberately hold our breath for short periods. This skill is advantageous when preventing water or dust from entering our lungs, when stabilizing our chests before… -
Bugs That Transmit "Silent Killer" Are Biting More in the U.S.
9 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amTransmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease--which afflicts millions in Central and South America--may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host--and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. [More] -
How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease?
2 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pmA $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases? [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Heart Disease
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4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
The Limits of Breath Holding (preview)
12 Apr 2012 | 9:07 amTake a deep breath and hold it. You are now engaging in a surprisingly mysterious activity. On average, we humans breathe automatically about 12 times per minute, and this respiratory cycle, along with the beating of our heart, is one of our two vital biological rhythms. The brain adjusts the cadence of breathing to our body’s needs without our conscious effort. Nevertheless, all of us also have the voluntary ability to deliberately hold our breath for short periods. This skill is advantageous when preventing water or dust from entering our lungs, when stabilizing our chests before… -
Bugs That Transmit "Silent Killer" Are Biting More in the U.S.
9 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amTransmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease--which afflicts millions in Central and South America--may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host--and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. [More] -
How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease?
2 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pmA $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases? [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Medical Ethics
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Herd Thinking
21 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am[More] -
Readers Respond to "The Coming Mega Drought" and Other Articles
20 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmSCREENING STATS [More] -
For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease?
2 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pmA $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases? [More] -
Health Care Reform on Trial: What's at Stake in the Supreme Court Arguments
23 Mar 2012 | 11:15 amThe U.S. Supreme Court is a busy place this time of year. So when the justices announced that, starting March 26, they would hear six hours of arguments on the health care reform law --the most time it has dedicated to any one case in decades--the gravitas of the issue became clear to all. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Mental Health
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Getting Guinea Worm Gone: Report from the AHCJ Conference
26 Apr 2012 | 2:16 pm[More] -
Tetris Shown to Lessen PTSD and Flashbacks
25 Apr 2012 | 4:00 pmLONDON -- A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference. [More] -
The Rue Age: Older Adults Disengage from Regrets, Young People Fixate on Them
19 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pm"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret," wrote 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in his political novel, Coningsby . Hyperbole aside, he may have mixed things up a bit. The latest research suggests that young people tend to fixate on their regrets, whereas older adults generally learn not to waste time wallowing in remorse about past circumstances they cannot change. A new study demonstrates that these cognitive differences manifest themselves in brain scans and physiological responses, revealing that, unlike healthy adults, both depressed… -
A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)
19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.” [More] -
Depression in Teens Could Be Diagnosed with Blood Test
18 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amCan a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Neurology
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4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
The Neuroscience of Habits: How They Form and How to Change Them [Excerpt]
27 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business ( Random House, 2012 ) by Charles Duhigg [More] -
Certainty Principle: People Who Hold False Convictions Are Better at Retaining Corrected Information
27 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amFirm convictions dominate news headlines these days, but because of a phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect, strongly held ideas that turn out to be factually incorrect are actually easier to amend . Brain imaging is now shedding light on how people change their minds during hypercorrection, potentially revealing the best ways for us to learn from our errors. [More] -
Blood Flow Fingered in Ice Cream Headaches
25 Apr 2012 | 12:43 pmThe infamous ice cream headache has been a bit of a medical mystery. Until recently. [More] -
How Do Painkillers Buffer against Social Rejection?
23 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amHow do painkillers buffer against social rejection? [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Obesity
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Obese People May Fail to Buckle Up
30 Apr 2012 | 7:13 pmObese people have higher risks for diabetes, heart disease, arthritis--and injuries in car accidents? Yes, in part because they’re far less likely to wear a seat belt . That’s the finding of a study out of the University of Buffalo that will be presented at an upcoming meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Chicago. [More] -
We Tend to Underestimate How Much We Weigh
8 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amIn a world full of mirrors, what I’m about to tell you may be a surprise. But many overweight people do not know they’re obese. They underestimate their weight, according to a study in the journal Body Image . [More] -
Kids Fail to Get Outdoors
5 Apr 2012 | 7:18 pmIt's springtime, and that means mud pies, bug bites and scraped knees--if you're a preschooler. Or at least it used to. [More] -
Meet Your Goals with Research-Proved Tips and Techniques (preview)
22 Mar 2012 | 8:00 amHave you already abandoned your New Year’s resolution? No need to feel ashamed. Fully a quarter of the people who make resolutions give up by the end of the first week , with many others falling off the wagon in the months to come. It seems to be human nature to aim high and fall short. [More] -
Gut Microbes May Drive Evolution
14 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amThe human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one's risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Pain
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4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
Blood Flow Fingered in Ice Cream Headaches
25 Apr 2012 | 12:43 pmThe infamous ice cream headache has been a bit of a medical mystery. Until recently. [More] -
How Do Painkillers Buffer against Social Rejection?
23 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amHow do painkillers buffer against social rejection? [More] -
A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)
19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.” [More] -
A Periodic Stress Meter
9 Apr 2012 | 10:02 amOverwhelming stress cripples. Neuroscientists have begun to learn that even acute, everyday stress can turn off the brain’s command-and-control center, the prefrontal cortex. Without our mental executive, we feel helpless and out of control. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Pediatrics
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Pacifiers Won't Make Newborns Shun Breast
1 May 2012 | 9:57 pmThe first hours of life can be rough. So for years newborns in the hospital were given pacifiers to calm and quiet them--with many breast-feeding advocates worrying the newborns would get used to the artificial nipple and be less inclined to take to the breast. [More] -
A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)
19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.” [More] -
Signs of Psychosis Appear Early (preview)
11 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmFrom the moment he was handed to me in the delivery room, Alex, my firstborn, seemed not happy to be here. His eyes were bottomless, his expression grave. He spent his first three months writhing and screaming inconsolably, the word “colic” wholly insufficient to describe our collective suffering. It wasn’t until his brother, Sammy, arrived that I realized just how different Alex was compared with other babies. Sammy cried only when he was hungry or wet. He made easy eye contact and loved to be stroked, hugged and kissed--all the things Alex recoiled from as an infant. -
Everyday Stress Can Shut Down the Brain's Chief Command Center (preview)
9 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amThe entrance exam to medical school consists of a five-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow and even shut down entirely. The experience--known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms--is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer’s block or struggled through a lengthy exam. -
Kids Fail to Get Outdoors
5 Apr 2012 | 7:18 pmIt's springtime, and that means mud pies, bug bites and scraped knees--if you're a preschooler. Or at least it used to. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Respiratory Medicine
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Nothing to Sneeze at: Allergies May Be Good for You
25 Apr 2012 | 1:50 pmAh, glorious springtime. It brings flowers, warmer temperatures--and for many, incessant sneezes and sniffles. Everybody curses allergies as annoying at best, and some allergic reactions--such as anaphylaxis, which rapidly lowers blood pressure and closes the airways--can be fatal. But a handful of researchers now propose that allergies may actually have evolved to protect us. Runny noses, coughs and itchy rashes keep toxic chemicals out of our bodies, they argue, and persuade us to steer clear of dangerous environments. [More] -
The Limits of Breath Holding (preview)
12 Apr 2012 | 9:07 amTake a deep breath and hold it. You are now engaging in a surprisingly mysterious activity. On average, we humans breathe automatically about 12 times per minute, and this respiratory cycle, along with the beating of our heart, is one of our two vital biological rhythms. The brain adjusts the cadence of breathing to our body’s needs without our conscious effort. Nevertheless, all of us also have the voluntary ability to deliberately hold our breath for short periods. This skill is advantageous when preventing water or dust from entering our lungs, when stabilizing our chests before… -
Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil [Excerpt]
23 Mar 2012 | 1:01 pmEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), by Maggie Koerth-Baker. [More] -
How the Dive Reflex Extends Breath-Holding
22 Mar 2012 | 9:00 amFloating motionless atop a tank of water in 2009, French diver Stéphane Mifsud claimed a world record for static apnea (stationary breath holding) of 11 minutes and 35 seconds. In 2010, another record setter, Ricardo da Gama Bahia of Brazil, flooded his body with oxygen for more than 20 minutes and then held his breath underwater for 20 minutes and 21 seconds. Both those achievements and many earlier records put to shame the breath-holding efforts of most people on dry land, who may nonetheless find that they, too, can hold out much longer than usual while swimming. The explanation,… -
Bats Harbor Novel Type of Influenza
27 Feb 2012 | 6:40 pmFrom Nature magazine [More]
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Scientific American - Space
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#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - on that TIME cover..., stem cells, invasive beetles, drowned Cretaceous birds, onset of autism, and more.
16 May 2012 | 1:28 am- Eric Michael Johnson – Out of the Mouth of Babes [More] -
#SciAmBlogs Monday - decaying aluminum, living photography, science movie consultant, octopus on ice, ugliest experiments, and more.
15 May 2012 | 12:03 amToday we are happy to announce the newest blog at #SciAmBlogs – check out Molecules to Medicine! And as usual on Mondays, we have the new Image of the Week . [More] -
Living Photography
14 May 2012 | 7:53 pmImage of the Week #42, May 14th, 2012: [More] -
Hot Jupiters Smarten Search for Other Earths
14 May 2012 | 7:08 pmScientists are looking for Earth-like planets around other stars. But one way to limit the search can be to figure out where an Earth-like planet cannot exist and eliminate those types of systems. [More] -
Astronomers Detect Smallish Exoplanet's Infrared Glow
14 May 2012 | 3:40 pmHere’s a hot topic: astronomers have detected infrared radiation from a faraway planet not much bigger than our own. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Mars
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How to Find a Meteorite in 5 Steps
2 May 2012 | 10:30 amEarth is under constant bombardment by space rocks. When they crash and burn through the atmosphere, most of the debris gets lost to the oceans, while some is buried or gradually weathered away. Nonetheless, plenty of chunks of fallen meteors, or meteorites, are strewn across the accessible parts of the planet. So far, more than 40,000 meteorites have been found and catalogued, and countless more are still out there, waiting to be chanced upon. [More] -
Mars and Mercury Star at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
29 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmNew Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet [More] -
Ballooning Star Split Planet in Two
16 Apr 2012 | 5:39 pmIn about five billion years, Earth is going into the broiler. The sun will swell up into a red giant, engulfing us and the other inner planets . And that'll be that. [More] -
A New Report Sheds Light on Problems Plaguing Russia's Space Program
16 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amLast November, Russia launched a widely anticipated mission to the Martian moon Phobos. The craft would gather samples from the moon’s surface to help determine if future space crews could obtain valuable supplies of oxygen there en route to Mars. For Russia, the mission was supposed to mark a “cavalry charge” that would redeem a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence. Instead it turned into a cosmic humiliation when the craft died shortly after takeoff and fell back to Earth. [More] -
New Data Suggest Mars Once Held an Ocean
1 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amIn the eyes of many planetary scientists, the surface of Mars’s northern hemisphere has long looked like it once contained an ocean. Now it is “sounding” that way, too. [More]
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Scientific American - Space
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#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - on that TIME cover..., stem cells, invasive beetles, drowned Cretaceous birds, onset of autism, and more.
16 May 2012 | 1:28 am- Eric Michael Johnson – Out of the Mouth of Babes [More] -
#SciAmBlogs Monday - decaying aluminum, living photography, science movie consultant, octopus on ice, ugliest experiments, and more.
15 May 2012 | 12:03 amToday we are happy to announce the newest blog at #SciAmBlogs – check out Molecules to Medicine! And as usual on Mondays, we have the new Image of the Week . [More] -
Living Photography
14 May 2012 | 7:53 pmImage of the Week #42, May 14th, 2012: [More] -
Hot Jupiters Smarten Search for Other Earths
14 May 2012 | 7:08 pmScientists are looking for Earth-like planets around other stars. But one way to limit the search can be to figure out where an Earth-like planet cannot exist and eliminate those types of systems. [More] -
Astronomers Detect Smallish Exoplanet's Infrared Glow
14 May 2012 | 3:40 pmHere’s a hot topic: astronomers have detected infrared radiation from a faraway planet not much bigger than our own. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Planetary Science
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Mars and Mercury Star at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
29 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmNew Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet [More] -
Ballooning Star Split Planet in Two
16 Apr 2012 | 5:39 pmIn about five billion years, Earth is going into the broiler. The sun will swell up into a red giant, engulfing us and the other inner planets . And that'll be that. [More] -
Entrepreneurs Race to Get a Rover on the Moon and Win $30 Million (preview)
3 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amOn a muddy, rubble-strewn field on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, a five-foot-tall pyramidal robot with twin camera eyes slowly rotates on four metal wheels, its electric motors emitting a low whine. In a nearby trailer, students from Carnegie Mellon University huddle around a laptop to watch the world through the robot’s eyes. In the low-resolution grayscale images on the laptop’s screen, the rutted landscape looks a lot like the moon, which is the robot’s ultimate destination. [More] -
New Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet
28 Mar 2012 | 8:00 amTHE WOODLANDS, Tex.--Mercury is a world of extremes . Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator, hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C. [More] -
Martian Water Stuck in Minerals
26 Mar 2012 | 8:12 pmMars today is pretty dry. But billions of years ago, water flowed across the Red Planet. It ran in rivers that carved deep valleys. And it may have even filled a Martian ocean inside what today look like the remains of ancient shorelines. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Spacecraft
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How to Find a Meteorite in 5 Steps
2 May 2012 | 10:30 amEarth is under constant bombardment by space rocks. When they crash and burn through the atmosphere, most of the debris gets lost to the oceans, while some is buried or gradually weathered away. Nonetheless, plenty of chunks of fallen meteors, or meteorites, are strewn across the accessible parts of the planet. So far, more than 40,000 meteorites have been found and catalogued, and countless more are still out there, waiting to be chanced upon. [More] -
Spy-High: Amateur Astronomers Scour the Sky for Government Secrets
1 May 2012 | 7:00 amEarlier this year Iran's defense minister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to "easily" watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground. The announcement was largely ignored, in part because it made the minister sound like a James Bond villain. The boast was also a bit anticlimactic, given that even amateur astronomers are already recording in detail what happens in low Earth orbit. Both the technology involved and the techniques used to observe satellites and even the occasional astronaut perched outside the International Space Station (ISS) are… -
Space Shuttle Swan Songs: Enterprise and Discovery Fly their Final Missions [Slide Show]
27 Apr 2012 | 6:00 amNew Yorkers who look up today can catch a glimpse of history. The Enterprise space shuttle will be flown along the Hudson River and around the metropolitan area on its way to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, a stopover on its final journey to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan. A modified Boeing 747 is ferrying the shuttle from its former home in Washington, D.C. [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
A New Report Sheds Light on Problems Plaguing Russia's Space Program
16 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amLast November, Russia launched a widely anticipated mission to the Martian moon Phobos. The craft would gather samples from the moon’s surface to help determine if future space crews could obtain valuable supplies of oxygen there en route to Mars. For Russia, the mission was supposed to mark a “cavalry charge” that would redeem a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence. Instead it turned into a cosmic humiliation when the craft died shortly after takeoff and fell back to Earth. [More]
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Scientific American - Technology
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Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 1:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north, according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions.The research will be published in Nature on May 17. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More] -
Under construction - ITER in LEGO
16 May 2012 | 10:21 amIf you just received your new issue of Scientific American , you saw the article The Problems with ITER and the Fading Dream of Fusion Energy by Geoff Brumfiel. Accompanying image (a little small online, but nice and big in print) is a photograph by Hironobu Maeda of a sculpture by Sachiko Akinaga. It is a LEGO model of the ITER fusion reactor which has been under construction for many years now, and apparently will keep being under construction for many years to come.You may think that the image is a photoshop, or a drawing, or that perhaps the LEGO model does exist somewhere, perhaps in… -
Beep on the Cheap: A Hack to Cut Cell Phone Charges
16 May 2012 | 7:30 amIn this month's Scientific American column I drafted a "Cellular Bill of Rights." It documents all the ridiculous ways that cell phone carriers gouge, cheat and double-bill us. [More] -
Down with Double Data Fees!
16 May 2012 | 7:00 amWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Lifestyle, establish Fairness, ensure blood pressure Tranquility, provide for the common Text Messager, promote less Outrage and secure Cell phone Service that’s anywhere near as good as it is in Other Countries, do ordain and establish this Cellular Bill of Rights. [More] -
#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - on that TIME cover..., stem cells, invasive beetles, drowned Cretaceous birds, onset of autism, and more.
16 May 2012 | 1:28 am- Eric Michael Johnson – Out of the Mouth of Babes [More]
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Scientific American - Energy Technology
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In Search of the Best (Energy) Ideas: A Q&A with ARPA-E's Arun Majumdar
10 May 2012 | 8:01 pmThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June. [More] -
L.A. Needs to Stop Being Such a Cow Town
29 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amEarly inhabitants of what’s now Los Angeles called the region the Valley of Smoke. But it was the car that really made Los Angeles's smog get out of hand. [More] -
Is Supersymmetry Dead?
25 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amFor decades now physicists have contemplated the idea of an entire shadow world of elementary particles, called supersymmetry. It would elegantly solve mysteries that the current Standard Model of particle physics leaves unexplained, such as what cosmic dark matter is. Now some are starting to wonder. The most powerful collider in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has yet to see any new phenomena that would betray an unseen level of reality. Although the search has only just begun, it has made some theorists ask what physics might be like if supersymmetry is not true after all. [More] -
Cheap Fracked Gas Could Help Americans Keep on Truckin'
23 Apr 2012 | 7:01 amA different kind of truck stop is coming soon to Atlanta. Greg Roche, vice president for infrastructure at Clean Energy Fuels , is presently scouting locations to build one of the California-based company's natural gas fueling stations for long-haul trucks by the end of this year. With fracking techniques freeing more and more natural gas in the U.S., the alternative fuel is suddenly much cheaper than those made from petroleum. [More] -
Happy Earth Day! Welcome to the Anthropocene
22 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amThe list of human impacts on the planet is a long one. We move more earth and stone than all the world's rivers. We are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere largely by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. And we now consume at least a quarter of all the sun's energy that plants have turned to food. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Green Technology
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Trash Reap: 10 Surprising Recycling Efforts--from Bras to Crayons [Slide Show]
19 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amRecycling has made huge gains in the last couple decades. The rate of municipal waste that gets recycled more than doubled in 2010 to 34 percent from 16 percent in 1990, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Still, about half of the nation’s 225 million metric tons of annual trash gets the "one and done" treatment. Even though virtually every object contains recyclable materials, much of our waste ends up being incinerated or dumped in a landfill. [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
Energy Secretary Steven Chu Discusses the "Weird Little Bacteria" in Our Energy Future
16 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amName: Steven Chu [More] -
EPA Cancels Grant Applications for $20 Million Green Chemistry Program
10 Apr 2012 | 12:45 pmIn an announcement that stunned scientists, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has cancelled grant applications for what was supposed to be a $20-million, four-year green chemistry program. [More] -
First Dedicated Biorefinery Could Wean Hawaii Off Imported Oil
10 Apr 2012 | 7:01 amOn former pineapple fields outside of Honolulu, an industrial tube has been erected, ensconced in a steel scaffold. Dwarfed by the nearby oil refinery, the modest tube represents an attempt to one day wean Hawaii from imported oil . It is the nation's first dedicated biorefinery, employing high heat to turn plant matter into oil, followed by chemical catalysis to upgrade that oil into a useable fuel, just like the much larger refinery down the road. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - How Things Work
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How Do Painkillers Buffer against Social Rejection?
23 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amHow do painkillers buffer against social rejection? [More] -
Second Wind: Air-Breathing Lithium Batteries Promise Recharge-Free Long-Range Driving--If the Bugs Can Be Worked Out
20 Apr 2012 | 3:30 pmResearchers predict a new type of lithium battery under development could give an electric car enough juice to travel a whopping 800 kilometers before it needs to be plugged in again--about 10 times the energy that today's lithium ion batteries supply. It is a tantalizing prospect --a lighter, longer-lasting, air-breathing power source for the next generation of vehicles--if only someone could build a working model. Several roadblocks stand between these lithium–air batteries and the open road, however, primarily in finding electrodes and electrolytes that are stable enough for… -
Cooperative Neural Networks Suggest How Intelligence Evolved
11 Apr 2012 | 12:30 pmWorking together can hasten brain evolution, according to a new computer simulation. [More] -
Grid Unlocked: How Street Networks Evolve as Cities Grow
6 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amThe world's cities are absorbing one million additional people every week--and by 2030, they could consume an extra 1.5 million square kilometers of land, or roughly the area of France, Germany and Spain combined. What would be the best ways for those cities to grow? A new study examines how--before urban planners existed--a group of Italian villages evolved into suburbs outside Milan today. Such studies may eventually help planners optimize future developments. [More] -
How Is Disaster Aid Being Retooled to Meet Catastrophes That Strike Cities?
6 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNASA scientists may have debunked the claim that the world will end this December , but evidence suggests that the number of natural disasters has risen during the past few decades. This trend, combined with the accelerating growth of urban populations, has international aid organizations rethinking how crisis response strategies designed to help rural communities can be adapted for city folk. [More]
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Scientific American - Medical Technology
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Why Polio Isn't Going Away (preview)
14 May 2012 | 7:05 amThe shadows lengthen in a guesthouse cafeteria on the sprawling campus of christian Medical College, Vellore, in India. Wrapped up as he is in an issue that has possessed him for years, T. Jacob John notices neither the dying light nor the gathering mosquitoes. He is talking about the oral polio vaccine. [More] -
Erasing Painful Memories: Drug and Behavioral Therapies Will Help Us Forget Toxic Thoughts (preview)
10 May 2012 | 7:04 amThe rat is on a carousel with clear plastic sides, rotating slowly in a small room. As it looks out through the plastic, it sees markings on the walls of the room from which it can determine its position. At a certain location it receives a foot shock--or, in experimenters’ jargon, a negative reinforcement. When that happens, the rat turns sharply around and walks tirelessly in the opposite direction, so it never reaches that same place in the room again. It will do this to the point of exhaustion. [More] -
Telltale Hearts: What Autopsies Reveal about This Vital Organ (preview)
3 May 2012 | 8:06 amThe human heart endures a lot in a lifetime. Sophisticated imaging can give insight into what it tolerates and what ails it, but the most direct information comes from an autopsy. [More] -
Tomorrow's Medicine (preview)
2 May 2012 | 7:02 amOver the past few years researchers have taken advantage of unprecedented advances in biology, electronics and human genetics to develop an impressive new tool kit for protecting and improving human health. Sophisticated medical technology and complex data analysis are now on the verge of breaking free of their traditional confines in the hospital and computer lab and making their way into our daily lives. [More] -
4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Defense Technology
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India Becomes World's Top Spammer
26 Apr 2012 | 4:05 pmIf you've got a junk email folder full of spam, there's nearly a 10 percent chance it came from a computer in India, the world's new top spam producer. [More] -
Why Light Touching Can Double Your Chances of Getting a Date [Excerpt]
25 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior , by Leonard Mlodinow. Copyright © 2012 by Leonard Mlodinow. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books , an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. [More] -
Cheap Fracked Gas Could Help Americans Keep on Truckin'
23 Apr 2012 | 7:01 amA different kind of truck stop is coming soon to Atlanta. Greg Roche, vice president for infrastructure at Clean Energy Fuels , is presently scouting locations to build one of the California-based company's natural gas fueling stations for long-haul trucks by the end of this year. With fracking techniques freeing more and more natural gas in the U.S., the alternative fuel is suddenly much cheaper than those made from petroleum. [More] -
Shorted Circuits: Pentagon Looks to DNA from Plants to Foil Electronic Component Counterfeiters
18 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amCounterfeit electronics embedded in missile guidance systems and hundred-million-dollar aircraft have become a serious problem for the U.S. military and its contractors. Unlike a knockoff Gucci purse or Rolex watch , however, it takes more than misspelled brand labels, altered logos or suspiciously low prices to spot a bogus microprocessor being passed off as the real thing. [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Defense Technology
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India Becomes World's Top Spammer
26 Apr 2012 | 4:05 pmIf you've got a junk email folder full of spam, there's nearly a 10 percent chance it came from a computer in India, the world's new top spam producer. [More] -
Why Light Touching Can Double Your Chances of Getting a Date [Excerpt]
25 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior , by Leonard Mlodinow. Copyright © 2012 by Leonard Mlodinow. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books , an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. [More] -
Cheap Fracked Gas Could Help Americans Keep on Truckin'
23 Apr 2012 | 7:01 amA different kind of truck stop is coming soon to Atlanta. Greg Roche, vice president for infrastructure at Clean Energy Fuels , is presently scouting locations to build one of the California-based company's natural gas fueling stations for long-haul trucks by the end of this year. With fracking techniques freeing more and more natural gas in the U.S., the alternative fuel is suddenly much cheaper than those made from petroleum. [More] -
Shorted Circuits: Pentagon Looks to DNA from Plants to Foil Electronic Component Counterfeiters
18 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amCounterfeit electronics embedded in missile guidance systems and hundred-million-dollar aircraft have become a serious problem for the U.S. military and its contractors. Unlike a knockoff Gucci purse or Rolex watch , however, it takes more than misspelled brand labels, altered logos or suspiciously low prices to spot a bogus microprocessor being passed off as the real thing. [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Nanotechnology
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New "Beauty Baryon" Particle Discovered at Large Hadron Collider
1 May 2012 | 10:15 amA never-before-seen subatomic particle has popped into existence inside the world's largest atom smasher, bringing physicists a step closer to unraveling the mystery of how matter is put together in the universe. [More] -
Microbial Mules: Engineering Bacteria to Transport Nanoparticles and Drugs
29 Mar 2012 | 6:00 pmTiny robots that swim through our blood vessels attacking viruses and malignant cells have not quite crossed the line that separates science fiction from science--but there might be a way to jump-start their development. [More] -
Ohm Run: One-Atom-Tall Wires Could Extend Life of Moore's Law
5 Jan 2012 | 2:05 pmThere may be a bit more room at the bottom, after all. [More] -
Gingrich Tops Scientific American 's Geek Guide to the 2012 GOP Candidates
3 Jan 2012 | 4:00 amThe contenders for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election may appear to be a fairly uniform group of middle-aged white conservatives, but when it comes to issues of science, technology and overall geek cred, none of these candidates is cut from the same cloth. In fact, Newt Gingrich nudges out Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in Scientific American 's overall ranking, based on the former Congressman's engagement in issues related to energy, the Internet and military weapons, combined with his mastery of top online tools such as Twitter and a healthy appetite for… -
Speaking Out on the "Quiet Crisis" (preview)
16 Dec 2011 | 7:00 amWhen Shirley Ann Jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, she would prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellow jackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and test which flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive. She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering, for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms by putting them under the dark porch in the middle of the day. The most important lesson she took away from these experiments was not about science but compassion. “Don’t imprison…
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Scientific American Topic - Optical Physics
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Spy-High: Amateur Astronomers Scour the Sky for Government Secrets
1 May 2012 | 7:00 amEarlier this year Iran's defense minister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to "easily" watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground. The announcement was largely ignored, in part because it made the minister sound like a James Bond villain. The boast was also a bit anticlimactic, given that even amateur astronomers are already recording in detail what happens in low Earth orbit. Both the technology involved and the techniques used to observe satellites and even the occasional astronaut perched outside the International Space Station (ISS) are… -
Bits of the Future: First Universal Quantum Network Prototype Links 2 Separate Labs
11 Apr 2012 | 3:15 pmQuantum technologies are the way of the future, but will that future ever arrive? [More] -
Urban Illusions
7 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amThe life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it. --Charles Baudelaire, 1846 [More] -
A New Radio Telescope Will Scan for E.T's Calls
1 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmMore than 44,000 radio antennas will soon link over the Internet to create one of the most ambitious radio telescopes ever built. Its job will be to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and, potentially, signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. [More] -
Small Reactors Make a Bid to Revive Nuclear Power
27 Mar 2012 | 2:01 pmSmall may be beautiful for the nuclear power industry So argue a host of would-be builders of novel nuclear reactors. While the U.S. government has not given up on investing in large units that boast conventional designs, the Department of Energy has also announced the availability of $450 million in funds to support engineering and licensing of so-called " small modular reactors ." [More]
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Scientific American - Biology
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Whales Adjust Their Hearing Sensitivity
15 May 2012 | 8:05 pmHave you ever wanted to turn down the volume at a deafening concert or noisy bar? Envy the whale: a new study finds that toothed whales can reduce their own auditory sensitivity when they expect a loud sound. The work is presented at this week’s Acoustics 2012 meeting. [Paul E. Nachtigall and Alexander Ya Supin, " Immediate changes in whale hearing sensitivity "] [More] -
The Football Concussion Crisis, Part 1
15 May 2012 | 7:15 pmNFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson joins former NBC anchor Stone Phillips and pathologist Bennet Omalu for a discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More] -
This Is Your Brain on Drugs
15 May 2012 | 7:30 amIn the 1954 foundational text of the Age of Aquarius, The Doors of Perception , Aldous Huxley describes his encounters with mescaline, a psychoactive substance derived from the peyote cactus and traditionally used by Native Americans for religious purposes. Huxley’s experiences include profound changes in the visual world, colors that induce sound, the telescoping of time and space, the loss of the notion of self, and feelings of oneness, peacefulness and bliss more commonly associated with religious visions or an exultant state: “A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full…
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Scientific American Topic - Allergies
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Nothing to Sneeze at: Allergies May Be Good for You
25 Apr 2012 | 1:50 pmAh, glorious springtime. It brings flowers, warmer temperatures--and for many, incessant sneezes and sniffles. Everybody curses allergies as annoying at best, and some allergic reactions--such as anaphylaxis, which rapidly lowers blood pressure and closes the airways--can be fatal. But a handful of researchers now propose that allergies may actually have evolved to protect us. Runny noses, coughs and itchy rashes keep toxic chemicals out of our bodies, they argue, and persuade us to steer clear of dangerous environments. [More] -
Bugs That Transmit "Silent Killer" Are Biting More in the U.S.
9 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amTransmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease--which afflicts millions in Central and South America--may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host--and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. [More] -
Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil [Excerpt]
23 Mar 2012 | 1:01 pmEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), by Maggie Koerth-Baker. [More] -
Why Cramming Doesn't Work
14 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amThe human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one's risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution. [More] -
Gut Microbes May Drive Evolution
14 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amThe human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one's risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Autoimmune Disorders
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For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease?
2 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pmA $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases? [More] -
Search for Faster, Better Antidepressants Makes Progress (preview)
7 Mar 2012 | 7:00 amA young woman who calls herself blueberryoctopus had been taking antidepressants for three years, mostly for anxiety and panic attacks, when she recounted her struggles with them on the Web site Experience Project. She said she had spent a year on Paxil, one of the popular SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but finally stopped because it destroyed her sex drive. She switched to Xanax, an antianxiety drug , which brought back her libido but at the cost of renewed symptoms. Then Paxil again, then Lexapro (another SSRI), then Pristiq, a member of a related class of… -
Psoriasis Linked to Protection from HIV-1
5 Mar 2012 | 7:02 pmPsoriasis is an autoimmune disease--the immune system mistakenly attacks its own body, causing red, itchy, scaly patches on the skin. But there may be a hidden upside. People with psoriasis are more likely to have gene variants that protect them against the effects of HIV-1. [More] -
Hearts and Air Pollution: 5 Deadly Air Pollutants Measured on 5 Continents
15 Feb 2012 | 11:30 amAround the world, breathing a variety of air pollutants – in some cases for a single day – increases the chance that people will suffer heart attacks, according to a new analysis published Tuesday. [More]
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Scientific American - Biotechnology
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Why Polio Isn't Going Away (preview)
14 May 2012 | 7:05 amThe shadows lengthen in a guesthouse cafeteria on the sprawling campus of christian Medical College, Vellore, in India. Wrapped up as he is in an issue that has possessed him for years, T. Jacob John notices neither the dying light nor the gathering mosquitoes. He is talking about the oral polio vaccine. [More] -
In Search of the Best (Energy) Ideas: A Q&A with ARPA-E's Arun Majumdar
10 May 2012 | 8:01 pmThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June. [More] -
Intel Futurist Discusses Data's Secret Life, the Ghost of Computing and How We Should Attack Fear
8 May 2012 | 7:40 amIn 2010 Brian David Johnson became Intel Corp. 's first futurist, a time-honored title bestowed on prognosticating technology mavens dating back to the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells . Equal parts seer and evangelist, Johnson helps map out the future of technology and then guides his company toward that destination, whether it is five years or even a decade away. [More] -
Weighing the Risks
5 May 2012 | 8:00 amOne of the biggest choices an expectant mother faces is how to handle the pain of childbirth. More than 60 percent of American women choose relief in the form of an epidural, a combination of local anesthetic and narcotic administered into the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord. Although most doctors believe that the injections are safe, a new study suggests that they may increase the risk that a mother will develop a fever during labor, which could, in rare instances, pose risks to her baby. [More] -
Return of the Clap
4 May 2012 | 7:15 amMark Pandori was worried. It was 2008, and he had just read the latest in a string of reports from Japan. The articles all described patients infected with a particular strain of gonorrhea that was less susceptible than usual to an important class of antibiotics. Pandori, director of the laboratory at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, knew that gonorrhea had become resistant to other antibiotics in past decades. Each time, the resistance seemed to arise in Asia and spread to California. He wondered if something new was heading across the Pacific. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Heart Disease
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4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny
30 Apr 2012 | 5:30 pmMedical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market. [More] -
For a Healthier Country, Overhaul Farm Subsidies
19 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amSome years ago two nutrition experts went grocery shopping. For a dollar, Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter could purchase 1,200 calories of potato chips or cookies or just 250 calories worth of carrots. It was merely one example of how an unhealthy diet is cheaper than a healthy one. This price difference did not spring into existence by force of any natural laws but largely because of antiquated agricultural policies. Public money is working at cross-purposes: backing an overabundance of unhealthful calories that are flooding our supermarkets and restaurants, while also battling… -
The Limits of Breath Holding (preview)
12 Apr 2012 | 9:07 amTake a deep breath and hold it. You are now engaging in a surprisingly mysterious activity. On average, we humans breathe automatically about 12 times per minute, and this respiratory cycle, along with the beating of our heart, is one of our two vital biological rhythms. The brain adjusts the cadence of breathing to our body’s needs without our conscious effort. Nevertheless, all of us also have the voluntary ability to deliberately hold our breath for short periods. This skill is advantageous when preventing water or dust from entering our lungs, when stabilizing our chests before… -
Bugs That Transmit "Silent Killer" Are Biting More in the U.S.
9 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amTransmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease--which afflicts millions in Central and South America--may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host--and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. [More] -
How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease?
2 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pmA $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases? [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Dinosaurs
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Triumph of the Titans: How Sauropods Flourished (preview)
30 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amEver since fossils of the behemoth, long-necked dinosaurs known as sauropods surfaced in England nearly 170 years ago, they have awed and confused scientists. Even when the great English anatomist Sir Richard Owen recognized in 1842 that dinosaurs constituted a group of their own, apart from reptiles, he excluded the gigantic bones later classified as sauropods. Instead he interpreted them as belonging to a type of aquatic crocodile, which he had named Cetiosaurus, or “whale lizard,” for the enormous size of its bones. Nearly 30 years later, in 1871, University of Oxford geologist… -
Animals through the Ages: The Art of Charles R. Knight [Slide Show]
26 Mar 2012 | 12:00 pmCharles R. Knight (1874 – 1953) is best known for his arresting paintings of dinosaurs and other long-vanished beasts. In the April issue of Scientific American, anthropologist and science historian Richard Milner--author of Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time --explores the experiences that shaped Knight as an artist and the influence his work had on science and popular culture. This slide show presents a selection of images from the book depicting both living animals and extinct ones. [More] -
Time Traveler: The Art of Charles R. Knight (preview)
26 Mar 2012 | 8:00 amYou may not know his name, but chances are that you have seen his work. Brooklyn-born artist Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) produced paintings and sculptures of dinosaurs, mammoths and prehistoric humans that adorn the great natural history museums in the U.S. His dinos have appeared as toys, stamps and comics, as well as in books and scientific journals on paleontology. One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s illustrators swiped them for his 1912 novel The Lost World . Some even became movie stars, directly inspiring sequences in the 1933 King Kong and, more indirectly, Walt… -
Illustrating the Lost Continent
29 Feb 2012 | 7:05 amWe are continually trying to illuminate things from the past, present and future. For this feature, we needed to depict rarely illustrated dinosaur species. We turned to James Gurney because he is adept at constructing lost worlds. Here is a short "how-to" lesson on how he went about re-creating long-extinct dinosaurs, making them come to life on our pages. [More] -
Dinosaurs of the Lost Continent (preview)
29 Feb 2012 | 7:00 amOn a cool September morning in 2010 my crew and I began our daily descent from camp back into deep time, walking single file down a steep, knife-edge ridge of sandstone and mudstone in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Each of us carried water, a field notebook, lunch, a rock hammer and other hand tools. Heavier tools and materials--rock saws, picks, shovels, bags of plaster and swaths of burlap--awaited us half a mile away at the dig site. Even from the hilltop we could easily see the plaster jackets down in the quarry--alabaster beacons in a wilderness of…
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Scientific American Topic - Genetic Engineering
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A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50
27 Apr 2012 | 1:45 pmScientific American 's review of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1964 ended with the pat pronouncement that the book was "much ado about very little." The short piece, which appeared two years after the initial publication of Structure as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science , discarded as unoriginal Kuhn's critique of the positivist argument that science progresses relentlessly forward toward the truth. [More] -
Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?
25 Apr 2012 | 1:01 pmFood for hungry mouths, feed for animals headed to the slaughterhouse, fiber for clothing and even, in some cases, fuel for vehicles--all derive from global agriculture. As a result, in the world's temperate climes human agriculture has supplanted 70 percent of grasslands, 50 percent of savannas and 45 percent of temperate forests. Farming is also the leading cause of deforestation in the tropics and one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions , a major contributor to the ongoing maul of species known as the " sixth extinction ," and a perennial source of nonrenewable… -
Readers Respond to "The Coming Mega Drought" and Other Articles
20 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmSCREENING STATS [More] -
Fossil Free: Microbe Helps Convert Solar Power to Liquid Fuel
30 Mar 2012 | 10:01 amA new " bioreactor " could store electricity as liquid fuel with the help of a genetically engineered microbe and copious carbon dioxide. The idea--dubbed " electrofuels " by a federal agency funding the research--could offer electricity storage that would have the energy density of fuels such as gasoline. If it works, the hybrid bioelectric system would also offer a more efficient way of turning sunlight to fuel than growing plants and converting them into biofuel . [More] -
How to Use Light to Control the Brain
27 Mar 2012 | 12:00 pmIn the film Amèlie , the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind. Next thing you know, Bretodeau is transported to a time when he was in the schoolyard scrambling to stuff his pockets with…
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Scientific American Topic - Genetics
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Leeches Spill Guts about Elusive Mammals
24 Apr 2012 | 4:02 pmWant to suss out the existence of a shy mammal in a tropical jungle? Just check a bloodsucking leech. [More] -
Genome Run: Andean Shrub Is First New Plant Species Described by Its DNA
24 Apr 2012 | 12:45 pmA flowering shrub from the Andean cloud forests made taxonomic history last month. The plant--now dubbed Brunfelsia plowmaniana --had puzzled botanists for decades as they endeavored to determine whether or not it was truly an evolutionary newcomer. When its DNA revealed this to be true, researchers made the unprecedented move to include B. plowmaniana 's genetic code in its description as a new species, in the journal PhytoKeys . That decision could open the door to future DNA definitions of new botanical species--and heal a rift in the field of botany. [More] -
Slight Genetic Variations Can Affect How Others See You
24 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amWhen we meet new people, we assess their character by watching their gestures and facial expressions. Now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that those nonverbal cues are communicating the presence of a specific form of a gene that makes us more or less responsive to others’ needs. [More] -
Hot Spring Yields New Hybrid Viral Genome
20 Apr 2012 | 10:20 amIn the hostile environment of a bubbling volcanic hot spring, a team of researchers at Portland State University in Oregon has discovered a new viral genome that seems to be the product of recombination between a DNA virus and an RNA virus -- a natural chimaera not seen before. Their findings appeared on 19 April in the journal Biology Direct . [More] -
Depression in Teens Could Be Diagnosed with Blood Test
18 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amCan a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Microbiology
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Garlic Compound Fights Food-Borne Bacteria
1 May 2012 | 9:24 pmIt’s more bad news for vampires, but good news for the fight against food-borne illness: a compound in garlic is extremely effective at fighting Campylobacter , bacteria that frequently cause intestinal infections. The work is in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy . [Xiaonan Lu et al., " Antimicrobial effect of diallyl sulphide on Campylobacter jejuni biofilms "] [More] -
Nothing to Sneeze at: Allergies May Be Good for You
25 Apr 2012 | 1:50 pmAh, glorious springtime. It brings flowers, warmer temperatures--and for many, incessant sneezes and sniffles. Everybody curses allergies as annoying at best, and some allergic reactions--such as anaphylaxis, which rapidly lowers blood pressure and closes the airways--can be fatal. But a handful of researchers now propose that allergies may actually have evolved to protect us. Runny noses, coughs and itchy rashes keep toxic chemicals out of our bodies, they argue, and persuade us to steer clear of dangerous environments. [More] -
Hot Spring Yields New Hybrid Viral Genome
20 Apr 2012 | 10:20 amIn the hostile environment of a bubbling volcanic hot spring, a team of researchers at Portland State University in Oregon has discovered a new viral genome that seems to be the product of recombination between a DNA virus and an RNA virus -- a natural chimaera not seen before. Their findings appeared on 19 April in the journal Biology Direct . [More] -
Melting Glaciers Liberate Ancient Microbes
18 Apr 2012 | 11:15 amEditor's Note: This article is an extended version of " Bugs in the Ice Sheet " from the May 2012 Issue of Scientific American . [More] -
Revealed: How Cold War Scientists Joined Forces to Conquer Polio (preview)
16 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amTo many Americans, the cold war is ancient history. Yet only a few decades ago the planet was dangerously divided between West and East, and the antagonism between the U.S. and the Soviet Union defined global politics. Flare-ups such as the Korean “police action,” which killed millions of people in the early 1950s, and the Cuban missile crisis, 10 years later, drew the American and Soviet governments and their proxies to the threshold of nuclear war. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Molecular Biology
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A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50
27 Apr 2012 | 1:45 pmScientific American 's review of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1964 ended with the pat pronouncement that the book was "much ado about very little." The short piece, which appeared two years after the initial publication of Structure as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science , discarded as unoriginal Kuhn's critique of the positivist argument that science progresses relentlessly forward toward the truth. [More] -
Leeches Spill Guts about Elusive Mammals
24 Apr 2012 | 4:02 pmWant to suss out the existence of a shy mammal in a tropical jungle? Just check a bloodsucking leech. [More] -
Genome Run: Andean Shrub Is First New Plant Species Described by Its DNA
24 Apr 2012 | 12:45 pmA flowering shrub from the Andean cloud forests made taxonomic history last month. The plant--now dubbed Brunfelsia plowmaniana --had puzzled botanists for decades as they endeavored to determine whether or not it was truly an evolutionary newcomer. When its DNA revealed this to be true, researchers made the unprecedented move to include B. plowmaniana 's genetic code in its description as a new species, in the journal PhytoKeys . That decision could open the door to future DNA definitions of new botanical species--and heal a rift in the field of botany. [More] -
Hot Spring Yields New Hybrid Viral Genome
20 Apr 2012 | 10:20 amIn the hostile environment of a bubbling volcanic hot spring, a team of researchers at Portland State University in Oregon has discovered a new viral genome that seems to be the product of recombination between a DNA virus and an RNA virus -- a natural chimaera not seen before. Their findings appeared on 19 April in the journal Biology Direct . [More] -
Shorted Circuits: Pentagon Looks to DNA from Plants to Foil Electronic Component Counterfeiters
18 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amCounterfeit electronics embedded in missile guidance systems and hundred-million-dollar aircraft have become a serious problem for the U.S. military and its contractors. Unlike a knockoff Gucci purse or Rolex watch , however, it takes more than misspelled brand labels, altered logos or suspiciously low prices to spot a bogus microprocessor being passed off as the real thing. [More]
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Scientific American - Mind & Brain
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Know Your Neurons: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons in the Brain's Forest
16 May 2012 | 10:40 amPreviously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron [More] -
Environment Enrichment: making your rat sexy since 2012
16 May 2012 | 8:11 amDOES environmental enrichment make your rat sexy ? Today, I’m over at Neurotic Physiology examining a paper on whether environmental enrichment drives the lady rats wild, and why that might be the case. I’ve got a few issues with the paper. The data is fine but it’s all in the interpretation. Head over and check it out . [More] -
#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - on that TIME cover..., stem cells, invasive beetles, drowned Cretaceous birds, onset of autism, and more.
16 May 2012 | 1:28 am- Eric Michael Johnson – Out of the Mouth of Babes [More] -
Whales Adjust Their Hearing Sensitivity
15 May 2012 | 8:05 pmHave you ever wanted to turn down the volume at a deafening concert or noisy bar? Envy the whale: a new study finds that toothed whales can reduce their own auditory sensitivity when they expect a loud sound. The work is presented at this week’s Acoustics 2012 meeting. [Paul E. Nachtigall and Alexander Ya Supin, " Immediate changes in whale hearing sensitivity "] [More] -
The Football Concussion Crisis, Part 1
15 May 2012 | 7:15 pmNFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson joins former NBC anchor Stone Phillips and pathologist Bennet Omalu for a discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Alzheimer's Disease
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9 Percent of Older Adults Have Osteoporosis
26 Apr 2012 | 3:00 pmNearly one in 10 older adults in the U.S. have osteoporosis, according to a new government report. [More] -
Memory Foraging: When the Brain Behaves Like a Bee
16 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amIn search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on. [More] -
Alzheimer's Drug Candidate May Help Brain Injuries Heal
13 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amNerve cells in our limbs can regenerate after injury, but neurons in the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, cannot. Figuring out why this is the case is critical to helping brain and spinal cord injuries heal. [More] -
April 2012 Advances: Additional Resources
8 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amThe Advances news section in April's issue of Scientific American included stories on digital textbooks, the promise of using gene therapy to fight blindness and how fragile orchids survive. To learn more about any of the stories, follow these links. [More] -
Climbing Mount Immortality: Death, Cognition and the Making of Civilization
6 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmImagine yourself dead. What picture comes to mind? Your funeral with a casket surrounded by family and friends? Complete darkness and void? In either case, you are still conscious and observing the scene. In reality, you can no more envision what it is like to be dead than you can visualize yourself before you were born. Death is cognitively nonexistent, and yet we know it is real because every one of the 100 billion people who lived before us is gone. As Christopher Hitchens told an audience I was in shortly before his death, “I’m dying, but so are all of you.” Reality…
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Scientific American - More Science
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Self-Worth Shattering: A Single Bomb Blast Can Saddle Soldiers with Debilitating Brain Trauma
16 May 2012 | 2:40 pmThe stress and suffering of combat are known to leave a lasting impact on military veterans, in some cases triggering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . Researchers have now found an even more serious and debilitating mental condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) , in veterans, particularly those injured by the concussive force of bomb blasts. [More] -
Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 1:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north , according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions.The research will be published in Nature on May 17. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More] -
Animal Tracks: Music about Unusual Creatures Features Some Unusual Instruments [Video]
16 May 2012 | 12:27 pmThe dugong, one of Michael Hearst's "unusual creatures." Credit: Julien Willem/Creative Commons Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks . Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record of recipes from Mario Batali, David Chang and other celebrity chefs set to music. [More] -
Under construction - ITER in LEGO
16 May 2012 | 10:21 amIf you just received your new issue of Scientific American , you saw the article The Problems with ITER and the Fading Dream of Fusion Energy by Geoff Brumfiel. Accompanying image (a little small online, but nice and big in print) is a photograph by Hironobu Maeda of a sculpture by Sachiko Akinaga. It is a LEGO model of the ITER fusion reactor which has been under construction for many years now, and apparently will keep being under construction for many years to come.You may think that the image is a photoshop, or a drawing, or that perhaps the LEGO model does exist somewhere, perhaps in… -
USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Coconut Crab in Guam
16 May 2012 | 9:38 amBy Emily Lu Birgus latro is the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world, in some cases having a leg span of over three feet and weighing over nine pounds. It is more commonly known as the coconut crab, due to its diet. Coconut crabs are mainly scavengers, feeding on various tropical fruits including coconuts. Their two powerful front chelipeds allow them to tear through the tough husk of a coconut and feed on the flesh. In addition, they can climb trees up to 20 feet high just to reach growing coconuts. But these crabs also have other nicknames including palm thief or robber crab. These…
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Scientific American Topic - Eyesight and Eye Health
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Patent Watch
21 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amApparatus and methods for mapping retinal function: More than two million people older than 40 in the U.S. suffer from glaucoma. The disease--one of the leading causes of blindness-- is the result of damage to ganglion cells in the retina. Early-stage glaucoma is treatable, and the earlier it is caught, the easier it is to reverse. But catching glaucoma is not easy, because it often starts at the edge of the retina, beyond our usual field of vision. The standard way of detecting it is decades old and involves placing a contact lens with a single electrode embedded within it on the eye. -
Signs of Psychosis Appear Early (preview)
11 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmFrom the moment he was handed to me in the delivery room, Alex, my firstborn, seemed not happy to be here. His eyes were bottomless, his expression grave. He spent his first three months writhing and screaming inconsolably, the word “colic” wholly insufficient to describe our collective suffering. It wasn’t until his brother, Sammy, arrived that I realized just how different Alex was compared with other babies. Sammy cried only when he was hungry or wet. He made easy eye contact and loved to be stroked, hugged and kissed--all the things Alex recoiled from as an infant. -
Bugs That Transmit "Silent Killer" Are Biting More in the U.S.
9 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amTransmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease--which afflicts millions in Central and South America--may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host--and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. [More] -
Why "Uncanny Valley" Human Look-Alikes Put Us on Edge
3 Apr 2012 | 3:00 pmWhen Pixar screened a computer-animated short film called "Tin Toy" in 1988, test audiences hated the sight of the pseudo-realistic baby named "Billy" who terrorized the toys. Such a strong reaction persuaded Pixar to avoid making uncannily realistic human characters -- it has since focused its efforts on films about living toys, curious robots and talking cars to win Academy Awards and moviegoers' hearts. [More] -
Gene Therapy Restores Sight to Three Patients
1 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amAfter several years of setbacks, gene therapy is once again yielding promising results. One area in which it is proving its potential is in restoring vision to patients who have been losing it since birth. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Stress
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Tetris Shown to Lessen PTSD and Flashbacks
25 Apr 2012 | 4:00 pmLONDON -- A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference. [More] -
A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)
19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.” [More] -
Depression in Teens Could Be Diagnosed with Blood Test
18 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amCan a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression. [More] -
Anxiety Boosts Threat Odor Perception
12 Apr 2012 | 7:04 pmWhen an animal faces a predator, its senses go into overdrive. So scientists wondered, could human anxiety be an evolutionary legacy to protect us against potential threats? And if so, might anxious people have a heightened sense of smell, presumably to detect predators or disease-carriers. [More] -
Signs of Psychosis Appear Early (preview)
11 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmFrom the moment he was handed to me in the delivery room, Alex, my firstborn, seemed not happy to be here. His eyes were bottomless, his expression grave. He spent his first three months writhing and screaming inconsolably, the word “colic” wholly insufficient to describe our collective suffering. It wasn’t until his brother, Sammy, arrived that I realized just how different Alex was compared with other babies. Sammy cried only when he was hungry or wet. He made easy eye contact and loved to be stroked, hugged and kissed--all the things Alex recoiled from as an infant.
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Scientific American Topic - The Senses
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Why Light Touching Can Double Your Chances of Getting a Date [Excerpt]
25 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amEditor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior , by Leonard Mlodinow. Copyright © 2012 by Leonard Mlodinow. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books , an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. [More] -
A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)
19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.” [More] -
Hierarchy of Color Naming Matches the Limits of Our Vision System
16 Apr 2012 | 4:30 pmThe order in which colors are named worldwide appears to be due to how eyes work, suggest computer simulations with virtual people. [More] -
A Coffee Sleuth Delves into the Mystery of "Potato Taste"
13 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amName: Thomas Miller [More] -
Anxiety Boosts Threat Odor Perception
12 Apr 2012 | 7:04 pmWhen an animal faces a predator, its senses go into overdrive. So scientists wondered, could human anxiety be an evolutionary legacy to protect us against potential threats? And if so, might anxious people have a heightened sense of smell, presumably to detect predators or disease-carriers. [More]
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Scientific American - Environment
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Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More] -
Understanding How Animals Create Dazzling Colors Could Lead to Brilliant New Nanotechnologies (preview)
13 May 2012 | 12:00 pmThe changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear. Hooke used the recently invented microscope to investigate the feathers and saw that they were covered with tiny ridges, which he figured might produce the brilliant yellows, greens and blues. [More] -
Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amWhen you don't clean your plate, microbes feast. And Americans are awfully good at feeding microbes, wasting some 222 million metric tons of food a year. That's a quarter of our food. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Atmospheric Sciences
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Fire Storm: Field Researchers and Their Subjects Endure Nature's Tempestuous Power [Slide Show]
25 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amCave-riddled hills jut steeply from the flat pine savanna of Runaway Creek Nature Reserve in Belize. Tapirs, jaguars and wild pigs call the forest-blanketed hillsides home. The territory also encompasses the range of a group of spider monkeys whose lives University of Calgary anthropologist Mary Pavelka and graduate students Kayla Hartwell and Jane Champion have chronicled for four years. The team has amassed a detailed record that goes beyond the animals' daily comings and goings to include measuring stress hormones and the parasites that inhabit their intestinal tracts. [More] -
How to Predict Extreme Weather [Video]
17 Apr 2012 | 7:05 amExtreme weather is expected to be an increasing part of our lives, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2011 alone the U.S. suffered 14 extreme weather events --from the tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., to Hurricane Irene's flooding of the Northeast--that each caused more than $1 billion in damage. [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
The Funny Side of Climate Change
12 Apr 2012 | 2:20 pmKate Evans majored in English during college in 1990s Britain while she perfected the art of getting arrested for trying to prevent the U.K. government and industry from cutting down too many trees. A fan of science, she gradually turned her artistic talents and environmental passions to crafting comics about climate change. In 2006 she published a fully referenced graphic novel based on peer-reviewed science, Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Should Probably Find Out . And she has just released a 16-page comic, The Carbon Supermarket , about… -
How Physics and Neuroscience Dictate Your "Free" Will
12 Apr 2012 | 12:40 pmIn a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned aeons. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Biodiversity
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Leeches Spill Guts about Elusive Mammals
24 Apr 2012 | 4:02 pmWant to suss out the existence of a shy mammal in a tropical jungle? Just check a bloodsucking leech. [More] -
Big Kill, Not Big Chill, Finished Off Giant Kangaroos
22 Mar 2012 | 2:31 pmAround 40,000 years ago, the giant kangaroo disappeared from Australia. So did Diprotodon ( rhinoceros-size wombats ) and Palorchestes ( tapirlike marsupials ) as well as supersize birds, reptiles and some 50 other so-called megafauna--big animals. And now a record of fungal spores pulled from the swamp at Lynch's Crater in the northeastern corner of the continent reveals humans as the culprit. [More] -
New Family of Limbless Amphibians Discovered in India
22 Feb 2012 | 3:50 pmFrom Nature magazine. [More] -
Museum Menagerie: Historical Photos of the Construction of Early Wildlife Exhibits [Slide Show]
12 Feb 2012 | 1:00 am[More] -
Scientists Manipulate and Erase Memories (preview)
26 Jan 2012 | 7:00 amJoël Coutu knelt on the cold cement floor of the pet supply store he managed in Montreal, his wrists bound behind him with telephone wire. He could feel the barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of his neck. “You’re lying!” the gunman screamed. “And I am going to blow your head off.” [More]
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Scientific American - Clean Air Policy
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Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amWhen you don't clean your plate, microbes feast. And Americans are awfully good at feeding microbes, wasting some 222 million metric tons of food a year. That's a quarter of our food. [More] -
How to Adapt to Climate Change
6 May 2012 | 10:00 amFor want of a mangrove , the village was lost. In fact, the loss of coastal mangroves made even a costly dyke along the Vietnamese seashore inadequate to cope with a recent typhoon. Plus, the absence of mangroves hit livelihoods--less seafood to catch. [More] -
L.A. Needs to Stop Being Such a Cow Town
29 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amEarly inhabitants of what’s now Los Angeles called the region the Valley of Smoke. But it was the car that really made Los Angeles's smog get out of hand. [More] -
Cheap Fracked Gas Could Help Americans Keep on Truckin'
23 Apr 2012 | 7:01 amA different kind of truck stop is coming soon to Atlanta. Greg Roche, vice president for infrastructure at Clean Energy Fuels , is presently scouting locations to build one of the California-based company's natural gas fueling stations for long-haul trucks by the end of this year. With fracking techniques freeing more and more natural gas in the U.S., the alternative fuel is suddenly much cheaper than those made from petroleum. [More] -
Happy Earth Day! Welcome to the Anthropocene
22 Apr 2012 | 9:00 amThe list of human impacts on the planet is a long one. We move more earth and stone than all the world's rivers. We are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere largely by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. And we now consume at least a quarter of all the sun's energy that plants have turned to food. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs
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Warming Ocean Current Might Create Coral Refuges
1 May 2012 | 10:30 amGlobal warming is expected to have devastating effects on coral reefs, but recent research points to a few exceptions. [More] -
From the Archive, 1912: What We Know About Icebergs
10 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pmEditor’s note: we are publishing this article on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912 [More] -
Tropical Depression: Your Saltwater Fish Tank May Be Killing the Ocean
6 Apr 2012 | 10:30 amTropical fish tanks in restaurants, hospitals and homes evoke feelings of tranquility and beauty. They even lower stress levels prior to medical procedures and encourage Alzheimer's patients to eat sufficiently . But what's good for humans may be bad for the sea. [More] -
Titanic : Resonance and Reality
4 Apr 2012 | 10:30 amThe tragedy [More] -
"Chum Cam" Helps Catalogue Endangered Sharks
9 Mar 2012 | 12:15 pmScientists have been trying to answer the question of whether marine protected areas, where sharks and their prey are off-limits to fishermen, are indeed home to more sharks than non-protected areas of the ocean. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Earth Science
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How the USDA Maps Food Deserts
28 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amFood deserts--areas where residents have limited options for purchasing fresh foods--are not easy to quantify. Access to food depends on a number of factors, from geography to transportation to the choices of individual grocers. One simple way to sketch out food desert boundaries is to chart those regions where supermarkets are scarce. The map below does just that for South Dakota, marking out areas that are more than 10 miles, and in many cases 20 miles, from a supermarket. The map comes from a 2009 USDA report to Congress, " Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food : Measuring and… -
Certainty Principle: People Who Hold False Convictions Are Better at Retaining Corrected Information
27 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amFirm convictions dominate news headlines these days, but because of a phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect, strongly held ideas that turn out to be factually incorrect are actually easier to amend . Brain imaging is now shedding light on how people change their minds during hypercorrection, potentially revealing the best ways for us to learn from our errors. [More] -
Melting Glaciers Liberate Ancient Microbes
18 Apr 2012 | 11:15 amEditor's Note: This article is an extended version of " Bugs in the Ice Sheet " from the May 2012 Issue of Scientific American . [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
Penguins from Space: A New Satellite Census Doubles the Known Population of Emperors
13 Apr 2012 | 5:00 pmA group of geographers and ecologists from three continents has taken an unprecedented look at Antarctica's emperor penguins. Using very high resolution (VHR) images from satellites 450 kilometers above Earth, the team has come up with the first total population count for an entire species. With a whopping 595,000 penguins, they found nearly twice as many emperor penguins as did previous studies, and they counted 46 colonies, up from the earlier total of 38. Their results were published today in PLoS One . [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Global Warming
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Warming Ocean Current Might Create Coral Refuges
1 May 2012 | 10:30 amGlobal warming is expected to have devastating effects on coral reefs, but recent research points to a few exceptions. [More] -
Is Global Warming Causing More Home Runs in Baseball?
30 Apr 2012 | 3:15 pmFox baseball commentator Tim McCarver is a retired baseball catcher whose work as a TV analyst recently got him inducted into the announcers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He occupies the top TV perch in the sport, and fans either love him or hate him. [More] -
The Funny Side of Climate Change
12 Apr 2012 | 2:20 pmKate Evans majored in English during college in 1990s Britain while she perfected the art of getting arrested for trying to prevent the U.K. government and industry from cutting down too many trees. A fan of science, she gradually turned her artistic talents and environmental passions to crafting comics about climate change. In 2006 she published a fully referenced graphic novel based on peer-reviewed science, Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Should Probably Find Out . And she has just released a 16-page comic, The Carbon Supermarket , about… -
Warmer Temps May Bollux Botanicals
11 Apr 2012 | 11:56 pmGlobal warming might seem like a botanical boon. After all, milder temperatures and more carbon dioxide and nitrogen should feed flora. But a ten-year study has found that any initial positive effect on plant growth from climate change may soon disappear. The report is in the journal Nature Climate Change . [Sarah C. Elmendorf et al.," Plot-scale evidence of tundra vegetation change and links to recent summer warming "] [More] -
A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming
2 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmEnergy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Oceanography
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Warming Ocean Current Might Create Coral Refuges
1 May 2012 | 10:30 amGlobal warming is expected to have devastating effects on coral reefs, but recent research points to a few exceptions. [More] -
Melting Glaciers Liberate Ancient Microbes
18 Apr 2012 | 11:15 amEditor's Note: This article is an extended version of " Bugs in the Ice Sheet " from the May 2012 Issue of Scientific American . [More] -
How to Predict Extreme Weather [Video]
17 Apr 2012 | 7:05 amExtreme weather is expected to be an increasing part of our lives, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2011 alone the U.S. suffered 14 extreme weather events --from the tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., to Hurricane Irene's flooding of the Northeast--that each caused more than $1 billion in damage. [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
Bright Microbes
16 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmBioluminescent bays are among the rarest and most fragile of ecosystems. They form when large numbers of microorganisms, often dinoflagellates such as Pyrodinium bahamense , congregate in a lagoon with an opening narrow enough to keep the organisms from escaping. The dinoflagellates feed on vitamin B 12 produced by red mangrove trees and glow bluish-green when disturbed by motion of any kind, although scientists have yet to fully understand the phenomenon. Because “bio bays” need very specific conditions to survive, there are only a handful worldwide, and most of the…
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Scientific American Topic - Earth Science
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How the USDA Maps Food Deserts
28 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amFood deserts--areas where residents have limited options for purchasing fresh foods--are not easy to quantify. Access to food depends on a number of factors, from geography to transportation to the choices of individual grocers. One simple way to sketch out food desert boundaries is to chart those regions where supermarkets are scarce. The map below does just that for South Dakota, marking out areas that are more than 10 miles, and in many cases 20 miles, from a supermarket. The map comes from a 2009 USDA report to Congress, " Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food : Measuring and… -
Certainty Principle: People Who Hold False Convictions Are Better at Retaining Corrected Information
27 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amFirm convictions dominate news headlines these days, but because of a phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect, strongly held ideas that turn out to be factually incorrect are actually easier to amend . Brain imaging is now shedding light on how people change their minds during hypercorrection, potentially revealing the best ways for us to learn from our errors. [More] -
Melting Glaciers Liberate Ancient Microbes
18 Apr 2012 | 11:15 amEditor's Note: This article is an extended version of " Bugs in the Ice Sheet " from the May 2012 Issue of Scientific American . [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
Penguins from Space: A New Satellite Census Doubles the Known Population of Emperors
13 Apr 2012 | 5:00 pmA group of geographers and ecologists from three continents has taken an unprecedented look at Antarctica's emperor penguins. Using very high resolution (VHR) images from satellites 450 kilometers above Earth, the team has come up with the first total population count for an entire species. With a whopping 595,000 penguins, they found nearly twice as many emperor penguins as did previous studies, and they counted 46 colonies, up from the earlier total of 38. Their results were published today in PLoS One . [More]
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Scientific American - Environment
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Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More] -
Understanding How Animals Create Dazzling Colors Could Lead to Brilliant New Nanotechnologies (preview)
13 May 2012 | 12:00 pmThe changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear. Hooke used the recently invented microscope to investigate the feathers and saw that they were covered with tiny ridges, which he figured might produce the brilliant yellows, greens and blues. [More] -
Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amWhen you don't clean your plate, microbes feast. And Americans are awfully good at feeding microbes, wasting some 222 million metric tons of food a year. That's a quarter of our food. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Cloning
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Readers Respond to "The Coming Mega Drought" and Other Articles
20 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmSCREENING STATS [More] -
Bugs That Transmit "Silent Killer" Are Biting More in the U.S.
9 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amTransmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease--which afflicts millions in Central and South America--may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host--and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. [More] -
Tropical Depression: Your Saltwater Fish Tank May Be Killing the Ocean
6 Apr 2012 | 10:30 amTropical fish tanks in restaurants, hospitals and homes evoke feelings of tranquility and beauty. They even lower stress levels prior to medical procedures and encourage Alzheimer's patients to eat sufficiently . But what's good for humans may be bad for the sea. [More] -
Can Radical Efficiency Revive U.S. Manufacturing?
16 Mar 2012 | 2:31 pmEditor's note: The following is adapted from the Rocky Mountain Institute's Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era . [More] -
Success Is Official: Russian Team Breaches Buried Antarctic Lake
8 Feb 2012 | 1:00 pmIt's official. Russian scientists announced today that they have reached Antarctica's Lake Vostok, an ancient, liquid lake the size of Lake Ontario buried beneath more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) of ice for at least 14 million years. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - Global Warming
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Warming Ocean Current Might Create Coral Refuges
1 May 2012 | 10:30 amGlobal warming is expected to have devastating effects on coral reefs, but recent research points to a few exceptions. [More] -
Is Global Warming Causing More Home Runs in Baseball?
30 Apr 2012 | 3:15 pmFox baseball commentator Tim McCarver is a retired baseball catcher whose work as a TV analyst recently got him inducted into the announcers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He occupies the top TV perch in the sport, and fans either love him or hate him. [More] -
The Funny Side of Climate Change
12 Apr 2012 | 2:20 pmKate Evans majored in English during college in 1990s Britain while she perfected the art of getting arrested for trying to prevent the U.K. government and industry from cutting down too many trees. A fan of science, she gradually turned her artistic talents and environmental passions to crafting comics about climate change. In 2006 she published a fully referenced graphic novel based on peer-reviewed science, Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Should Probably Find Out . And she has just released a 16-page comic, The Carbon Supermarket , about… -
Warmer Temps May Bollux Botanicals
11 Apr 2012 | 11:56 pmGlobal warming might seem like a botanical boon. After all, milder temperatures and more carbon dioxide and nitrogen should feed flora. But a ten-year study has found that any initial positive effect on plant growth from climate change may soon disappear. The report is in the journal Nature Climate Change . [Sarah C. Elmendorf et al.," Plot-scale evidence of tundra vegetation change and links to recent summer warming "] [More] -
A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming
2 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmEnergy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world. [More]
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Scientific American Topic - PTSD
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Tetris Shown to Lessen PTSD and Flashbacks
25 Apr 2012 | 4:00 pmLONDON -- A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference. [More] -
Everyday Stress Can Shut Down the Brain's Chief Command Center (preview)
9 Apr 2012 | 10:00 amThe entrance exam to medical school consists of a five-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow and even shut down entirely. The experience--known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms--is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer’s block or struggled through a lengthy exam. -
Decoding the Body Watcher
3 Apr 2012 | 10:30 amWhat's the difference between noticing the rapid beat of a popular song on the radio and noticing the rapid rate of your heart when you see your crush? Between noticing the smell of fresh baked bread and noticing that you're out of breath? Both require attention. However, the direction of that attention differs: it is either turned outward, as in the case of noticing a stop sign or a tap on your shoulder, or turned inward, as in the case of feeling full or feeling love. [More] -
How Yoga Might Relieve Stress-Linked Ailments
13 Mar 2012 | 7:14 pmYoga and relaxation practices have been around for thousands of years. And modern research suggests that yoga could have a very real impact on many stress-related illnesses, including anxiety, depression and heart disease. [More] -
Stress Linked to Aging Chromosomes
22 Feb 2012 | 10:43 pmToo much sun, smoking and a poor diet can make us look older. But additional forces are at work aging our cells. [More]
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Scientific American - Environment
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Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More] -
Understanding How Animals Create Dazzling Colors Could Lead to Brilliant New Nanotechnologies (preview)
13 May 2012 | 12:00 pmThe changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear. Hooke used the recently invented microscope to investigate the feathers and saw that they were covered with tiny ridges, which he figured might produce the brilliant yellows, greens and blues. [More] -
Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amWhen you don't clean your plate, microbes feast. And Americans are awfully good at feeding microbes, wasting some 222 million metric tons of food a year. That's a quarter of our food. [More]
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Scientific American - Environment
-
Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More] -
Understanding How Animals Create Dazzling Colors Could Lead to Brilliant New Nanotechnologies (preview)
13 May 2012 | 12:00 pmThe changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear. Hooke used the recently invented microscope to investigate the feathers and saw that they were covered with tiny ridges, which he figured might produce the brilliant yellows, greens and blues. [More] -
Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amWhen you don't clean your plate, microbes feast. And Americans are awfully good at feeding microbes, wasting some 222 million metric tons of food a year. That's a quarter of our food. [More]
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Scientific American - Environment
-
Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?
15 May 2012 | 8:15 pmNo two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo ’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More] -
Understanding How Animals Create Dazzling Colors Could Lead to Brilliant New Nanotechnologies (preview)
13 May 2012 | 12:00 pmThe changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear. Hooke used the recently invented microscope to investigate the feathers and saw that they were covered with tiny ridges, which he figured might produce the brilliant yellows, greens and blues. [More] -
Wasted Food No More
13 May 2012 | 9:00 amWhen you don't clean your plate, microbes feast. And Americans are awfully good at feeding microbes, wasting some 222 million metric tons of food a year. That's a quarter of our food. [More]
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Scientific American - Everyday Science
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Down with Double Data Fees!
16 May 2012 | 7:00 amWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Lifestyle, establish Fairness, ensure blood pressure Tranquility, provide for the common Text Messager, promote less Outrage and secure Cell phone Service that’s anywhere near as good as it is in Other Countries, do ordain and establish this Cellular Bill of Rights. [More] -
The Football Concussion Crisis, Part 1
15 May 2012 | 7:15 pmNFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson joins former NBC anchor Stone Phillips and pathologist Bennet Omalu for a discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players. [More] -
Car Commutes Can Counter Conditioning
15 May 2012 | 3:19 pmThe average American car commuter spends a total of about 50 minutes each day getting to and from work. Some spend hours stuck in heavy traffic. Others may enjoy clear roads, but long drives from suburbs to the city. [More] -
How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
15 May 2012 | 10:25 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People"
15 May 2012 | 10:05 am“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More]
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Scientific American - Archaeology & Paleontology
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Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins
10 May 2012 | 2:01 pmAn excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.) [More] -
Recommended: Bird Sense
4 May 2012 | 12:00 pmBird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird [More] -
Stonehenge Had Lecture Hall Acoustics
3 May 2012 | 4:35 pmThe stone slabs of England's Stonehenge may have been more than just a spectacular sight to the ancient people who built the structure; they likely created an acoustic environment unlike anything they normally experienced, new research hints. [More] -
Giant Flealike Pest Put the Bite on Dinosaurs
3 May 2012 | 4:15 pmPaleo-pests about 10 times bigger than today's fleas may have sneaked up on a huge dinosaur, crawled onto its soft underbelly and taken a bite, likely a painful one, say researchers who have discovered fossils of the flealike organisms. [More] -
Triumph of the Titans: How Sauropods Flourished (preview)
30 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amEver since fossils of the behemoth, long-necked dinosaurs known as sauropods surfaced in England nearly 170 years ago, they have awed and confused scientists. Even when the great English anatomist Sir Richard Owen recognized in 1842 that dinosaurs constituted a group of their own, apart from reptiles, he excluded the gigantic bones later classified as sauropods. Instead he interpreted them as belonging to a type of aquatic crocodile, which he had named Cetiosaurus, or “whale lizard,” for the enormous size of its bones. Nearly 30 years later, in 1871, University of Oxford geologist…
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Scientific American - Language & Linguistics
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Older Adults Prize Accuracy More Than Speed
14 May 2012 | 7:30 amOlder adults often take longer to make a decision than young adults do. But that does not mean they are any less sharp. According to research at Ohio State University, the slower response time of older adults has more to do with prizing accuracy over speed. [More] -
When Pro-Vaccine Messaging Backfires
13 May 2012 | 12:00 amAmericans get a stream of messages telling them to avoid vaccines, from Jenny McCarthy on Oprah to billboard animations shown in Times Square. The responsible solution--fight back with forceful pro-vaccine messaging, right? [More] -
Imagining the Future Invokes Your Memory
12 May 2012 | 7:30 amI remember my retirement like it was yesterday. As I recall, I am still working, though not as hard as I did when I was younger. My wife and I still live in the city, where we bicycle a fair amount and stay fit. We have a favorite coffee shop where we read the morning papers and say hello to the other regulars. We don’t play golf. [More] -
MIND Reviews: Memoirs of an Addicted Brain
11 May 2012 | 12:00 pmMemoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs [More] -
Why Science Is Better When It's Multinational
9 May 2012 | 7:30 amNations are rivals in soccer and international relations, but science is a unifying force. Many of our biggest achievements seem to come from international collaborations. A team from 11 laboratories in nine countries identified the SARS coronavirus in 2003 with unprecedented speed. Scientists come from all over to chase the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Centers of excellence dot the globe. The world of science is getting flatter. [More]
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Scientific American - Physics
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Astronomers Detect Smallish Exoplanet's Infrared Glow
14 May 2012 | 3:40 pmHere’s a hot topic: astronomers have detected infrared radiation from a faraway planet not much bigger than our own. [More] -
In Search of the Best (Energy) Ideas: A Q&A with ARPA-E's Arun Majumdar
10 May 2012 | 8:01 pmThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June. [More] -
Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins
10 May 2012 | 2:01 pmAn excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.) [More] -
Climate Forecasting: A Break in the Clouds
10 May 2012 | 11:15 amBy Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine [More] -
Screening Test: Are al Qaeda's Airline Bombing Attempts Becoming More Sophisticated?
9 May 2012 | 5:10 pmThe CIA, working with counterparts in the Middle East, earlier this week halted the latest al Qaeda terrorist plot to bomb aircraft bound for the U.S. The planned attack, which would have come from explosives worn under a passenger's clothing, is reminiscent of the so-called underwear bomb worn by an al Qaeda operative in the failed attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a Detroit-bound passenger airliner on Christmas Day 2009 . The latest underwear bomb found through the covert CIA operation is thought to be the work of Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri , who designed the original…
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Scientific American Topic - Electrical Engineering
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What Wi-Fi Stands for--and Other Wireless Questions Answered
1 May 2012 | 12:00 pmIn my Scientific American column this month , I chased down the answers to questions about wi-fi that have plagued mankind from the beginning--at least, the beginning of wireless Internet. Things like "Why do I have four bars but still can't connect?" and "Why do I see a phony hot spot called 'Free Public Wi-Fi' in airports?" [More] -
New Technology Allows Better Extreme Weather Forecasts
17 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amAfter the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. [More] -
AI Me-Rector Sets: Self-Assembling Robotic Cubes Can Replicate Objects [Video]
5 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am[More] -
Fossil Free: Microbe Helps Convert Solar Power to Liquid Fuel
30 Mar 2012 | 10:01 amA new " bioreactor " could store electricity as liquid fuel with the help of a genetically engineered microbe and copious carbon dioxide. The idea--dubbed " electrofuels " by a federal agency funding the research--could offer electricity storage that would have the energy density of fuels such as gasoline. If it works, the hybrid bioelectric system would also offer a more efficient way of turning sunlight to fuel than growing plants and converting them into biofuel . [More] -
A Rosie Future: Jetsons -Like Gadgets with "Ambient Intelligence" Are Key to Smart Homes and Cities
29 Mar 2012 | 2:30 pmFifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually surpass this futuristic vision. By 2062, the year the animated show was set, advances in artificial intelligence , sensor networks and robotics promise to make the Jetsons's home in Skypad Apartments, and indeed in all of Orbit City, seem quaint by comparison (although flying cars may remain out of reach--especially ones that beat parking problems by folding into a suitcase). [More]
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Scientific American - Math
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Down with Double Data Fees!
16 May 2012 | 7:00 amWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Lifestyle, establish Fairness, ensure blood pressure Tranquility, provide for the common Text Messager, promote less Outrage and secure Cell phone Service that’s anywhere near as good as it is in Other Countries, do ordain and establish this Cellular Bill of Rights. [More] -
In Their Prime: Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture
11 May 2012 | 8:00 amOne of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (numbers that cannot be evenly divided by any other number except themselves or 1). For example: [More] -
Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins
10 May 2012 | 2:01 pmAn excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.) [More] -
Does Digital Piracy Really Hurt Movies?
8 May 2012 | 8:00 amThe shadowy nature of illegal media downloading makes it difficult for researchers to analyze the true relation between piracy and lost sales. Does every movie download represent a theater ticket left unpurchased, as the movie industry contends? Or are most downloaders people who never would have bought a ticket in the first place? [More] -
Spy-High: Amateur Astronomers Scour the Sky for Government Secrets
1 May 2012 | 7:00 amEarlier this year Iran's defense minister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to "easily" watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground. The announcement was largely ignored, in part because it made the minister sound like a James Bond villain. The boast was also a bit anticlimactic, given that even amateur astronomers are already recording in detail what happens in low Earth orbit. Both the technology involved and the techniques used to observe satellites and even the occasional astronaut perched outside the International Space Station (ISS) are…
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Scientific American - History of Science
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In Their Prime: Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture
11 May 2012 | 8:00 amOne of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (numbers that cannot be evenly divided by any other number except themselves or 1). For example: [More] -
In Search of the Best (Energy) Ideas: A Q&A with ARPA-E's Arun Majumdar
10 May 2012 | 8:01 pmThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June. [More] -
Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins
10 May 2012 | 2:01 pmAn excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.) [More] -
Psychiatry's "Bible" Gets an Overhaul (preview)
7 May 2012 | 6:30 amEditor's Note: Read our blog series on psychiatry's new rulebook, the DSM-5. [More] -
Are We Born to Be Religious? (preview)
5 May 2012 | 8:06 amA deep question pervades the debates surrounding religion--whether God exists, sure, but that one is mighty difficult to answer. Instead we can ask a related, more approachable query: Why does God exist for some of us but not for others? Theologians and ministers preach that faith is preeminently a matter of personal choice. Is it, really? [More]
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Scientific American - Chemistry
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This Is Your Brain on Drugs
15 May 2012 | 7:30 amIn the 1954 foundational text of the Age of Aquarius, The Doors of Perception , Aldous Huxley describes his encounters with mescaline, a psychoactive substance derived from the peyote cactus and traditionally used by Native Americans for religious purposes. Huxley’s experiences include profound changes in the visual world, colors that induce sound, the telescoping of time and space, the loss of the notion of self, and feelings of oneness, peacefulness and bliss more commonly associated with religious visions or an exultant state: “A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full… -
MIND Reviews: Memoirs of an Addicted Brain
11 May 2012 | 12:00 pmMemoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs [More] -
In Search of the Best (Energy) Ideas: A Q&A with ARPA-E's Arun Majumdar
10 May 2012 | 8:01 pmThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June. [More] -
Screening Test: Are al Qaeda's Airline Bombing Attempts Becoming More Sophisticated?
9 May 2012 | 5:10 pmThe CIA, working with counterparts in the Middle East, earlier this week halted the latest al Qaeda terrorist plot to bomb aircraft bound for the U.S. The planned attack, which would have come from explosives worn under a passenger's clothing, is reminiscent of the so-called underwear bomb worn by an al Qaeda operative in the failed attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a Detroit-bound passenger airliner on Christmas Day 2009 . The latest underwear bomb found through the covert CIA operation is thought to be the work of Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri , who designed the original… -
How to Adapt to Climate Change
6 May 2012 | 10:00 amFor want of a mangrove , the village was lost. In fact, the loss of coastal mangroves made even a costly dyke along the Vietnamese seashore inadequate to cope with a recent typhoon. Plus, the absence of mangroves hit livelihoods--less seafood to catch. [More]
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Observations
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Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 12:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north, according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions. The research will be published in Nature on May 17. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The tropics—the belt of land around the equator characterized by abundant rainfall and torrid temperatures —have been expanding for at least 40 years. In fact, the tropics have widened by roughly 0.7… -
Animal Tracks: Music about Unusual Creatures Features Some Unusual Instruments [Video]
16 May 2012 | 11:27 amThe dugong, one of Michael Hearst's "unusual creatures." Credit: Julien Willem/Creative Commons Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks. Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record of recipes—from Mario Batali, David Chang and other celebrity chefs—set to music. Now comes Hearst’s Songs for Unusual Creatures, a new album honoring some of the… -
Microbes Annihilate the “Nature vs. Nurture” Debate
16 May 2012 | 9:02 amMost E. coli bacteria found in the body are harmless The latest research into the genetics of the human microbiome is taking to a whole new level the old (and not always fruitful) argument about whether nature or nurture is a more important influence in our lives. In the past few days, Science Express published a paper that demonstrated that friendly (or commensal) bacteria don’t just passively crowd out the disease-causing ones. They actively fight back after an infection by taking advantage of selective pressure to force the disease-causing germs to become less fit and eventually die… -
The Mathematician’s Obesity Fallacy
15 May 2012 | 5:30 pmAs I write, this interview with mathematician Carson C. Chow is the number-one most-emailed story on the New York Times Web site. Chow, a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, had no experience in the health sciences before he came to study the problem of why so many Americans are overweight. “I didn’t even know what a calorie was,” he says. This kind of outsider’s perspective can be invaluable when attacking a problem as difficult and entrenched as the epidemic of obesity in the U.S. Chow relates the story of starting work… -
Searching for the Onset of Autism
15 May 2012 | 2:43 pmDiffusion tensor image shows white matter pathways in infant at risk for autism. Warmer colors represent higher fractional anisotropy, a measure of white-matter organization. (Credit: Image created by Jason Wolff, University of North Carolina.) Early behavioral intervention has shown some promise as a way to help children with autism. But it’s difficult to see the hallmarks of autism before two years of age with today’s diagnostic criteria. Could we find other methods? Seeking to answer that question is Jed Elison at the California Institute of Technology, who is working with Ralph…
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Extinction Countdown
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New Polar Bear Counting Method Creates Confusion
10 May 2012 | 8:18 amA few weeks ago, the director of wildlife for Nunavut, Canada, made an unexpected declaration, claiming that the number of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in the western Hudson Bay region is increasing, even though scientists say the population is declining. Western Hudson Bay is one of 19 distinct polar bear subpopulations, and previous research has suggested that the animals in that region could die out in 25 to 30 years as climate change eliminates the sea ice that they rely on for hunting and breeding. Media outlets such as Forbes and the Web sites of various climate change skeptics quickly… -
Amazing Video: First Camera Trap Footage of Critically Endangered Cross River Gorillas
8 May 2012 | 1:46 pmVery few people have ever seen a Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli), the rarest and most endangered of the world’s four gorilla subspecies. Only about 250 to 300 of these animals exist in the world, and they have almost never been photographed in the wild. Well, you’re in for a treat. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) this week released the first camera trap video footage of Cross River gorillas. The footage, shot in Cameroon’s Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary, shows eight different gorillas—representing about 3 percent of the entire species—casually walking… -
New Conservation Plan Will Protect Endangered Zebra Species
3 May 2012 | 2:36 pmThe governments of Kenya and Ethiopia agreed last week to develop a new action plan to help protect the endangered Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi), the rarest zebra species and the largest equid species on the planet. The previous five-year conservation strategy for the species expired last year. Grevy’s zebra populations have declined from an estimated 15,000 in the 1970s to about 2,400 today. Most of the animals live in Kenya; about 140 live in Ethiopia. The species has disappeared from much of its previous range, including Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Sudan. The International… -
The Most Eagerly Awaited Rhino Porn of All Time [Video]
30 Apr 2012 | 4:11 pmIn 2009 four of the world’s last seven northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) were moved from a zoo in the Czech Republic to Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. At the time conservationists expressed hope that returning the rhinos to semi-wild lives under their native African skies would help inspire the animals to mate and, if they were extremely lucky, save the species from extinction. No such luck. There were a few half-hearted couplings in early 2011, neither of which resulted in pregnancies, but for the most part, the rhinos showed little to no interest in breeding. Maybe… -
160 Video Cameras to Help Monitor Last 35 Javan Rhinos
27 Apr 2012 | 7:23 amSmile, you’re on endangered-species camera. The world’s last 35 Javan rhinoceroses (Rhinoceros sondaicus) are a little bit safer this week as 120 new camera traps have been installed in Ujung Kulon National Park, located on the western corner of the island of Java, in Indonesia. The new video cameras were donated by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Rhino Foundation (IRF). They join 40 cameras that were already in use. The park is the only habitat for this critically endangered species. There are no Javan rhinos in captivity. Javan rhinos, like all rhino species,…
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Expeditions
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USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Coconut Crab in Guam
16 May 2012 | 8:38 amBy Emily Lu Birgus latro is the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world, in some cases having a leg span of over three feet and weighing over nine pounds. It is more commonly known as the coconut crab, due to its diet. Coconut crabs are mainly scavengers, feeding on various tropical fruits including coconuts. Their two powerful front chelipeds allow them to tear through the tough husk of a coconut and feed on the flesh. In addition, they can climb trees up to 20 feet high just to reach growing coconuts. But these crabs also have other nicknames including “palm thief” or “robber… -
USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Invasion of the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle
15 May 2012 | 6:38 amBy Miller Zou Marine and terrestrial ecosystems of the Indo-West Pacific are among the most biologically diverse regions in the world. Unfortunately, these areas are often ill prepared to combat non-native intruders, which, in many cases, can easily prey upon and out-compete their neighbors. These so-called ‘alien’ and ‘introduced’ species can quickly become invasive if environmental conditions are favorable (e.g., predators absent, nutrients abundant, etc.). Accordingly, the prevention and management of invasive species is a top priority for many geographically isolated ecosystems,… -
Following the Ice: Greenland
14 May 2012 | 11:25 amThe moon rising over Leverett Glacier.) One night last summer, I rose from my bed, left my tent and walked to the river. It was well past midnight, a full moon had risen over the glacier and in the twilight of the Arctic summer night, I could make out a herd of musk ox grazing nearby. My hair had gotten long, my beard now changed the shape of my face, and my clothes were soaked in dirt, sewn and patched. A few steps from the riverbank, I slung a climbing rope around my waist and checked the knot at other end secured to a boulder. Then, with one hand on the rope and sampling bottles in the… -
USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The California Spiny Lobster
14 May 2012 | 7:06 amBy Alyssa Dykman In the cool waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean lies the California spiny lobster. The lobster, Panulirus interruptus, can be found on the rocky substrates of the coastal ocean floor between Monterey Bay, California and the northwestern coast of Mexico. A majority of the population is found off the coastline from Point Conception southwards, to the Channel Islands, and Cortes Bank (Duffy, 1973). In southern California, the California spiny lobster primarily lives in the dynamic kelp forests of the region. A California spiny lobster hiding in a crevice in a southern California… -
USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Palauan Mermaids
11 May 2012 | 7:04 amBy Christina Irvin Sirens are mythical, mermaid-like sea creatures that lure ships and seafarers into dangerous waters with their beauty and songs. These legends are rooted in Greek mythology – particularly in Homer’s The Illiad. Interestingly, for more than 600 years after Homer’s time, early explorers believed that the oceans were home to mermaids and monsters. As we know today, these creatures were not imagined, but likely slow moving, herbivorous marine mammals known as manatees and dugongs (native to the tropical Atlantic and Indo-West Pacific Oceans, respectively). Comoros Island…
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Scientific American - Scientific American Magazine
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How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health (preview)
1 Jun 2012 | 12:00 amBiologists once thought that human beings were physiological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes--pathogens--while at the same time sparing our own tissues. [More] -
Telltale Hearts: What Autopsies Reveal about This Vital Organ (preview)
1 May 2012 | 12:00 amThe human heart endures a lot in a lifetime. Sophisticated imaging can give insight into what it tolerates and what ails it, but the most direct information comes from an autopsy. [More] -
Psychiatry's "Bible" Gets an Overhaul (preview)
1 May 2012 | 12:00 amEditor's Note: Read our blog series on psychiatry's new rulebook, the DSM-5. [More] -
Understanding How Animals Create Dazzling Colors Could Lead to Brilliant New Nanotechnologies (preview)
1 May 2012 | 12:00 amThe changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear. Hooke used the recently invented microscope to investigate the feathers and saw that they were covered with tiny ridges, which he figured might produce the brilliant yellows, greens and blues. [More] -
Intel Futurist on Why We Should Not Fear the Future (preview)
1 May 2012 | 12:00 amMuch of intel’s success as a microprocessor manufacturer over the past four decades has come from the company’s ability to understand and anticipate the future of technology. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore famously asserted in 1965 that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit would double every two years. This assessment, which came to be known as Moore’s Law, proved to be a highly accurate prediction of what his business could accomplish with generous research and development investments and a meticulous product road map. [More]
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Scientific American - Mind Matters
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Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?
15 May 2012 | 12:50 pmWhat would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and… -
The Scientific Flaws of Online Dating Sites
8 May 2012 | 7:00 amEvery day, millions of single adults, worldwide, visit an online dating site. Many are lucky, finding life-long love or at least some exciting escapades. Others are not so lucky. The industry--eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and a thousand other online dating sites--wants singles and the general public to believe that seeking a partner through their site is not just an alternative way to traditional venues for finding a partner, but a superior way. Is it? [More] -
How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God
1 May 2012 | 10:15 amWhy are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God. They also showed that encouraging people to think intuitively increased people’s belief in God. -
How Creativity Connects with Immorality
24 Apr 2012 | 7:30 amIn the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market share by improving the Macintosh operating system were unsuccessful. After several years of debilitating financial losses, the company chose to purchase a fledgling software company called NeXT. Along with purchasing the rights to NeXT’s software, this move allowed Apple to regain the services of one of the company’s founders, the late Steve Jobs. Under the guidance of… -
The Secrets of Your Brain's Zoom Lens
17 Apr 2012 | 7:10 amNotice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries . For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized attention as akin to a shifting spotlight that “illuminates” regions it shines upon, or as a zoom lens, focusing on things so that we see them in finer detail. These metaphors are commonplace because they capture the intuition that attention illuminates or sharpens things, and thus, enhances our perception of them. [More]
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Scientific American - In-Depth Reports
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Earth Day 2012: Strategies for a Green Planet
19 Apr 2012 | 12:00 pmFrom recycling to energy use, new strategies are needed to ensure a more sustainable future [More] -
The Titanic : 100 Years Later
3 Apr 2012 | 9:30 amA look back at one of the biggest moments in steamship history, including how Scientific American covered it [More] -
The Tsunami and Nuclear Crisis: 1 Year Later
5 Mar 2012 | 10:01 amJapan still struggles with the effects of a powerful earthquake, devastating tsunami and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant [More] -
Love, Explained: The Science of Romance
13 Feb 2012 | 2:15 pmSex, speed dating, monogamy--for Valentine's Day, we look at the science behind the mating game [More] -
The Crisis of Antibiotic Resistance
8 Feb 2012 | 1:15 pmBacteria are finally overrunning our last defenses. Can we stop them? [More]
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Scientific American - Ask the Experts
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Screening Test: Are al Qaeda's Airline Bombing Attempts Becoming More Sophisticated?
9 May 2012 | 5:10 pmThe CIA, working with counterparts in the Middle East, earlier this week halted the latest al Qaeda terrorist plot to bomb aircraft bound for the U.S. The planned attack, which would have come from explosives worn under a passenger's clothing, is reminiscent of the so-called underwear bomb worn by an al Qaeda operative in the failed attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a Detroit-bound passenger airliner on Christmas Day 2009 . The latest underwear bomb found through the covert CIA operation is thought to be the work of Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri , who designed the original… -
How Is Disaster Aid Being Retooled to Meet Catastrophes That Strike Cities?
6 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amNASA scientists may have debunked the claim that the world will end this December , but evidence suggests that the number of natural disasters has risen during the past few decades. This trend, combined with the accelerating growth of urban populations, has international aid organizations rethinking how crisis response strategies designed to help rural communities can be adapted for city folk. [More] -
Is It Possible to Build an "Unsinkable" Ship?
2 Apr 2012 | 7:00 amThe claim that the RMS Titanic was "practically unsinkable" may have been more a marketing tactic than a commentary on its engineering, but its prelaunch reputation of being impervious to the perils of the high seas has lingered for the past 100 years. [More] -
Is "All of the Above" the Right Strategy for U.S. Energy? A Q&A with Steven Chu
12 Mar 2012 | 7:01 amPresident Obama has called for an "all of the above" energy strategy , ranging from taxpayer funding for electric vehicles to more drilling for oil and natural gas. The goal is to get a greater contribution from domestic renewable energy sources, such as the sun and wind, yet maintain cheap domestic energy from traditional fossil fuels. [More] -
Does Overeating Cause Memory Impairment as We Age?
23 Feb 2012 | 10:30 amOvereating has been linked to a litany of health problems--diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke, to name a few. Memory loss , dementia and even Alzheimer's may someday be added to that list, according to the preliminary findings of a study on aging conducted by the Mayo Clinic . [More]
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Scientific American - More Science
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Self-Worth Shattering: A Single Bomb Blast Can Saddle Soldiers with Debilitating Brain Trauma
16 May 2012 | 2:40 pmThe stress and suffering of combat are known to leave a lasting impact on military veterans, in some cases triggering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . Researchers have now found an even more serious and debilitating mental condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) , in veterans, particularly those injured by the concussive force of bomb blasts. [More] -
Soot May Help Shift Tropics North
16 May 2012 | 1:01 pmSoot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north , according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions.The research will be published in Nature on May 17. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More] -
Animal Tracks: Music about Unusual Creatures Features Some Unusual Instruments [Video]
16 May 2012 | 12:27 pmThe dugong, one of Michael Hearst's "unusual creatures." Credit: Julien Willem/Creative Commons Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks . Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record of recipes from Mario Batali, David Chang and other celebrity chefs set to music. [More] -
Under construction - ITER in LEGO
16 May 2012 | 10:21 amIf you just received your new issue of Scientific American , you saw the article The Problems with ITER and the Fading Dream of Fusion Energy by Geoff Brumfiel. Accompanying image (a little small online, but nice and big in print) is a photograph by Hironobu Maeda of a sculpture by Sachiko Akinaga. It is a LEGO model of the ITER fusion reactor which has been under construction for many years now, and apparently will keep being under construction for many years to come.You may think that the image is a photoshop, or a drawing, or that perhaps the LEGO model does exist somewhere, perhaps in… -
USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Coconut Crab in Guam
16 May 2012 | 9:38 amBy Emily Lu Birgus latro is the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world, in some cases having a leg span of over three feet and weighing over nine pounds. It is more commonly known as the coconut crab, due to its diet. Coconut crabs are mainly scavengers, feeding on various tropical fruits including coconuts. Their two powerful front chelipeds allow them to tear through the tough husk of a coconut and feed on the flesh. In addition, they can climb trees up to 20 feet high just to reach growing coconuts. But these crabs also have other nicknames including palm thief or robber crab. These…
