Posts

Gwen Dewar, biological anthropologist and founder of the Web site Parenting Science, responds: The urge to nibble cute creatures might be a case of getting one’s wires crossed. In a recent study, researchers performed functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on women who unwittingly sniffed newborn infants. The odors activated reward-related areas of the brain, the same regions that trigger a pleasurable rush of dopamine when we get our hands on a desirable bit of food....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Dialogues of the Greek philosopher Plato (l. 428/427-348-347 BCE) have exerted such an extraordinary influence over western thought and culture for the past 2,000 years that readers in the modern day frequently approach his works as philosophical icons. The Republic is routinely taught in college classes as the blueprint for the ideal society, the Apology is the epic defense of freedom of thought and personal integrity, the Symposium defines the true meaning of love, and all the other dialogues have been set and defined for their particular intellectual merit....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Among the duties of any Egyptian monarch was the construction of monumental building projects to honor the gods and preserve the memory of their reigns for eternity. These building projects were not just some grandiose gesture on the part of the king to appease the ego but were central to the foundation and development of a unified state....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Visiting the vibrant and colorful city of Lisbon, on the banks of the river Tagus and the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, what is most showcased is one episode of the city’s and country’s glorious past: Lisbon as the capital of the Portuguese Empire, a nation of explorers, seafarers and conquerors....

DENVER — Can a city built from scratch be profitable to developers and enjoyable to residents as it tries to be carbon-free? That is the question facing owners and planners of a mostly vacant, sunburned 400-acre plot of land near this city’s sprawling International Airport as they plan an energy system with vast differences from the typical suburban subdivision. The city, called Peña Station Next, is located at the last stop of Denver’s newly completed rail line to its airport....

When we gaze into the peaceful, twinkling night sky, we see much the same vistas witnessed by our ancestors thousands of years ago. Yet centuries of scientific progress have so transformed our understanding that it cannot be said we share their same simplistic view. We now know that the world is not flat, that the sky is not a dome, that the stars are not pinholes through which flickering fires shine....

Things are rarely as simple as they seem, and what appears to be complex may be no more than ripples on the surface of a fathomless ocean. The mechanics of malignancy—a single cell acquiring mutation upon mutation until it spirals down the rabbit hole of cancer—was neatly described by two scientists, Douglas Hanahan and Robert A. Weinberg, in a sweeping synthesis published in 2000 called “The Hallmarks of Cancer.” The idea of cancer occurring as an accumulation of mutations to a normal cell goes back decades....

Editor’s Note: This story is a supplement to the Feature “Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain” from the April 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind After shouting a series of racist slurs during a performance, comedian Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame apologized to a late-night television audience: “I went into a rage.… I’m deeply, deeply sorry … I’m not a racist.” For making anti-Semitic remarks during a drunk-driving arrest, actor Mel Gibson (left) pleaded with the public: “Please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite....

Over the next five years at least half a million tons of carbon dioxide will be injected into rock deep underneath the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, W.Va. Although that is less than 0.00001 percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas and less than 2 percent of the plant’s own CO2 output, the sequestration, which begins this week, marks the first commercial demonstration of the only available technological fix for the carbon problem of coal-fired power plants, one that many coal facilities around the world hope to emulate....

As California reels from record-breaking erosion following punishing waves last winter, the federal government is turning to mud and sand from dredging projects to slow land losses and ease flooding nationwide as seas rise and storms intensify. Pacific Ocean storms strengthened by a powerful El Niño and global warming caused yawning erosion from Washington state to California a year ago. The problem was severe in the San Francisco Bay Area, where unprecedented beach losses were worsened by a shortage of shore-nourishing mud and sand that flows from mountain valleys to beaches through rivers and bays....

By Kate McAlpine of Nature magazineDiagram of 1630 Halo by Christoph ScheinerA print of a diagram that was feared lost details the astonishing halo effects seen over Rome in 1630.Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: (Graph. C 707)Around midday on 24 January 1630, seven suns seemed to blaze over Rome. Many onlookers took the phenomenon as a celestial omen of good or ill fortune, but an adherent of the scientific revolution also took note of the kaleidoscopic sky....

More than 500 health care workers have contracted Ebola since the outbreak began in December 2013, and 269 have died, according to WHO statistics through the end of October. Some of the deaths resulted from faulty or nonexistent personal protective equipment (PPE)—gloves, masks and other barriers used to block Ebola transmission. Yet more recent cases in well-equipped U.S. hospitals and in Spain have uncovered a broader PPE-related problem: the guidelines for how to use the gear were insufficient....

From Nature magazine Negotiations over the sale of products from cloned animals in the European Union have broken down and run out of time.The stalemate means that existing regulations, dating from 1997, remain in place. These state that although authorization is required to market food from clones, the use of their progeny as well as nanomaterials in foods will remain unregulated – meaning that meat from the offspring of cloned animals can go on sale unlabelled....

FOR CENTURIES, the fleeting and highly subjective world of feelings was the purview of philosophers. But during the past 30 years, Antonio R. Damasio has strived to show that feelings are what arise as the brain interprets emotions, which are themselves purely physical signals of the body reacting to external stimuli. Born in 1944 in Lisbon, Portugal, Damasio has been chair of the University of Iowa’s neurology department since 1986. He and his wife, neurologist Hanna Damasio, have created one of the world’s largest databases of brain injuries, comprising hundreds of studies of brain lesions and diagnostic images....

Nathan Myhrvold—wealthy former Microsoft technologist, current patent tycoon, classically trained chef, bestselling author, prize-winning photographer, PhD-holding physicist and gleeful scientific gadfly—has a new obsession: killer asteroids, or rather the researchers he suspects of botching their study. Astronomers have found more than 14,000 potentially hazardous “near-Earth objects” (NEOs) that buzz our planet with alarming regularity, and estimate that hundreds of thousands more await discovery. Much of what we know about NEOs comes from a single spacecraft, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and its offshoot NEOWISE observing program....

As I type this essay on a flight from Dubai to Paris, I can see the hazy curve of our blue planet at the horizon. I’ve just finished the kickoff meeting of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, where I served as vice chair of the Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies. I am now headed to the launch of the UNESCO World Library of Science, a set of free science resources for educators and students created by a partnership of UNESCO and Nature Education, with funding support from Roche....

Gamma rays are like cheetahs: they are the charismatic megafauna of the particle world. They are light of the maximum possible potency, usually defined as a wavelength shorter than 10–11 meter—a realm where light’s wave nature is hard to observe and its particulate nature stands out. Each gamma photon has an energy of more than 100 kilo-electron-volts (keV), 100,000 times more than a photon of visible light. The mightiest gamma ever recorded packed a punch of 100 tera-electron-volts (TeV), far outgunning anything particle physicists can blast out with their most powerful instrument, the Large Hadron Collider....

The idea of solving the human organ shortage with pigs has tantalized surgeons for decades. More than 117,000 Americans are currently on a transplant wait-list in the U.S., according to federal figures, and 22 people die every day awaiting a match. Pig organs are similar in size and function to our own, and people are less squeamish about harvesting body parts from an animal raised for meat than they would be about a primate’s....

At six billion plus today, the earth’s human population will reach more than nine billion by 2050, according to estimates. If this many people consume energy at the current rate in the developed world, the planet will need more than double the amount of power it consumes today. But energy is just one issue that humankind will have to tackle to create a sustainable future. The root cause of the looming energy problem—and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health—is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population....

Scientists found that meat-eating “vulture bees” have evolved more acidic guts that harbor acid-tolerant bacteria, similar to those found in vultures and hyenas, letting the insects safely consume carrion. BRAZIL GERMANY Silver-studded blue butterflies naturally favor grassland habitats, but researchers recently found four times as many in active mining quarries than in similar-sized meadows. The insects lay their eggs on certain plants, which mining operations may help thrive by eliminating larger, competing vegetation....