Posts

Rodents and primates around the world can breathe a little easier. Ditto animal rights activists who have long opposed testing drugs and conducting other experiments on animals. Top officials from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Thursday announced a five-year deal promising to share technology, information and other resources that will improve the toxicity testing of chemical compounds used in food, medicine and other products using robots rather than lab animals....

Almost a decade after manufacturers stopped using certain chemical flame retardants in furniture foam and carpet padding, many of the compounds still lurk in homes. New work to be presented today reaffirms that the chemicals may also still be hurting young children who were exposed before they were born. Researchers investigating the health impacts of prenatal exposure to flame retardants collected blood samples from 309 pregnant women early in their second trimester....

Researchers in Greece have developed a new system that converts video into virtual, touchable maps for the blind. The three-dimensional maps use force fields to represent walls and roads so the visually impaired can better understand the layout of buildings and cities. “Imagine I’m blind and I want to come to New York,” says Konstantinos Moustakas, lead researcher on the virtual mapping project and a graduate student at Aristotle University of Thessaloníki in Greece....

Google Scholar, the free search engine for scholarly literature, turns ten years old on November 18. By ‘crawling’ over the text of millions of academic papers, including those behind publishers’ paywalls, it has transformed the way that researchers consult the literature online. In a Nature survey this year, some 60% of scientists said that they use the service regularly. Nature spoke with Anurag Acharya, who co-created the service and still runs it, about Google Scholar’s history and what he sees for its future....

I met Hans Bethe 10 years ago, on the morning of his festschrift, a kind of preposthumous memorial that physicists throw for a retiring giant. It was to be an ambitious, two-day event, for Bethe’s career spanned almost the entire length and breadth of nuclear physics. In his early years, he worked with Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi and then soared to fame with his Nobel Prize–winning discovery in 1938 of how nuclear fires light the stars....

ZURICH, Switzerland – Despite a strong philosophical connection, computers and brains inhabit separate realms in research. IBM, though, believes the time is ripe to bring them together. Through research projects expected to take a decade, Big Blue is using biological and manufactured forms of computing to learn about the other. On the computing side, IBM is using the brain as a template for breakthrough designs such as the idea of using fluids both to cool the machine and to distribute electrical power....

How does the architecture of our brain and neurons allow each of us to make individual behavioral choices? Scientists have long used the metaphor of government to explain how they think nervous systems are organized for decision-making. Are we at root a democracy, like the U.K. citizenry voting for Brexit? A dictatorship, like the North Korean leader ordering a missile launch? A set of factions competing for control, like those within the Turkish military?...

Apocalypse is a word that we throw around pretty readily these days, and we can choose from a cornucopia of terrifying options—from the fierce ochre skies of western North America to the seemingly endless days of a global pandemic, to the suffering of mass migrants and the trauma from unstable political leaders (the specifics of which I leave to your imagination). But it’s a bit unfair to this overused term. The more literal, root meaning of apocalypse, from its construction out of ancient Greek, is “an uncovering....

Observations from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft have uncovered a ’tilted’ solar system, a finding that gives clues as to how some planets come to orbit their stars on paths that are misaligned with the stars’ equators, astronomers report today in Science. The planets of Earth’s Solar System formed from a flat disc of gas and dust revolving around the Sun’s equator, so they all started out in nearly the same plane. Earth’s orbit makes an angle of just 7....

PARADOXES—IN WHICH THE SAME information may lead to two contradictory conclusions—give us pleasure and torment at the same time. They are a source of endless fascination and frustration, whether they involve philosophy (consider Russell’s paradox, “This statement is false”), science—or perception. The Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar once said that such puzzles have the same effect on a scientist or philosopher as the smell of burning rubber on an engineer: they create an irresistible urge to find the cause....

Data collected from two NASA spacecraft have revealed that Earth’s northern and southern auroras are not simply mirror images of one another, as previously believed. Nearly circular bands, called auroral ovals, surround both poles of our planet. They result from the interaction between Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, and energized particles from the solar wind that emit light in the upper atmosphere. A research team led by Timothy J. Stubbs of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed images from NASA’s Polar spacecraft and the IMAGE spacecraft taken of both the northern (aurora borealis) and southern (aurora australis) lights....

Last October, asteroid monitors at the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona in Tucson picked up a small object on an immediate collision course with Earth. The asteroid was too small to present a real threat—just a few meters across, it stood little chance of penetrating the atmosphere intact. Indeed, it exploded in a stratospheric fireball over northern Sudan less than 24 hours later—an event witnessed by people on the ground as well as the pilots of a KLM airliner—conforming well to astronomers’ predictions for its trajectory....

A barren, treeless island in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard may prove to be the last, best hope of agriculture in warmer, more fertile parts of the world. The first batch of 100 million of the most important agricultural seeds were placed into the doomsday repository there today. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried deep within a frozen mountainside near the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen that perpetually cools it to –18 degrees Celsius (–0....

When physicists are forced to give a single-word answer to the question of why we are building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), we usually reply “Higgs.” The Higgs particle—the last remaining undiscovered piece of our current theory of matter—is the marquee attraction. But the full story is much more interesting. The new collider provides the greatest leap in capability of any instrument in the history of particle physics. We do not know what it will find, but the discoveries we make and the new puzzles we encounter are certain to change the face of particle physics and to echo through neighboring sciences....

Kanjaksha Ghosh has seen more than a thousand people with haemophilia since he became a physician. But he has always wondered why some patients bleed spontaneously and develop crippling joint damage whereas others barely seem to be affected. Ghosh, who heads the National Institute of Immunohaematology in Mumbai, India, remembers a soldier who had been fighting insurgents in the northeast of the country. The man’s brother was almost bedridden by haemophilia, but the soldier’s symptoms were so mild that he did not even realize that he had the disease until he was shot on the battlefield....

A study, published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists in the online edition of Nature, reports the successful restoration of memory in mice by administering medicine that mimics the memory-boosting effects of enriched environmental conditions. This class of drugs, the researchers say, could lead to new treatment options for Alzheimer’s disease. Li-Huei Tsai, a professor of neuroscience in M.I.T.’s department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the study’s senior author, notes that for decades neuroscientists have known that living conditions with lots of novel stimuli improve rodent memory....

A NASA spacecraft that in 2005 discovered watery plumes spewing from the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus has now found compelling evidence that the plumes stem from an underground reservoir of saltwater. The Cassini probe in 2008 and 2009 flew through a towering plume emanating from the moon’s southern polar region and sampled its contents. In an analysis published online June 22 in Nature, a team of researchers reports that the composition of the plume is most easily explained by a sizable subterranean body of water....

Humans don’t molt,” R.J. Kirk tells me. Kirk is a billionaire geek who runs his offices out of West Palm Beach, Fla., a balmy land of pelicans and tangled mangroves. He built his fortune on conventional medications that can be taken as a pill, and I had phoned to talk about his newest endeavors in biotech. I wasn’t expecting to hear about bugs. But the molting process, in which a growing insect builds a new exoskeleton to replace an old one that no longer fits, turns out to have some very important properties that can be adapted to make gene therapy, still a largely experimental procedure, safer....

Warmer air allows for more water vapor. So scientists have long predicted that global warming will result in a more intense water cycle—the process by which water evaporates from the oceans, travels through the atmosphere and then falls as rain. Now new measurements of the ocean’s salinity prove that prediction—and suggest that global warming strengthens the water cycle even more than anticipated. “What we found is that regions that are salty in the main are becoming saltier” and areas that boast more rainfall are getting fresher, explains oceanographer Paul Durack of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who led the research to be published in Science on April 27....

By Philip Ball of Nature magazineWhy are we so complicated? You might imagine that we’ve evolved that way because it conveys adaptive benefits. But a study published by Nature today suggests that the complexity in the molecular ‘wiring’ of our genome–the way our proteins talk to each other–may simply be a side effect of a desperate attempt to stave off problematic random mutations in proteins’ structures.Ariel Fernández, previously at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and now at the Mathematics Institute of Argentina in Buenos Aires, and Michael Lynch of Indiana University in Bloomington argue that complexity in the network of our protein interactions arises because our relatively small population size–compared with that of single-celled organisms–makes us especially vulnerable to ‘genetic drift’: changes in the gene pool due to the reproductive success of certain individuals by chance rather than by superior fitness....