Posts

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. As a youngster, David (the later king of Israel), slew Goliath, a giant, who was the champion of Israel’s enemy, the Philistines. “David and Goliath” became a metaphor for an underdog who nevertheless is victorious over a more powerful opponent and is particularly applied to sports stories and to larger corporate entities raiding smaller ones in takeover bids; sometimes the latter successfully resist incorporation....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The monastic orders of the Middle Ages developed from the desire to live a spiritual life without the distractions of the world. Men and women who took religious vows were seeking a purity of experience they found lacking as lay people. Their ultimate role model was Jesus Christ who owned nothing and devoted his energies toward others in articulating a vision of communal awareness and self-denial at odds with the human inclination toward self-interest and self-promotion....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineA mutation that appeared more than half a million years ago may have helped humans learn the complex muscle movements that are critical to speech and language.The claim stems from the finding that mice genetically engineered to produce the human form of the gene, called FOXP2, learn more quickly than their normal counterparts.The work was presented by Christiane Schreiweis, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, at the Society for Neuroscience meeting this week in Washington DC this week....

August 1962 Bee Jargon “For almost two decades my colleagues and I have been studying one of the most remarkable systems of communication that nature has evolved. This is the ‘language’ of the bees: the dancing movements by which forager bees direct their hivemates, with great precision, to a source of food. In our earliest work we had to look for the means by which the insects communicate and, once we had found it, to learn to read the language....

If the average American lives to be 78 years old, roughly a third of those years are spent lying on a mattress. Brandon Boor, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, studies air pollutants in the sleep microenvironment. In his most recent study, detailed in the journal Indoor Air, Boor covered a twin mattress with 225-thread-count sheets and seeded the bed with artificial dust as a proxy for the microorganisms, fungal spores and skin cells that routinely collect there....

Editor’s Note (2/26/18): Sometimes research projects end—abruptly. Just after Scientific American published the story below, we learned the Wonderful Company decided to close the eight-year-long research project that the story describes. The goal was to develop a backup bee for the struggling honeybee. We think the science in the story remains intriguing, and the idea of having another commercial pollinator remains important. Every February an extraordinary research project resumes in the southwestern corner of California’s Central Valley....

Anxiety and depression go together like peanut butter and jelly, peas and carrots, or bacon and eggs. And while they don’t exactly taste great together, they often go hand in hand. In fact, nearly 50% of people diagnosed with depression can also be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and vice versa. Depression and anxiety are fundamentally different—depression is based in hopelessness and helplessness, while anxiety is steeped in fear of the uncertain....

With an ax rather than a scalpel, Australia’s federal science agency last week chopped off its climate research arm in a decision that has stunned scientists and left employees dispirited. As many as 110 out of 140 positions at the atmosphere and oceans division at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) will be cut, Larry Marshall, the agency’s chief executive, told staff Friday. Another 120 positions will be cut from the land and water program....

By Rory Carroll SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown and Mexican environmental officials signed a pact on Monday aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, an agreement that could eventually expand the market for carbon credits. The six-page memorandum of understanding calls for cooperation in developing carbon pricing systems and calls on the partners to explore ways to align those systems in the future. “California can’t do it alone and with this new partnership with Mexico, we can make real progress on reducing dangerous greenhouse gases,” said Governor Brown....

A fruit fly walked into a test tube, got coated in carbon black, and lost its ability to climb. Sound like the set up for some bad science-based joke? Nope, it’s the premise of a preliminary safety test for carbon nanoparticles. Nanotechnology—whether multiwalled carbon nanotubes, buckyballs or nanosize particles of silver—has barely begun to make its way into everyday products. But, in an effort to stave off the kind of after-the-fact bad news that has plagued introduced materials ranging from asbestos to bisphenol A (BPA), scientists are preemptively testing the potentially ill effects of the tiny molecules and even atoms engineered at the scale of one billionth of a meter or smaller....

A band of more than 50 scientists has created a website to help biologists avoid poor-quality chemical reagents that undermine experiments in molecular biology and drug discovery. “Shitty reagents generate shitty science. They waste money and waste careers,” says biochemist Aled Edwards, head of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a public–private partnership to study proteins important to drug-discovery efforts. Although the literature is rife with reports about the flaws of individual chemical tools, scientists continue to use them, he says....

The thick body armour on some dinosaurs seems perfectly engineered to foil hungry predators. But the remains of a newly discovered armoured dinosaur hint that its spiky suit had another role: showing off to potential mates and rivals. The spikes on a well-preserved fossil of a 1,300-kilogram armoured dinosaur called Borealopelta markmitchelli exhibit the same growth pattern as antelope horns and other structures used for both defence and display, says vertebrate palaentologist Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Canada....

For years, environmentalists and the gas drilling industry have been in a pitched battle over the possible health implications of hydro fracking. But to a great extent, the debate — as well as the emerging lawsuits and the various proposed regulations in numerous states — has been hampered by a shortage of science. In 2011, when ProPublica first reported on the different health problems afflicting people living near gas drilling operations, only a handful of health studies had been published....

NATURAL SELECTION IS NOT NATURAL PERFECTION. Living creatures have evolved some remarkably complex adaptations, but we are still very vulnerable to disease. Among the most tragic of those ills—and perhaps most enigmatic—is cancer. A cancerous tumor is exquisitely well adapted for survival in its own grotesque way. Its cells continue to divide long after ordinary cells would stop. They destroy surrounding tissues to make room for themselves, and they trick the body into supplying them with energy to grow even larger....

High radiation levels beyond Earth orbit pose the biggest challenge to human exploration of deep-space destinations, experts say. With current spacecraft technology, astronauts can cruise through deep space for a maximum of one year or so before accumulating a dangerously high radiation dose, researchers say. As a result, many intriguing solar system targets remain off-limits to human exploration at the moment. “There is an equivalent of a Mach 1 — a sound barrier — that exists, in terms of galactic cosmic radiation,” Alvin Drew, manager of NASA’s Deep Space Habitat Project, said Wednesday (Dec....

As herpetologist Steven Platt trudged through the seasonally flooded Nay Ya Inn wetland in Myanmar (formerly Burma) during a 2016 dry-season expedition, something strange caught his eye: Frisbee-sized pools brimming with clusters of frog eggs and wriggling tadpoles. The watery pockmarks were old elephant tracks. Platt, who works at the Wildlife Conservation Society, realized that in the parched landscape these puddles may be a lifeline for the next generation of frogs....

(Reuters) - A Massachusetts town on Wednesday stubbed out a proposal that apparently would have made it the first in the United States to ban tobacco sales, a newspaper reported. The proposal in Westminster, a town of about 7,300 people 60 miles (97 km) northwest of Boston, had generated strong opposition from store owners who contended the ban would cut into sales. The Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise newspaper reported that the Westminister Board of Health voted 2-1 to turn down the proposal....

If only mood rings really worked. With no easy test for mood disorders, doctors must rely on patients’ subjective reports of their emotional states to make a diagnosis. But help may be on the way—researchers have discovered markers of depression and mania in blood, taking a significant step toward developing a blood test for mood. A team of molecular psychiatrists led by Alexander Niculescu of the Indiana University School of Medicine extracted RNA—genetic material that turns genes on and off—from the blood of people with bipolar disorder....

The iPhone 5 may have found its polar opposite in Moto X. For better or worse, Moto X – which was unveiled Thursday – is everything the iPhone is not. Rather than a tightly controlled look and feel for the device, Motorola will let customers tweak the colors and materials. Instead of the latest specifications, Moto X employs a solid – but not cutting-edge – set of hardware features. Instead of a proprietary operating system built for one device, it runs on an open platform available to hundreds of other phones....

A new family of magnetic molecules may point the way to computer memory that can be bent and flexed like plastic. A group has synthesized three carbon-based (organic) nickel compounds that become magnetic spontaneously at room temperature–an extremely rare find. If researchers can figure out how these materials form and how to control that process, they might be able to turn similar compounds into pliable magnetic plastics. Past examples of magnetic organic materials were either unstable in air or were mostly made of metal, making them unsuitable for linking together into a plastic, says chemist Robin Hicks of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, lead author of the study reporting the find in this week’s Nature....