Posts

It’s been a long day at work. You walk in the door, drop your bag and turn on your computer. You start a playlist on Spotify. Bon Jovi roars, “It’s my life, it’s now or never …” Facebook pops up, “Would you like to share this song with your friends?” You click yes. Songs keep playing and Facebook keeps asking if you want to share them. Time for TV. Old “Saturday Night Live” clips are good for a laugh, and Hulu has them on Facebook....

The Philippines, Asia’s fastest-growing country and among its most vulnerable to climate change, has launched several new strategies to both prepare for the impacts of global warming and develop its renewable energy capacity. Meeting in Washington, D.C., recently, a high-level government delegation outlined its plans for low-carbon growth and this week is meeting with counterparts in California to discuss ways to implement policies on the ground. From a new “People’s Survival Fund” aimed at making communities more resilient to climate change to working with the U....

Advances in science and technology can launch from unassuming springboards. In 1609 Galileo tweaked a toylike spyglass, pointed it at the moon and Jupiter (not the neighbors), and astronomy took a quantum leap. About 150 years later, Benjamin Franklin reportedly used a kite to experiment with one of the earliest-known electrical capacitors. Continuing that tradition, these researchers prove toys inspire more than child’s play. View a slide show of four toys that inspired technological breakthroughs...

With the 2012 presidential election looming on the horizon in November, consider these two crucial questions: Who looks more competent, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? Who has the deepest and most resonant voice? Maybe your answer is, “Who cares? I vote for candidates based on their policies and positions, not on how they look and sound!” If so, that very likely is your rational brain justifying an earlier choice that your emotional brain made based on these seemingly shallow criteria....

A submarine, scooting through the depths, shoots sound waves to probe the mountains and valleys of the ocean floor, allowing humans to explore that inhospitable realm. The Hubble Space Telescope takes snapshots of scenes billions of light-years away, revealing vistas vastly beyond the limits of the human eye. Yet we need not venture to treacherous places to enhance our perception of our home planet. A compass tunes hikers to the earth’s magnetic field, endowing them with knowledge of north and south as they wander through the woods....

Michael Harms, director of the Cairo office of the German Academic Exchange Service, offers a view from the Egyptian capital.By Quirin SchiermeierAs the protests against President Hosni Mubarak gather pace across Egypt, the growing possibility of regime change is inspiring hope among many sectors of the population. The swelling number of protestors has seen academics add their voices to the call for change (see “Scientists join protests on streets of Cairo to call for political reform”)....

A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II W. W. Norton, 2015 (($27.95)) No scientific quandary is as confounding, controversial or important as the question of how life began, argue journalist Mesler and geochemist Cleaves. “It touches upon not only how we came to be, but why we came to be,” they write. “It is, in a sense, the ultimate question....

“Electronic skin” is blurring the lines between biological tissue and electronics. These filmlike patches, introduced in 2011, contain incredibly thin circuits, sensors and other electronic components and mount onto the skin with all the flexibility and stretchiness of a temporary tattoo. Within the past few months scientists have demonstrated numerous practical applications for the devices, setting the stage for a revolution in health care monitoring. Electronic skin can keep tabs on: The Brain When placed on the forehead, it can read the electrical activity of the brain and provide electroencephalographic data just as well as conventional wired devices while being far more comfortable and less motion-restrictive—a boon for neonatal intensive care units....

Frederick Sanger, who won two Nobel Prizes for his work on DNA and protein sequencing, died yesterday, according to a spokesperson at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was 95. The chemist won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing a method to determine the complete amino acid sequence of insulin. Twenty-two years later, the Nobel Committee awarded him the 1980 prize in Chemistry for discovering a way to determine the ordered sequence of DNA molecules....

Resistance to glyphosate, a herbicide more popularly known as Roundup, has been rising among weeds across the American Southeast that are growing among genetically engineered crops, according to a report released today by the National Research Council. “Weed resistance is so bad in Georgia that GE cotton is no longer being used as much,” said LaReesa Wolfenbarger, a co-author of the report and associate professor of biology at the University of Nebraska....

Editor’s Note: The extended Q&A with Isabella Rossellini mentioned in the July magazine can be found here. Video clips of this program can be found here. Isabella Rossellini, well known as a supermodel and movie star, is now making short films for mobile devices that illustrate the sex lives of dragonflies, earthworms and other creatures. But they are not like standard nature shows. In these films, which she researched with the help of Wildlife Conservation Society experts, she not only details unusual aspects of the critters’ biology but also dresses up as them and mimics sex with paper cutouts....

She stood barely more than a meter tall and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s. That is about all scientists can agree on in the case of the adult human skeleton known as LB1—popularly dubbed the hobbit. Unveiled in 2004, the diminutive bones hail from a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. Based on analyses of LB1 and some other, more fragmentary remains, the discovery team concluded that the specimens belonged to a previously unknown human species, Homo floresiensis, that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago [see “The Littlest Human,” by Kate Wong; Scientific American, February 2005]....

My advice to young scientists who seek a sense of purpose in their research is to engage in a topic that matters to society, such as moderating climate change, streamlining the development of vaccines, satisfying our energy or food needs, establishing a sustainable base in space or finding technological relics of alien civilizations. Broadly speaking, society funds science, and scientists should reciprocate by attending to the public’s interests. The most vital societal challenge is to extend the longevity of humanity....

COSTA RICA Researchers embedded GPS devices in decoy sea turtle eggs to track poaching patterns. In their first field test, five of the 101 decoys (which had similar size, weight and texture to real eggs) traveled significantly, potentially reaching consumers. LATVIA DNA harvested from a 700-year-old public toilet in Riga (as well as a 600-year-old cesspit in Jerusalem) will help researchers examine how human microbiomes have evolved over time. Microbial DNA from both sites matches some species common in modern hunter-gatherers and some in today’s city dwellers....

One of the common expressed worries about carbon capture is that injected CO2 will eventually leak from its resting spot, offsetting climate benefits or creating health risks. With offshore CO2, there is speculation about the effect of any potential leak on acidity, among other things. But in a first-of-its-kind study, European and Japanese researchers deliberately injected CO2 offshore knowing it would leak, to see what would happen. They found that although there was small leakage into the water, it was confined to a minority of the injected CO2, and the effects on the surrounding ecosystem were negligible....

Flexibility or performance? That choice is a constant trade-off for microprocessor designers. General-purpose processors in personal computers execute a broad set of software commands that can cope with any task from graphics to complex calculations. But their flexibility comes at the expense of speed. In contrast, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), optimized for a given task, such as the computing required in graphics or sound cards, are very fast but lack adaptability....

By Adam Marcus of Nature magazineA long-running question about how the largest species of birds achieve erect penises seems to have been settled. In a study published this week in the Journal of Zoology, researchers report that male ostriches and emus enlarge their penises using a burst of lymphatic fluid rather than a blood vascular system like that found in reptiles and mammals.The finding, based on dissections, matches what is known about other species of birds–only 3% of which have penises–and could have important implications for the understanding of the shared, and divergent, evolutionary heritage of birds and reptiles....

Normally, it’s football that makes the big noise at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has been playing the game since 1905, but this year, there is an uproar in the school’s small earth science department. Two out of 34 climate scientists are being probed by members of Congress—amazingly, by both Republicans and Democrats. Rodney Weber, an atmospheric scientist, is being questioned by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who wants to know why Weber’s climate-change-related research deserved a federal grant in 2012....

People have been arguing about autism for a long time—about what causes it, how to treat it and whether it qualifies as a mental disorder. The controversial idea that childhood vaccines trigger autism also persists, despite the fact that study after study has failed to find any evidence of such a link. Now, psychiatrists and members of the autistic community are embroiled in a more legitimate kerfuffle that centers on the definition of autism and how clinicians diagnose the disorder....

More than 50 years ago, aerospace engineers spent over $1 billion—in 1950s money—designing atomic-powered airplanes in the hope that such superfast jets could remain aloft for 15,000 miles (21,150 kilometers) at a time. They expected one pound (half a kilogram) of nuclear material would eliminate the need for refueling stops. An intriguing concept, but nuclear aircraft were grounded before the end of the Cold War due to, among other things, concerns about passenger and crew exposure to radiation....