His finalist year: 1989 His finalist project: Figuring out if creativity can predict chess expertise What led to the project: Tamir Druz’s mother and father grew up in the Soviet Union where “chess was pretty much a national pastime,” he says. As immigrants to New York City they taught their son the game, and by his senior year at The Bronx High School of Science, Druz was the captain of the chess team....
Consumers used to waking up every week or so to news of yet another Internet security hole or data breach may be hard-pressed to understand why Heartbleed, the hole in the commonly used Web security software OpenSSL, is different. But it is: Such diverse and nonalarmist security commentators as Bruce Schneier, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ars Technica, have all dubbed the bug “catastrophic.” “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” Schneier wrote on his blog yesterday....
In my Scientific American column this month, I pondered why it’s so hard to predict the future of technology. It sometimes seems as though it’s not even worth the effort; inevitably you wind up looking like an idiot. Especially if the gist of your prediction is that something won’t happen or isn’t possible. You wind up with enough egg on your face to make an omelet. If you’re not convinced, have a look at these whoppers: some of the biggest muffed tech predictions of all time, and spoken by people you’d expect would know better....
What happens in the brain when we experience a panic attack? —Davide Razzoli, Italy Paul Li, a lecturer of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, explains: BEFORE GOING onstage to give a presentation, you notice your breathing becomes heavy, your hands tremble and you feel faint. Though frightening, these symptoms are not life-threatening; rather they are indicative of a panic attack. We know a fair amount about the physiology of a panic attack, but we have only recently started to understand how it affects our brain chemistry....
Kala-azar, the most deadly parasitic disease after malaria, afflicts hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest people in tropical countries such as India, Brazil and Sudan. Spread by sandfly bites, the disease can be fought with existing treatments — but these are expensive and inconvenient, and sometimes have toxic side effects. Yet commercial work aimed at finding better drugs for kala-azar has largely been abandoned. Pharmaceutical companies say that poor customers cannot afford to pay the high prices needed to recoup development costs....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Hyangga was a form poetical ‘country song,’ distinct from contemporary Chinese songs, which were written in the Silla and Goryeo kingdoms of ancient Korea between the 7th and 10th century CE. The indigenous songs cover such topics as love, loss, and Buddhist devotion. The majority are written in couplets arranged in four-line stanzas with each line having four syllables....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Colchis (western Georgia) and Kartli/Iberia (eastern and southern Georgia) were important regions in the Caucasus area of Eurasia from the Bronze Age of the 15th century BCE. Prospering through agriculture and trade, the region attracted Greek and then Roman colonists. The success of several cities is indicated by the minting of their own coinage....
A decade ago, this week, scientists at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the Institute for Genomic Research announced they had decoded the genetic information inside Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted disease (STD) syphilis. At the time, Penelope Hitchcock, the chief of the sexually transmitted disease branch of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), hailed the work as critical to developing better drugs....
In 1797, at the dawn of the industrial age, Goethe wrote “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a poem about a magician-in-training who, through his arrogance and half-baked powers, unleashes a chain of events he cannot control. About 20 years later, a young Mary Shelley answered a dare to write a ghost story, which she shared at a small gathering at Lake Geneva. Her story would go on to be published as a novel, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” on Jan....
Japan’s mission to bring asteroid dust back to Earth has succeeded. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed on 14 December that a capsule from spacecraft Hayabusa2, which landed in an Australian desert last week, contained black grains from asteroid Ryugu. “The confirmation of sample is a very important milestone for us and for JAXA,” says Yuichi Tsuda, project manager for the mission at JAXA, in Sagamihara. JAXA said in a statement that they observed the sandy material at the entrance of the collection chamber, but have yet to look inside to see whether more asteroid dust is lurking there....
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in our May 2002 issue. We are posting it because of news from the JUPITER trial. AS RECENTLY AS FIVE YEARS AGO, most physicians would have confidently described atherosclerosis as a straight plumbing problem: Fat-laden gunk gradually builds up on the surface of passive artery walls. If a deposit (plaque) grows large enough, it eventually closes off an affected “pipe,” preventing blood from reaching its intended tissue....
Recalling childhood memories can lead people to behave more ethically, according to a study published in April in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In a series of experiments done by Francesca Gino and Sreedhari Desai of Harvard University, participants were more likely to help the experimenters with an extra task, judge unethical behavior harshly and donate money to charity when they had actively remembered their childhood (as opposed to their teenage years)....
Dinosaur tracks recently discovered on the Arabian Peninsula are not only the first of their kind in the region, but they also reveal more about the herding behavior of the prehistoric beasts. The footprints, left by a group of 11 plant-eaters that walked on all fours, along with a lone dino that stood on its hind legs, were found on a coastal mudflat in Yemen. The footprints left by the herding herbivores varied in size, implying a roving group of adults and children....
Unique among the human body’s larger organs, the liver has a remarkable ability to recover from injury. An individual can lose a big chunk of it in an accident or during surgery, but as long as at least a quarter of the organ remains intact and generally free of scars, it can grow back to its full size and function. Alas, this capacity for self-regeneration does not hold for other body parts....
HORSESHOE BAY, BRITISH COLUMBIA—Bruce McArthur, who headed up The Coalition to Save Eagleridge Bluffs, is taking me on a tour of what will be the 2010 Olympics legacy in his community of Horseshoe Bay. “It’s been chopped in half and mowed down,” McArthur says of the wilderness that lay right over and above his house. “That’s a problem.” View Slide Show of Vancouver’s Development What he’s showing me is the result of re-routing the Vancouver–Whistler Sea-to-Sky Highway that joins 2010 Olympic venues between the city and the ski-resort town....
UNITED NATIONS — Two years of intense polar research have shown declining snow and ice pack and rising seas, but they have also yielded abundant new data that might help scientists understand the overall effects of climate change and what to do about it, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said today. Summarizing results of those studies as the International Polar Year—a two-year, $1.2 billion initiative—draws to a close, officials say scientists know considerably more now about how Arctic and Antarctic changes are affecting weather patterns and the migration of pollutants....
CHONGQING, China—Another aftershock registering magnitude 5.1 on the Richter scale rattled Sichuan Province and the nearby city of Chongqing at 1:20 A.M. local time, sending thousands of nervous residents into the street. Thousands of people huddled in People’s Hall Square in the heart of downtown, including government officials—and most buildings over three stories were evacuated. Jittery residents were further rattled by a government warning that another aftershock—potentially as strong as magnitude 7 on the Richter scale—could come today....
If you leave your camera at home on a long vacation, you can buy a disposable one. But that’s not an option if you have traveled 422 million miles (679 million kilometers) to another planet—especially if that world’s extreme conditions present a challenge for the average camera. So to chronicle Phoenix’s trip to the Red Planet, NASA had to come up with a special device, based on the experiences they’ve had with other Mars landers and rovers: the Surface Stereo Imager (SSI), which acts as Phoenix’s main set of “eyes....
Some 15,500 years ago early nomadic North Americans had already set up camp near Buttermilk Creek in central Texas’s hill country, where they left behind impressive array of stone tools and artifacts. Such an old habitation predates the widespread toolmaking tradition known as Clovis, which spread across the continent some 12,800 to 13,100 years ago and was once thought to mark the first wave of settlers in the Americas. The find is “unequivocal proof for pre-Clovis occupation of America,” said Steven Forman, of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago....
A sweltering mid-June day with temperatures topping 100 degrees spurred one of the largest livestock die-offs in recent Kansas history, killing about 2,000 cattle. Twice that many cattle perished in fierce 2011 Iowa heat, with thousands more dying in neighboring states. And a July 1995 heat wave took a similar toll in the Farm Belt. Heat stress reduces cows’ appetite, fertility and milk production. It also suppresses their immune systems. And that is likely to happen more often as the climate warms, particularly in the Midwest and Great Plains where heat, drought, fire and flood are challenging long-standing farm practices....
