MAY 1959 THE COLOR OF LIGHT: “No student of color vision can fail to be awed by the sensitive discernment with which the eye responds to the variety of stimuli it receives. Recently my colleagues and I have learned that this mechanism is far more wonderful than had been thought. The eye makes distinctions of amazing subtlety. It does not need nearly so much information as actually flows to it from the everyday world....
There’s only so much you can do searching for extraterrestrial life when you’re Earthbound. One approach is to locate and study the best terrestrial examples of what might resemble conditions that could support life on another planet. View Slide Show Exploration of the Lake That is exactly why astrobiologists are getting so excited about Pavilion Lake in British Columbia, Canada. Pavilion’s lake floor is scattered with living coral reef–like structures called microbialites that result from microbes and minerals interacting over thousands of years....
The glittering, icy landscape of Greenland is being marred by soot that falls from the smoke plumes of Arctic wildfires, new satellite-based research shows. That soot darkens the surface of the ice and makes it absorb more sunlight, hastening its melt. Researchers caught what they say are the first direct images of wildfire smoke drifting over Greenland this past summer with NASA’s Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite, which they presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco....
In the classic view of evolution, organisms undergo random genetic mutations, and nature selects for the most beneficial ones. A recent study in Science adds a twist to that theory: variability already present in a population’s genome may remain hidden in times of plenty but come unmasked in stressful situations, ready to help with adaptation. At the theory’s core is a protein called HSP90. It binds to other proteins to keep them properly folded....
Dear EarthTalk: I understand that Toyota is planning to sell a plug-in Prius that will greatly improve the car’s already impressive fuel efficiency. Will I be able to convert my older (2006) Prius to make it a plug-in hybrid vehicle? – Albert D. Rich, Kamuela, HI Toyota is readying a limited run of a plug-in Prius, which can average 100 miles per gallon, for use in government and commercial fleets starting in 2009....
Thousands of ancient olive trees laden with fruits, just ahead of what promised to be a bumper crop for Italy’s olive producers, have been marked with a blood-red X. They are supposed to be cut down by government officials, immediately, in hopes of stopping the spread of a deadly plant bacterium that is spreading across southern Italy’s olive trees and could threaten all those across Europe.* But grassroots activists who are helping the farmers resist the slaughter are gaining ground by enlisting lawyers to fight for farmers’ rights....
A new technique using a pair of laser-based instruments could one day help scientists more accurately detect concentrations of the greenhouse gases considered responsible for climate change. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are refining a method using two frequency combs to indirectly measure the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor over a substantial distance. A single frequency comb emits a laser beam that contains many different wavelengths or frequencies of light, with each “tooth” of the comb representing a different frequency....
For six weeks this past summer pregnant women in a large swath of eastern Sierra Leone were unable to find a single person to perform caesarean sections. Ebola was to blame. The deadly virus, which kills about 70 percent of its west African victims, had killed two of four clinicians at the region’s main hospital. Another doctor had fled in fear and the remaining clinician was sick with another malady. Kenema Government Hospital—a facility that serves three districts with over one million people in the area—typically delivered around 150 babies and performed 17 C-sections each month before Ebola....
Imagine talking to a friend in a crowded bar, while music blares and the surrounding din nearly drowns out your conversation. That experience of trying to track and follow the conversational thread is what statisticians would call a signal to noise problem. The signal is your friend’s voice. The noise is everything keeping you from hearing it. This problem, of course, is not limited to a happy-hour conversation. In the field of climate science, researchers are finding that the practice of geoengineering is likely to have some significant signal to noise problems, as well....
A couple of months ago, I addressed the question of whether eating meat affects your hormone levels. Since then, several of you have written to ask the same question about cow’s milk. All milk (whether from cows, goats, humans, or porpoises) naturally contains small amounts of various hormones, including estrogen and progesterone. Because hormones like estrogen are fat-soluble, the level of hormones is higher in whole milk than in skim milk....
Questions answered in this episode: “If the multiverse theory is true and other universes truly exist, and let’s say we had the technology to escape our universe and go into interuniversal space…since time only exists because of the big bang and there are other “times” in different universes same as our own then what about the area in between the universes does time exist there?” - Barrows0re “With the theory, or fact, that the universe is expanding how does science determine the edge of the universe?...
If you’ve got a junk email folder full of spam, there’s nearly a 10 percent chance it came from a computer in India, the world’s new top spam producer. India claimed the unwanted crown from the U.S. in the security firm Sophos’ most recent “Dirty Dozen” report of the top spamming countries between January and March. Rounding out the infamous top five are South Korea, which accounts for 8.3 percent of spam, and Indonesia and Russia, both of which distribute 5 percent of the spam clogging up inboxes....
Daniel Tammet is the author of two books, Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky, which comes out this month. He’s also a linguist and holds the European record for reciting the first 22,514 decimal points of the mathematical constant Pi. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Tammet about how his memory works, why the IQ test is overrated, and a possible explanation for extraordinary feats of creativity....
Crops across the country are grown in soil amended with coal fly ash—the same substance that caused a massive environmental emergency in December when it gushed from a holding pond at a Tennessee power plant. Tons of fly ash are routinely added to soil to nourish vegetables, peanuts and other crops, primarily in the Midwest and Southeast. But now the spill has raised questions about whether this longstanding agricultural practice is environmentally sound....
By Kate Kelland Average life expectancy will rise in many countries by 2030, breaking through 90 years in some places, and policymakers need to make more efforts to plan for it, according to a large international study. South Koreans are likely to have the highest life expectancy in the world by 2030 and the United States one of the lowest among developed countries, the study showed. “The fact that we will continue to live longer means we need to think about strengthening the health and social care systems to support an ageing population with multiple health needs,” said Majid Ezzati, the lead researcher and a professor at Imperial College London’s school of public health....
By Megan Brooks NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Patients with advanced colorectal cancer fare better with first-line treatment with FOLFOXIRI (folinic acid, 5-FU, oxaliplatin and irinotecan) plus bevacizumab than with FOLFIRI (folinic acid, 5-FU and irinotecan) plus bevacizumab, according to updated survival results from the Italian TRIBE study. The FOLFOXIRI regimen extended overall survival by about four months and doubled the estimated five-year overall survival rate, Dr. Chiara Cremolini, medical oncologist at the Tuscan Tumor Institute in Pisa, Italy, reported January 12 during a media briefing, ahead of the 2015 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, which opens January 15 in San Francisco....
Why pregnant women don’t tip over There seems to be more keeping pregnant women upright than fear of toppling over and squishing their unborn child. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin examined 19 pregnant women and discovered a number of reinforcements in their backs that men lack, including a lumbar (lower back) curve that spans three instead of two vertebrae and spinal joints that are 14 percent larger and positioned differently....
Middle-ear infections—the most common illness in young children—afflict three out of every four kids before the age of three. Now research suggests that these bacterial infections cause more than just pain. They may lead to taste impairment, putting children at an increased risk of becoming obese. Linda Bartoshuk, a University of Florida researcher who studies how taste perception affects health, knew from earlier research that middle-ear infections can damage the chorda tympani, the nerve that carries taste information from the front of the tongue to the brain....
After a nearly 40-year chase, physicists have found experimental proof for one of the first fractal patterns known to quantum physics: the Hofstadter butterfly. Named after Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer prizewinning author of the 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, the pattern describes the behavior of electrons in extreme magnetic fields. To catch the butterfly, scientists have had to fashion innovative nets. Since May, several groups have published experiments that sought the pattern using hexagonal lattices of atoms; last month, others reported seeking it with atomic laser traps....
Reality just got a one-two punch. A new experiment has tried to suss out which of two counterintuitive ingredients is more basic to quantum theory, only to find that they go hand in hand. Einstein was famously bugged by what are now well-established facts of quantum theory: the randomness of a particle’s choices and the possibility of instantaneous linkages between far-flung light or matter. Experimenters now conclude that Einstein cannot even pick his poison, because allowing for instant links kills any simple notion of reality, too....
