Key Concepts Physics Temperature Thermal expansion Metals Introduction Do you enjoy wrapping gifts for people? Perhaps you have even curled a ribbon with scissors (or watched someone else do it). Have you ever wondered why the ribbon curls when you run a scissor blade down one side of it? The answer is that when you apply pressure on the ribbon with the blade of the scissors, the outer layer of the ribbon stretches and expands....
Our small and large intestines, collectively known as the gut, do more than just provide a long, twisting joyride for our food. As we heard in last week’s episode, our gut, plus the trillions of bacteria that live there, influence our mood, our health, and even our personalities. Indeed, when you hear what it can do, the gut sounds more like a superhero than an internal organ: with a surface area the size of a basketball court, it secretes acid strong enough to burn your skin!...
When Mick Jagger first sang “what a drag it is getting old,” he was 23 years old. Now at 71, he is still a veritable Jumpin’ Jack Flash on stage. Jagger seems to have found the secret to staying physically fit in his advancing years, but getting old can be a drag on the psyche. Many older adults fear memory loss and worry they are headed down the road to dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease....
NASA and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) are coordinating efforts focused on the recent touchdown of China’s Chang’e 4 moon lander and Yutu 2 rover on the lunar farside. The robotic probe throttled itself down on January 3 within the Von Kármán Crater in the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin. Newly released images of Chang’e 4’s landing site, snapped by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on January 30 and released yesterday, were just the first step in a collaboration between the two space agencies....
Armed with new Department of Energy money, a Connecticut company announced this week it is moving forward with a carbon capture project that it thinks could revolutionize the technology. FuelCell Energy is one of a handful of companies investigating how to address one of the biggest barriers in trying to capture carbon dioxide from coal plants for later storage underground, an unproved concept. The problem is called parasitic load. It refers to the phenomenon that a typical carbon capture system requires a great deal of electricity and thus saps power from a power plant and can cause electricity costs to spike by 70 percent or more....
The list of mycologists whose names are known beyond their fungal field is short, and at its apex is Paul Stamets. Educated in, and a longtime resident of, the mossy, moldy, mushy Pacific Northwest region, Stamets has made numerous contributions over the past several decades— perhaps the best summation of which can be found in his 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. But now he is looking beyond Earth to discover new ways that mushrooms can help with the exploration of space....
About 115 people nationwide die every day from opioid overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A lack of timely, granular data exacerbates the crisis; one study showed opioid deaths were undercounted by as many as 70,000 between 1999 and 2015, making it difficult for governments to respond. But now Internet searches have emerged as a data source to predict overdose clusters in cities or even specific neighborhoods—information that could aid local interventions that save lives....
An estimated 10 billion people will inhabit that warmer world. Some will become climate refugees—moving away from areas where unbearable temperatures are the norm and where rising water has claimed homes. In most cases, however, policy experts foresee relatively small movement within a country’s borders. Most people—and communities, cities and nations—will adapt in place. Below the interactive panel we have highlighted roughly a dozen hotspots where climate change will disrupt humanity’s living conditions and livelihoods, along with the strategies those communities are adopting to prepare for such a future....
His finalist year: 1973 His finalist project: Building a way to launch objects from the moon What led to the project: Growing up as the eldest of eight children of a University of Arizona materials science professor and a biochemist-turned-homemaker in the 1960s, Joseph Demer was always designing his own experiments. For instance, he built a low-frequency radar system on the roof of his parents’ Tucson house to measure the height of the ionosphere—an electrically charged layer of the atmosphere that starts about 45 miles (70 kilometers) above Earth’s surface....
Subtleties in the language people use may reveal physiological stress. Psychologists found that tracking certain words used by volunteers in randomly collected audio clips reflected stress-related changes in their gene expression. The speech patterns predicted those physiological changes more accurately than speakers’ own ratings of their stress levels. The research, which is published on November 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that changes in language may track the biological effects of stress better than how we consciously feel....
JUNE’S ISSUE held a rich vein of letter-inciting content. Software professionals challenged “Dependable Software by Design” author Daniel Jackson about the new analytical tools developed to ensure the reliability of computer programs, especially those used in critical systems. Also, the four apocalyptic volcanic eruptions in what is now California and Wyoming that each covered large areas of North America under many centimeters of ash, described in “The Secrets of Supervolcanoes,” by Ilya N....
By Reuters Staff VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. drug body warned on Friday that record poppy output in Afghanistan will translate into a spike in heroin-induced deaths, with death rates already rising in Britain and the United States. Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan reached its highest last year since records began in 1998, according to the annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Afghanistan accounts for about 85% of opium production and 77% of worldwide heroin production, UNODC’s annual World Drug Report showed....
As the body of North Korea’s “dear leader” Kim Jong-il lies in state at his palace in Pyongyang, his youngest son Kim Jong-un takes control of the country’s nuclear weapons program. Despite being named Kim’s successor in 2009, Kim Jong-un remains a bit of a mystery to the West. One unanswered question: How much power does the younger Kim wield over the country’s military? To better understand what the succession of power in North Korea means for its nuclear program, Scientific American spoke with Frank von Hippel, a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and co-founder of the school’s Program on Science and Global Security....
When it comes time to perform difficult tasks, octopuses do their best impression of humans, according to a new report. Results published today in Nature indicate that the soft-bodied creatures move their arms as if they were jointed to lift objects. German Sumbre of the Hebrew University in Israel and his colleagues analyzed a hundred videotapes of octopuses using their flexible arms to fetch food items. They found that the animals formed “quasi-joints” that resembled those of the shoulders, elbows and wrists of humans....
CURIOUS AND CREATIVE I just finished reading “Creativity Is Collective,” by S. Alexander Haslam, Immaculada Adarves-Yorno and Tom Postmes, and enjoyed it very much. I am a partner and creative director at a Toronto-based graphic design firm and always look forward to anything you publish on the subject of creativity. After spending many years participating in and observing the creative process, I found myself searching for explanations as to what makes for a successful and gratifying collaboration....
Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math Daniel Tammet Little, Brown, 2013 ($26)Tammet is famous for his unusual brain: he possesses the extraordinary number skills of an autistic savant with very few of the intellectual limitations associated with autism. Because of his gifts, neuroscientists have spent time with him to gain deeper insight into the autistic mind. He is also a best-selling author, and his new book is a collection of beautifully wrought essays about numbers, which he experiences as shapes, colors and textures....
In the blink of an eye, a wave of visible light completes a quadrillion (1015) oscillations, or cycles. That very large number presents both opportunities and a challenge. The opportunities promise numerous applications both inside and outside of laboratories. They go to the heart of our ability to measure frequencies and times with extremely high precision, a skill that scientists rely on for some of the best tests of laws of nature—and one that GPS systems, for instance, depend on....
A new batch of stolen emails between climate scientists hit the Web yesterday, less than a week before U.N. climate talks begin in South Africa. The emails appear to be part of the same trove of messages taken from a British university and posted to the Internet in November 2009, just before a major U.N. climate meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark. Both sets of emails feature the same scientists and were pulled from roughly the same time frame....
Key Concepts Energy Heat Physics Thermal energy Thermal expansion Introduction Ever wonder why rubber bands so easily snap back into place after being stretched? When stretched out, rubber pulls back hard to return to its original shape. It’s pretty resilient stuff! Of course, you’ll find that if you leave a rubber band wrapped around something long enough—say, a year or two—it will eventually stretch out permanently and may even snap. But what is it about rubber that makes it so stubbornly resist being permanently deformed?...
People who eat more salt tend to weigh more. But maybe not for the reasons you think. Eating a lot of salt can cause your body to retain more water, which can show up on the scale as extra pounds. But we’re not just talking about water weight here. High salt diets appear to be linked to higher body fat—in particular, the kind of fat that accumulates around your middle. There are a few obvious explanations for this....
