When we launched Scientific American Mind as a new publication in 2004, it seemed like a great opportunity to give readers more stories about popular areas of mind and brain research—which, fortuitously, were also booming because of imaging and other advances. What I didn’t realize at the time, but probably should have, is how often the findings in our pages would shake loose what I thought I knew about how our gray matter works....
Global energy subsidies, including the social and environmental costs associated with heavily subsidized fossil fuels, are costing the world’s governments upward of $5 trillion annually, according to new estimates released yesterday by the International Monetary Fund. That lost revenue is punching gaping holes in the budgets of both wealthy and poor nations, according to IMF, while the benefits of the subsidies are flowing disproportionately to the wealthy. Energy subsidies are also exacerbating pollution problems in many of the world’s large cities and discouraging investment in newer, cleaner energy sources, states the IMF working paper titled, “How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies?...
Google Maps gets back on the road on iOS.(Credit:Google)Google Maps didn’t take long to capture the top spot among free iPhone apps.Driving back into iTunes earlier today, the app had already reached first place after the first several hours. It’s also garnered close to 8,000 reviews at this point, almost all of them earning five stars. (Credit:Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)The new app offers all of the features that made it an iOS standard in the past but with a cleaner look and feel....
The number of biological older brothers a boy’s mother has carried–whether they live with him in the same household or not–affects his chances of being gay. The findings, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Anthony Bogaert of Brock University, lend credence to the theory that it’s not the social or rearing factors that influence a man’s sexual orientation, but rather prenatal mechanisms that begin in the womb....
A recently published study by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington found elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in groundwater near natural gas fracking sites in Texas’ Barnett Shale. While the findings are far from conclusive, the study provides further evidence tying fracking to arsenic contamination. An internal Environmental Protection Agency PowerPoint presentation recently obtained by the Los Angeles Times warned that wells near Dimock, Pa., showed elevated levels of arsenic in the groundwater....
Johnson joined what was then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1953 as a so-called human computer at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, office. The office was still segregated when she joined, and she worked with other black mathematicians in the West Area Computing section. The agency became NASA in 1958, and Johnson remained at the agency until she retired, in 1986. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced her death today (Feb....
Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Key information from this month’s issue: • HIV A new gene-editing technique, that modifies immune cells to make them resistant to the virus, offers hope of eliminating HIV in other patients....
LIMA, Peru – When a retired fisherman called to report that about 1,500 dolphins had washed up dead on Peru’s northern coast, veterinarian Carlos Yaipén’s first reaction was, “That’s impossible.” But when Yaipén traveled up the coast last week, he counted 615 dead dolphins along a 135-kilometer stretch of coastline. Now, the death toll could be as high as 2,800, based on volunteers’ counts. Peru’s massive dolphin die-off is among the largest ever reported worldwide....
Before the release this Friday of the documentary “Merchants of Doubt,” S. Fred Singer sought the advice of nearly 30 climate skeptics about their chances of halting the movie and whether he should sue Naomi Oreskes, who co-authored the book on which it’s based. “Has she finally gone too far?” asked Singer. The discussion is outlined in a chain of emails initiated last fall by the 90-year-old physicist, who is featured in the film for his work questioning the amount of influence people have on rising temperatures....
By Richard Valdmanis and Valerie VolcoviciCAMBRIDGE, Mass./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Delivering her first speech as the top U.S. environmental steward, Gina McCarthy on Tuesday pre-empted a frequent mantra of critics of the Environmental Protection Agency - that the agency’s regulations disrupt the economy and cost jobs.The benefits derived from rules to address climate change and protect the environment far outweigh their costs, said McCarthy, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 18 as EPA administrator....
By Ron Cowen of Nature magazinePhysicists last week announced evidence that particles of dark matter–the invisible, hypothetical material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the mass of the Universe–may have a lower mass than suspected. The results, posted on the arXiv preprint server, match findings from some experiments but contradict others. What are the findings? The researchers, including Godehard Angholer at the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich, Germany, focused on candidate dark-matter particles called WIMPs–weakly interacting massive particles....
Archaeologists excavating a South African cave have recovered remains of the oldest known complex projectile weapons. The tiny stone blades, which were probably affixed to wood shafts for use as arrows, date to 71,000 years ago and represent a sophisticated technological tradition that endured for thousands of years. The discovery bears on an abiding question about when and how modern human cognition emerged. Fossils show that humans who basically looked like us had evolved by 200,000 years ago....
After an echolocating bat locks on to an insect with its sonar beam, it can keep track of its prey despite receiving a slew of echoes from other objects—leaves, vines and so on. How does it separate echoes bouncing off its target from echoes bouncing off the surrounding clutter, especially when the echoes reach the bat at the same time? The key, according to a new study of echolocation in the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus), is that objects in a bat’s sonar beam produce echoes of a different character depending on where they fall within the beam....
A controversial European neuroscience project that aims to simulate the human brain in a supercomputer has published its first major result: a digital imitation of circuitry in a sandgrain-sized chunk of rat brain. The work models some 31,000 virtual brain cells connected by roughly 37 million synapses. The goal of the Blue Brain Project, which launched in 2005 and is led by neurobiologist Henry Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is to build a biologically-detailed computer simulation of the brain based on experimental data about neurons’ 3D shapes, their electrical properties, and the ion channels and other proteins that different cell types typically produce (see ‘Brain in a box’)....
The olive was first domesticated in the Eastern Mediterranean between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago, according to new research. The findings, published today (Feb. 5) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are based on the genetic analysis of nearly 1,900 samples from around the Mediterranean Sea. The study reveals that domesticated olives, which are larger and juicier than wild varieties, were probably first cultivated from wild olive trees at the frontier between Turkey and Syria....
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is suffering the same fate as countless hoverboards—there are reports that some phones have been bursting into flames, prompting Samsung is issue a recall and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to strongly discourage passengers from carrying the device on planes, news sources report. Why is this smartphone such a fire hazard? The answer has to do with its lithium-ion battery, a common power source that isn’t just used in cellphones but also in computers, power tools and toys....
The magnetic fields in our solar system are surprisingly diverse—Jupiter’s and Saturn’s are extremely strong, but Mercury’s is puny. Uranus’s and Neptune’s are out of whack with the direction of their rotation, although others are closely aligned. And each has a unique set of conditions that gives rise to a dynamo—the engine thought to activate a magnetic field. Several upcoming space missions seek to study planetary magnetic fields, which offer a window into planets’ internal makeup as well as their history and formation....
By Laura Zuckerman May 4 (Reuters) - U.S. wildlife managers on Wednesday again proposed granting 30-year permits to wind farms that would forgive them for thousands of eagle deaths expected during that time frame from collisions of the birds with turbines, towers and electrical wires. The proposed rule, like one struck down by a federal judge last year, would greatly extend the current five-year time frame in the permits required under U....
Scientists love precision. They can measure the distance from Earth to the moon to within a couple of centimeters and the spins of far-off pulsars to fractions of a millisecond. When peering inside a nearby atom, however, that kind of precision is harder to come by. Consider protons, the positively charged chunks of matter found in every atomic nucleus. Physicists have been trying to pin down their size for more than half a century, but it has proved fiendishly difficult—and conflicting measurements have left researchers scratching their heads....
Every decade or so since the first cellular networks appeared the companies that make mobile devices and the networks linking them have worked out new requirements defining transmission speeds, capacity and other technical characteristics. Each new set of requirements is referred to as the latest “generation.” Today’s fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless digital networks made it possible for smartphones and tablets to deliver voice and data communications with bandwidths measuring many millions of bits per second....
