By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazine Raleigh, North Carolina—Theirs was the immortal battle: a fierce tyrant battling a defender armed with three lethal horns and protected by a bony frill around its neck. Yet the violent fight between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops is hardly the stuff of Hollywood hype. Tyrannosaurus bite marks are well known on the fossil bones of Triceratops but, so far, such fossils have always been studied in an isolated manner....
Originally posted on the Nature news blog Don’t try this at home. No really, don’t: it almost certainly won’t work and you won’t be able to use your kitchen blender for food afterwards. But buried in the supplementary information of a research paper published today is a domestic recipe for producing large quantities of clean flakes of graphene. The carbon sheets are the world’s thinnest, strongest material; electrically conductive and flexible; and tipped to transform everything from touchscreen displays to water treatment....
In M. Night Shyamalan’s film Signs, the protagonist suffers a crisis of faith so deep that it takes an alien invasion of Earth for him to work it out. In Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Happening, which opens today, the protagonist suffers a crisis of reason. Unfortunately, this time not even the looming extinction of humanity resolves it for him. Given that it’s mass entertainment, the film raises a lot of interesting questions about science, and it’s clear from it that Shyamalan’s interest in science goes much deeper than a superficial mining of ideas for plotlines....
No one thinks damaging coral is sexy, but researchers from the University at Buffalo just made it official. Turns out, coral sex is dampened after injury from storms and human activity. Their study shows that while coral adapts to injury events by initially growing back rapidly, reproduction rates are suppressed up to four years after initial injury. This is particularly alarming since size, rather than age, dictates coral’s health and maturity, explained study leader Howard Lasker....
By James Topham and Osamu Tsukimori TOKYO (Reuters) - Hundreds of technicians and engineers are camped out in Tokyo hotels trying to revive Japan’s nuclear industry, shut down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster almost three years ago. It’s proving a hard slog. A new, more independent regulator is in place, asking difficult questions and seeking to impose tougher safety rules on powerful utilities that were largely their own masters for the past 50 years....
U.S. EPA’s pollution-cutting oil and gas rule will help cut emissions of a potent greenhouse gas without regulating it directly, say clean air advocates. EPA released a final rule yesterday that requires new hydraulically fractured gas wells to use technology that will cut toxic substances and smog-forming pollution by 2015. As a co-benefit, the upgrades will also reduce methane – a greenhouse gas with 30 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide – by up to 1....
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a special report on the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016 produced by the World Economic Forum. The list, compiled by the Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, highlights technological advances its members, including Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina, believe have the power to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard the planet. It also provides an opportunity to debate any human, societal, economic or environmental risks and concerns that the technologies may pose prior to widespread adoption....
Key concepts Physics Gravity Weight Civil engineering Introduction Have you ever walked, ridden your bike or driven in a car over a long bridge? Bridges have to be sturdy enough to support the weight of many people and cars without collapsing. One important part of designing a bridge is selecting the right materials. Another is making sure those materials comprising it are shaped in a way to make them strongest. In this project you will build a simple “bridge” using materials you already have on hand—paper and tape!...
A new analysis found that records were sketchy and hard to access in two states that require drug companies to publicly disclose payments made to physicians. Many payments exceeded the $100 cap on marketing activities recommended by the American Medical Association and a trade group representing the pharmaceutical industry. Five states and the District of Columbia have enacted so-called sunshine laws that require companies to report how much money they pay doctors and other health care workers as well as in what form and for what purpose....
Patent Lead In “Origin of Computing,” Martin Campbell-Kelly writes that the first digital computer was J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly’s ENIAC, finished in 1945 as part of the war effort. But the first person to build and operate an electronic digital computer was a physics professor, as noted in “Dr. Atanasoff’s Computer,” published in the August 1988 Scientific American. John Vincent Atanasoff’s first computer was a 12-bit, two-word machine running at 60-hertz wall-plug frequency and could add and subtract binary numbers stored in a logic unit built with seven triode tubes....
EXHIBITIONS Neuroscapes 2006 Neuroscientists’ images from cutting-edge technologies “capture landmark concepts of how the brain works.” The exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize for Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi, for their work on the structure of the nervous system. Barcelona Science Museum, Spain Spring 2006 +34 91 585 4735 www.neuroart2006.com/ (1) Brain: The World inside Your Head A lively show that uses modern exhibition technology to engage your brain while showing you its inner workings....
My mother is a more patient human being after having raised a child who incessantly asked, “Are we there yet?” That information, often out of reach for a frustrated toddler, carries with it a feeling of reward. The majority of us are all too familiar with the urge to know more about the future, whether it is an exam grade, an experimental result, or the status of a new job. Prior knowledge frequently has no effect on the actual outcome of the event – we’ll get the same grade regardless – and yet we still desperately want to know....
In late May, eight employees of Mayo Clinic’s medical-records department packed up their belongings, powered down their computers and moved into a brand new office space in the heart of Rochester, Minnesota. There, they made themselves at home—hanging up Walt Disney World calendars, arranging their framed dog photos and settling back into the daily rhythms of office life. Then, researchers started messing with them. They cranked the thermostat up—and then down....
On the classic TV series Star Trek, Dr. McCoy made his job look easy. Diagnosing a patient was a simple matter of whipping out a device called a tricorder and waving it over the person, accompanied by suitably futuristic sound effects. More often than not, the diagnosis was grim and McCoy would declare to Captain Kirk, with professional deadpan, “He’s dead, Jim.” The dream of a working tricorder may be on the verge of becoming a reality, as eight teams from around the world gather in San Diego this month to deliver prototypes of their entries for the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE....
(Reuters) - Conservation groups on Thursday decried U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to allow trophy hunters who kill elephants in two African countries to bring home the endangered animals’ tusks or other body parts as trophies. The move triggered protests from conservation groups and a frenzy on social media from opponents who posted pictures of Trump sons Donald Jr. and Eric, who are avid hunters, posing with the cut-off tail of a slain elephant and other dead wild animals on Twitter....
More than two million Americans have served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Of those that return, thousands carry invisible trauma that impact their daily lives. The effects of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) from explosive blasts are especially commonplace for these veterans, afflicting hundreds of thousands of service members. New research explores how the number of explosions experienced by a veteran relates to lasting changes in the activity of specific brain cells in the cerebellum, an area traditionally associated with motor coordination....
From Afghanistan to Somalia, the struggle to eradicate polio continues to lurch along in fits and starts. The past few days have brought a modicum of good news and some potentially quite bad news. On May 13, the Taliban issued a statement declaring that it would no longer target polio vaccine workers and is ordering its fighters to help in vaccination campaigns. The group had previously marked vaccine workers for death because of fears that they might be acting as spies for Western countries—fears that were further inflamed by a successful US effort to assassinate Osama bin Laden that included a sham hepatitis vaccine campaign by the CIA....
MONTPELLIER, France – South Africa, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand export their wines all over the world, a feat that was unthinkable here a few decades ago. Fatalists claim it won’t be long until there will be more produced in China than in Europe. To some observers, these prognostications illustrate the wide-ranging adaptive capacity of the wine grape, Vitis vinifera. To others, particularly those whose reputations and businesses are at stake, changes to worldwide wine production patterns are unthinkable....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the year 330 BCE Alexander the Great (l. 356-323 BCE) conquered the Achaemenid Persian Empire following his victory over the Persian Emperor Darius III (r. 336-330 BCE) at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BCE. After Darius III’s defeat, Alexander marched to the Persian capital city of Persepolis and, after looting its treasures, burned the great palace and surrounding city to the ground, destroying hundreds of years’ worth of religious writings and art along with the magnificent palaces and audience halls which had made Persepolis the jewel of the empire....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Whether there was a king, a consul, or an emperor that stood supreme over Rome and its territories, the one constant throughout Roman history was the family. Like many earlier societies, the family was the fundamental social unit in the eternal city, and at its head was the father, or if there were no father, the eldest living male - the Latin expression for this is paterfamilias....
