Posts

Developing, testing, launching and operating a space science mission typically costs hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, but a new breed of satellites lowers the price tag to just $100,000 or so. These cubic, one-liter, one-kilogram satellites, called CubeSats, are designed to be launched in batches and can piggyback on other space missions, thus dramatically reducing launch costs. CubeSats originated in a set of technical specifications proposed as a standard in 2000 by aerospace engineer Bob Twiggs, formerly of Stanford University’s Space and Systems Development Laboratory, and Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo....

“Global society operates as a network of creativity and innovation.”–John Sexton, writing in Scientific American. In the October 2012 issue, we publish our Global Science Scorecard, a ranking of nations on how well they do science—not only on the quality and quantity of basic research but also on their ability to project that research into the real world, where it can affect people’s lives. The United States comes out on top, by a wide margin, followed by Germany, China, Japan, the U....

Researchers are investigating how carbon can harness the sun’s light, potentially replacing more expensive and toxic materials used in conventional photovoltaic technologies. Now a team at Stanford University has developed a solar cell whose components are made solely from carbon. The scientists published their findings last month in the journal ACS Nano. “We were interested in forming basically a new type of solar cell in which the materials being used are all carbon materials,” said Michael Vosgueritchian, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at Stanford and a co-author....

A paralyzed man with an implant in his brain was able to operate a television, play a simple video game and flex a robotic hand using only his thoughts, researchers reported in July. They say such devices hold long-term promise for restoring function to paralyzed individuals. But a review of other neural prosthetics indicates that for now, less invasive techniques may provide the same abilities at less risk. Two years ago a surgeon inserted a 16-square-millimeter, pincushionlike array of electrodes (right) into the motor cortex of 26-year-old Matthew Nagle, whose spinal cord had been severed by a knife wound to the neck....

The International Monetary Fund this week denounced a study that links its loans to a rise in deaths from tuberculosis (TB) in the former republics of the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe. “This is just phony science,” IMF spokesperson William Murray told The New York Times about research that cites IMF loans as a possible reason that TB rates soared in 21 post-Soviet countries after the Berlin Wall crumbled....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineWas the case a fluke or a forewarning? Now that a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit that sought to halt US government funding of research using human embryonic stem cells, scientists who depend on that support are left wondering whether the battle is truly over, or is merely moving on to a different arena.Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued his decision on 27 July, acknowledging a higher court’s opinion that overruled a preliminary injunction that he had placed to suspend the funding last August (see ‘Trying times’)....

The longstanding division of dinosaurs into ‘bird-hipped’ species including Stegosaurus and their ’lizard-hipped’ counterparts such as Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may no longer be valid, a study published on March 22 in Nature contends. Among the other proposed changes to the dinosaur family tree, the long-necked herbivorous and often gargantuan sauropods such asBrachiosaurus are no longer as closely related to bipedal, meat-eating theropods such as T. rex as they were under previous schemes....

This story is a supplement to our feature “New Breast Cancer Treatments Help Sufferers Gain Ground” which was printed in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American. Targeted therapies will be most powerful, in principle, when they are used together in combinations tailored to the tumor features driving an individual patient’s cancer. Clinical trials to test specific drug combinations provide critical information about which treatments work most effectively on different tumor profiles and reveal unexpected interactions between drugs....

A 30-year-old puzzle about the origin of short bursts of high-radiation energy in the cosmos has been solved. In the current issue of Nature, four different teams of astronomers provide a variety of evidence that, for the first time, establishes the cosmological distance of the so-called short gamma-ray bursts and points to the source as either the collision of two small but dense stars, known as neutron stars, or the collision of a neutron star with a black hole....

Right now, somewhere in the world—in a petri dish in Baltimore, maybe, or in the salivary glands of a laboratory-bred mosquito in Seattle, or in the bloodstream of a villager in Ghana—resides a chemical compound that could help eradicate human history’s biggest killer. Scientists have many promising malaria vaccine candidates in the works, and for the first time one has reached advanced human trials. If it or another candidate is even partly effective in people, it could save the lives of millions of children and pregnant women....

“There is such a thing as being too late when it comes to climate change,” Pres. Barack Obama said in unveiling the administration’s Clean Power Plan at the White House on August 3. “The science tells us we have to do more.” An analysis by Scientific American suggests that the president is right: the Clean Power Plan alone is not enough. The plan, which goes into effect in 2022 and aims to reduce U....

In the first study to compare social skills of different species performing the same tasks, a team of German researchers found that two-year-old toddlers are more socially mature than adult apes. “No one has ever given a systematic battery [of tests] like this one to both apes and humans,” study co-author Esther Herrmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, said at a press conference in Berlin....

Wealth inequality is escalating at an alarming rate not only within the U.S. but also in countries as diverse as Russia, India and Brazil. According to investment bank Credit Suisse, the fraction of global household wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the world’s population increased from 42.5 to 47.2 percent between the financial crisis of 2008 and 2018. To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world’s population combined—about 3....

By Irene KlotzCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Scientists have no doubts that oceans and rivers once pooled on the surface of Mars, but what happened to all that water is a long-standing mystery.The prime suspect is the sun, which has been peeling away the planet’s atmosphere, molecule by molecule, for billions of years.Exactly how that happens is the goal of NASA’s new Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, which is scheduled for launch at 1:28 p....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the 1999 book The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos. The Sarlacc, according to the Star Wars Encyclopedia, is not a native of Tatooine, but seems to function in the desert climate just fine, digging itself into the ground and waiting for prey to come. We can’t be sure how big the Sarlacc is, but it must be fairly large to have such a huge appetite....

Deep in South Africa’s gold mines water can be found in rock fractures, hosting bacteria that feed off the stone itself and form biofilms on the hard surfaces. Now new samples pulled from these sunless pools show that nematodes—roundworms of varying size that are essentially tubes with a digestive tract and thrive everywhere on the planet—likely graze on these bacterial films, surviving more than a kilometer underground. In fact, an entirely new species of nematode—dubbed Halicephalobus mephisto for a lifestyle reminiscent of Faust’s underworld demon, Mephistopheles, or “he who loves not the light”—makes its home only in the deep subsurface, suggesting that life, even complex, multicellular life, may populate sulphate-loving ecosystems in the planet’s unexplored depths....

Car chases are exciting, but fraught. One slip of the wheel, one errant pedestrian, one drunken driver, and difficult consequences may follow. Police in Iowa and Florida, however, seem to have taken the counsel of Q from the “Bond” movies. Instead of constantly hurtling after potential madmen, they have found an entirely new method of tracking their cars. It’s called Starchase. Essentially, it’s a cannon that fires “bullets” that are sticky GPS devices....

The mud on Roberts Bank at the southern end of the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia is deep—and smelly. Exposed at low tide, it ranges for kilometers, and looks devoid of life. But across some sections, sunlight reflects with a slightly greenish luminescence. Those places are where you see flocks of plump little brown-and-white western sandpipers (Calidris mauri), and they are slurping up the shimmering material with their bristly tongue....

The first raft of stories in the wake of the Biden administration’s dramatic acceleration of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the U.S. centered on all the things the newly vaccinated among us can and cannot do, as if we were working off a master list of approved activities. Like so many things associated with this pandemic, the truth is nowhere near that clean. No such list exists, and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has only issued recommendations, not requirements....

Hot summers (and balmier winters) may simply be the new normal, thanks to carbon dioxide lingering in the atmosphere for centuries. This trend reaches back further than a couple of years. There have been exactly zero months, since February 1985, with average temperatures below those for the entire 20th century. (And those numbers are not as dramatic as they could be, because the last 15 years of the 20th century included in this period raised its average temperature, thereby lessening the century-long heat differential....