Posts

In a quiet, darkened lecture room, you begin a frustrating fight against fatigue. The overhead projector hums, and you cannot concentrate on the slides. You stop absorbing information and doodle mindlessly. The professor lost you eons ago. You are bored. Virtually everyone gets bored once in a while. Most of us chalk it up to a dull environment. “The most common way to define boredom in Western culture is having nothing to do,” says psychologist Stephen Vodanovich of the University of West Florida....

It seems a natural pairing, almost like the hemispheres of a human brain: two controversial and ambitious projects that seek to decipher the body’s control center are poised to join forces. The European Union’s €1-billion (US$1.3-billion) Human Brain Project (HBP) and the United States’ $1-billion Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative will launch a collaboration later this year, according to government officials involved in both projects. Representative Chaka Fattah (Democrat, Pennslyvania) hinted at the plan in a speech on 12 March....

Trying to cut down on your coffee consumption, ladies? Well if you’re of a certain age, you might want to reconsider. A new study from France found that women—especially those 65 and over—who reported drinking three-plus cups of java daily did better on memory tests than compeers who drank one or fewer cups a day. “Caffeine is a psychostimulant which appears to reduce cognitive decline in women,” study author Karen Ritchie of INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Montpellier, France, said in a statement....

Paul Ehrlich had just injected aniline dye–used to color blue jeans–into a rat’s bloodstream. For years the immunologist had been working on ways to stain cells so they would be more visible under a microscope, and aniline looked promising. Soon all the animal’s muscles, blood vessels and organs were deep indigo. But for some confounding reason the central nervous system–the brain and spinal cord–remained untouched. Ehrlich’s experiment, done at Berlin’s Charit hospital in 1885, provided early evidence for the blood-brain barrier–a vital wall that controls which molecules in the bloodstream can enter the brain or nerve pathways....

An investigation of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded deep within the Earth suggests deep quakes may be better at dissipating pent-up energy than similar quakes near the surface, researchers say in a new study. Scientists investigated a magnitude-8.3 earthquake that struck beneath the Sea of Okhotsk, between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan, on May 24. The Sea of Okhotsk rests above a subduction zone, a place where one of the Earth’s tectonic plates slides beneath another....

The north pole is on the run. Although it can drift as much as 10 meters across a century, sometimes returning to near its origin, it has recently taken a sharp turn to the east. Climate change is the likely culprit, yet scientists are debating how much melting ice or changing rain patterns affect the pole’s wanderlust. The geographical poles—the north and south tips of the axis that the Earth spins around—wobble over time due to small variations in the sun’s and moon’s pulls, and potentially to motion in Earth’s core and mantle....

Invasive animals are a scourge the world over, and on many islands they have decimated local plants and animals. New Zealand has contended with such losses for centuries as rats and stoats (short-tailed weasels) from abroad have helped to wipe out 19 bird species. These small mammals continue to threaten wildlife there today. Now climate change could ramp up that process. Scientists at Landcare Research, a government-funded research center in New Zealand, say they’ve found a troubling link between climate change and invasive mammals that could threaten biodiversity and disease containment around the world if the local pattern holds....

Legacy contaminants are decreasing more quickly than previously reported in three of the Great Lakes, but have stayed virtually the same in two other lakes, according to new research. “These are very positive results. The lakes are improving and slowly cleaning themselves up,” said Thomas Holsen, co-director of Clarkston University’s Center for the Environment and co-author of the study. Even with the decreases, it will be 20 to 30 years until the decades-old contaminants in Great Lakes fish decline to the point that consumption advisories can be eliminated, Holsen said....

During the time it takes to read this brief article, ischaemic heart disease, in its various forms, will claim the lives of about 50 people around the world. This interrelated constellation of conditions—including myocardial infarction, atrial fibrillation and cardiac arrest—account for more deaths globally than any other cause. The seeds of heart disease are often apparent early in life—or even before birth. An inherited form of high cholesterol, for instance, is linked to a 10- to 20-fold increased risk of coronary artery disease—blockages of the arteries that supply blood to the heart....

Dust and rock particles that mimic regolith on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been turned into 3D printer inks, offering a glimpse into how humans might one day use local materials in situ to construct and maintain extraterrestrial outposts. 3D printing approaches have already been demonstrated to make objects from simulated lunar and Martian regolith. However, these are not well suited for use in extreme, resource-starved, low-gravity environments due to processing limitations and high energy requirements....

In the past 24 hours Hurricane Patricia, bearing down on Mexico’s west coast, has rapidly intensified to become the strongest storm ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. As of this morning, data from Air Force planes show peak winds (sustained for one minute) of 200 mph and a surface pressure bottoming out at 880 millibars (typical pressure at sea level is 1013 millibars). The numbers push Patricia past the former record holders: Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and Hurricane Gilbert in 1988....

If You’re Happy, How You Know It [Podcast] Social scientist Roly Russell, of the Sandhill Institute in British Columbia, talked with Scientific American’s Mark Fischetti at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science about potentially better measures than GDP of a nation’s well-being Fermilab Set to Reveal “Interesting” Higgs Boson Results Last fall, the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shut down for good, but we shouldn’t count it out of the Higss hunt just yet...

By Julie Steenhuysen (Reuters) - Scientists behind the discovery of a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 that allows researchers to edit virtually any gene they target are among the top contenders for Nobel prizes next month, according to an annual analysis by Thomson Reuters. The predictions announced on Thursday come from the Intellectual Property & Science unit of Thomson Reuters (which also owns the Reuters news service). Since 2002, it has accurately identified 37 scientists who went on to become Nobel laureates, although not necessarily in the year in which they were named....

“The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers,” wrote Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last reigning monarch, in 1897. Kilo hk, or “star watchers,” were among the most esteemed members of Hawaiian society. Sadly, all is not well with astronomy in Hawaii today. Protests have erupted over construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a giant observatory that promises to revolutionize humanity’s view of the cosmos. At issue is the TMT’s planned location on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano revered by some Hawaiians as the piko, or “umbilical cord,” that connects the Hawaiian Islands to the heavens....

BIG OLD GALAXIES Arianna S. Long’s “Too Big for the Universe” describes ancient galaxy clusters that are surprisingly massive for their early age. Could this observation be related to how supermassive black holes in the centers of some galaxies have grown so big so quickly that their size is also difficult to explain? K. CYRUS ROBINSON Tampa, Fla. While I was reading Long’s article, I happened to be twirling a glass of iced tea and noticed that the bubbles on top had centered in a cluster that looked very much like the image of the Distant Red Core protocluster in the accompanying graphic....

This story is a joint project with ProPublica, PBS Frontline and McClatchy. The story will air on Frontline on Oct. 11. Check local listings. WASHINGTON — In March 2007, federal agents convened an elite group of outside experts to evaluate the science that had traced the anthrax in the letters to a single flask at an Army lab in Maryland. Laboratory work had built the heart of the case against Bruce Ivins, an Army researcher who controlled the flask....

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s largest particle accelerator—is due to restart after a two-year hiatus in a matter of days. For an update on the collider and the world of particle physics, tune in tonight, Wednesday, April 1 at 7 P.M. Eastern time for a public lecture by Jon Butterworth, a physics professor at University College London who works on the LHC’s ATLAS detector. Butterworth will cover the achievements of LHC so far—especially its discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson particle—and what may be in store when the upgraded machine turns on again....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Diodorus Siculus, the 1st century BCE historian, took great pride in precision of description but, even so, could not refrain from adding his own personal views and interpretations of historical events and persons. In the following passage, Diodorus describes the reign of King Philip II of Macedon (382-336 BCE) with a focus on the role fortune' or fate’ played in the king’s successes....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Dogs have been a part of the history of human beings since before the written word. The ancient temple of Gobekli-Tepe in Turkey, dated to at least 12,000 years BCE, has provided archaeologists with evidence of domesticated dogs in the Middle East corresponding to the earliest evidence of domestication, the Natufian Grave, (c....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Book of the City of the Ladies (1405) by Christine de Pizan (l. 1364 - c. 1430) is considered by many scholars to be the first work of feminist literature, predating A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft by almost 400 years in advocating for the equality of women in society....