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Oil is the fuel of modern life. Made up of long hydrocarbon chains, it can be broken down into a slew of useful substances and products. Other fossil resources– coal and natural gas–are made up of much shorter chains and it has proved difficult to rearrange their carbon and hydrogen atoms to make fuels such as diesel. Now chemists have used a combination of catalysts to produce more useful hydrocarbons from short-chain molecules, potentially opening the door to an alternative-fuel future....

In the past year floods have submerged cities as far apart as Nashville, Tenn., and Nowshera, Pakistan. An epic heat wave touched off peat fires in Moscow that wreathed the capital in smoke. A drought in northeastern China ruined the wheat crop. Blizzards left the U.S. buried in snow—and collapsed the roof of a football stadium. “It is a reasonable question: Is human influence on climate anything to do with this nasty bit of weather we’re having?...

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, Facebook was the new kid on the block. There was no Twitter for news updates, and the iPhone was not yet on the scene. By the time Hurricane Sandy slammed the eastern seaboard last year, social media had become an integral part of disaster response, filling the void in areas where cell phone service was lost while millions of Americans looked to resources including Twitter and Facebook to keep informed, locate loved ones, notify authorities and express support....

Jazz greats have said that spinning off an improvised tune is like entering another world, and a new study has provided that world’s first map. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health gave six professional jazz pianists a few days to memorize a never-before-seen tune. The musicians then tickled the ivories while being scanned by an MRI machine, playing the novel composition and an improvisation in the same key. As compared with the memorized melody, the improvised jam elicited stronger activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain active in autobiographical storytelling, among other varieties of self-expression....

A small amount of hair collecting in the shower drain or hairbrush is not necessarily cause for concern. According to the Academy of Dermatology, it’s perfectly normal to lose 100 or so hairs from your head every day. Gradually thinning hair as you age is also normal, and largely hereditary. But hair loss—especially when it’s sudden or at a young age—can also be a sign of certain medical conditions or nutrient deficiencies....

Update: David Wogan’s blog post summarizing the event can now be accessed over on The Guest Blog Nuclear power is evil. Solar power is our savior. Or…is it the other way around? Tonight, March 9, at 7:00 p.m. EST, the University of Texas will present an entertaining lecture about how movies have depicted energy sources and therefore shaped public opinion and government policy, for generations. The evening will be filled with video clips and expert debates, and you can watch the whole event, live, right here at ScientificAmerican....

James Watson: genetically predisposed to stupidity? Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, canceled an international book tour and returned to the U.S. in disgrace this week after a furor over racist comments published in The Sunday Times Magazine of London, which quoted Watson as saying he’s “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Several conditions that stem from a malfunctioning immune system – psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis – may create a higher than average risk for heart-related problems and death, a new study finds. “It’s not terribly surprising that there is an increased risk of heart disease because of the similar levels of systemic inflammation,” said co-lead author Dr. Alexis Ogdie of the rheumatology division in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia....

A decade ago IBM’s chess program, Deep Blue, beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. The event marked a milestone, forcing humans to yield dominance of yet another strategic diversion. Only the Asian board game Go seemed to be computer science’s Achilles’ heel: humans could soundly beat the machines. A new algorithm can now take on strong human players–and win. Go has proved enormously difficult for computer programmers because of the game’s deceptive complexity....

As temperatures rise in the rapidly warming Arctic, scientists are growing more and more concerned about the region’s permafrost—the carbon-rich, frozen soil that covers much of the landscape. As permafrost warms up and begins to thaw out, microbes in the soil may release large quantities of both climate-warming carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, potentially worsening the effects of climate change. Researchers are carefully monitoring the natural emissions from permafrost in the Arctic....

About 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate toilet facilities, and hundreds of children die every day from preventable, sanitation-related diarrheal diseases. But water scarcity—a worsening problem in many low-resource environments—is one factor that makes it difficult to meet the need for clean, functioning toilets. “Many parts of the world don’t have flushing toilets because they just don’t have the water required to operate them,” says Peter Lillehoj, an engineer at Michigan State University....

Human memory is highly influenced by emotion. In healthy subjects events that are emotionally charged—and it doesn’t matter if the emotions are positive or traumatic—tend to be much better remembered than emotionally neutral events. This psychological tendency comes with a glaring exception, however: in some individuals, extremely stressful or traumatic events can induce amnesia, so that they lose the ability to remember what happened. In some instances this loss can lead to the erasure of a vast amount of memory, so that people even forget basic facts about their identity, such as where they live or what their name is....

Anyone who has ever loaded a moving van knows how difficult it is to safely stack boxes of different sizes, weights and levels of fragility, all while minimizing the amount of space those cartons take up. Imagine an endless stream of such boxes and a business that lives and dies by the efficiency of their stacking, and you have an idea of the challenge facing warehouses that process large volumes of cargo onto pallets for shipping....

By Elie Dolgin of Nature magazineGraft-versus-host disease (GvHD) is a common and often deadly complication of bone-marrow transplantation that occurs when immune cells from an unrelated donor attack the transplant recipient’s tissue. Now, researchers have for the first time managed to completely replace people’s bone-marrow-derived stem cells with those from unrelated donors without causing GvHD. And because of this, the recipients could also accept kidneys from the same donors without the need for drugs that suppress the immune system....

A blast of sweltering heat will sweep across the United States over the next four days, and some places will see temperatures as much as 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (5.6 to 8.3 degrees Celsius) above average for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service. Hot weather in July is to be expected, of course — after all, it’s the middle of summer — but a so-called heat dome is kicking these hot and humid temperatures up a notch....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Visiting Alexandria, Egypt, once the greatest cultural center of the ancient world, rivaling Athens, Greece, is an unforgettable experience. The food, the wonderful people, and the history at every turn of a street are all dazzling but, if you do not know what you are doing, a trip there can get off to a bumpy start....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Daily life in medieval Japan (1185-1606 CE) was, for most people, the age-old struggle to put food on the table, build a family, stay healthy, and try to enjoy the finer things in life whenever possible. The upper classes had better and more colourful clothes, used expensive foreign porcelain, were entertained by Noh theatre and could afford to travel to other parts of Japan while the lower classes had to make do with plain cotton, ate rice and fish, and were mostly preoccupied with surviving the occasional famine, outbreaks of disease, and the civil wars that blighted the country....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Polynesian navigation of the Pacific Ocean and its settlement began thousands of years ago. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands had been voyaging across vast expanses of ocean water sailing in double canoes or outriggers using nothing more than their knowledge of the stars and observations of sea and wind patterns to guide them....

Leonardo Da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura), advises painters to pay particular attention to the motions of the mind, moti mentali. “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure,” he advises; otherwise the figure will be considered twice dead: “dead because it is a depiction, and dead yet again in not exhibiting motion either of the mind or of the body....

Most people know two things about helium. One is that it makes your voice comically high-pitched when you inhale it; the other is that it is extremely light, which is why balloons filled with the stuff float upward through the heavier air. But in particle physics terms—and especially when it comes to the nuclear physics of antimatter—helium is no lightweight. With two protons and two neutrons, ordinary helium is four times as massive as hydrogen, the lightest element....