Posts

A synthetic chemical that may mimic the effects of eating a low-calorie diet extends life span in mice, a new study has found. Previous research showed that mice on a high-fat diet lived longer when given this compound, known as SRT1720; the new work shows that mice on a standard diet also benefit from it. This study is just the latest in an extensive effort to find compounds that may help slow aging and aging-related diseases....

Nature, famously, abhors a vacuum. But some cooks have learned to feel differently. Step through the swinging doors at the back of a top restaurant like Alinea in Chicago, and you may find vacuum pumps being used to reduce cooking juices into concentrated sauces, to distill essential oils from fruits and vegetables, to dehydrate chips or to brew coffee. Many of these techniques originated in chemistry laboratories or industrial food-processing operations, and the equipment involved still evokes the bench sci­entist more than the top chef....

In the infant universe, a substantial enhancement in the radiation density on the scale of the cosmic horizon could have made some small regions behave as a closed universe and sealed their fate in isolated collapses to black holes. The typical variations that are actually observed in the cosmic microwave background radiation had an initial amplitude that is a 100,000 times smaller than needed to make black holes. But these variations can only be observed on large spatial scales....

By 1989 more than half of African elephants had been slaughtered for their tusks. That year, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) banned international shipment of ivory and, combined with foreign aid to help African countries fight poaching, almost immediately brought an end to its trade. But, as ivory prices crept up during the 1990s and early 2000s, poaching returned. In June 2002 officials in Singapore seized a container from Malawi filled with 6....

Alien life may flourish in subsurface oceans on Jupiter’s Europa, but another of the icy moon’s secrets is displayed in plain view: a mysterious “brown gunk” filling many of the fissures, fractures and craters that crisscross its face. “That is our state-of-the-art term for it—brown gunk,” says NASA’S Curt Niebur, who explained at a recent conference that the unknown substance most likely is carried to the surface by water erupting from Europa’s depths....

When pondering a decision or trying to convince others, think carefully about your metaphors. The implicit information may subtly influence decision making. A study published in January in PLOS ONE examined how reading different metaphors—“crime is a virus” and “crime is a beast”—affected participants’ reasoning when choosing solutions to a city’s crime problem. Those who read the beast metaphor were more likely to opt for a direct approach emphasizing enforcement, whereas the virus metaphor elicited a preference for a systemic, reform-focused solution....

After passing through a dark shaft in September 1940, four teenage boys entered an underground chamber filled with wondrous drawings—hundreds of figures of animals, such as horses and deer, and other markings. What must they have thought on first seeing such an array of fantastic imagery from our forbears? Lascaux Cave, located near Montignac, France, contains more than 2,000 paintings and engravings, which date to some 15,000 or more years ago....

Dear EarthTalk: What is “microfinance” and how does it help poor countries and preserve the environment? – Eliza Clark, Seattle, WA The brainchild of Grameen Foundation founder Muhammad Yunus, microfinance is a form of banking whereby financial institutions offer small loans to the poor. The idea behind the concept, which originated in Bangladesh in the mid 1970s, is that motivated and disciplined poor people could climb out of poverty if they had access to funding—even small amounts—that help get businesses off the ground....

I was about to book a trip to Berlin for a neuroscience meeting when I heard the news: President Donald Trump had issued an executive order barring citizens from seven countries from entering the United States. I have lived in the U.S. for more than seven years and I have a green card. But I have dual citizenship in France and Syria, one of the blocked countries. It took me a while to realize the true impact of the order, issued 27 January....

Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives were North America’s dominant predators in the late Cretaceous period, about 99 million to 65 million years ago, but a new analysis of a toothy fossil skull suggests that the early history of this group includes smaller meat-eating ancestors that date as far back as 170 million years ago. The skull belongs to the only known specimen of Proceratosaurus, which now represents the oldest known relative of T....

In its first issue, dated Thursday, August 28, 1845, under the elaborate woodcut illustrating its logo, Scientific American summed up its mission: “The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise, and Journal of Mechanical and Other Improvements.” Founder and editor Rufus Porter, himself an inventor and painter, noted that the new publication “is especially entitled to the patronage of Mechanics and Manufacturers, being the only paper in America, devoted to the interests of those classes....

The Killer Bacteria Hall of Fame no doubt houses the usual suspects: Yersinia pestis, perpetrator of the Plague; Treponema pallidum, the spiral-shaped culprit in syphilis; and Vibrio cholerae, the swimmer that causes cholera. But you have probably never heard of one of the inductees. Serratia marcescens is a forgotten but ubiquitous bacterium that can produce a red pigment called prodigiosin and likes to hang out as a pink film in the shower grout and toilet bowls of less-than-scrupulously clean homes....

When British Capt. James Cook undertook his second voyage in the Southern Ocean in 1772, scientists on board measured the temperature 183 meters below the surface. It was colder than at the surface. Scientists have since graduated to vastly improved technologies for measuring the ocean’s temperatures. By 2004, they had launched Argo (“swift” in Greek), a network of 3,000 floating devices spread out throughout the world. The devices record the temperatures down to 6,500 feet, where only the deepest divers, like sperm whales and great white sharks, visit....

Peter Moyle has seen a lot in five decades of roaming California’s streams and rivers and gathering data on the fish that live in them. But last month he saw something new: tributaries of the Navarro River, which rises in vineyards before snaking through a redwood forest to the Pacific, had dried up completely. “They looked in July like they normally look in September or October, at the end of the dry season,” says Moyle, a fish biologist at the University of California, Davis....

On Thursday, July 17, four science experts served as witnesses at the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing, “The Federal Research Portfolio: Capitalizing on Investments in R&D.” The hearing considered the federal government’s role in research and development (R&D), and the nation’s STEM education and outreach initiatives. Attendees in the Capitol hearing room were Mariette DiChristina, editor in chief and senior vice president of Scientific American; Vinton G....

Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of the Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.) Walking through Gordon Fishell’s lab now, you would never know that much of his research was swept away by Hurricane Sandy, almost exactly a year ago. The lab’s staff is back at work, studying — among other things — the role of certain neurons in disorders such as autism. With gleaming floors under glowing lights, the space resembles nothing of the dark, dank disaster zone it was back then....

A number of law enforcement officials have hailed the advent of “familial DNA searching” in which genetic material found at a crime scene resembles an existing profile but does not provide an exact match. Civil liberties advocates decry this new addition to DNA forensics as holding the potential for invading the privacy of innocent people. At a National Institute of Justice Conference in June of 2011, both sides of the issue were presented....

Disagreeing On Everything As theoretical physicists, we deplore the publication of A. Garrett Lisi and James Owen Weatherall’s “A Geometric Theory of Everything,” as well as of Zeeya Merali’s “Rummaging for a Final Theory” [News Scan] in the September issue, which was PR-level praise of Lisi’s research that presented him as struggling against an entrenched establishment. As you surely knew Lisi’s views to be, to say the least, controversial, basic editorial precaution would have required first consulting a reputable particle physicist....

When Jesse Bloom heard in 2009 that Tamiflu, once the world’s best treatment for flu, had inexplicably lost its punch, he thought he knew why. Sitting in his lab at the California Institute of Technology, the biologist listened to a spokesperson from the World Health Organization recount the tale of the drug’s fall from grace. Introduced in 1999, the compound was the first line of defense against the various strains of flu virus that circulate around the world every year....

By Rujun Shen SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Indonesia’s complex rules on land use and the difficulty in prosecuting foreign businesses mean Singapore has its work cut out bringing companies to book under its new cross-border air pollution law. The bill, approved by parliament on Tuesday, has won praise from politicians and environmentalists as a bold move to tackle a decades-long problem of smoke from forest fires in neighboring Indonesia choking the city state....