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Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. A young listener writes in with this question: “Why do apples turn brown after you cut them?” An excellent question! The Secret Life of Fruit Imagine for a second that you’re an apple. You’re hanging there on a tree, just minding your own business, when you feel it – the force of gravity has started to overcome the strength of your stem....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A famous story from Greece relates how a young woman named Agnodice wished to become a doctor in Athens but found this forbidden. In fact, a woman practicing medicine in Athens in the 4th century BCE faced the death penalty. Refusing to give up on her dreams, she traveled to Alexandria where women were routinely allowed in the medical profession....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Military Enlightenment of the 18th century was a concerted effort across Europe to engage with the science of war. Embracing rationalism and professionalism, especially in military education, statesmen, philosophers, and educators explored the relationship between the military and civilian spheres. Leading figures in Russia included Ivan Betskoi (1704-1795) and Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1745-1813)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Women in the ancient Greek world had few rights in comparison to male citizens. Unable to vote, own land, or inherit, a woman’s place was in the home and her purpose in life was the rearing of children. That is a general description and when considering Greek women one should remember our sources are incomplete and not always unbiased....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Outlawing “heading the ball” during soccer games may reduce the rate of concussions, but eliminating player-on-player contact would help more, suggests a new study. The findings challenge recent calls to ban “heading,” which is when players hit soccer balls with their heads, the study’s lead author told Reuters Health. “Intuitively it sounds great,” said Dawn Comstock of Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora....

Renewable energy sources could take the world by storm. That is what well-known advocate Amory Lovins envisaged in 1976. He claimed that by the year 2000, 33 percent of America’s energy would come from many small, decentralized renewable sources. Decades later, in July 2008, environmentalist Al Gore claimed that completely repowering the country’s electricity supply in a single decade would be “achievable, affordable and transformative.” And in November 2009 Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi published “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables” in Scientific American, presenting a plan for converting the global energy supply entirely to renewables in just two decades....

Science and the arts have never made easy bedfellows, but three projects that unite psychology and theater could help treat autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). The skills developed in drama training closely correspond with three of the main impairments seen in autism: social interaction, communication and flexibility of imagination. One drama-based intervention is the SENSE Theatre project, which aims to help children with ASD improve their social skills. “I knew from experience that acting can have a profound impact on how we interact with others,” says Blythe A....

It’s time to spot some mountains on the moon. When you look at the moon through binoculars or a small telescope, the first thing you notice is that the lunar surface is divided into two distinct forms of terrain: large dark flat plains and bright mountainous highlands. Both of these are pockmarked by an enormous number of craters of all sizes. Early observers of the moon assumed that the large flat plains were seas, not knowing that liquid water was not available on the dry, airless surface of the moon, and so named them “maria,” the Latin for “seas,” singular “mare....

On September 3, 2004, a nearly one-million-kilogram asteroid disintegrated as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, releasing as much energy as a nuclear bomb. Satellites got a close-up view of the explosion and allowed researchers to study the resulting cloud in unprecedented detail. When meteoroids break up into tiny fragments on contact with our planet’s atmosphere they leave behind a visible trail, which observers can enjoy as “shooting stars” and meteor showers. (The image is an artist’s interpretation of a midsize meteor....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineRanching cod off the coast of Iceland is far more financially sensible than conventional fishing methods or keeping the fish in cages, according to a new analysis.Fish ranching – where the animals are free to roam but trained to return to a certain point so they can be caught – could one day become a significant part of global fisheries, fitting between traditional catching and aquaculture, says Björn Björnsson, the lead author of the study, published in Marine Policy on 1 April....

The rains come and water the spring shoots of another bounteous Midwestern corn crop in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. The rains also wash phosphorus off farm fields and into creeks, streams and rivers. The waters flow into the shallowest of the Great Lakes—Lake Erie, which is just 18 meters deep on average and far shallower on its western edge. All that phosphorus doesn’t just help crops grow. When it reaches the lake it fuels the growth of mats of bright green algae, turning the water the color of pea soup....

Human egg freezing is going mainstream. The biggest reason: it works. A handful of studies suggest the success rate for women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) is just as high when using frozen eggs as fresh ones. The results increase the flexibility and control women can have in their reproduction and their careers. Egg freezing and IVF follow the same steps, but the timing of pregnancy is different. A woman first takes fertility shots to boost her egg production and then has them extracted....

Workers who apply certain pesticides to farm fields are twice as likely to contract melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, according to a new scientific study. The findings add to evidence suggesting that frequent use of pesticides could raise the risk of melanoma. Rates of the disease have tripled in the United States in the last 30 years, with sun exposure identified as the major cause. The researchers identified six pesticides that, with repeated exposure, doubled the risk of skin cancer among farmers and other workers who applied the chemicals to crops....

Genetically modified organisms typically have one or two genes added or replaced. So, for example, a gene that promotes the production of insulin might be added to a microbe that scientists want to turn into a cellular factory of the diabetes medication. But now microbiologists and geneticists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., have successfully transferred the entire genome—roughly 500 genes, in this instance encased in more than one million base pairs of DNA—from one microbe to another, transforming the latter into the donor and raising prospects of designing organisms from scratch to solve specific problems, such as the world’s dependence on fossil fuels or global warming....

The U.S. government shutdown beginning today (Oct. 1) will shut down much of NASA, but the space agency is taking special measures to safeguard American astronauts currently living on the International Space Station. Veteran NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and first-time space traveler Mike Hopkins can rest assured that when they call home to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, someone will pick up the call. Today also happens to be NASA’s 55th birthday — the space agency began operations on Oct....

Wetlands from Bangladesh to Florida submerged. Drought and devastating heat in important granaries such as the Yangtze floodplain in China or Ukraine. Rains that come too often or too hard in India or the U.S. Northeast. The list of potentially devastating impacts from climate change is a long one. But with greenhouse gas emissions continuing to climb and concentrations in the atmosphere rising by roughly two parts per million (ppm) a year, climate catastrophes are looking more and more imminent....

Jet lag: the main killer of productivity and enjoyment when travelling across time zones. Common folk remedies include pressure points, aromatherapy, and light exposure behind the knee. But is there evidence any of these actually work? Probably not. Fortunately, recent research on circadian rhythms has suggested a reliable method to reduce or even completely prevent jet lag. Circadian rhythms are the roughly 24-hour biological rhythms that drive changes within humans and most other organisms....

Inventions are a dime a dozen. Truly. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just granted patent number 9,000,000 (to WiperFill in Jupiter, Fla, for collecting rainwater from a car windshield and using it in an environmentally sensible way “to replenish fluids in the windshield washer reservoir.” But who knows? In 10 years either every car will have one or none of them will). An even larger number of inventions do not get patented....

From the moment they are born, sea turtles fight to survive. Buried alive, they dig themselves out and evade hungry crabs and birds as they crawl to the ocean, where they begin a long and treacherous migration. One out of 1,000 will survive into adulthood. And those that do will bear a toxic burden. Scientists are discovering that sea turtles, long ignored by toxicologists who study wildlife, are highly contaminated with industrial chemicals and pesticides....

The U.S. Navy is considering new technology that will allow land-based officers to communicate with submarines with minimal disruption to the sub’s operations and reduced risk of detection. The military hopes that an emerging tactical paging technology dubbed Deep Siren will allow fleet commanders anywhere in the world to instantly communicate with subs despite the latters’ depth or speed. Currently, vessels can only be contacted if they are on or near the surface, which is not only inefficient but dangerous for subs furtively trolling hostile waters....