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The Bush Administration's push for "midnight regulations" in the last moments of office continues. [More]
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
The jury is still out on the relationship between cell phone use and brain tumors. But the American Association of Neurological Surgeons has issued a statement to remind people that cell phones present lots of other risks to your brain. Of course, we all know about yapping while driving. A Harvard study finds that 2,600 people die each year in accidents related to cell distraction and 12,000 more are injured. Canadian research shows that you’re four times more likely to be in an accident while on the phone. [More]
Irene Pepperberg is associate research professor at Brandeis University and the author of a new book, Alex and Me. She and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what Alex and other African Grey Parrots can teach us about the evolution of intelligence and the concept of zero. [More]
Rules for Genetically Engineered AnimalsAfter years of anticipation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released in September preliminary guidelines for genetically engineered animals [see “Does the World Need GM Foods?”; SciAm, April 2001]. The agency, which deemed that cloned meat poses no extra risk, wants to regulate engineered animals as it does drugs. Producers would have to substantiate claims and demonstrate safety. Consumer groups complain that the draft sets no provision for labeling and that safety trials can be done behind closed doors, as is the case for drug applications. Public comment on the draft ended in mid-November, and the FDA was to issue its final guidelines shortly thereafter.
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A good working definition of quantum mechanics is that things are the exact opposite of what you thought they were. Empty space is full, particles are waves, and cats can be both alive and dead at the same time. Recently a group of physicists studied another quantum head spinner. You might innocently think that when a particle rolls across a tabletop and reaches the edge, it will fall off. Sorry. In fact, a quantum particle under the right conditions stays on the table and rolls back.
This effect is the converse of the well-known (if no less astounding) phenomenon of quantum tunneling. If you kick a soccer ball up a hill too slowly, it will come back down. But if you kick a quantum particle up a hill at the same speed, it can make it up and over. The particle will have “tunneled” across (although no actual tunnel is involved). This process explains how particles can escape atomic nuclei, causing radioactive alpha decay. And it is the basis of many electronic devices.
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A large-scale study released this week showed that the herb gingko biloba has no effect in preventing dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. But alternative medicine aficionados may find hope in a new research touting the bennies of another "herb" in preserving memory. [More]
The tiny Furby-like pygmy tarsier, presumed to be extinct, was found during a recent expedition to Indonesia. And the cuddly, huge-eyed nocturnal critter is the very definition of cute. [More]
Could next election season's dirty tricks include disclosures about the candidates' genes? [More]
Quantum computers are a sort of holy grail of information science. Their inherent computational advantage comes from their fundamental computational unit, the quantum bit ("qubit"). Unlike a digital bit in a classical computer, which can take the form of either 0 or 1, a qubit can be both zero and one simultaneously, throwing open the door to vastly more powerful computation. And although a usable computer based on qubits remains a far-flung fantasy, investigators continue to make strides toward their realization. [More]
The international commission charged with saving the once abundant bluefin tuna of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea is meeting this week in Morocco to discuss ways to reverse the decline of the dwindling fish. On the watch of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the bluefin population has plummeted as much as 90 percent due to illegal and chronic over-fishing. [More]
President-elect Barack Obama has tapped former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to be his secretary of health, the Associated Press is reporting. [More]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week fined electronics recycler Jet Ocean Technology of Chino, Calif., just over $10,000 for illegally exporting cathode-ray tubes from old television sets to China. Jet Ocean is only the second electronics recycler to be penalized for shipping and deliberately mislabeling the tubes, which contain the brain-damaging metal lead. It falsely labeled the cargo as "mixed metal scrap" when it shipped it out--and as "scrap metal" when China (after being warned by Greenpeace of the true contents) refused to accept delivery and returned it. [More]
You may recall that President George W. Bush pledged to do something about climate change when campaigning for the presidency back in 2000--but reneged on that promise once in office. But it appears that President-elect Barack Obama will not follow suit, telling a gathering of governors yesterday that "few issues facing America--and the world--are more urgent than combating climate change":
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New results from an instrument that detects energetic particles in the upper altitudes above Antarctica show an excess of cosmic-ray electrons that may be a signal of dark matter, researchers say. The study, published today by Nature, examines data from a balloon-borne detector called ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter). The unexpected wealth of electrons in a specific energy range, about 300 to 800 giga-electron-volts, points to a nearby source, the authors write. [More]
Editor's note: This story will appear in our January issue but is being posted early because of a publication in today's Nature.
Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth lumbered across the tundra, scientists have sequenced a whopping 50 percent of the beast’s nuclear genome, they report in a new study. Earlier attempts to sequence the DNA of these icons of the Ice Age produced only tiny quantities of code. The new work marks the first time that so much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved. Not only has the feat provided insight into the evolutionary history of mammoths, but it is a step toward realizing the science-fiction dream of being able to resurrect a long-gone animal. [More]
A 30-year-old Colombian woman with damaged airways is healthy months after receiving what European doctors are reporting is a first-ever, stem-cell-based windpipe transplant. They say the technique has allowed the woman to thrive without the use of the drugs that other transplant patients must take to prevent their immune systems from rejecting the new organs.
The unique transplant was performed in June on Claudia Castillo, who was severely short of breath after part of her trachea had collapsed from tuberculosis, hampering the flow of oxygen to her left lung. Doctors in Barcelona took a trachea from a 51-year-old female donor who’d died of a stroke and, over a six-week “washing,” stripped it of its cells. British doctors then grew stem cells from Castillo’s own bone marrow in the lab and had them grow on the donor trachea with them before implanting it, creating a kind of hybrid windpipe with the donor organ as a scaffold, the doctors write in this week’s edition of The Lancet.
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Some veterinarians treat animals much more exotic than the family pet. Jeffrey Boehm, executive director of the Marine Mammal Center, talks about the challenges of caring for sick sea mammals. And Alisa "Harley" Newton, a pathologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, discusses how vets figured out that a pathogen attacking humans was in fact West Nile Virus. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites related to this episode include www.tmmc.org; www.wcs.org
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When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years. Even by the diverse standards of Saturn’s satellites, Enceladus was an outlier. Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity. At just over 500 kilometers across, Enceladus seemed far too small to generate much heat on its own. Yet something unusual had clearly happened to this body to erase vast tracts of its cratering record so completely.
Voyager’s brief encounter allowed no more than a cursory look, and, in hindsight, its imaging coverage of Enceladus was terribly unfortunate: a few medium-resolution images of the northern hemisphere, some low-resolution coverage in the south, and none of the south pole. We had no idea what we had missed.
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Forty years ago, in December of the troubled year of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders piloted the Apollo 8 spacecraft into orbit around the moon, the first humans ever to circle any globe but our own. From that unique vantage, they sent back the iconic photograph (taken by Anders) shown below, known as “Earthrise.” It unforgettably captured the fragile beauty of our living planet as it hovered in stark contrast over the arid sterility of the lunar horizon: a precious droplet of life--perhaps the only one we could ever know--in the velvety darkness.
For a world torn by conflicts over an unpopular war and other social upheavals, that photograph was a timely reminder of how inextricably united the fates of everything and everyone on Earth were. Indeed, the image is widely credited with having energized the environmental movement. [More]
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
Truth in advertising is a questionable concept, because it’s often self-serving to lie. Whether you’re talking about a used car salesman or a poisonous snake. No, they’re not the same thing. [More]
What is consciousness? What is this ineffable, subjective stuff--this thing, substance, process, energy, soul, whatever--that you experience as the sounds and sights of life, as pain or as pleasure, as anger or as the nagging feeling at the back of your head that maybe you’re not meant for this job after all. The question of the nature of consciousness is at the heart of the ancient mind-body problem. How does subjective consciousness relate to the objective universe, to matter and energy?
Consciousness is the only way we experience the world. Without it, you would be like a sleepwalker in a deep, dreamless sleep, acting in the world, speaking, having babies, but without feeling anything. You would feel nothing, nada, nichts, rien. Indeed, in the most famous deduction of Western thought, philosopher and mathematician René Descartes concluded that because he was conscious he existed. That was his only unassailable proof that he wasn’t just a chimera. Maybe he didn’t have the body he thought he had, maybe he had fake memories (premonitions of The Matrix), but because he was conscious he must exist.
[More]
If you were a nine-foot tall animal covered in dense fur – say, Bigfoot – you would probably seek cooler climes if temps began inching up. That’s the hypothesis one Queens College biologist posed to me last night – without, I should note, acknowledging that such an animal exists at all. [More]
Alaska is making the best use of cigarette taxes and Big Tobacco settlement money distributed to states in the decade after authorities negotiated a deal with the companies over smoking-related health costs incurred by the states, according to a new report released today by a coalition of advocacy groups. South Carolina ranks the worst. [More]
It's been in stores for only one week, but Mirror's Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts, Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games without Frontiers." [More]
It sounds like something a villain might construct in a James Bond film: a laser, trained on a thin gold target, that churns out antimatter to annihilate ordinary matter. But scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced that they made just such a device, from which they were able to detect the production of more than a million positrons, the antimatter particle counterpart to electrons. (By this detection they infer the presence of many times more positrons, in the realm of 100 billion particles.) [More]
Editor's Note: Marine geophysicist Robin Bell is leading an expedition to Antarctica to explore a mysterious mountain range beneath the ice sheet. Following is the first of her updates on the effort as part of Scientific American.com's In-depth Report on "The Future of the Poles."
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND (11/16/08)--Things have improved since the days of ship and dog sleds, but it still is not easy to get to the center of Antarctica. It will have been a month from the time I stepped into the car on a rainy Thursday until we reach our field camp in mid-December. A month, that is, if things go well. Today was an example of things not quite going according to plan. [More]
The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems--all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. [More]
Complaints of memory and concentration problems, headaches, pain and fatigue among Gulf War vets have often fallen on deaf ears – until now. A Department of Veterans Affairs advisory panel has concluded that Gulf War syndrome is a real illness affecting at least 174,000 soldiers, a quarter of those who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict. [More]
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Scientists for years have been scratching their heads over the cause of itching. There were theories that it shared a nerve pathway with pain to the brain – and now comes news that different forms of itching apparently have their own neural routes. The question is how to block their way. Sure there are some treatments like Benadryl and its ilk that stop itching induced by histamines, biological compounds known to cause itching. But no treatments exist for other forms of itching that drive patients to the doctor’s office. [More]
Despite broad consensus on the existence, origins and potentially catastrophic effects of global warming, a vocal minority continues to question the motives, methods and assumptions of climate scientists sounding the alarm. So when temperature data released by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), one of the leading monitors of climate change, showed an unusually warm October, climate change skeptics cried foul. [More]
If you study prostitutes, would you tell the NIH? [More]
This is the fifth article in the Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions.
Scientists did not invent the vast majority of visual illusions. Rather, they are the work of visual artists, who have used their insights into the workings of the visual system to create visual illusions in their pieces of art. We have previously pointed out in our essays that, long before visual science existed as a formal discipline, artists had devised techniques to “trick” the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional, or that a series of brushstrokes in a still life was in fact a bowl of luscious fruit. Thus the visual arts have sometimes preceded the visual sciences in the discovery of fundamental vision principles, through the application of methodical--although perhaps more intuitive--research techniques. In this sense, art, illusions and visual science have always been implicitly linked.
[More]
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
In theory, scientists could learn a lot about our health by testing tiny amounts of bodily fluids--a drop of blood, a tear, a bead of sweat. But something this small is easily contaminated by other liquids or surfaces. So what are scientists doing? They're making liquids bounce, dance, and float lightly through the air. Researchers from Belgium's University of Liege published their findings November 18th in the New Journal of Physics. [More]
ScientificAmerican.com presents some of this year's most exciting high-tech toys as well as gadgets to make the planet greener and inventions designed to deliver the most basic needs to developing countries [More]
In a fitting irony, the static that once bothered scientists trying to tune in to the universe has turned out to be an incredibly rich source of information about it. Probing these signals over the past 40 years--known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation--scientists have dug out cosmological secrets that have revolutionized the field. Next, European scientists will spy on the relic photons with instruments of unprecedented detail, when they launch the Planck satellite in early 2009.
But the Planck mission won’t be about putting the proverbial “one more number after the decimal.” For the first time, it will probe the dynamics of the early inflationary universe. By sifting through the details of how the temperature of the early universe varied slightly in different directions, the many different models of inflation--the furious exponential expansion of space that took place around 10–35 second after the big bang--can be put to the test, as each makes its own unique predictions. The satellite will also look for evidence of primordial gravity waves, providing theorists with more data to apply to their ideas. And it will more accurately measure the densities of ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy that occur in puzzling proportions in the universe (5, 23 and 72 percent, respectively).
[More]
Looking for the perfect present for that techno geek in your life? This year's guide has plenty to choose from, including a bunch for the socially conscious in search of green tech that helps curb energy usage, cut down on paper pollution and clean up--sans toxic chemicals. The guide also features innovative uses of technology to provide basic services such as water, sanitation and light to areas that lack them.
First: Here's a look at some of this year's high-tech toys, including those that let you watch movies, play video games or pretend to fly an airplane in your own little (virtual) world, or just kick back on a floating chair.
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The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change–inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions--measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)--dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available). [More]
It's not all fun and games. Some gadgets are designed to help measure and curb energy usage, cut down on wasted paper, and clean without the need for toxic chemicals.
Green Gadget Slide Show
[More]
Some technology employs the most basic concepts (a hand crank, a straw or bicycle pedals) to find innovative ways of delivering basic needs such as water, light and transportation to areas where they have been absent.
Showcase for Socially Responsible Inventions
[More]
A new study shows that the cancer drugs imatinib (also known as Gleevec by Novartis) and sunitinib (Sutent, made by Pfizer) halt diabetes in mice. [More]
The eagerly awaited start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, has been put off--again. The LHC was shut down in September, just days after being switched on for the first time, when an electrical malfunction caused a helium leak in the collider's tunnel. The repairs, which had been expected to last until spring, will now keep the LHC off-line into early summer, according to published statements from a spokesman for the accelerator's operator. [More]
It was 38 years ago today that the U.S. Patent Office officially recognized an invention that would help make computers more accessible to the masses. We are, of course, talking about Douglas Engelbart's "X-Y position indicator for a display system," more commonly known today as the computer mouse. Engelbart, 83, then a researcher at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, Calif., filed the patent in 1967 but had to wait three years for the government to acknowledge his technology, which provided the tool needed to navigate graphics-filled computer screens with a simple motion of the hand rather than by wading through screens filled with green-tinted text using keys or a light pencil pressed up against a computer monitor. [More]
Hell apparently hath no fury like a Motrin mom scorned. It began innocently enough--a painkiller ad targeted to aching moms. But seems the spot touched a nerve in the ever-growing blogging mom community, drawing heat for claims that ibuprofen (brand name Motrin) could help cure the pain in the neck, not to mention back and shoulders, caused by carrying a baby in a sling, wrap or "schwing." [More]
In July a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wy. and pulled up a load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people. [More]
Like many an unsung artist or writer, the late Mars Phoenix Lander's fame has increased since the robot expired last week -- thanks to social-networking tools that gave it a human voice. [More]
Move over, HAL, there's an entire brigade of rock 'em, sock 'em robots in town. They're dexterous, graceful, and they can . . . dance? [More]
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