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Buzz Aldrin on Why We Should Go to Mars

Mon, 20 May 2013 03:16:57 GMT

A member of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon. In the years since, he has become an advocate for space exploration and technology, calling for renewed U.S. investment in the space program. In Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, Aldrin lays out a detailed, multi-stage plan for journeying to the red planet that would culminate in the first permanent human settlement beyond the Earth. It’s been more than four decades since you landed on the moon. What’s your assessment of the U.S. space program since then? The United States has had periods of ambition, but it has not financed them appropriately. Interest waned after t

How Edwin Hubble Became the 20th Century’s Greatest Astronomer

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:28:00 GMT

Galaxy M106 as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA Edwin Hubble. Photo: Wikipedia When the great minds of science gathered at the U.S. National Museum (now known as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History) on April 26, 1920, the universe was at stake. Or at least the size of it, anyway. In scientific circles, it was known as the Great Debate, and although they didn’t know it at the time, the astronomy giants Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis—the two men who came to Washington, D.C., to present their theories—were about to have their life’s work eclipsed by Edwin Hubble, a young man who would soon become known as the grea

Endangered Ocean Creatures Beyond the Cute and Cuddly

Fri, 17 May 2013 06:10:02 GMT

Staghorn coral is listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. NOAA Fisheries has proposed it be reclassified as endangered. Photo by Albert Kok Our oceans are taking a beating from overfishing, pollution, acidification and warming, putting at risk the many creatures who make their home in seawater. But when most people think of struggling ocean species, the first animals that come to mind are probably whales, seals or sea turtles. Sure, many of these large (and adorable) animals play an important part in the marine ecosystem and are threatened with extinction due to human activities, but in fact, of the 94 marine species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), o

Can Brain Scans Really Tell Us What Makes Something Beautiful?

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:21:56 GMT

It’s beautiful, but does it know art? Image courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH When art meets neuroscience, strange things happen. Consider the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art in Oregon which features rugs and knitting based on a brain scan motif. Or the neuroscientist at the University of Nevada-Reno who scanned the brain of a portrait artist while he drew a picture of a face. And then there’s the ongoing war of words between scientists who think it’s possible to use analysis of brain activity to define beauty–or even art–and their critics who argue that it’s abs

Why the Endangered Species Act Is Broken, and How to Fix It

Thu, 16 May 2013 02:44:27 GMT

While a college student in the early 1990s at Northwestern, Peter Alagona became fascinated with the red-hot controversies swirling endangered species, from the California condor and desert tortoise to the northern spotted owl and black-footed ferret. As environmentalists and animal lovers pushed to do whatever it took to save them, there was strong resistance from the ranchers, loggers, and other communities threatened by the rigorous federal laws required to do so. “I was watching this stuff unfold on a daily basis, wondering what the hell was going on, why it was so contentious, and why we couldn't figure it out,” recalls Alagona, now a professor of environmental history at

Earthworms in Your Garden May Help Prevent Invasive Slugs from Devouring Plants

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:52:02 GMT

The invasive Spanish slug, one of the worst alien pests in Europe, is naturally repelled by ecosystems if soils house a healthy population of earthworms, new research suggests. Photo by Xauxa Håkan Svensson They creep through a garden, lubricated by their own secretions, leaving a trail of mucus behind. In their wake is destruction–their rapacious appetites can require them to consume several times their own body weight each day, chomping roots and leaves with guillotine-like jaws and thousands of backward-pointing teeth. Hermaphroditic as adults, they lay tiny pearls of eggs easily mistaken for fertilizer beads in potting soil, allowing them to rampantly proliferate in gardens a

Amazing Sea Butterflies Are the Ocean’s Canary in the Coal Mine

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:27:00 GMT

The shelled sea butterfly Hyalocylis striata can be found in the warm surface waters of the ocean around the world. Photo: © Karen Osborn The chemistry of the ocean is changing. Most climate change discussion focuses on the warmth of the air, but around one-quarter of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean. Dissolved carbon dioxide makes seawater more acidic—a process called ocean acidification—and its effects have already been observed: the shells of sea butterflies, also known as pteropods, have begun dissolving in the Antarctic. Tiny sea butterflies are related to snails, but use their muscular foot to swim in the water instead

Solving an Alligator Mystery May Help Humans Regrow Lost Teeth

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:07:00 GMT

Could this gator’s teeth hold clues for regenerating humans’ pearly whites? Photo by Flickr user montuschi Humans drew the short end of the toothbrush when it comes to our pearly whites’ longevity. Other animals such as reptiles and fish frequently lose and replace their teeth by growing new ones, but people are stuck with the same set of mature adult teeth their entire lives. If they lose a tooth–or all 32–dentures are usually the only option. Oddly enough, alligators’ deadly chomps may hold a clue for how scientists could coax humans into regrowing teeth. These reptiles belong to the order Crocodilia, who, with their famous cheerful grins, caused

What Genomic Research Can Tell Us About the Earth's Biodiversity

Thu, 16 May 2013 02:35:27 GMT

Inside two gleaming white rooms at a vast complex in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. are 20 round five-foot-tall steel tanks whose contents are cooled by liquid nitrogen to temperatures as low as minus 310 degrees Fahrenheit. Lift the lid of one of the tanks and look through the wispy nitrogen vapor that wafts upward, and you’ll see rack upon rack of two-inch-tall plastic vials, tens of thousands of them, each containing a bit of tissue extracted from a living thing somewhere in the world—North American birds, Gabonese monkeys, venomous brown recluse spiders, Burmese rainforest plants, South Pacific corals. There are now some 200,000 samples in the Natural History Museu

Leaproaches, Mutant Butterflies and Other Insect News That the 17-Year Cicadas Missed

Fri, 10 May 2013 06:30:51 GMT

Periodical cicadas, like the one pictured above, have missed a lot of news about insects since they last appeared. Photo via Wikimedia Commons After 17 years underground, billions of cicadas are ready to emerge and see sunlight for the first time. They will blanket the East Coast until around mid-June, buzzing like jackhammers in harmony as they search for a mate. Since 1996, the periodical insects, which belong to a group called Brood II, have lived as nymphs two feet deep in the soil, feeding on nothing but the liquid they suck out of tree roots. Once they crawl up to the surface, they molt, mate, lay eggs and die within a month. Scientists are still trying to determine how periodic

Macoto Murayama’s Intricate Blueprints of Flowers

Fri, 10 May 2013 04:11:00 GMT

A side view of Lathyrus odoratus L. 2009-2012. By Macoto Murayama. Image courtesy of Frantic Gallery. The worlds of architecture and scientific illustration collided when Macoto Murayama was studying at Miyagi University in Japan. The two have a great deal in common, as far as the artist’s eye could see; both architectural plans and scientific illustrations are, as he puts it, “explanatory figures” with meticulous attention paid to detail. “An image of a thing presented with massive and various information is not just visually beautiful, it is also possible to catch an elaborate operation involved in the process of construction of this thing,” Murayama on

The World According to Twitter, in Maps

Fri, 10 May 2013 02:31:00 GMT

Tweets from around the world, plotted by location as part of a new study. Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al. It’s hard to appreciate just how quickly and thoroughly Twitter has taken over the world. Just seven years ago, in 2006, it was an idea sketched out on a pad of paper. Now, the service is used by an estimated 554 million users—a number that amounts to nearly 8 percent of the all humans on the planet—and an estimated 170 billion tweets have been sent, with that number climbing by roughly 58 million every single day. All these tweets provide an invaluable source of news, entertainment, conversation and connection between people. But for sc

10 New Things Science Says About Moms

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:37:00 GMT

What makes a 21st century mom? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Robert Whitehead To be honest, I’ve never associated motherhood with science. I assume this has everything to do with the fact that I’m one of eight kids, and while I’m sure we were a study in chaos theory, my mother didn’t have much time to nail the concept and work it into bedtime stories. That said, moms remain a subject of scientific inquiry because, no matter how constant they may seem to us, they’re always changing to keep up with the times. Here then are 10 recent studies or surveys that give a bit more insight into the institution of 21st century moms. 1) Have I got a story for you: A

The Water On the Moon Probably Came From Earth

Thu, 09 May 2013 06:01:00 GMT

New isotopic analysis of Apollo-era Moon rocks shows that the water locked inside them likely came from our planet . Image via Wikimedia Commons/Gregory H. Revera In September 2009, after decades of speculation, evidence of water on the surface of the Moon was discovered for the first time. Chandrayaan-1, a lunar probe launched by India’s space agency, had created a detailed map of the minerals that make up the Moon’s surface and analysts determined that, in several places, the characteristics of lunar rocks indicated that they bore as much 600 million metric tonnes of water. In the years since, we’ve seen further evidence of water both on the surface and within the

Baby Weddell Seals Have the Most Adult-Like Brains in the Animal Kingdom

Thu, 09 May 2013 01:00:10 GMT

Helpless babe or capable professional navigator? Photo by Samuel Blanc With their big, glossy black eyes and downy fluff, baby Weddell seal pups are some of the most adorable newborns in the animal kingdom. But these cute infants are far from helpless bundles of joy. New research published in the journal Marine Mammal Science reveals that Weddell seal pups likely possess the most adult-like brain of any mammal at birth. The seal pups’ brains, compared to adult seals’ brain proportions, are the largest known for any mammal to date. The researchers write that this is “remarkable” considering that the pups are quite small at birth compared to many other newborn ma

How the Human Brain Tracks a 100-mph Fastball

Wed, 08 May 2013 04:01:06 GMT

New research shows our brains have a specialized system to anticipate the location of moving objects, located in V5 region of the visual cortex. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Calebrw Throwing a baseball is hard. As xkcd pointed out just yesterday, accurately throwing a strike requires that a pitcher release the ball at an extremely precise moment—doing so more than half a millisecond too early or too late causes it to miss the strike zone entirely. Because it takes far longer (a full five milliseconds) just for our nerve impulses to cover the distance of our arm, this feat requires the brain to send a signal to to the hand to release the ball well before the arm has reached its proper th

What Phone Companies Are Doing With All That Data From Your Phone

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:02:32 GMT

Cell phones have become prolific data engines. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon Cell phones are so many things now–computer, map, clock, calculator, camera, shopping device, concierge, and occasionally, a phone. But more than anything, that little device that never leaves your person is one amazingly prolific data engine. Which is why last October, Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S, carrier with almost 100 million customers, launched a new division called Precision Market Insights. And why, at about the same time, Madrid-based Telefonica, one of the world’s largest mobile network providers, opened its own new business unit, Telefonica Dynamic Insights. The poin

My Big Fat European Family: What Genomics Tell Us About Shared Ancestors

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:01:00 GMT

Thousands of Dutch fans celebrate a soccer match between Netherlands and Germany in the Ukranian city of Kharkiv in 2012. The fans and their German counterparts likely share hundreds of genetic ancestors from the past thousand years. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Aleksandr Osipov Last month, a trio of engineers debuted an app that allows Icelanders to determine if they’re actually related to a potential date. Why, you ask? Because the entire population of Iceland, roughly 320,000 people, derives from a single family tree, and it’s very possible to bump into a former flame at a family gathering. The case of Iceland is an extreme one, but the idea that we are all distant cousins, in the

Are Modern Football Helmets Any Safer than Old-School Leather Ones?

Tue, 07 May 2013 02:01:48 GMT

Recent testing shows that, contrary to prior findings, new plastic helmets reduce the risk of concussions by 45 to 96 percent. Image via Journal of Neurosurgery, Rowson et. al. In the past century or so, football helmets have come a long way, evolving from crude “leatherheads” crafted by shoemakers to plastic-and-rubber hybrids that can be customized to fit a player’s head and have radios built in. Nevertheless, the sport currently faces a serious and growing problem: brain injuries. Studies have shown that former NFL players are about three times more likely to die from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s diseases as the general population, a result of t

Heavy Metals, Insects and Other Weird Things Found in Lipstick Through Time

Fri, 03 May 2013 06:30:23 GMT

The creamy sticks of color seen here are just the latest in a long history of lipsticks—historical records suggest that humans have been artificially coloring their lips since 4,000 B.C. Photo by Flickr user ookikioo Lipstick has seen a fair share of funky ingredients in its long history of more than 6,000 years, from seaweed and beetles to modern synthetic chemicals and deer fat. In recent years, traces of lead have been found in numerous brands of the popular handbag staple, prompting some manufacturers to go the organic route. This week, more dangerous substances joined the roster. Researchers at Berkeley’s School of Public Health at the University of California tested 32 diffe

Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:02:27 GMT

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her DNA-derived self-portrait. Photo by Dan Phiffer. It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of discarded chewing gum. At 12:15 pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg collected a cigarette butt (above, right) on Myrtle Avenue (above, le

The Secret to a Long Life May Be Deep Inside Your Brain

Fri, 03 May 2013 02:42:15 GMT

Scientists could be one step closer to slowing down aging. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Paolo Margari It may have been the word retrieval adventure I had the other night when I couldn’t remember the name of thinly sliced cured ham. (I nailed the “p,” but didn’t come close to conjuring up “prosciutto.”) Or it could have been the annoying pain I feel in a knuckle on my right hand these days. Probably both. All I know is that when I read about a recent study in which scientists were able to slow down the aging process in mice, I was more than a little intrigued. According to the researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, the

Why Asparagus Makes Your Urine Smell

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:48:33 GMT

Our bodies convert asparagusic acid into sulfur-containing chemicals that stink—but some of us are spared from the pungent aroma. Photo by Gunnar Magnusson If you’ve ever noticed a strange, not-entirely-pleasant scent coming from your urine after you eat asparagus, you’re definitely not alone. Distinguished thinkers as varied as Scottish mathematician and physician John Arbuthnot (who wrote in a 1731 book that “asparagus…affects the urine with a foetid smell”) and Marcel Proust (who wrote how the vegetable “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume”) have commented on the phenomenon. Even Benjamin Franklin took note, stating in a 1781

Five Innovative Technologies that Bring Energy to the Developing World

Thu, 02 May 2013 06:20:14 GMT

VOTO, a new device that converts the heat from a fire into readily usable electricity. Photo via Point Source Power In the wealthy world, improving the energy system generally means increasing the central supply of reliable, inexpensive and environmentally-friendly power and distributing it through the power grid. Across most of the planet, though, simply providing new energy sources to the millions who are without electricity and depend on burning wood or kerosene for heat and light would open up new opportunities. With that in mind, engineers and designers have recently created a range of innovative devices that can increase the supply of safe, cheap energy on a user-by-user basis,

Want to See How an Artist Creates a Painting? There’s an App for That

Thu, 02 May 2013 02:30:00 GMT

The Repentir app reveals an artist’s creative process by allowing users to peel back layers of paint with the touch of their fingertips. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Hook. Artwork © Nathan Walsh An artist’s studio is usually a private space, and the hours spent with a paint-dipped brush in hand mostly solitary. So, the final products we gaze at on gallery walls are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the makers’ creative processes. For Nathan Walsh, each of his realist paintings is a culmination of four months of eight to 10-hour days in the studio. Now, thanks to a new app, we can go back in time and see how his work came to be, stroke by stroke. Repentir, a free

Baby Sand Tiger Sharks Devour Their Siblings While Still in the Womb

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:01:07 GMT

How many unborn brothers and sisters did this sand tiger shark devour to be here today? Photo by Amada44 Baby animals may seem irresistibly adorable, but in reality many of them are calculating killers. Hyena, wolf or even dog litter runts are pushed aside by their larger siblings and left to go hungry; fuzzy white egret chicks will kick their weaker clutch mates out of the nest to certain doom; and baby golden eagles sometimes go so far as to snack on their smaller brothers and sisters while their mother looks on. Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, is the case of the baby sand tiger shark. While sharks may not be the most snuggly animals to begin with, the sand tiger shark set

Look Ma, No Fuel! Flying Cross Country on Sun Power

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:31:58 GMT

The Solar Impulse flying over San Francisco at night. Photo courtesy of Jean Revillard/Solar Impulse Bet you didn’t know that Texas has more solar energy workers than ranchers and California has more of them than actors, and that more people now work in the solar industry in the U.S. than in coal mines. Or that in March, for the first time ever, 100 percent of the energy added to the U.S. power grid was solar. Okay, so now you know all that, but I’m guessing you’re no more aquiver over solar energy than you were five minutes ago. That’s the way it is in America these days. Most people think solar is a good thing, but how jazzed can you get about putting pane

Saving the Cao Vit Gibbon, the Second Rarest Ape in the World

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:00:24 GMT

A baby cao vit gibbon learns to search for food. Photo: Zhao Chao 赵超, Fauna and Flora International You probably haven’t heard of the world’s second rarest ape, the cao vit gibbon. Scientists know of only one place the species still lives in the wild. In the 1960s, things got so bad for the cao vit gibbon that the species was declared extinct. But in 2002, to the surprise and elation of conservationists, the animals—whose shaggy coats can be a fiery orange or jet black—turned up along Vietnam’s remote northern border. Several years later, a few gibbons were found in China, too. Also known as the eastern black-crested gibbon, the cao vit gibbons once covered an expans

The Strange Beauty of David Maisel’s Aerial Photographs

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:07:53 GMT

Terminal Mirage 2, 2003. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE For almost 30 years, David Maisel has been photographing areas of environmental degradation. He hires a local pilot to take him up in a four-seater Cessna, a type of plane he likens to an old Volkswagen beetle with wings, and then, anywhere from 500 to 11,000 feet in altitude, he cues the pilot to bank the plane. With a window propped open, Maisel snaps photographs of the clear-cut forests, strip mines or evaporation ponds below. American Mine (Carlin NV 2), 2007. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE The resulting images are beautiful and, at the same, absolutely unnerving. What exactly are those blood-red stains? As a nod to the con

How Big Data Will Mean the End to Job Interviews

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:09:55 GMT

Who makes a good call center worker? Big Data knows. Photo courtesy of Flickr user State Farm I have good news and bad news for anyone who will be looking for a job in the coming years. The good news is that some time in the future, job interviews may go away. Okay, maybe some companies will still do them for the sake of tradition, but they won’t matter all that much. Which leads me to the bad news–Big Data is more likely to determine if you get a job. Your dazzling smile, charming personality and awesome resume may count for something, but it’s algorithms and predictive analysis that will probably seal your fate. Here’s why. Enormously powerful computers ar

Cops Could Soon Use Breathalyzers to Test for Illegal Drugs

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:30:06 GMT

Swedish researchers are developing a system that tests for 12 different drugs on your breath, including cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines. Image via SensAbues Your breath says a lot about you. Recent research has found that the chemicals present in each person’s breath can provide a unique “breathprint” that differs from person to person, while other scientists have worked on breathalyzer-like tests that can indicate the presence of a bacterial infection inside someone’s body. In the decades since the 1960s, though, when the first electronic breathalyzer for blood alcohol content was developed, research has led to relatively little advancement in the use of c

14 Fun Facts About Penguins

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:30:52 GMT

Emperor penguins swimming. Photo by Polar Cruises Penguins seem a bit out of place on land, with their stand-out black jackets and clumsy waddling. But once you see their grace in the water, you know that’s where they’re meant to be–they are well-adapted to life in the ocean. April 25 of each year is World Penguin Day, and to celebrate here are 14 facts about these charismatic seabirds. 1. Depending on which scientist you ask, there are 17–20 species of penguins alive today, all of which live in the southern half of the globe. The most northerly penguins are Galapagos penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus), which occasionally poke their heads north of the equator. 2. While they can’

Google Search Terms Can Predict the Stock Market

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:01:10 GMT

An investing strategy based on the frequency of certain words Google searches, it turns out, might provide sizable profits. Image via Flickr user velorowdy Google, as many researchers know well, is more than a search engine—it’s a remarkably comprehensive barometer of public opinion and the state of the world at any given time. By using Google Trends, which tracks the frequency particular search terms are entered into Google over time, scientists have found seasonal patterns, for example, in searches for information about mental illnesses and detected a link between searching behavior and a country’s GDP. A number of people have also had the idea to use these trends to try

Why Women Like Deep Voices and Men Prefer High Ones

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:01:26 GMT

We find different pitches attractive because of the body size they signal—and a touch of breathiness is crucial to take the edge off a man’s deep voice. Image via Flickr user linda Who you’re physically attracted to might seem like a frivolous, random preference. In recent years, though, science has told us that our seemingly arbitrary tastes often reflect unconscious choices that are based upon very relevant biological traits. In general, we find symmetric faces more attractive, likely because they reflect a healthy underlying genome. Women typically prefer men with more distinctively masculine facial features because they indicate high testosterone levels and physical st

For Some Species, You Really Are What You Eat

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 03:30:23 GMT

Flamingos depend on plant-derived chemical compounds to color their feathers, legs and beaks. Photo: Flickr user longhorndave Pop quiz: Why are flamingos pink? If you answered that it’s because of what they eat—namely shrimp—you’re right. But there’s more to the story than you might think. Animals naturally synthesize a pigment called melanin, which determines the color of their eyes, fur (or feathers) and skin. Pigments are chemical compounds that create color in animals by absorbing certain wavelengths of light while reflecting others. Many animals can’t create pigments other than melanin on their own. Plant life, on the other hand, can produce a variety of them, and if a large qua

Eight New Things We’ve Learned About Music

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:33:09 GMT

Music works deep into our brains. Photo courtesy of Flickr user antonkawasaki In one those strange twists of modern life, we were reminded last week of the power of music–at a hockey game. It was at Boston’s TD Garden, two days after the explosions that contorted so many lives, and as singer Rene Rancourt began the Star Spangled Banner before the game between the hometown Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres, he noticed that many in the crowd were joining in. Rancourt got only as far as …”what so proudly we hailed” before he pulled the microphone away from his mouth and motioned to those in the stands to carry on. They did, in full voice, building to a stirring

Heart Attacks May Be Linked to Air Pollution

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:01:28 GMT

Hikers ascend through the smog of Los Angeles, one of six cities where researchers studied the effects of air pollution on the heart. By Flickr User Jason Morrison One morning a couple of years ago, I decided to take a jog around the perimeter of my hotel in Delhi, India. A little bit of exercise might mitigate the crushing jetlag after my 24-hour flight from California, I thought. Within a minute or two of sucking in the city’s soot-filled air, my lungs and eyes were scorched. While I knew that Delhi’s air quality was bad, I had no idea it’s the 12th worst in the world—nor was I aware of precisely how damaging air pollution can be to the body. As we’ve written about recently, resear

What is Causing Iran’s Spike in MS Cases?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Multiple sclerosis has skyrocketed in Tehran, increasing almost sevenfold between 1989 and 2005. In Iran’s central province of Isfahan, the incidence nearly tripled from 2005 to 2009. Now Oxford University researchers suggest, for the first time, that the 1979 Iranian Revolution may deserve some of the blame for the extraordinary jump. They say the revolutionary mandate for modest dress and head coverings for women may have inadvertently fueled the increase by limiting their exposure to sunlight. Scientists have long recognized a link between lack of sunlight and multiple sclerosis (MS), a neurological disease that typically first strikes people in their 20s and 30s, and women more

Microbes: The Trillions of Creatures Governing Your Health

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Of all the cases Barbara Warner has faced as a pediatrician specializing in newborns, the one that sticks hardest in her mind involved a couple who had been trying for years to have children. Finally, in 1997, the woman was pregnant. She was in her mid-40s. “This was her last chance,” says Warner. Then, too soon, she gave birth to twins. The first child died at two weeks of respiratory failure, at the time the most common killer of preterm babies. A week later—it happened to be Thanksgiving Day—Warner folded down the blanket on the surviving twin, and even now she draws in her breath at the memory. The baby’s belly was reddened, shining and so swollen “

What Lies Ahead for 3-D Printing?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Wandering the brightly lit halls of the 3D Systems’ plant in Rock Hill, South Carolina, I gaze upon objects strange and wondrous. A fully functioning guitar made of nylon. A phalanx of mandibles studded with atrocious-looking teeth. The skeleton of a whale. A five-color, full-scale prototype of a high-heeled shoe. Toy robots. And what appears to be the face of a human fetus. “That was made from an ultrasound image,” Cathy Lewis, the company’s chief marketing officer, tells me, shrugging. This collection of objects shares one feature: All were “printed” by machines that, following instructions from digital files, join together layer upon layer of materia

Neuroscience Explores Why Humans Feel Empathy for Robots

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 02:04:13 GMT

Brain scans show that the neurological patterns linked with pangs of empathy for humans also occur when we see a robot like WALL-E treated harshly. Image via Flickr user Rob Boudon If, while watching WALL-E, your heart broke just a little bit when you saw the title character desperately travel across outer space in search of true love, it doesn’t mean you’re crazy. Sure, WALL-E is a robot. But its cute, anthropomorphized look and all too human desire to end its loneliness made us subconsciously forget that it is not human. The ability to forget that key point wasn’t just a matter of clever storytelling. New research shows that, at least in a small sample of people te

Before and After: America’s Environmental History

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:21:37 GMT

A difference of nearly four decades: at top, a ski area in Aspen, Colorado last year, captured by Ron Hoffman; at bottom, the same location in 1974, shot by Dustin Wesley. Credit: US EPA In 1971, about 70 photographers, commissioned by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, set out to document the American landscape on just 40 rolls of film each. They trudged through coal mines and landfills, traversed deserts and farms and discovered big cities’ small corridors. The end result was DOCUMERICA, a collection of more than 15,000 shots capturing the country’s environmental problems—from water and air pollution to industrial health hazards—over six years. Decades lat

10 Things We’ve Learned About the Earth Since Last Earth Day

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:09:20 GMT

Image via NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring Last year, to celebrate the 42nd Earth Day, we took a look at 10 of the most surprising, disheartening, and exciting things we’d learned about our home planet in the previous year—a list that included discoveries about the role pesticides play in bee colony collapses, the various environmental stresses faced by the world’s oceans and the millions of unknown species are still out in the environment, waiting to be found. This year, in time for Earth Day on Monday, we’ve done it again, putting together another list of 10 notable discoveries made by scientists since Earth Day 2012—a list that ranges from specific top

Genetically Modified E. Coli Bacteria Can Now Synthesize Diesel Fuel

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:01:07 GMT

By combining genes from different bacteria species, scientists created E. coli that can produce diesel fuel from fat. Image via Marian Littlejohn/PNAS Over the past few decades, researchers have developed biofuels derived from an remarkable variety of organisms—soybeans, corn, algae, rice and even fungi. Whether synthesized into ethanol or biodiesel, though, all of these fuels suffer from the same limitation: They have to be refined and blended with heavy amounts of conventional, petroleum-based fuels to run in existing engines. Though this is far from the only current problem with biofuels, a new approach by researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK appears to solve at leas

Which Primate Is the Most Likely Source of the Next Pandemic?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:01:09 GMT

This chimp may look innocent, but he may harbor any of dozens of diseases that infect humans. Photo by AfrikaForce Anyone who has read a Richard Preston book, such as The Hot Zone or Panic in Level 4, knows the danger of tampering with wildlife. The story usually goes something like this: Intrepid explorers venture into a dark, bat infested cave in the heart of East Africa, only to encounter something unseen and living, which takes up residence in their bodies. Unknowingly infected, the happy travelers jump on a plane back to Europe or the States, spreading their deadly pathogen willy-nilly to every human they encounter upon the way. Those people, in turn, bring the novel virus or bact

PHOTOS: The Mind-Blowing, Floating, Unmanned Scientific Laboratory

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Wave Gliders are about to make scientific exploration a lot cheaper and safer

Intriguing Science Art From the University of Wisconsin

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 06:41:12 GMT

ZnO Fall Flowers. Image by Audrey Forticaux, a graduate student in the Chemistry Department. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.” —Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician (1854-1912) Earlier this month, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced the winners of its 2013 Cool Science Image contest. From an MRI of a monkey’s brain to the larva of a tropical caterpillar, a micrograph of the nerves in a zebrafish’s tail

Do Teachers Need Their Own “Bar Exam”?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:56:42 GMT

Do teachers need to train more like doctors? Photo courtesy of Flickr user WoodleyWonderworks Question: What’s needed to raise the quality of school teachers in America? Answer: A bar exam? So say the head of the country’s most powerful teachers’ union, the governor of New York and the U.S. secretary of education, among others. Their contention is that the only way teachers can truly elevate their profession–and with it the level of public education–is if they follow the lead of doctors, lawyers and engineers and are required to pass a test to prove mastery of their subject matter and how to teach it. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federat

Hurricane Sandy Generated Seismic Shaking As Far Away As Seattle

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:01:07 GMT

New research finds that the superstorm’s massive ocean waves produced seismic activity as far away as Seattle. Image via NASA If you weren’t on the East Coast during Hurricane Sandy, you likely experienced the disaster through electronic means: TV, radio, the internet or phone calls. As people across the country tracked the storm by listening to information broadcast through electromagnetic waves, a different kind of wave, produced by the storm itself, was traveling beneath their feet. Keith Koper and Oner Sufri, a pair of geologists at the University of Utah, recently determined that the crashing of massive waves against Long Island, New York and New Jersey—as well as wav

DNA Sequencing Reveals that Coelacanths Weren’t the Missing Link Between Sea and Land

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:01:58 GMT

The rare coealacanth’s genome is slowly evolving—and contrary to prior speculation, it probably isn’t the common ancestor of all land animals. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Amelia Guo On December 23, 1938, South African Hendrick Goosen, the captain of the fishing trawler Nerine, found an unusual fish in his net after a day of fishing in the Indian Ocean off of East London. He showed the creature to local museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who rinsed off a layer of slime and described it as “the most beautiful fish I had ever seen…five foot long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It

The Colorado: America’s Most Endangered River

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 03:21:38 GMT

Drought and an increased demand for water have stressed the Colorado River, which flows nearly 1,500 miles through seven states and Mexico. Photo by Flickr user Alex E. Proimos When Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques, recently went to Mexico to explore the southern terminus of the Colorado River, she found mud, sand and dust where water once raged. The expedition was videotaped for a short film (viewable below) produced in conjunction with Cousteau’s nonprofit, Blue Legacy, which raises awareness about water issues. The video was called Death of a River: The Colorado River Delta. That title, it turns out, is an apt one: Today, the conservation organization American Riv

An Artist Creates Artificial Fog in San Francisco

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:32:37 GMT

An artist’s rendering of Fog Bridge at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Image courtesy of the Exploratorium. Artist Fujiko Nakaya believes in the transformative power of fog. The first time she realized that her fog sculptures could change a person’s memory was in 1976 during the run of Earth Talk, a fog sculpture made for the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. After seeing her sculpture, an electrician told her how he had taken his family to see the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The mountain was fogged in at first and he couldn’t see it, but the fog cleared and the view of the mountain was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “The instant he saw the

Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 03:46:44 GMT

A new study shows that fathers and mothers are equally skilled at picking out their infant’s unique cry—if they spend the same amount of their time parenting. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Voiceboks After a baby orangutan is born, it’ll spend the first two years of its life completely dependent on its mother—maintaining direct physical contact with her for at least the first four months—and breastfeeding for up to five years in total. During that time, it will likely never meet its father. Polar bears are also born helpless, surviving on their mothers’ milk through the harsh Arctic winter, but polar bear fathers provide no parenting, and have even been known to eat thei

How to Count to 100,000 STEM Teachers in 10 Years

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

On January 25, 2011, President Obama set a clear goal in his State of the Union Address regarding STEM education. “Over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms,” he said, “we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.” One group was already in the process of delivering on the president’s call to action. By June of that year, representatives from 28 organizations—including corporations, foundations, museums, school districts, universities and nonprofits—took to the stage at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Chicago. There, the group of partners offici

Five Surprising Facts About the Common Cold

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:30:59 GMT

More than 1 billion cases of the common cold occur in the United States each year. Credit: Flickr user mcfarlandomo This year, prolonged extreme temperatures and seemingly never-ending snowstorms in the United States forced many inside, seeking shelter from what felt like an unusually long winter. This meant some of us were stuck in bed for a day or two clutching a box of Kleenex and downing cough syrup. That’s because viruses that cause the common cold love enclosed spaces with lots of people—the family room, the office, the gym. And though spring has arrived, cold-causing microbes haven’t slowed down. More than 200 viruses can trigger a runny nose, sore throat, sneezing and coughing

How Museums Are Fostering the Workforce of the Future

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

More than 20 years ago, researchers began the 13-year-long process of working with hundreds of sequencing machines to map the entire human genome. Today, the same amount of data can be produced in a matter of a few days to a few weeks, and at a fraction of the cost. “Smart people like you guys will work on it,” says Maggie Halloran, a sequencing technician, standing before a group of wide-eyed high school freshmen at the National Museum of Natural History’s brand-new Laboratories of Analytical Biology (LAB), a molecular biotechnology hub. The students are 15 of the 100 that attend a selective science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) magnet program at Sout

Where Are the Greenest Schools in the Country?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The definition of being eco-conscious is so much more than having solar panels on a roof

Merely a Taste of Beer Can Trigger a Rush of Chemical Pleasure in the Brain

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 04:01:00 GMT

New research shows just a sip of beer can cause a rush of pleasure due to the potent neurotransmitter dopamine. Image via Flickr user Mr. T in DC If you take just a sip of beer, and moments later—before you’ve had close to enough alcohol to get intoxicated, perhaps even before the beer has hit your stomach—feel a distinctly pleasurable sensation, it might not be strictly due to subtle aromas that result from the beverage’s blend of malt, hops and yeast. The cause of your pleasure might be due to tangible changes in your brain chemistry—specifically, a surge in levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Scientists have long known that part of the reason alc

Should We Fall Out of Love with Robot Surgery?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:35:41 GMT

A da Vinci robot zeroes in. Photo courtesy of Intuitive Surgical Last fall, shoppers outside a Macy’s store in Boston were given a chance to test drive a robot. They were invited, compliments of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to sit at a console and move the machine’s arm the same way surgeons would in an operating room. And why not? What says cutting-edge medicine more than robotic surgery? Who wouldn’t be impressed with a hospital where robot arms, with all their precision, replace surgeons’ hands? The surgeons, of course, control the robots on computers where everything is magnified in 3D, but the actual cutting is done by machines. And that means smaller in

Why Humidity Makes Your Hair Curl

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:36:00 GMT

Humid air causes hydrogen bonds to form between the proteins in your hair, triggering curls and frizz. Image via Flickr user Simon Gotz If you have long hair, you probably don’t need to look up a weather report to get an idea of how much humidity’s in the air: You can simply grab a fistful of hair and see how it feels. Human hair is extremely sensitive to humidity—so much that some hygrometers (devices that indicate humidity) use a hair as the measuring mechanism, because it changes in length based on the amount of moisture in the air. Straight hair goes wavy. If you have curly hair, humidity turns it frizzy or even curlier. Taming the frizz has become a mega indust

Revealed: The Part of Our Brains That Makes Us Like New Music

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 06:01:31 GMT

A reward center known as the nucleus accumbens (shown in dark blue) is most closely associated to the pleasure we get from listening to new music. Image via Peter Finnie and Ben Beheshti The link between music and pleasure runs deep. A desire to make and listen to music is found in virtually every culture around the world, and dates back at least 43,000 years, when a Cro-Magnon in Europe pierced holes into a bear bone, creating a flute that has become the world’s oldest surviving musical instrument. There are good reasons music is so universal: Experiments have shown that our brains’ reaction to hearing favorite music most closely resembles what happens after we take psycho

Where Have the Trees of Guam Gone?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 03:32:05 GMT

Scientists believe the absence of seed-dispersing birds is thinning the forests on the island of Guam. Photo by Isaac Chellman Visitors to Guam’s forests find them quiet–eerily so: No chirping of birds can be heard overhead. But slithering in the shadows on the ground are snakes, each some six feet long. Brown tree snakes made their debut on Guam, the southernmost island in the Mariana Archipelago, when islanders were rebuilding after World War II. Most likely, they were stowaways in lumber shipments heading north through the Pacific Ocean from New Guinea. They quickly began feasting on the birds and small lizards they discovered in Guam’s dense forests, and–free to s

Researchers Turn Brains Transparent By Sucking Out the Fat

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:01:00 GMT

A new technique renders a mouse brain (opaque, at left) entirely transparent (at right) for easier imaging. Image by Kwanghun Chung and Karl Deisseroth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Stanford University The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the known universe. Packed into just 3 pounds of flesh (on average) is an assembly of roughly 86 billion interconnected neurons, forming countless intricate networks that make up the essence of your personality. A preserved brain on an examination table, though, conveys none of this complexity: It looks, more or less, like a pile of grey meat, because we can’t see through the outer cells’ membranes to see the individu

Bean Leaves Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite by Using Tiny, Impaling Spikes

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:01:00 GMT

This adult male bedbug wants to suck your blood. Photo: Armed Forces Pest Management Board For thousands of years, humans have shared their beds with blood-sucking parasites. The ancient Greeks complained of bedbugs, as did the Romans. When the lights go off for those suffering from this parasitic infestation today, from under the mattress or behind the bedboard creeps up to 150,000 of the rice grain-sized insects (though average infestations are around 100 insects). While bedbugs are one of the few parasites that live closely with humans yet do not transmit a serious disease, they do cause nasty red rashes in some of their victims, not to mention the psychological terror of knowing t

How to Travel to Outer Space Without Spending Millions of Dollars

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 05:56:36 GMT

Who’s in the suit? Increasingly, it’s our digital selves. Photo from NASA/STS-104 Ever since the collective “YOU” became Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006, campaigns to get our attention have increasingly sought out our digital selves. You can name a Budweiser Clydesdale. You can pick Lays’ new potato chip flavor. And it’s not just retail that wants your online opinions: You can vote for who will win photography contests. You can play the futures market on who will win elected offices. And with enough signatures, you can get the White House to read your petitions. Many science endeavors rely on such crowdsourcing. With a simple app, y

What’s in Century-Old ‘Snake Oil’ Medicines? Mercury and Lead

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 01:52:17 GMT

A chemical analysis of early 1900s medicines like Hollister’s Golden Nugget Tablets revealed vitamins and calcium, but also toxic compounds like mercury and lead. Image via Mark Benvenuto If you suffered from a medical ailment in the year 1900, your treatment options were varied: You could take everything from Dr. Tutt’s Liver Pills to Hollister’s Golden Nugget Tablets, Dr. Sawen’s Magic Nerving Pills or Dr. Comfort’s Candy-Covered Cathartic Compound. Of course, their titles notwithstanding, the creators of these pills weren’t always doctors, and the medicines certainly hadn’t gone through the controlled randomized trials we have today to ensu

New Web Tool Helps Avoid Flooding by Finding the Best Spots to Build Wetlands

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:12:50 GMT

Wetlands, such as this marsh above, buffer communities against flooding. Photo by Flickr user daryl_mitchell In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy last fall, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joked to President Barack Obama that New York “has a 100-year flood every two years now.” On the heels of flooding from 2011′s Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, it certainly seemed that way. Given that climate change has sparked multiple major storms and raised sea levels, and that urban and agricultural development have impeded our natural flood-management systems, chronic flooding could be here to stay. Wetlands, which include swamps, lagoons, marshes and mangroves, help mit

Every Day a Different Dish: Klari Reis’ Petri Paintings

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:21:38 GMT

April 4, 2013: Taylor Swift, by Klari Reis. For all 94 days of 2013 thus far, Klari Reis has kept to her resolution. The San Francisco-based artist has posted a new petri dish painting—eye candy for any sci-art lover—to her blog, The Daily Dish. Reis’ circular art pieces are explosions of color. The yellows, pinks, purples, greens, oranges, reds and blues in the paintings take on a smattering of different shapes, including amorphous blobs, radiating fireworks and wavy veins that resemble, quite intentionally on Reis’ part, what a scientist might see when gazing through a microscope. The artist gives her creations playful names, little quips, really, that spring to mind whe

Do Wind Turbines Need a Rethink?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:05:37 GMT

Imagine them without the blades. Photo courtesy of Flickr user “Caveman Chuck” Coker Bet you didn’t know that last year a record amount of wind power was installed around the planet. The U.S. set a record, too, and, once again, became the world leader in adding new wind power, pushing China into second place for the year. You’re not alone in being clueless about this. So was I. After all, this is a subject that gets about as much attention as 17-year-cicadas in a off year. What generally passes for energy coverage in the U.S. these days is the relentless cycle of gas-prices-up, gas-prices-down stories and the occasional foray into the natural-gas-fracking-is-a

Video: Researchers Produce Human Tissue-Like Material Using 3D Printing

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:01:17 GMT

What can’t a 3D printer build? The number of possible answers to this question has shrunk exponentially in recent years, as the high-tech machines continue to churn out solid object after object from computer designs. The last few months alone saw countless new products and prototypes spanning an array of industries, from football cleats and pens to steel rocket parts and guns. Last month, the technology helped replace 75 percent of a person’s damaged skull, and this week it restored a man’s face after he lost half of it to cancer four years ago. Today, a new study suggests 3D-printed material could one day mimic the behavior of cells in human tissue. Graduate student Gabriel Villar a

Scientists Figure Out What You See While You’re Dreaming

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 06:01:00 GMT

A learning algorithm, coupled with MRI readings, was able to predict the images seen by dreamers with a 60 percent accuracy. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Mark Sebastian In today’s science-so-weird-it-absolutely-must-be-science-fiction contest, we have a clear winner: a new study in which a team of scientists use an MRI machine, a computer model and thousands of images from the internet to figure out what people see as they dream. Unbelievable as it sounds, researchers from Kyoto, Japan, say that they’ve built something of a dream-reading machine, which learned enough about the neurological patterns of three research participants to predict their sleeptime visualizations wi

What Should Be Done With Yachak, the Cattle-Killing Bear of the Andes

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 05:11:03 GMT

On November 12, 2009, in the remote northern highlands of Ecuador not far south of Colombia, a pair of grazing bulls lost their footing on a steep, muddy slope. They slipped down the sheer face of a deep Andean ravine and landed dead in the small stream gully below. Some days later, a large spectacled bear picked up the smell of ripe flesh. The animal, a male, followed the scent trail down from its high cloud forest habitat and spent several days feasting on the carcasses—treasure troves of protein and fat for an animal that lives mostly on vegetables, fruits and tubers. The event, seemingly just another day in the high Andes, where bears and cattle have crossed paths for centurie

Earthworms: A Nightmare for America’s Orchids?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 06:53:00 GMT

Worms are great for your garden, but a recent study shows that non-native species may be wreaking havoc on orchids in forests along the east coast. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Think twice before you order earthworms to improve the soil of your garden. A group of scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences recently published a study that shows the damage non-native earthworms, who creep their way into forests thanks to human activities like fishing and gardening, may cause to one of the world’s favorite flowers, the orchid. Goodyera pubes

19th Century Shark Tooth Weapons Reveal A Reef’s Missing Shark Species

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:01:00 GMT

Lashed to a spear made in the Gilbert Islands, researchers found a tooth from a dusky shark, a species previously unknown in the area. Image via PLOS ONE/Drew et. al. For decades, a total of 124 swords, tridents and spears taken from the Pacific Ocean’s Gilbert Islands in the mid-1800s sat untouched in vaults in Chicago’s Field Museum. The weapons—each made up of dozens of individual shark teeth that islanders lashed to a wooden core with coconut fibers—were primarily considered artifacts of anthropological value. Then, Joshua Drew, a marine conservation biologist at the museum, had an unusual idea: that the shark teeth lining the serrated blades could also se

What Makes Rain Smell So Good?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:01:00 GMT

A mixture of plant oils, bacterial spores and ozone is responsible for the powerful scent of fresh rain. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Juni Step outside after the first storm after a dry spell and it invariably hits you: the sweet, fresh, powerfully evocative smell of fresh rain. If you’ve ever noticed this mysterious scent and wondered what’s responsible for it, you’re not alone. Back in 1964, a pair of Australian scientists (Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas) began the scientific study of rain’s aroma in earnest with an article in Nature titled “Nature of Agrillaceous Odor.” In it, they coined the term petrichor to help explain the phenomenon, comb

Michael Benson’s Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 01:35:38 GMT

Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io, is extremely volcanic. “If you look closely on the upper left and upper right horizon, you can see eruptions in the process of happening,” says Benson. “We know that at least 400 volcanos are continuously blasting magma into space from Io.” Mosaic composite photograph. Galileo, July 3, 1999. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures. At the outset of both his new book, Planetfall, and his exhibition of the same title now at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, photographer Michael Benson defines the word “planetfall.” Pla

10 New Things We Know About Food and Diets

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:55:37 GMT

New research says olive oil is one healthy fat. Courtesy of Flickr user renedepaula Usually, when we talk about innovation, it has to do with some whizzy new invention, like a robot ant colony, or a novel approach to solving a problem, say a wind turbine that doesn’t wipe out bats and birds. Rarely does it have to do with something as ancient, or prosaic, as olive oil. Sometimes, though, research tells us something new about something old and it forces us to view it with fresh appreciation. So it is with olive oil. In this case, it’s two studies. The first, done by the German Research Center for Food Chemistry, focused on whether it’s possible to lower the fat co

Why Geckos Don’t Slip Off Wet Jungle Leaves or Hotel Ceilings

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:01:47 GMT

A handsome tokay gecko. Photo: Ethan Knapp and Alyssa Stark Anyone who lives in or has visited a tropical country is likely familiar with the chipper chirping of the gecko. These friendly little lizards inhabit homes and jungles stretching from Indonesia to Tanzania to the Dominican Republic. They emerge after sunset, taking advantage of their night vision eyesight—which is 350 times more powerful than a human’s—and are welcome guests in homes and hotels since they gobble up mosquitoes and other insect pests. In addition to the locals, scientists also love these colorful lizards. Geckos possess the unique ability among lizards to run up flat walls and scamper across ceilings, ev

The Greening of the Arctic is Underway

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 05:01:45 GMT

As the Arctic warms, more of it will be covered by shrubs (like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, above) and even by forest. Image via ANWR You probably think of the Arctic as a cold, frozen tundra—home to lichen, polar bears and scattered herds of reindeer. In many places, this view would be accurate, but in a few relatively southern areas in Canada, Alaska and Russia, warming temperatures over the past few decades have allowed new types of plants, such as shrubs, to take root. And by 2050—if current warming trends continue—we’ll see a dramatically different ecosystem across the Arctic, starting with something that’s largely unknown in the area currently: trees. Accord

Marshmallows: The Perfect Media for Demonstrating Principles of Physics

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 07:30:16 GMT

The gooey confections can be used to measure the speed of light and demonstrate relationships between the volume of a gas and its pressure and temperature. Photo by Flickr user John-Morgan If the Easter Bunny comes to your house this weekend, you may find yourself with a plethora of marshmallows and Peeps. What to do with them all? Aside from simply eating them, cooking with them, or unleashing your artistic side by making dioramas, consider using them….for science! Marshmallows, it turns out, are must-have pieces of equipment for at-home science experiments. Sure, you can use them test your kids’ self control through the the field of psychology’s notorious marshmall

What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 06:00:58 GMT

San Francisco 37° 48′ 30″ N 2010-10-9 Lst 20:58. © Thierry Cohen. Last week in Collage, I interviewed Caleb Cain Marcus, a New York City-based photographer who spent the last two years documenting glaciers around the world. When he composed his photographs of glaciers in Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Alaska, Marcus obscured the actual horizon. It was an experiment, he explained, to see how it affected his viewers’ sense of scale. The idea was born out of the Colorado native’s own experience with city living. “Living in New York City, unless you live very high up, you never see the horizon, which is really kind of odd,” said Marcus. “I’

Microbes Buried Deep in Ocean Crust May Form World’s Largest Ecosystem

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:17:29 GMT

Beneath the seafloor, there is an ecosystem of microbes living in the oceanic crust, independent of sunlight. Here, the seafloor of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. NSF/USAP photo by Steve Clabuesch If you were to hit the seafloor and continue to travel down, you’d run into an ecosystem unlike any other on earth. Beneath several hundred meters of seafloor sediment is the Earth’s crust: thick layers of lava rock running with cracks that cover around 70% of the planet’s surface. Seawater flows through the cracks, and this system of rock-bound rivulets is enormous: it’s the largest aquifer on earth, containing 4% of global ocean volume, says Mark Lever, an ecologist who studies anaerobic (no-

Free Online Courses Mean College Will Never Be the Same

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 02:12:28 GMT

Will going to class become quaint? Photo courtesy of Coursera. Depending on who you’re listening to, Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, are either the greatest boon to the spread of knowledge since Gutenberg cranked his first press or the biggest threat to learning on campus since the coming of cheap beer. No question that they are the most disruptive innovation to come out of universities in a very long time, although it’s still too soon to say if that’s “good” disruptive or bad. A quick refresher: Though free online courses, notably through Khan Academy, were already starting to build an audience, the first MOOC by a university professor popped up

Greenland’s Glaciers Are Hemorrhaging Ice, Best Seen By Photos from Space

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:30:00 GMT

An island of ice breaking away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier (in the center of the photo) in the summer of 2010. By NASA On the morning of July 16, 2010, a hunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan cracked away from the tongue of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier and drifted to sea as the largest iceberg since 1962. Just two years later, another massive section of ice calved from the same glacier. Icebergs like these don’t stay put in the Arctic–they get picked up by currents and ushered to warmer climates, melting along the way. According to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Greenland’s melting glaciers and ice caps

Sugar Cube-Sized Robotic Ants Mimic Real Foraging Behavior

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:01:10 GMT

Researchers used miniature robots to mimic how real ants maneuver networks of their own. Credit: Simon Garnier, et al For ants, the pheromone-laden foraging trails they leave behind are like lifelines: they direct the workers toward food hubs discovered earlier and help guide them home back to their nest. These networks of trails can stretch for hundreds of feet, quite the achievement considering many worker ants are less than half an inch in length. One type of harvester ant can lay down a set of trails (PDF) that stretch 82 feet from the entrance of its nest. The trails of a wood ant, an insect measuring just five millimeters (that’s one-fifth of an inch), reach 656 feet, each one b

Research Shows That True Fame Lasts Longer Than 15 Minutes

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 03:16:00 GMT

Natalie Portman was among the most often-mentioned names of the 2000s, according to a new study, reflecting the fact that true celebrity lasts longer than 15 minutes. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Real TV Films In 1968, Andy Warhol—already famous in his own right—further added to his celebrity by creating a lasting cliché: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Prescient as Warhol might have been, it seems we haven’t reached that future quite yet, at least according to science. A new study, published today in the American Sociological Review, finds that true fame lasts a good deal longer than 15 minutes. In an analysis of the

A Survey of the 161 Bacterial Families That Live on Your Fruits and Veggies

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:01:34 GMT

The first-ever sequencing of the produce microbiome reveals that grapes, peaches and sprouts host the largest diversity of harmless bacteria. Image via Wikimedia Commons In recent years, research has upended one of the most intuitive ideas of modern science: that bacteria simply make us sick. Scientists have discovered that many types of bacteria living in and on the human body play a crucial role in its healthy functioning—and that these colonies are remarkably populous, with an estimated ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones in the average person. Similarly, most research into the microorganisms living on fresh produce has focused on a few species of bacteria that cause di

Landslide “Quakes” Give Clues to the Location and Size of Debris Flows

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:32:14 GMT

Landslides can be both sudden and devastating to people living in the shadows of mountains. This one, which slid in 2006 in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte, killed more than 1000 people. Image via U.S. Marine Corps/Raymond D. Petersen III Imagine a 100-million-ton mass of rock, soil, mud and trees sliding off a mountain 30 miles from a major city, and no one knowing that it happened until days later. Such was the case after Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan in 2009, dumping around 100 inches of rain in the southern regions of the island over the course of 24 hours. Known as the Xiaolin landslide, named for the village it hit and obliterated, the thick carpet of debris it left behin

The Otherworldly Calm of Wolfgang Laib’s Glowing Beeswax Room

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 03:04:08 GMT

Wolfgang Laib, Wax Room. (Wohin bist Du gegangen-wohin gehst Du?/Where have you gone-where are you going?), 2013. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Photo by Lee Stalsworth. When I step into the newly installed Laib Wax Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the floral smell of beeswax wafts through my senses. Psychologists say that scents can quickly trigger memories, and this one transports me back to my childhood: The fragrance of the amber beeswax coating the walls instantly reminds me of the crenellated sheets of beeswax, dyed pink and purple, that came in a candle making kit I had as a kid. I remember rolling the sheets into long tapers for Advent. The warm

Warning: Living Alone May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:01:00 GMT

Being socially isolated increases your chance of death, but not simply because you’re feeling lonely. Image via Flickr user eflon One of the most unprecedented trends of modern society is the number of people who choose to live alone. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg observed in his 2012 book Going Solo, living alone was virtually unheard of in most world cultures throughout history prior to the 20th century, but an estimated 32.7 million people now live alone in the United States, accounting for about 28 percent of the country’s households today, compared with 17 percent in 1970. The medical and mental effects of this shift are complex. As Klinenberg notes, many people who

Sea Monkeys, Ferns and Frozen Frogs: Nature’s Very Own Resurrecting Organisms

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 03:39:14 GMT

Tadpole shrimp eggs can remain dormant for years, then burst into life when elusive desert rains arrive. Photo by Flickr user theloushe As Easter draws near, we begin to notice signs of nature’s very own annual resurrection event. Warming weather begins “breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” as T.S. Elliot noted, and “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Where a black and white wintery landscape just stood, now technicolor crocus buds peak through the earth and green shoots brighten up the azalea bushes. Aside from this grand show of rebirth, however, nature offers several cases of even more overtly stunning resurrections. From frozen animals jumping b

How Digital Devices Change the Rules of Etiquette

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:27:57 GMT

Smartphones are changing our notion of acceptable behavior. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jennifer Conley I committed my first texting heresy a few years ago when my son was away at college. I had asked him about a class he was taking and had needed three, maybe four sentences to express myself. He responded with bemusement. Or maybe it was disgust. Who could tell? But his message was clear: If I continued to be so lame as to send texts longer than two sentences–using complete words, no less–he would have little choice but to stop answering. I was reminded of this less-than-tender father-son moment recently by a post by Nick Bilton for The New York Times’ Bits bl

Brown Polar Bears, Beluga-Narwhals and Other Hybrids Brought to You by Climate Change

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:43:41 GMT

Polar bear-brown bear hybrids like this pair at Germany’s Osnabrück Zoo are becoming more common as melting sea ice forces the two species to cross paths. Photo by Corradox/Wikimedia Commons Scientists and science writers have created catchy monikers for hybrid species, much the way tabloid writers merge the names of celebrity couples (Kimye, Brangelina, anyone?). Lions and tigers make ligers. Narwhals meet beluga whales in the form of narlugas. And pizzlies and grolar bears are a cross between polar bears and grizzlies. In coming years, their creativity may get maxed out to meet an expected spike in the number of hybrids. A driving force? Climate change. A new study published

Video: This Lizard-Inspired Robot Can Scamper Across Sand

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:01:15 GMT

The new robot runs across an uneven surface in a way modeled off a zebra-tailed lizard. Image courtesy of Chen Li, Tingnan Zhang, Daniel Goldman Designing a robot that can easily move across loose terrain—say, a rover meant to traverse the surface of Mars—poses a unique engineering challenge: Wheels commonly sink into what engineers call “flowable ground” (mixtures of sand, soil, mud and grass). Given the many biologically-inspired innovations in robotics, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech had an idea—to base a design on desert creatures such as zebra-tailed lizards that are able to scramble across a loose, sandy surface without slowing down. Their efforts allowed them to

Caleb Cain Marcus’ Photos of Glaciers on a Disappearing Horizon

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:35:24 GMT

Perito Moreno, Plate I, 2010. Patagonia. © Caleb Cain Marcus. What happens when you lose your grip on the horizon? How much does it warp your sense of scale? One trek on the 97-square-mile Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia and Caleb Cain Marcus was hooked by these questions of perspective. With that experience, in January 2010, the New York City-based photographer launched a two-year odyssey, documenting, in his own minimalist style, glaciers all around the world—in Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand and Norway. Marcus shares 3o photographs taken in his travels in his latest book, A Portrait of Ice. The images—three of which were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—are R

After 17 Years, the Northeast Is About to Be Blanketed by a Swarm of Cicadas

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 03:54:00 GMT

This cicada is part of Brood XIX, a 13-year recurrent swarm from the southern US. Photo: dra415 It’s been 17 years since the cicadas of Brood II swarmed the northeastern United States. A mass of winged creatures, red eyes glowing, the cicadas “are expected to emerge and overwhelm a large swath of land from Virginia to Connecticut — climbing up trees, flying in swarms and blanketing grassy areas so they crunch underfoot,” says WNYC. Across the United States, different broods of cicadas emerge after long withdrawls underground, some on 13-year cycles, some, like Brood II, on 17-year cycles. Cicadas live in the ground, near trees. They feed off the roots of trees.

Video: This Mini 3D Display Could Show up on Next Generation Smartphones

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 06:01:00 GMT

The new technology can be packed into a tiny piece of glass, requires no glasses and can project images and video in full color. Image via Nature/Fattal et. al. Most of the research that goes into producing cutting-edge commercial technology goes on in corporate R&D departments, away from the public eye. Every so often, though, some of that work gets published in a scientific journal, giving us a sneak preview of the capabilities we might see in our smart phones and devices in the years to come. That’s certainly the case with a study in week’s issue of Nature, in which researchers from Hewlett-Packard detail their new invention: A mini 3D display that can be installed

UPDATED: Has the Voyager 1 Probe Finally Left the Solar System?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 05:37:05 GMT

New data from the Voyager 1 probe, more than 11 billion miles away from the sun, indicate that it has entered interstellar space after 35 years of travel. Image via NASA/JPL Update: Since the press release announcing Voyager 1′s exiting the solar system, NASA has clarified that the final indicator of this event—a change in the direction of the magnetic field surrounding the craft—has still not been observed. As was first observed in December 2012, Voyager 1 is in a new outermost region of the solar system called “the magnetic highway,” not true interstellar space. This post has been edited to reflect the clarification. Since the dawn of the Space Age, our manned miss

Untangling the Mysterious Genetic Tentacles of the Giant Squid

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:30:50 GMT

A model of a giant squid versus sperm whale. Photo taken at the American Museum of Natural History by Mike Goren from New York For centuries, monsters of the deep sea captivated the imagination of the public and terrified explorers–none more so than the many-tentacled kraken. In 13th century Icelandic sagas, the Vikings wrote of a terrifying monster that “swallows both men and ships and whales and everything that it can reach.” Eighteenth century accounts from Europe describe arms emerging from the ocean that could pull down the mightiest ships, attached to bodies the size of floating islands. Today, we’re fairly confident that a tentacled beast will not emerge

B.F. Skinner: The Man Who Taught Pigeons to Play Ping-Pong and Rats to Pull Levers

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 03:00:27 GMT

Psychologist B.F. Skinner taught these pigeons to play ping-pong in 1950. Photo via Psychology Pictures B.F Skinner, a leading 20th century psychologist who hypothesized that behavior was caused only by external factors, not by thoughts or emotions, was a controversial figure in a field that tends to attract controversial figures. In a realm of science that has given us Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jean Piaget, Skinner stands out by sheer quirkiness. After all, he is the scientist who trained rats to pull levers and push buttons and taught pigeons to read and play ping-pong. Besides Freud, Skinner is arguably the most famous psychologist of the 20th century. Today, his work is basic s

The Unintended (and Deadly) Consequences of Living in the Industrialized World

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

After eight hours in an overheated Soviet-era sleeper car, we pull into the Petrozavodsk train station just after 1 a.m. The streets are silent, the night air chilly. Our taxi shudders and swerves along roads pitted with axle-gulping potholes. Identical concrete apartment blocks built in the 1960s flash by in a blur. Winter temperatures here, some 250 miles northeast of St. Petersburg, sometimes plunge to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. A traffic circle in the middle of town boasts what locals claim is Russia’s only statue of Lenin holding a fur hat. I’m traveling with Mikael Knip, a short, energetic Finnish physician and University of Helsinki researcher with a perpetual smil

Scientists Are Trying to Create a Temperature Below Absolute Zero

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

When a cold snap hits and the temperature drops, there’s nothing to stop it from falling below zero, whether Celsius or Fahrenheit. Either zero is just a mark on a thermometer. But drive a temperature lower and lower, beyond the coldest realms in the Arctic and past those in the most distant reaches of outer space, and eventually you hit an ultimate limit: absolute zero. It’s a barrier enforced by the laws of physics below which temperatures supposedly cannot possibly go. At minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 273.15 Celsius), all the heat is gone. Atomic and molecular motion ceases. Trying to create a temperature below absolute zero would be like looking for a location

When an Iceberg Melts, Who Owns the Riches Beneath the Ocean?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Global warming might be an environmental catastrophe, but countries eyeing the North Pole also see it as an opportunity. “We’ve never had a situation where an ocean has appeared overnight,” says Rob Huebert, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, who studies Arctic security issues. “The ice kept everybody out, and now all of a sudden the ice is going to be gone. So what happens?” Maybe a 21st-century version of the Great Game, which Russia and Britain played among the mountains and deserts of Central Asia in the 19th century. The prize then was the riches of India; today, it’s new shipping routes and untapped natural resources, including a

How Far Can Voyager I Go?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

To casual stargazers, space seems to have no boundaries. Yet fans of NASA’s farthest-flung spacecraft can’t stop talking about how the probe is on the verge of piercing a border surrounding the planets and plunging into the realm beyond. Since Voyager 1 blasted off in 1977, it has skirted past the kaleidoscopic clouds of Jupiter and the icy rings of Saturn. The spacecraft is now 124 times farther from the Sun than we are, and in the time it takes you to read this paragraph will venture outward 100 miles more. Its most recent observations raise questions about our solar system’s true reach. Although we often consider Pluto the end of the solar system, Voyager 1 is mor

Haiku Highlight the Existential Mysteries of Planetary Science

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:54:20 GMT

Artist’s rendition of a ethane lake on Titan. Image via NASA/Karl Kofoed Science conferences are hotbeds for jargon. In fields where dissertation titles tend to have a string of polysyllabic words, followed by the requisite colon, followed by another string of polysyllabic words; where abstracts of scholarly articles are packed with the names of chemical compounds, isotope ratios and undefined program acronyms; where images are multivariate graphs of curves traced through dots crisscrossed with error bars, the instances where an outside person can read a summary of science written for scientists by scientists are naturally rare. And why not go whole hog with the language of your

Prehistoric Human Skull Shows Signs of Inbreeding

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:30:00 GMT

The hole in the top of this 100,000-year-old skull from China, researchers say, reflects genetic mutations that result from inbreeding. Image via PLOS ONE/Wu et. al. In 2010, the surprising discovery that Neanderthals likely crossbred with our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago generated headlines around the world. Now, we have a new finding about the sex lives of early Homo sapiens: It looks like they engaged in some inbreeding as well. That is the conclusion of anthropologist Erik Trinkhaus of Washington University in St. Louis and Xiu-Jie Wu and Song Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, based on a fractur

How Do Roosters Know When to Crow?

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:01:00 GMT

Roosters have an internal circadian rhythm, which keeps them crowing on schedule even when the lights are turned off. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Muhammad Mahdi Karim Some scientists investigate the universe’s biggest mysteries, like the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that endows all other subatomic particles with mass. Other researchers look into questions that are, well, a bit humbler—like the age-old puzzle of whether roosters simply crow when they see light of any kind, or if they truly know to crow when the morning sun arrives. Lofty or not, it’s the goal of science to answer all questions that arise from the natural world, from roosters to bosons and ev

Nearly 8 Miles Down, Bacteria Thrive in the Oceans’ Deepest Trench

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 06:01:00 GMT

At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly eight miles below the ocean’s surface, abundant communities of bacteria thrive. Image via PNAS/Yayanos et. al. The Challenger Deep, the deepest point on the entire seafloor, lies in the Mariana Trench off the coast of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Islands. It is nearly 36,000 feet—7.8 miles—below the ocean’s surface. If you were to stand at this remarkable depth, the column of water above your head would exert 1000 times the amount of pressure you normally experience at the surface, crushing you instantly. Even in this extreme environment, though, organisms can survive. One type, it turns out, can even prosper: b

14 Fun Facts about Marine Ribbon Worms

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 06:30:48 GMT

Ribbon worms come in all shapes and sizes. This one, with white stripes along the body, was found off the coast of Mexico. Photo by Chris Meyer and Allen Collins Whether they’re on a rain-soaked sidewalk, in the compost bin or on the end of a fish hook, the worms most people know are of the segmented variety. But what about all the other worms out there? With more than 1,000 species of ribbon worms (phylum Nemertea), most found in the ocean, there is a huge range of sizes and lifestyles among the various types. A defining characteristic of ribbon worms is the presence of a proboscis—a unique muscular structure inside the worm’s body. When attacking prey, they compress their bod

Fresh Off the 3D Printer: Henry Segerman’s Mathematical Sculptures

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:00:46 GMT

“Bunny” Bunny, by Henry Segerman and Craig Kaplan. The pattern on the bunny consists of copies of the word “bunny.” Listen as the artist describes the sculpture in this YouTube video. To say that Henry Segerman is schooled in mathematics is an understatement. The 33-year-old research fellow at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, earned a master’s degree in math at Oxford and then a doctorate in the subject at Stanford. But the mathematician moonlights as an artist. A mathematical artist. Segerman has found a way to illustrate the complexities of three-dimensional geometry and topology—his areas of expertise—in sculptural form. First things first

Vanishing Marine Algae Can Be Monitored From a Boat With Your Smartphone

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:00:12 GMT

Warming oceans have caused levels of phytoplankton, like the mixed sample of single-celled and chain-forming diatoms pictured above, to decline 40 percent since 1950. Photo by Richard Kirby Two weeks ago, a group of sailors off the coast of New Zealand leaned over the side of their boat, dropped a contraption into the Pacific Ocean and watched it disappear. Using an app they’d downloaded to a smartphone, they logged a reading from the underwater device, along with their GPS location and the water temperature. In just a few minutes’ time, they had become the first participants in a new program launched by the UK’s Plymouth University Marine Institute which allows citizen scientists to h

Why We Should All Celebrate Save a Spider Day

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 03:25:00 GMT

Fear-inducing or awe-inspiring? For more stunning shots of spiders, check out our Save a Spider Day slideshow. Photo by Thomas Vignaud If you’re afraid of spiders, you’re in good company–at least according to the Wikipedia page on arachnophobia, which lists Justin Timberlake, Kim Kardashian and Jessica Simpson as sharing the affliction. As star-studded as the fear may be, however, it’s not particularly well-founded. For example, one of the most infamous spiders, the brown recluse, has earned a terrible and outsized reputation for its supposedly deadly bite. Doctors often blame the species for spider bites, even in states where the brown recluse isn’t pre

Prehistoric Birds May Have Used Four Wings to Fly

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 06:01:00 GMT

A fossil of a prehistoric bird from the enantiornithine genus shows feathers on its hind legs—evidence of an extra pair of wings. Courtesy of Xiaoting Zheng et al/Science Roughly 150 million years ago, birds began to evolve. The winged creatures we see in the skies today descended from a group of dinosaurs called theropods, which included tyrannosaurs, during a 54-million-year chunk of time known as the Jurassic period. Why the ability to fly evolved in some species is a difficult question to answer, but scientists agree that wings came to be because they must have been useful: they might have helped land-based animals leap into the air, or helped gliding creatures who flapped t

That Time Indiana Almost Made Pi Equal to 3.2 And Other True Stories About Pi

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:32:23 GMT

Fans celebrate Pi Day (3.14) with π pie. Photo by Flickr user pauladamsmith March 14, when written as 3.14, is the first three numbers of pi (π). To commemorate the (completely artificial) confluence of the world’s most famous and never-ending mathematical constant with the way we can write the date, math enthusiasts around the country embrace their inner nerdiness by celebrating π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle and its diameter. The date–which also happens to be Einstein’s birthday–inspires celebrations every year. Today. the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is posting password-protected decision letters on its admissions office site–wo

The Bay Bridge Gets Its Glow On

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:42:28 GMT

Is the Bay Bridge now the cooler bridge in San Francisco? Photo courtesy of Leo Villareal Last week, for the first time in 75 years, the Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, made the Golden Gate seem like just another bridge. Kudos to Leo Villareal. He’s an artist who works with lights, but also with algorithms. And his latest project, The Bay Lights, is probably the most spectacular example of that mix of art and tech that most of us have ever seen. Under Villareal’s direction, teams of electricians spent the past five months stringing 25,000 LED lights a foot apart–from the top of the bridge’s towers down to the deck–for the full length (a

How Do Astronauts Go to the Bathroom in Space?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:23:26 GMT

To boldly go where only a few men (and women) have gone before: “Moving Beyond Earth,” a permanent exhibit at the Air and Space Museum, has a replica of the waste collection system used aboard NASA’s space shuttles. This may be the fanciest toilet you will ever see. All photos courtesy of the Air and Space Museum. The National Air and Space Museum has a $50,000 toilet. It’s functional, and it answers one of the greatest engineering puzzles of the 20th century: How do you pee in space? The “space toilet” is a replica of the waste collection systems used aboard NASA’s five space shuttles—Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery and Endeavor—whi

Stressed Corals Dim Then Glow Brightly Before They Die

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:30:26 GMT

Fluorescent proteins all aglow in these corals. Photo by Michael Lesser and Charles Mazel, NOAA Ocean Explorer Anyone who has gone scuba diving or snorkeling in a coral reef will likely never forget the dazzling colors and other-worldly shapes of these underwater communities. Home to some of the world’s most diverse wildlife hotspots, reefs are worth an annual $400 billion in tourist dollars and in the ecosystem services they provide, such as buffering shores from storms and providing habitat for fish that people eat. Yet it’s a well known fact that coral reefs around the world are in decline thanks to pollution and rapidly warming oceans. However, determining just how ree

Are Babies Bigoted?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:00:00 GMT

An intriguing new study suggests that infants dislike those who are different from themselves. Image via Flickr user paparutzi In one of the fastest-growing areas in psychology, researchers are gaining insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to communicate: babies. In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have suggested that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that 18-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others. Some of this research, though, has also shed light on babies’ dark side. A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that 9- to 14-month-olds exhibit a partic

Science Shows Why You’re Smarter Than a Neanderthal

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:01:39 GMT

A Neanderthal’s skull (right) was larger than a human’s (left) and had a similar inner volume for mental capacity, but new research indicates less of it was devoted to higher-order thinking. Image via Wikimedia Commons/DrMikeBaxter Neanderthals never invented written language, developed agriculture or progressed past the Stone Age. At the same time, they had brains just as big in volume as modern humans’. The question of why we Homo sapiens are significantly more intelligent than the similarly big-brained Neanderthals—and why we survived and proliferated while they went extinct—has puzzled scientists for some time. Now, a new study by Oxford researchers provides evid

An Otter Learns to Play Therapeutic Basketball at the Oregon Zoo

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:30:00 GMT

A rescued sea otter named Eddie is keeping spry by playing basketball at the Oregon Zoo. Eddie is turning 16 this year—a ripe old age for otters, which normally live around 15 to 20 years. Recently, Eddie began developing arthritis in his elbows. To help keep him limber, the zoo keepers decided to teach the old otter a new trick: basketball. “There aren’t many natural oppportunities for Eddie to work those arthritic elbow joints, because sea otters don’t use their front limbs to swim — they swim by moving their back legs and flippers,” explained Eddie’s lead keeper to the Weather Channel. “So training him with the basketball hoop was a wa

The Northern Lights—From Scientific Phenomenon to Artists’ Muse

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:52:18 GMT

Jesper Kongshaug’s Northern Lights display at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Photo by Margot Schulman. The aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, is a spectacle to behold—so much so, that it is hard to put into words. I think Smithsonian‘s former senior science editor, Laura Helmuth, did it justice a few years back. “Try to imagine the most colorful, textured sunset you’ve ever seen, then send it swirling and pulsing across an otherwise clear and starry sky,” she wrote. Helmuth also handily described the physics behind the natural phenomenon: “Your planet is being buffeted by solar wind—particles of protons and electrons that

How a Computer Program Can Learn All About You From Just Your Facebook Likes

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:01:00 GMT

Your publicly available “likes” can tell others a lot you wouldn’t expect—including your political views, sexual orientation and religion. Image via Flickr user Kevin Krejci Odds are, when you decided to “like” a TV show, band, local business or product’s Facebook page, you didn’t imagine that that click would have much consequence. It might show your friends a bit about your interests, and occasionally cause status updates from the page to show up in your news feed. “Likes,” however, are publicly available for anyone to see on Facebook, even people you haven’t approved as friends. And for a new study published today i

New Study Examines San Joaquin Valley, Home to America’s Dirtiest Air

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:54:48 GMT

The pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley, including above this Norton cornfield, was tested by NASA as part of a program to monitor air quality from space. Photo by Flickr user mhall209 If you had to guess what part of the the U.S. has the very worst air pollution–where winds and topography conspire with fumes from gasoline-chugging vehicles to create an aerial cesspool–places like Los Angeles, Atlanta and as of late, Salt Lake City, would probably pop to mind. The reality may come as a bit of a surprise. According to the Environmental Protection agency, California’s bucolic San Joaquin Valley is “home of the worst air quality in the country.” Not coinc

16 Photographs That Capture the Best and Worst of 1970s America

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:22:56 GMT

A new exhibit at the National Archives highlights an interesting decade—one that gave rise to the environmental movement and some awkward fashion

Lousy Sleep Isn’t Good For Your Body, Either

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:58:56 GMT

A good night’s sleep is worth the effort. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kaptain Kobold This weekend, most of us Americans will lose an hour of sleep when we push the clocks ahead to swing into Daylight Saving Time. That may not seem like much–the Academy Awards were three and a half times that long–but research suggests our bodies wouldn’t agree. A recent study by two Michigan hospitals found that they treated almost twice as many heart attack victims on the first day of Daylight Saving than on a typical Sunday. And if past behavior holds true, there will be a bump in traffic accidents on Monday because, as researchers have suggested, more people take “

Scientists Map Buried Flood Channels on Mars in 3D

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 10:03:04 GMT

Mars, photo via Pixabay Roughly 3.5 billion years ago, Mars began to shift from a wetter, warmer climate to the dry and cold planet we see today. This period of geologic change, known as the Hesperian age, was a turbulent time. The red planet saw widespread volcanic eruptions and catastrophic flooding as melted ice rushed into wide craters, forming lakes. These natural disasters carved a network of basins into its surface called outflow channels, eroding the terrain and reshaping the landscape of the planet. The exact end of this geologic period in Mars’ history is unknown, but scientists give a rough estimate of 3 billion years ago. Later, many of these outflow channels became covere

Even Bees Get a Buzz When They Drink Caffeine

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:01:00 GMT

Caffiene, naturally present in some plant nectars, was shown to improve honeybees’ long-term memory in a new study. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Fir0002 Caffeine is likely the world’s most popular psychoactive drug. In the U.S., an estimated 90% of adults consume it daily, either in coffee, tea, soda or energy drinks. A new study published today in Science found that the drug isn’t just popular among humans. A group of scientists from Newcastle University in the UK and elsewhere found that low doses of caffeine are present in the nectar of coffee flowers and many types of citrus plants—and that when the honeybees imbibe the drug while foraging, they demonstrate

The (Natural) World, According to Our Photo Contest Finalists

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:12:12 GMT

The Milky Way Galaxy Exploding from Mount Rainier. Photo by David Morrow (Everett, Washington). Photographed at Sunrise Point in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, October 6, 2012. David Morrow, a 27-year-old aerospace engineer by day and budding photographer by night, was perched at Sunrise Point on the evening of October 6, 2012. From the popular viewing spot in Mount Rainier National Park, he had a clear view of Rainier, the 14,411-foot beastly stratovolcano to his west. As he recalls, at about 9 p.m. the sun had set and the stars began to appear. Filling the viewfinder of his Nikon D800, quite brilliantly, was the Milky Way. “It is not often that you see the Milky Way

Which Major Cities Are Leaders in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:31:08 GMT

New York City is a leader in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Photo by Flickr user Andrew C Mace Cities are to greenhouse-gas emissions what Chernobyl was to nuclear power plant failures, which is to say, they’re the worst offenders out there. Cities consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and cough up 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. Some are even gaining notoriety: Air pollution in Beijing is so severe these days that residents can’t even escape it by going indoors, according to scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. But many cities are making progress in shrinking their greenhouse-gas footprints, and a recent new study shows that they can make reductions of as m

A Plague of Locusts Descends Upon the Holy Land, Just in Time for Passover

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:02:33 GMT

A swarm of locusts descends upon Israel. Photo by Amir Ayali Locusts have plagued farmers for millennia. According to the Book of Exodus, around 1400 B.C. the Egyptians experienced an exceptionally unfortunate encounter with these ravenous pests when they struck as the eighth Biblical plague. As Exodus describes, “They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.” Locusts attacks still occur today, as farmers in Sudan and Egypt well know. Now, farmers in Israel ca

This 33,000-Year-Old Skull Belonged to One of the World’s First Dogs

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:01:21 GMT

A new DNA analysis confirms that this ancient skull, found in a Siberian cave, was an early ancestor of man’s best friend. Image via PLOS ONE/Ovodov et. al. In 1975, a team of Russian archaeologists announced that they’d made a remarkable find: From a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, they’d unearthed a 33,000-year-old fossil skull that resembled a wolf. In 2011, an anatomical analysis suggested that the fossil was a hybrid of a wolf (with its large teeth) and a dog (with its shortened snout), raising the possibility that it was a partly domesticated wolf—in other words, one of the oldest ancestors of the modern dog ever discovered. At the time, though, DNA ana

How Emperor Penguins Survive Antarctica’s Subzero Cold

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 12:01:00 GMT

Scientists discovered that the penguins plumage is even colder than the surrounding air, potentially allowing them to absorb heat through convection. Image © Université de Strasbourg and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Strasbourg, France Antarctica, as you might expect, gets pretty darn cold: Temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit are often recorded during the winter. For the creatures who live there, this extreme cold demands innovative survival strategies that enable the loss of as little heat as possible. Scientists recently discovered that Emperor Penguins—one of Antarctica’s most celebrated species—employ a particularly u

How Smart Can a Watch Be?

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:48:26 GMT

It tells you what’s happening on your phone. And it tells time. Photo courtesy of Sony. It’s amazing how putting a lower case “i” in front of the name of a gadget can make it righteous. What that means, of course, is that Apple has deemed that particular piece of technology worthy of its attention. And with that comes both market credibility and geeky cool. So when rumors started swirling a few weeks ago that Apple could unveil an “iWatch” later this year, tech writers around the Web were quick to ponder if 2013 will become “The Year of the Smartwatch.” Maybe. Maybe not. The iGod has not yet spoken on the subject. At least not officia

When, Where and How to Watch the Comet PanSTARRS This Month

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:59:42 GMT

Comet PanSTARRS, seen here from Australia, will be visible in the Northern Hemisphere starting around March 6. Photo by stargazer Terry Lovejoy This year is shaping out to be an exciting one for us to see chunks of rocks and ice as they hurl through space. We’ve had an asteroid the size of half a football field zoom within the paths of our orbiting satellites and a 10,000 ton meteor the size of a grey whale blow up over Russia. Now, Comet PanSTARRS is making its closest approach to Earth today and will be visible to observers in the United States starting later this week and through the middle of the March. People in the Southern Hemisphere have been able to see PanSTARRS for we

Miniature African Forest Elephants Could Be Extinct in 10 Years

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:15:25 GMT

A bull male forest elephant in Gabon. A new study published in the PLOS ONE shows that African forest elephants are being poached into extinction. Photo by Elizabeth M. Rogers When you think of an elephant, you probably picture a big-tusked bull stampeding through vast African grasslands. But there are more to elephants than this run-of-the-mill savannah variety. The African forest elephant—recently declared a distinct species from its plains-dwelling cousin–lives exclusively in the forests of Central Africa. Males rarely exceed 8 feet in height, compared to about 13 feet for savannah elephants–all the better for navigating through the jungle trees. They eat mostly fruit, a

Climate Change Could Allow Ships to Cross the North Pole by 2040

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 08:01:39 GMT

Rapidly melting sea ice will open up shipping lanes across the Arctic, potentially making the Northwest Passage (left) and North Pole (center) navigable during the summer. Image via PNAS/Smith and Stephenson Rapidly melting ice has already remade shipping possibilities in the Arctic. Over the past decade, commercial use of the Northern Sea Route (the blue shipping lane along the northern coast of Russia in the map above) during late summer has become commonplace, dramatically shortening the journey from Europe to the Far East. If present trends continue, though, the options for shipping goods across the Arctic will expand even more. According to a paper published today in the Proceedi

Trapped as Climate Changes, Giant Gusts of Hot Air Trigger Weather Extremes

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 04:35:52 GMT

Scientists have identified a link between global warming and extreme weather events such as heat waves. Photo by Flickr user perfectsnap During the month of July 2011, the United States was seized by a heat wave so severe that roughly 9,000 temperature records were set, 64 people were killed and a total of 200 million Americans were left very sweaty. Temperatures hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Shamrock, Texas, and residents of Dallas spent 34 consecutive days stewing in 100-plus-degree weather. For the past couple of years, we’ve heard that extreme weather like this is tied to climate change, but until now, scientists weren’t sure exactly how the two were related. A new study pub

Transforming Raw Scientific Data Into Sculpture and Song

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:15:00 GMT

For Nathalie Miebach, the stars aligned with this sculpture, inspired by a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. © Nathalie Miebach In 2000, Nathalie Miebach was studying both astronomy and basket weaving at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was constantly lugging her shears and clamps with her into the room where she’d study projections of stars and nebulas on the wall. Understanding the science of space could be tricky, she found. “What was so frustrating to me, as a very kinesthetic learner, is that astronomy is so incredibly fascinating, but there’s nothing really tactile about it,” says Miebach. “You can’t go out and to

What Does the Unbelievably Bad Air Quality in Beijing Do to the Human Body?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 05:26:00 GMT

The unprecedented levels of fine particulates that pollute Beijing’s air can cause lung cancer, heart attacks and other health problems. Image via Flickr user jaaron Beijing’s terrible air quality is currently in the news, and for good reason: The level of pollution present in the air there is unprecedented for a heavily populated area, and several times worse than what any U.S. resident has likely ever experienced. The New York Times recently reported on the air quality problems of Salt Lake City, Utah, and how the area’s geographical features and weather systems occasionally trap pollution in the city’s bowl-shaped basin. But the highest reading on the EPA&r

E.T. Phone Home: New Research Could Detect Signs of Life in this Decade

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:25:03 GMT

A habitable planet orbits a white dwarf. Here the ghostly blue ring is a planetary nebula—hydrogen gas the star ejected as it evolved from a red giant to a white dwarf. Illustration by David A. Aguilar (CfA) According to a new proposal from astronomers and professors Avi Loeb and Dan Maoz, signs of life may be awaiting detection in the shadows of death. Looking to the abundance of dying stars known as white dwarfs, Loeb and Maoz devised a simple way to search for oxygen in the atmosphere of exoplanets which orbit around white dwarfs much the way Earth orbits the sun. Loeb says the theory could yield results within the decade with the launch of NASA’s James Webb Telescope in 2018.

The War on Cancer Goes Stealth

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 02:29:18 GMT

Zinc oxide nanoparticles. Courtesy of National Institutes of Health. So, we’re 42 years into the War on Cancer, and while the enemy remains formidable, our strategy is shifting into yet another phase. We’ve been through the equivalent of hand-to-hand combat–surgery–carpet bombing–radiation–and chemical warfare–chemotherapy. Now the fight is about stealth. Instead of concentrating on blasting away at cancer cells, or poisoning them, you’re more likely to hear cancer scientists talk about “Trojan horses” or “cloaking strategies” or “tricking” the immune system. All are cell-level ploys hatched through

Dust from the Sahara Can Seed Rain and Snow Clouds Over the Western U.S.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:46:04 GMT

Dust lofted up from the Sahara can be blown across the Pacific and seed clouds over California. NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center The fascinating idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can change the path of a hurricane over the Pacific is, alas, probably not accurate. But slight changes in one part of the atmosphere can indeed have disproportionate effects elsewhere, a concept known as the butterfly effect. Just how slight one of these factors can be—and how incredibly far away their effects can reach—is vividly illustrated by a new finding by an international team of atmospheric scientists and chemists from the U.S. and Israel. As t

Could Disappearing Wild Insects Trigger a Global Crop Crisis?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:24:00 GMT

Wild bees, such as this Andrena bee visiting highbush blueberry flowers, provide crucial pollination services to crops across the globe. Photo by Daniel Cariveau Insect pollination is crucial for the healthy development of our favorite foods, from apples and avocados to cucumbers and onions. Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the global population’s food, nearly three-quarters rely on pollination by bees. The rest need beetles, flies, butterflies, birds and bats to act as pollinators. It’s a mutually beneficial system—the flowers of most crops require pollen from another plant of the same crop to produce seeds or fruits, and bees and other critters tr

Nitpicking the Lice Genome to Track Humanity’s Past Footsteps

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:01:00 GMT

A male human head louse. Photo by Flickr user Gilles San Martin Parasites have been around for more than 270 million years. Around 25 million years ago, lice joined the blood-sucking party and invaded the hair of ancient primates. When the first members of Homo arrived on the scene around 2.5 million years ago, lice took advantage of the new great ape on the block for better satisfying its digestive needs. As a new genetic analysis published today in PLoS One shows, mining these parasites’ genomes can lend clues for understanding the migration patterns of these early humans. The human louse, Pediculus humanus, is a single species yet members fall into two distinct camps: head a

Video: This Stretchable Battery Could Power the Next Generation of Wearable Gadgets

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:30:18 GMT

A new battery can be stretched to 300% of its size and still provide power. Image via Nature Communications/Xu et. al. The world’s biggest tech companies all suddenly seem bent on one goal: claiming control of the screens and computers they think we’ll be wearing in the near future. Google has recently made waves by recruiting “explorers” to try out its new glasses-mounted smartphone technology (aptly called “Google Glass”), while Apple’s recent patent for a curved glass computerized watch garnered widespread attention in tech circles. Many, though, have noted that one of the biggest limitations for wearable tech is durability—it’s diffi

Small Satellites—Some the Size of Postage Stamps—Are Transforming How Scientists Conduct Space-based Research

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:12:00 GMT

Cordell Grant assembles the BRITE telescope, a nanosatellite. Image via the University of Toronto Picture a telescope orbiting in space, and your mind probably flies to the Hubble Space Telescope. At roughly 43 feet long and weighing 25,000 pounds, its footprint is the size of a small house and it’s just a little shy of the weight of a subway car. But not all satellite telescopes are behemoths–one launched yesterday from India, designed and developed by the Space Flight Laboratory of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, is roughly the size of a cooler you’d bring to a picnic. The telescope is part of the Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) mission,

Snakes in a Frame: Mark Laita’s Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:07:08 GMT

Rowley’s Palm Pit Viper (Bothriechis rowleyi). This venomous snake, which ranges from two and a half to five feet in length, lives in the forests of Mexico. © Mark Laita. Mark Laita captured plenty of photographs of snakes striking, their mouths agape, in the making of his new book, Serpentine. But, it wasn’t these aggressive, fear-inducing—and in his words, “sensational”—images that he was interested in. Instead, the Los Angeles-based photographer focused on the graceful contortions of the reptiles. “It is not a snake book,” says Laita. As he explained to me in a phone interview, he had no scientific criteria for selecting the species he did, thoug

Mapping How the Brain Thinks

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 02:20:00 GMT

The challenge is to figure out how all that wiring works. Image courtesy of Human Connectome Project A year and a half into his presidency, John F. Kennedy challenged U.S. scientists to get Americans to the moon by the end of the decade. At his recent State of the Union address, Barack Obama hinted at what could become his version of reaching for the moon–he’d like scientists to solve the mystery of the brain. Obama’s mission would be a heavier lift. He didn’t go into much detail, other than citing brain research as a stellar example of how government can “invest in the best ideas.” But last week a story in the New York Times by John Markoff fill

Climate Change is Reducing Our Ability to Get Work Done

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:00:00 GMT

High temperatures and high levels of humidity reduce the human body’s ability to do work. Image via Flickr user zoonabar If you feel sluggish and have difficulty getting physical work done on very hot, humid days, it’s not your imagination. Our bodies are equipped with an adaptation to handle high temperatures—perspiration—but sweating becomes ineffective at cooling us down when the air around us is extremely humid. Add in the fact that climate change is projected to increase the average humidity of Earth as well as its temperature, and you could have a recipe for a rather unexpected consequence of greenhouse gas emissions: a reduced overall ability to get wor

Growing New Hearts Without Using Embryonic Stem Cells

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 01:00:17 GMT

The human heart. Illustration by Patrick J. Lynch It seems like science fiction, but researchers have actually grown organs from stem cells, organs that were successfully transplanted into humans. Two years ago, a man received a new trachea to replace his, damaged by cancer—the trachea was made by Swedish researchers who infused a synthetic scaffold with the patient’s own stem cells. Earlier, in 2006, scientists at Wake Forest used stem cells to successfully implant laboratory-grown bladders in young patients with spina bifida, a developmental birth defect. Now, science has set its sights on even bigger lab-grown organs: hearts. Researchers are currently growing them in labs usi

What Damage Could Be Caused by a Massive Solar Storm?

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 06:21:02 GMT

A sunspot six times the diameter of Earth formed on the sun on Wednesday. Image via NASA/SDO/AIA/HMI/Goddard Space Flight Center On Wednesday, NASA released an image of a series of enormous sunspots snapped by at the Solar Dynamics Observatory, an orbiting telescope. The sunspots—the dark spots in the center of the image—are estimated to be larger in diameter than six Earths placed next to each other. These sunspots pose no inherent danger—they’re merely temporary areas of intense magnetic activity that inhibit the sun’s normal convection currents—but, on occasion, the unstable area around a sunspot can trigger an unusually large solar flare (below), flinging streams of ra

Meals in a Jar: From Pancakes to Baby Back Ribs, Just Add Water

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:31:41 GMT

Photo by Kim Nelson/Hand in Hand Photography In 1994, Julie Languille lived at the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake, which struck the Los Angeles neighborhood with a magnitude of 6.7. She and her family were without power for two weeks, and the long lines at nearby grocery stores soon began to shrink as food ran out. “It just became really important to me as part of my feeling of security and good planning for my family to have meals on hand,” Languille says. The Puget Sound resident, who also runs a dinner planning website, has been canning meals since, and her recipes, ranging from oatmeal and macaroni and cheese to braised chicken and pulled pork, are featured in a cookbook

The Story of How An Artist Created a Genetic Hybrid of Himself and a Petunia

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:36:00 GMT

DNA splicing joins one of the artist’s genes (red) and an antibioticresistance gene (yellow) in a bacterium, which inserts the genes into petunia cells. Photo by Eduardo Kac. The most radical figure in the biodesign movement is Eduardo Kac, who doesn’t merely incorporate existing living things in his artworks—he tries to create new life-forms. “Transgenic art,” he calls it. There was Alba, an albino bunny that glowed green under a black light. Kac had commissioned scientists in France to insert a fluorescent protein from Aequoria victoria, a bioluminescent jellyfish, into a rabbit egg. The startling creature, born in 2000, was not publicly exhibited, but

Interview: Jane Goodall on the Future of Plants and Chimps

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Over the course of 45 years studying the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, Jane Goodall revolutionized our understanding of our closest primate relatives. A champion of animal conservation and the author of 26 books, she turns her attention for the first time to plants with Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, to be published April 2 and excerpted in the March issue of Smithsonian. As one of the world’s most renowned animal researchers, what made you decide to write a book about plants? For my last book about saving endangered animals from extinction, I wrote a long section about plants, but my publisher said the book was way too long, so

Melting Polar Ice Will Spike Sea Levels at the Equator

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:27:42 GMT

Ice melt in Greenland will significantly affect water levels throughout the world, most of all the equatorial Pacific and South Africa. Photo by Christine Zenino If you live on the coast, watch out–the shoreline close to home is moving. The planet’s two largest ice sheets, in Antarctica and Greenland, have been melting at an unprecedented pace for the past decade, and ice melt is the biggest contributor to rising sea levels. But not all coasts will draw closer inland. Scientists have determined (PDF) that water levels will rise in some parts of the world and dip in others. Now, new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and coordinated by the European org

With Biodesign, Life is Not Only the Subject of Art, But the Medium Too

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:34:00 GMT

“This project was inspired by the universe of unseen organisms that inhabit our bodies,” author William Myers says of Julia Lohmann’s mural Co-Existence exhibited in 2009 in London. Photo courtesy of The Wellcome Trust. When Julia Lohmann set out to create an artwork for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the health research foundation, she chose a classic subject: the female body. But where Lohmann broke from tradition was her medium. The German designer created her large-scale portrait of two reclining nudes using 9,000 petri dishes, each containing an image of live bacteria. Suzanne Lee, a British fashion designer, is attem

A New Addition to the International Space Station

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The AMS can detect and sort hundreds of billions of high-energy particles whizzing through space

Photos: The Uneasy Conflict Between Artificial and Natural Light

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Artist Kevin Cooley has traveled the world capturing landscapes where one light shines on the horizon

An Artificial Ear Built By a 3D Printer and Living Cartilage Cells

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 03:04:56 GMT

One of the Cornell team’s prosthetic ears, created from living cartilage cells. Image via PLOS ONE/Reiffel et. al. 3D printing is big news: During his State of the Union speech, President Obama called for the launch of manufacturing hubs centered around 3D printing, while earlier this week, we saw the birth of one of the most playful applications of the technology yet, the 3D Doodler, which lets you draw solid plastic objects in 3 dimensions. Yesterday, Cornell doctors and engineers presented a rather different use of the technology: a lifelike artificial ear made of living cells, built using 3D printing technology. Their product, described in a paper published in PLOS ONE, is d

Brian Skerry Has the World’s Best Job: Ocean Photographer

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

You could forgive Brian Skerry if he let a hint of despair seep into his voice. He did, after all, achieve his lifelong dream of becoming an underwater wildlife photographer just in time to see the coral reefs, fish and other creatures he loves start disappearing from the world’s oceans. “Everywhere I go, I notice the wildlife just isn’t what it used to be,” he tells me over the phone from his home in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. “There are places where I’ve spent weeks and not seen a single shark, and I know if I’d been there ten years earlier, I would have seen dozens.” But Skerry is also an optimist who hopes—believes—that his sta

Jane Goodall Reveals Her Lifelong Fascination With…Plants?

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Editor's Note: There have been allegations of plagiarism in the book Seeds of Hope, from which this excerpt was drawn. Smithsonian has checked this material independently and ascertained to the best of our ability that everything published in the magazine and in this post is original. From my window, as I write in my house in Bournemouth, England, I can see the trees I used to climb as a child. Up in the branches of one of them, a beech tree, I would read about Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan, and dream about the time when I, too, would live in the forest. I spent hours in that tree, perched in my special place. I had a little basket on the end of a long piece of string that was tied to my br

How Two Women Ended the Deadly Feather Trade

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

John James Audubon, the pre-eminent 19th-century painter of birds, considered the snowy egret to be one of America’s surpassingly beautiful species. The egret, he noted, was also abundant. “I have visited some of their breeding grounds,” Audubon wrote, “where several hundred pairs were to be seen, and several nests were placed on the branches of the same bush, so low at times that I could easily see into them.” Audubon insisted that birds were so plentiful in North America that no depredation—whether hunting, the encroachment of cities and farmlands, or any other act of man—could extinguish a species. Yet little more than half a century after Audu

The Meanest Girls at the Watering Hole

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

A roar broke the silence of a dead winter's night. When I heard the noise, I shot up and tossed back the hood of my sleeping bag, which I had pulled over my head to cut the chill. From my bed up in the research tower, I looked down at the water hole 20 feet below, now black since the moon had set several hours ago. This was my home during my elephant field season, and it offered a great view of elephants in action day and night. I couldn’t make sense of the situation in the dark, so I reached for my night-vision scope. The shadows of four elephants came into view, too few for an extended family group. I watched an adult female marching up and down the most popular drinking spot, a c

Bioluminescence: Light Is Much Better, Down Where It’s Wetter

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

“Surface, surface, this is Triton.” The acrylic sphere floats like a soap bubble in the rough waves, and I drop through the dripping hatch into my seat beside the famed ocean explorer Edith Widder. We are test-driving a new three-person submarine in choppy waters off Grand Bahama Island. Despite the rocking gusts of wind outside, Widder is serene. “Surface, surface, this is Triton,” our pilot says. “My hatch is secure. My life-support systems are running.” “You are cleared to dive,” a static-drowned voice replies. “OK, folks, here we go.” We sink. Widder studies underwater light. From bacteria to sea cucumbers to shrimp and

Some Mosquitoes Become Immune to DEET After Just a Few Hours of Exposure

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:01:37 GMT

A new study indicates that mosquitoes can become habituated to the smell of DEET over time, reducing its effectiveness as a repellent. Image via CDC If you’re someone that’s naturally irresistible to mosquitoes, a new finding published today in PLOS ONE could make for a rude awakening. A group of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered that three hours after an exposure to DEET, many Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were immune to the chemical, ignoring its typically noxious smell and attempting to land on irresistible human skin. Normally, DEET—short for N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide, which is the active ingredient in most insect repellents on

INFOGRAPHIC: Light By the Numbers

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

As the fastest thing in the universe, light certainly gets around

Can Chemistry Make Healthy Foods More Appealing?

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:48:45 GMT

Photo: holtmi Give a baby her first spoonful of mashed spinach or blended brussell sprouts and you can likely watch her face pucker up in shocked torment. Veggies tend to be a dreaded childhood bane for many youngsters, yet there are exceptions to the vegetable hate rule. Sweet potatoes and carrots, for example, tend to score highly. But why is that? As a general rule, much of our likes and dislikes spawn from sweetness – or at least our perception of it. Evolutionarily, we’re programmed to like sweetness, since it’s indicative of calorie-rich sugar. Millennia ago, when we were just beginning our evolutionary journey as Homo sapiens, those individuals who preferred a

Where Men See White, Women See Ecru

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

If you’ve ever found yourself at a paint store with a member of the opposite sex trying to decide between, say, “laguna blue” and “blue macaw,” chances are you’ve disagreed over which hue is lighter or looks more turquoise. Take comfort in the fact that the real blame lies with physiology: Neuroscientists have discovered that women are better at distinguishing among subtle distinctions in color, while men appear more sensitive to objects moving across their field of vision. Scientists have long main- tained that the sexes see colors differently. But much of the evidence has been indirect, such as the linguistic research showing that women possess a la

Introducing the Dom Pedro Aquamarine

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

You start with the stone, aquamarine, a word that means “seawater,” but not the deep-ocean blue that is the sea’s homage to the sky, nor the gray-green swells crashing on a shore, but the soft blue-green of a lagoon on a clear tropical morning. Chemically, it is almost identical to an emerald. What makes a stone one or the other is a handful of atoms scattered among the crystalline ranks: chromium for emerald, iron for aquamarine. Then you must have light. Aquamarine comes to life under the blues and cyans of daylight, as a ruby does near firelight. Next, consider the object itself, an obelisk of a little more than 10,000 carats, shot through with radiant starbursts of as

Locking Eyes With Spiders and Insects

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:03:40 GMT

Male Paraphidippus aurantius (a species of jumping spider), by Thomas Shahan Thomas Shahan came eye to eye with a jumping spider in his backyard about seven years ago when he was living and attending high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Since that first encounter, he has been “smitten,” according to a December 2011 spread of his macrophotography in National Geographic. “I began learning about their names and their ways, then looking for them in local parks and reserves like the Oxley Nature Center,” he wrote in the magazine. Holcocephala fusca (robber fly), by Thomas Shahan For the past seven years, Shahan has developed a hobby of photographing arthropods—insects,

Will the Next Lake-Effect Snowstorm be Severe? Ask Mountains Far Far Away

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:49:16 GMT

Lake-effect snow, which can blanket communities downwind of lakes, is influenced by upwind geographic features, a new study finds. Photo by Flickr user singloud12 People who live by large, inland bodies of water have a phrase in their lexicon that describes the blizzards that hit them throughout the winter: “lake-effect snow.” When wintry winds blow over wide swaths of warmer lake water, they thirstily suck up water vapor that later freezes and drops as snow downwind, blanketing cities near lake shores. These storms are no joke: a severe one dumped nearly 11 feet of snow over the course of week in Montague, N.Y. before New Year’s Day, 2002; another week-long storm ar

A New Way to Illuminate Inequality Around the World

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Satellite photos of Earth’s artificial lights at night form a luminescent landscape. But researcher Chris Elvidge of NOAA and colleagues from the University of Colorado and the University of Denver realized that they could also illuminate something much darker: the magnitude of human poverty. By comparing the amount of light in a particular area and its known population, they realized that they could infer the percentage of people who are able to afford electricity and the level of government spending on infrastructure development. This allowed them to extrapolate levels of human development—a measure of well-being that includes such factors as income, life expectancy and lite

Could Solar Panels on Your Roof Power Your Home?

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of solar power is the simple homeowner question: Will I see a return on my investment? In response, major cities across America have unveiled online “solar maps” that allow residents to type in their address and receive estimates of how much money they would save on their electric bill per year. The most accurate solar map in the United States is one being used by residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to the map’s creators, the MIT Sustainable Design Lab and the design workshop Modern Development Studio, their solar mapping tool can provide energy-saving estimates that fall within 4 to 10 percent of real-world me

How Did Plants Develop Photosynthesis?

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

When the last Apollo mission was on its way to the Moon four decades ago, one of the astronauts took a snapshot that is among the most famous in NASA history. It is known as the “blue marble” photograph because it shows Earth, from about 28,000 miles away, as a bright, swirling and mostly blue sphere. The dominant color wasn’t surprising—it’s the color of the oceans, which cover nearly three-quarters of the planet. But Earth is hardly unique in having water. It is everywhere in the universe; even that dusty neighbor Mars, it is now apparent, was once awash. What sets Earth apart isn’t colored blue but green, a green that is best appreciated not from sp

A Visit to the Natonal Zoo’s “Ark of Life”

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

A 90-minute drive from the National Mall and the bustle of the capital, on 3,250 verdant, rolling acres next door to Shenandoah National Park, sits a hidden gem in our network of museums and centers: the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, in Front Royal, Virginia, a unit of the National Zoo. This is the sort of behind-the-scenes operation that all zoos wish they could have, an ark of life. Away from the demands of public exhibitions, our scientists study red pandas, clouded leopards, maned wolves, red-crowned cranes and other threatened animals—25 species and some 275 animals in all. Many of the animals roam (or sprint!) across the hillsides, in ample enclosures of several

What Can We Do About Big Rocks From Space?

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 03:09:00 GMT

Last week’s asteroid pass was the closest ever predicted. Computer graphic courtesy of NASA Last Friday was, astronomically speaking, one of those days that comes along every 40 years. Actually, a lot less frequently than that. That’s how often, according to NASA estimates, an asteroid the size of the one that flew by Friday gets that close to hitting the Earth–it passed 17,000 miles away. But when you throw in the considerably smaller meteorite that exploded over Russia the same day and injured more than 1,000 people–that’s never happened before–you’re talking about one extremely unique moment in space rock history. Most of us have moved o

It’s Raining Spiders in Brazil

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:12:00 GMT

Footage from Brazil’s “spider rain.” Photo: TV45000 The Northeast may be prone to blizzards this time of year, but in Brazil it’s raining spiders. In a video that’s covered the Internet like an immense web, a local photographer captures images of thousands of spiders shimmying up and down silk threads attached to telephone pole wires. The footage gives the distinct impression of a shower–or perhaps light snow–of spiders sprinkling down on the shocked residents below. Erick Reis, a 20-year-old web designer in Santo Antonio da Platina, a town about 250 miles west of Sao Paulo, captured the striking video that has since accumulated mor

Any Two Pages on the Web Are Connected By 19 Clicks or Less

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 02:33:46 GMT

The Opte Project creates visualizations of the 14 billion pages that make up the network of the web. Image via Opte Project Note: After publishing this article, it came to our attention that Barabási originally made this finding in 1999, and it was merely referenced in the recent publication. We regret the error. No one knows for sure how many individual pages are on the web, but right now, it’s estimated that there are more than 14 billion. Recently, though, Hungarian physicist Albert-László discovered something surprising about this massive number: Like actors in Hollywood connected by Kevin Bacon, from every single one of these pages you can navigate to any other in 19 click

Parched Middle East Faces Severe Water Crisis

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 07:30:05 GMT

The Tigris River basin is chief among the regions in the Middle East that have suffered massive groundwater depletion in recent years. Photo by Charles Fred Climate change, believed to have contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire (PDF) when drought forced villagers into a nomadic life in the late 16th century, is once again having an adverse affect on the Middle East. Precipitation has dropped off and temperatures have climbed for the past 40 years, with conditions growing especially severe in the last decade. A 2012 Yale study (PDF) showed that a drought from 2007 to 2010 so seriously stunted agriculture in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins that hundreds of thousands of p

The Last Massive Exploding Meteor Hit Earth in 1908, Leveling 800 Square Miles of Forest

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 04:54:00 GMT

Trees blown over by the shock wave of the 1908 Tunguska meteor. Photo: Vokrug Sveta / Wikimedia Commons Early this morning in Russia, when a meteor broke up a few dozen kilometers above ground, its supersonic flight and mid-air death generated shock waves that rattled houses, broke windows, and sent dozens to the hospital. The meteor’s break-up released energy equivalent to a few hundred thousand tons of TNT. But while it was surely scary for those whose heads it passed over, compared to a disaster that took place a few thousand miles to the east more than 100 years ago, today’s meteor was rather puny. On June 30, 1908, says NASA, a truly massive meteor exploded near the Pod

Climate Change’s Latest Victim: Canada’s Outdoor Ice Rinks

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 03:38:01 GMT

A new project examines how a warming climate will effect Canada’s tradition of backyard skating rinks. Image via Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources Of all the harmful effects of climate change—bigger storms, more severe droughts and sea level rise, for starters—a group of Canadian scientists have focused on one that hits particularly close to home: melting outdoor ice rinks. Traditionally, Canada has been home to thousands of tiny backyard skating rinks; a huge number of hockey legends, including Wayne Gretzky, learned the game growing up on these rinks, which can either be custom-made or simply frozen-over ponds. But a report published last year by McGill University scientist

How Does McCormick Pick the Top Flavors of the Year?

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 02:21:00 GMT

Black rum, charred orange and allspice. Photo courtesy of McCormick Today, entering “chipotle” into a Google search yields 19.7 million results in a fraction of a second. The ingredient appears in more than 800 recipes on Food Network’s website. A MenuPages search for the ingredient generates more than 1,500 mentions of chipotle on the East Coast alone. Founded in 1993, the Chipotle Mexican Grill franchise grew from 16 locations in 1998 to more than 500 in 2005, then doubled that in 2011. How did a small smoke-dried jalapeno reach such celebrity status in the kitchen? Ten years ago, McCormick & Company, the largest spice company in the world, put chipotle on th

A Valentine for Sci-Art Lovers

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:46:56 GMT

Mates for Life, by Jacqueline Schmidt at Screech Owl Design. Happy Valentine’s Day, Collage readers! I’ll be brief. I just wanted to pass along this cool find—a print by artist and designer Jacqueline Schmidt. In a style that smacks of scientific illustration, Schmidt depicts 12 species that, generally, remain loyal to a single mate over the course of a lifetime. With gray wolves (#1, in the diagram), couples pair off Sadie-Hawkins style. The female determines her mate. The alpha female and alpha male are the only pair to breed, from January to March each year, in a pack of wolves, and they keep things monogamous. Meadow voles (#6) are quite loyal. The rodents make the mos

Flushing Your Anti-Anxiety Pills Down the Toilet Could Affect the Behavior of Wild Fish

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:01:00 GMT

A study shows that wild perch are less fearful, eat faster and are more anti-social when exposed to a common pharmaceutical pollutant. Image via Bent Christensen It’s obvious that anti-anxiety medicines and other types of mood-modifying drugs alter the behavior of humans—it’s what they’re designed to do. But their effects, it turns out, aren’t limited to our species. Over the past decade, researchers have repeatedly discovered high levels of many drug molecules in lakes and streams near wastewater treatment plants, and found evidence that rainbow trout and other fish subjected to these levels could absorb dangerous amounts of the medications over time. N

Study Predicts Political Beliefs With 83 Percent Accuracy

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:44:59 GMT

What can brain scans reveal about a person’s political beliefs? Photo by Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS If you want to know people’s politics, tradition said to study their parents. In fact, the party affiliation of someone’s parents can predict the child’s political leanings about around 70 percent of the time. But new research, published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests what mom and dad think isn’t the endgame when it comes to shaping a person’s political identity. Ideological differences between partisans may reflect distinct neural processes, and they can predict who’s right and who’s left of center with 82.9 percent accuracy, outperforming the “your parents p

Outrageous Taxidermy, the Subject of a New Show on AMC

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:49:26 GMT

Judges Paul Rhymer, Catherine Coan and Brian Posehn. Photo courtesy of Ben Leuner/AMC Taxidermy: dying trade or resurgent art form? As an outsider—I have never hunted, let alone stuffed and mounted an animal—I was tempted to think the former. Then, I spoke with Paul Rhymer, a former Smithsonian taxidermist and model maker.”Taxidermy is alive and well,” he says. “Commercial taxidermy, for hunters, has probably never been stronger than it is now—and probably never been better. The skill levels have just gotten so good with all the different advances in materials and techniques.” Rhymer is a traditionalist. He hails from the museum world, where he spent 26 years (

Meet Indonesia’s New Owl Species

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:00:30 GMT

Photo by Philippe Verbelen Indonesia’s numerous islands (18,307 to be exact) house a wealth of avian biodiversity, yet scientists speculate that many of the country’s bird species have yet to be discovered or categorized. But ornithologists are celebrating today as a new species of owl joins the list, taking filling in one more spot in the catalog of the archipelago’s animals. In 2003, George Sangster, a Dutch ornithologist from Stockholm University, and his wife were exploring the forested foothills of Lombak, an island just east of Bali. While traipsing through the forest at night, Sangster picked up on an owl call he did not recognize. Coincidentally, just a few d

Is It Love? Why Some Ocean Animals (Sort Of) Mate For Life

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:45:00 GMT

Two waved albatrosses, the only tropical albatross species, courting one another on the Galapagos Islands. Photo by Flickr User James Preston We often hear stories of animal love—tales of rare monogamy in the animal kingdom where life-long love is implied. But there is a distinction between romantic love and an efficient mating system. Here’s a look at some ocean animals to see what is really going on. Albatrosses Get ‘Romantic’ to Increase Chick Survival Albatross relationships seem especially relatable to humans. These long-lived and highly-endangered birds will court each other through ritual dances for years. Albatrosses are slow to reach sexual maturity, and some spe

10 Fresh Looks at Love

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:45:27 GMT

Scientists are still wrestling with how love works. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hamed Masoumi It should probably tell us something that the most frequently asked question on Google last year was “What is love?” Clearly, most of us are clueless on the matter; otherwise we wouldn’t be turning to algorithms for an explanation. Which explains why scientific research on love continues unabated. We want answers. So, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, here are 10 recent studies or surveys trying to make sense of matters of the heart. 1) You light up my brain: Researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island say that based on brain scans, they may be able to predict if

Flower Power, Redefined

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 03:09:50 GMT

Beehive ginger. © Andrew Zuckerman. With a stark white background and a splash of color, minimalist master Andrew Zuckerman has reinvented the way we look at the world around us. Known for his crisp photographs of celebrities and wildlife, Zuckerman turned his lens on the plant kingdom and captured 150 species in full bloom for his latest book Flower. © Andrew Zuckerman. The filmmaker/photographer culled through over 300 species—even visiting the Smithsonian Institution— to select plants both familiar and exotic. Armed with a 65 mega-pixel camera, Zuckerman’s images capture the color, texture and form of each flower and showcase them in a way never seen before. Smithsonian.com

This Sea Slug Discards Its Penis After Sex and Grows Another

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:00:46 GMT

Chromodoris reticulata, native to the Pacific, engages in mating behavior unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom. Image via Stephen Childs Even in the utterly dry language of science, there is no way to describe the mating behavior of the sea slug Chromodoris reticulata as anything other than bizarre. The creature, native to the Pacific Ocean, engages in simultaneous hermaphroditic mating—that is, each slug has both a penis and a vagina, and when mating, both members of a couple inserts their penises into the other’s vagina at the same time—but that’s not nearly the strangest aspect of their reproduction efforts. As discovered by a group of Japanese scientists and revea

Trash Threatens Fragile Antarctic Environment

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 06:58:58 GMT

Trash dumped on Antarctica’s King George Island in the 2008/2009 field season mars its image as a pristine area. Photo by A. Nordt, included in a new report (PDF) Most people think of Antarctica as a harsh but pristine ice landscape where mountain tips poke through thick ice sheets and penguins lounge on ice shelves. But Antarctica, particularly the ice-free areas that serve as research hubs, have a darker, dirtier side. A report released Friday (PDF) called ‘”Current Ecological Situation of the Fildes Peninsula Region and Management Suggestions,” authored by scientists at Germany’s Jena University, shows that decaying field huts, piles of trash and oil-

An Asteroid Will Skim Right By the Earth on Friday Afternoon

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:38:00 GMT

A rendering of Asteroid 2012 DA14, which will pass within 17,200 miles of Earth’s surface. Image via NASA/JPL This Friday afternoon at approximately 2:26 Eastern time, an asteroid roughly half the size of a football field (147 feet) in diameter will pass extremely close to the Earth—just 17,200 miles from our planet’s surface. That said, there’s no need to worry, as NASA scientists confirmed with certainty nearly a year ago that the asteroid will not make an impact and poses absolutely no threat. Nevertheless, the proximity of the asteroid’s path is noteworthy: it will come within a distance 2 times the Earth’s diameter, passing us by even closer t

Photos of Starfish Up Close: What Are You Looking At?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:14:15 GMT

A close-up photo of the common sunstar (Crossaster papposus), a starfish found in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Photo: © Alexander Semenov Invertebrates close-up never fail to please: with their bright colors and strange structures, they begin to take on patterns that are more art than animal. So is true of this series of close-up photographs of starfish taken by researcher and photographer Alexander Semenov. But it isn’t enough to call them art: why are all those finger-like appendages waving around? And what are those bulbous spikes (or floral bouquets, if you’re feeling romantic)? Lucky for us, two floors up from the Ocean Portal office sits Dr. Chris Mah, an

Can Birds Survive Climate Change?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 04:46:43 GMT

The Indian Peafowl may need help adapting to climate change. Photo by Sergiu Bacioiu In the coming years, the birds of Asia’s Eastern Himalaya and Lower Mekong Basin, considered biodiversity hotspots by scientists, will need to relocate within the region to find viable habitat, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology. The reason? Climate change. Researchers at England’s Durham University tested 500 different climate-change scenarios for each of 370 Asian bird species and found that every possible climatic outcome–even the least extreme–would have an adverse effect on the birds. The researchers honed in on sensitive habitat in Bhutan, Laos, C

Can Machines Learn Morality?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:44:12 GMT

Can drones be taught the rules of war? Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense When John Brennan, President Obama’s choice to be the next head of the CIA, appeared before a Senate committee yesterday, one question supplanted all others at his confirmation hearing: How are the decisions made to send killer drones after suspected terrorists? The how and, for that matter, the why of ordering specific drone strikes remains largely a mystery, but at least one thing is clear–the decisions are being made by humans who, one would hope, wrestle with the thought of sending a deadly missile into an occupied building. But what if humans weren’t involved? What if one day

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Pathogens

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:34:38 GMT

E. coli, by Luke Jerram. Few non-scientists would be able to distinguish the E. coli virus bacteria from the HIV virus under a microscope. Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe in intricate detail the shapes of a slew of deadly viruses pathogens. He is intrigued by them, as a subject matter, because of their inherent irony. That is, something as virulent as SARS can actually, in its physical form, be quite delicate. Clearly adept at scientific work—as an undergraduate, the Brit was offered a spot on a university engineering program—Jerram chose to pursue art instead. “Scientists and artists start by asking similar questions about the natural world,” he told SEED magazine in a 2009

Salmon Swim Home Using Earth’s Magnetic Field as a GPS

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 05:18:00 GMT

Sockeye salmon rely on a magnetic map to navigate home after years spent at sea. Credit: Putman et al., Current Biology Scientists have long known that various marine animals use the earth’s magnetic forces to navigate waters during their life cycles. Such inherent navigational skills allow animals return to the same geographic area where they were born, with some migrating thousands of miles, to produce the next generation of their species. As hatchlings, sea turtles scuttle from their sandy birthplace to the open sea as if following an invisible map, and, as adults, the females return to that spot to lay their own eggs. Bluefin tuna home in on their natal beaches after years

New Photos Show Stars on the Brink of Death and the Precipice of Life

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:17:47 GMT

Galaxy M106′s spiral arms. Image via NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler (for the Hubble Heritage Team) and J. GaBany Space added several stunning new images to its photo album this week, including the one above of spiral galaxy M106, located 23.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, Notice something? The image, released yesterday, actually contains two spirals overlain on each other. One is the cloudy, blue-white spiral with a yellow core. The core itself is a composite of images take by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 detectors. Spiraling

The Year’s Most Outstanding Science Visualizations

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:09:00 GMT

First Place and People’s Choice, Photography: Biomineral Single Crystals. Credit: Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert and Christopher E. Killian; University of Wisconsin, Madison. When Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleague Christopher E. Killian saw the scanning electron micrograph that they took of a sea urchin’s tooth, they were dumbstruck, says the journal Science. “I had never seen anything that beautiful,” Gilbert told the publication. The individual crystals of calcite that form an urchin’s tooth are pointy, interlocking pieces; as the outermost crystals decay, others come to the surface, keeping the too

Pick Your Poison: A Diet Mixer Could Make You Get Drunk Faster

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:13:00 GMT

The same amount of liquor causes a higher level of intoxication when mixed with diet soda, compared with regular. Image via Flickr user Joel Olives If you’re mixing up a cocktail and worried about how drunk you’ll feel after finishing it, you might be closely measuring the amount of liquor that you pour in. But recent research suggests that your choice of mixer—whether regular soda or diet—plays a key role in determining how that alcohol affects your body. A new study, published by Cecile Marczinski and Amy Stamates of Northern Kentucky University in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER), indicates that drinking diet soda with liquor causes br

“Earth-Like” Exoplanets May Actually Be Mini-Neptunes

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 01:23:00 GMT

Super-Earth exoplanets may actually be severely uninhabitable, new research suggests. Artist’s rendition from NASA The discovery of planets beyond our solar system, along with recent efforts to catalog them, has fueled the search for rocky planets similar to Earth that may have conditions suitable for life. For the past 20 years, many scientists have focused on locating “super-Earths“–planets heavier than Earth but with masses quite a bit below that of Neptune or Uranus–in the so-called “habitable zone” of their stars. Within this zone, it is theoretically possible for a planet with the right atmospheric pressures to maintain liquid water on i

Why Cockroaches Meticulously Groom Their Antennae

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:03:00 GMT

A cockroach diligently cleans his antenna. Photo by Ayako Wada-Katsumata When encountering a two-inch American cockroach, most people quickly skedaddle the other way or raise a foot to stomp the little creeper out of existence. For those curious few who stick around to quietly observe the roach, however, the insect will inevitably fall into a certain diligent, repetitive motion. First, it reaches its spiny little roach feet up towards its head, then grips the base of one of its antennae and finally, as if it were spinning yarn at triple speed, threads the length of its antennae through its furiously working mouthparts. Insects such as cockroaches, house flies and carpenter ants often

Obesity Could Be the True Killer for Football Players

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:22:21 GMT

On February 3, the Baltimore Ravens and the San Fransisco 49ers will face off in the 47th Super Bowl. When they sit down to watch fans will see players on the field like the Ravens’s Haloti Ngata, a 6’4”, 340 pound defensive end. Bryant McKinnie, the left tackle for the Ravens, is 6'8" and 360 pounds. Leonard Davis, on the 49ers, is 6’ 6” and 355 pounds. Fans and players alike understand some of the risks that come with two 350 pound men slamming into one another. The hidden, long term risks of repeated head injuries have dominated the football headlines this season. But the risks go beyond torn ligaments and bashed heads. Bigger players also have to deal with

The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and his Tower

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:20:28 GMT

Nikola Tesla. Image courtesy of LIbrary of Congress By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination. Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him. “If E

Top Ten Cases of Nuclear Thefts Gone Wrong

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:03:14 GMT

Since 1993, there have been 419 cases of smuggled or stolen nuclear materials worldwide. Today, about 1.6 million kilograms of highly enriched uranium and 500,000 kilograms of plutonium—enough to make more than 125,000 nuclear bombs—exist in nations across the globe. The following ten incidents detail success stories of snatching some of these loose nukes up from the black market. 1992 The first-known thief of weapons-grade fissile material, chemical engineer Leonid Smirnov, smuggles 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of weapons-grade uranium from a Russian state research institute where he worked. He does so over a five-month period, sneaking 50 grams of the material at a time and

Don’t Get Duped: Six Foods That Might Not Be The Real Deal

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 06:59:42 GMT

Made from vinyls and plastics, these fake foods on display in Japan aren’t the only fakes around. Photo by Lombroso, courtesy of wikimedia Is your lemon juice really citrusy sugar water? Is that hunk of white tuna sushi actually escolar, a cheaper fish associated with its own kind of food poisoning? And is your age-defying pomegranate juice just plain-old grape juice with a splash of the good stuff? After winning a seat in the pantheon of so-called “super foods,” pomegranates got a burst of popularity, with consumers craving everything from fresh seeds to juices and teas. But its newfound fame also found it the victim of an age-old problem: food fraud. According to

Honey, I Blew Up the Bugs

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 04:15:08 GMT

A leaf grasshopper (Phyllophorina kotoshoensis). Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.” As a kid, I was an avid bug collector. I had one of those screen-covered bug boxes, and I carried it with me on backyard adventures and forays into the woods behind my house. I have fond memories of the first nights of summer when the fireflies came out–I’d cup the air and catch one, put it in my box and lie belly in the grass, with the box at my nose, watching the little thing light up. My brother and I had ant farms, sea-monkeys and kits to grow monarch butterflies from caterpillars and frogs from tadpoles. Seeing little critters up-close was fasci

Scientists See Insect Outbreaks From Space

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:38:00 GMT

Using new technology, scientists can study how infestations by insects like the western spruce budworm play a role in climate change. Photo by Paul Williams It’s become a destructive cycle in the western U.S.: Warmer temperatures and drought conditions prolong the life cycle of mountain pine beetles, allowing them to prey on the pine, spruce and fir trees that blanket the mountains. The trees turn reddish-brown before dying off–a phenomenon the National Park Service deemed “an epidemic stretching from Canada to Mexico.” There’s widespread concern that such tree mortality creates an excellent fuel source for wildfires. Until recently, scientists were left

Primal Screens: How Pro Football Is Amping Up Its Game

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:00:54 GMT

At football stadiums today, it’s all about the screens. Photo courtesy of Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision It’s the time of year when the National Football League gets a little bit smaller. Sure, the Super Bowl on Sunday is its championship game and more than 100 million people will be watching, but if the outcome isn’t decided in the last two minutes, more people on Monday will be talking about the funniest TV commercials or how Beyonce sang–or didn’t–at halftime or the post-game homage to the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis as he dances off into the sunset. It’s been this way for a while now. As the spectacle of everything around it ha

Solving the Mystery of Owls’ Head-Turning Abilities

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:19:00 GMT

This barred owl shares an adaptation with other owl species that allows it to rotate its head 270 degrees without damaging blood vessels in the neck. Photo via Flickr user The Rocketeer Ever wonder how owls can turn their heads almost all the way around? They have a complex, adaptive network of protective blood vessels that make the structures in our necks look puny–a network that researchers have now dissected, mapped and illustrated for the first time. “Until now, brain imaging specialists like me who deal with human injuries caused by trauma to arteries in the head and neck have always been puzzled as to why rapid, twisting head movements did not leave thousands of ow

VIDEO: See a Thought Move Through a Living Fish’s Brain

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:01:39 GMT

You may have never seen a zebrafish in person. But take a look at the zebrafish in the short video above and you’ll get to see something previously unknown to science: a visual representation of a thought moving through a living creature’s brain. A group of scientists from Japan’s National Institute of Genetics announced the mind-boggling achievement in a paper published today in Current Biology. By inserting a gene into a zebrafish larvae—often used in research because its entire body is transparent—and using probe that detects florescence, they were able to capture the fish’s mental reaction to a swimming paramecium in real time. The key to the technology is a

Obesity Could Be the True Killer for Football Players

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 03:42:37 GMT

Virtual Superhuman Powers Translate into Real Life Helpfulness

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 02:44:27 GMT

A subject uses a helmet and gloves in the real world to enter a virtual world. Photo via Flickr user caseorganic Action-centric video games have gotten a bad rap for their often violent content. Previous research says the brutal material can leak into real-world behavior, producing more aggression and triggering physiological changes in children’s brains. But what about virtual reality situations that put players in rescue-mode without the gore and pillaging? What happens in these types of fantasy worlds also translates into real-life behavior, but in a different way: People who are given superpowers meant to save someone in virtual reality are more helpful outside of it. This

How the Star-Nosed Mole ‘Sees’ With Its Ultra-Sensitive Snout

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:01:42 GMT

The utterly strange-looking star-nosed mole sees the world with one of the most sensitive touch organs in the animal kingdom. Photo by Kenneth Catania That’s an actual, earthly animal you’re looking at in the photo above—not, as you might have assumed, a creature out of Star Wars. The star-nosed mole, which resides in the bogs and wetlands of the eastern U.S. and Canada, is roughly the size of a rat when fully-grown. It’s functionally blind and eats insects, worms and small fish. But the most noticeable aspect of the animal is its utterly strange appearance, dominated by its 22-tentacled ultra-sensitive snout, called a star (those aren’t its eyes and face at th

These Machines Will Be Able to Detect Smells Your Own Nose Cannot

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:17:45 GMT

A machine that sniffs out cancer. Photo courtesy of Metabolomx Admittedly, it’s a little hard to imagine smell scientists, but research published earlier this week has those who study the sense of smell taking sides. It comes down to how our noses detect odors. The long-standing explanation is that our noses have receptors that respond based on the shapes of odor molecules. Different molecules fit together with different receptors, the thinking goes, and when a match is made, the receptor tips off the brain that our nose has picked up a whiff of coffee or perhaps a very different smell emanating from the bottom of our shoe. But a conflicting and more exotic theory received a bo

Beatboxing, as Seen Through Scientific Images

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:32:25 GMT

Doug E. Fresh (shown above, performing at the Legends of Hip Hop Tour in February 2011) was a beatboxing pioneer in the 1980s. © Briana E. Heard/Corbis It is always interesting to watch a beatboxer perform. The artist, in the thrust of performing, can reach a compulsive fit as he musters up the rhythmic sounds of percussion instruments a cappella-style. But what does beatboxing looking like from the inside? That is the question that University of Southern California researchers Michael Proctor, Shrikanth Narayanan and Krishna Nayak asked in a study (PDF), slated to be published in the February issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. For the first time, they used re

Feral Cats Kill Billions of Small Critters Each Year

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 05:17:00 GMT

A feral cat, just trying to get by. Photo: Topsynette There are so many ways for a little bird or squirrel to die these days–they can be squished by cars, splattered into buildings, run over by bulldozers, poisoned or even shot. But if you have ever had to clean up a mangled “present” left on your doorstep by a kitty, you’ll know that little creatures can also be killed by pets. Cats in particular have earned a nasty reputation for themselves as blood thirsty killers of wildlife. They have been named among the top 100 worst invasive species (PDF) in the world. Cats have also earned credit for countless island extinctions. Arriving onto the virgin specks of la

Coming Out of the Closet May Be Good For Your Health

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 01:52:29 GMT

Image via Flickr user .reid A new study by a team of researchers from the University of Montreal seems to scientifically support what many have long suspected: For lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals, coming out provides a tangible benefit in terms of both biological and mental health. The findings, published today in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine (the paper is not yet linked online), are the result of a study originally intended to see if, overall, lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals had higher levels of cortisol—a hormone whose presence in the body reflects chronic stress—as well as a greater chance of self-reported negative psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety and depressi

Urban Heat Islands Can Alter Temperatures Thousands of Miles Away From a City

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 06:00:56 GMT

Ambient heat produced by a city’s buildings and cars often gets lifted into the jet stream and affects temperatures in places thousands of miles away. Image via Wikimedia Commons The urban heat island effect—in which heat trapped by large-scale construction and paving cause a city to be several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside—is a well-documented phenomenon that’s been studied for decades. Now, though, a group of atmospheric researchers have discovered that through a different mechanism, cities can also alter the weather over a much wider area—causing temperatures to rise or fall by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit thousands of miles away. As described in a pape

Mona Lisa Travels by Laser, to Space And Back Again

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:13:38 GMT

Art buffs are not the only ones intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In a fun experiment in 2005, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam analyzed Mona Lisa’s famous smile. They ran a scanned reproduction of the painting through “emotion recognition” software, which concluded that Mona was precisely 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry, 1 percent neutral—and completely unsurprised. In 2010, scientists in France used X-ray fluorescence spectrometry on the painting and found that da Vinci applied layers upon thin layers of glazes and paints to achieve the subject’s flawless complexion. Then,

Lightning May Trigger Migraine Headaches

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 02:00:00 GMT

A new study suggests that lightning alone—even without the other elements of a thunderstorm—might trigger migraines. Image via Wikimedia Commons Migraine sufferers know that a variety of influences—everything from stress to hunger to a shift in the weather—can trigger a dreaded headache. A new study published yesterday in the journal Cephalalgia, though, suggests that another migraine trigger could be an unexpected atmospheric condition—a bolt of lightning. As part of the study, Geoffrey Martin of the University of Cincinnati and colleagues from elsewhere asked 90 chronic migraine sufferers in Ohio and Missouri to keep detailed daily diaries documenting

The Most Infamous Komodo Dragon Attacks of the Past 10 Years

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 08:52:09 GMT

A Komodo dragon lounges near the Komodo National Park welcome center on Rinca Island. Photo: Rachel Nuwer Mr. Safina, a local guide working at Komodo National Park, took a particular relish in describing the way a Komodo dragon’s strong jaws can snap a man’s leg in two. He’d lived on Rinca – a speck of land off Indonesia’s Flores Island, and one of the five places Komodo dragons reside – his whole life, and he was used to the various horror stories that surfaced every now and then after a tourist wandered off the trail or a kid got ambushed while playing in the bush. Standing in front of an assembly line of water buffalo, deer and wild horse skulls &

African Dung Beetles Navigate At Night Using the Milky Way

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A new study shows the tiny insects orient themselves by the stars. Image via Current Biology, Dacke et. al. Science has shown us that a number of organisms use the stars for navigation: songbirds, harbor seals and, of course, humans. But a new study by a team of Swedish and South African researchers published today in the journal Current Biology indicates that a rather unexpected creature can be added to this list—the lowly dung beetle. The beetles are known for creating small balls made of animal feces (i.e. dung) and rolling them in straight lines over long distances. They do this because the dung is their main food source—and other beetles often try to steal the dung o

Scientists Dismiss Geo-Engineering as a Global Warming Quick Fix

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:29 GMT

A new study shows that dispersing minerals into oceans to stem global warming would be an inefficient and impractical process. By Kent Smith Installing a giant mirror in space to block sunlight, dispersing mass quantities of minerals into the oceans to suck carbon dioxide from the air and infusing the Earth’s upper atmosphere with sun-reflecting chemicals might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but they’re actual techniques that have been contemplated by scientists as possible quick solutions to climate change. More specifically, they’re examples of geo-engineering, a hotly contested subset of climate science whereby the Earth’s environment is intentionally manipulated in order

The House Where Darwin Lived

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Charles Darwin lived with his wife, children and servants in Down House, a Georgian manor 15 miles south of London in the Kent countryside, for 40 years—from 1842 to 1882. Like all close-knit families, they did not just live in this house, they created a remarkable home here. Emma and Charles adapted Down House and the 20 or so acres of its grounds, extending the building and gardens continually, so they could nurture a large family and a community within it, built on routines, mutual respect, adaptation, tolerance, affection and good humor. In his book Art Matters, the art theorist Peter de Bolla claims that we must attend to what paintings “know,” what knowledge they c

Welcome to America’s Dinosaur Playground

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

A visit to Dinosaur National Monument begins with the usual preposterousness of scale. A life-size Stegosaurus takes up the equivalent of three parking spaces next to the visitor center lot, and a four-foot-long Diplodocus thighbone, mounted on end, is positioned near the entrance like a greeter. But within a minute or two, it’s clear this isn’t your typical dinosaur exhibit. A ranger sidles up to steer your attention to a shuttle bus idling on the far side of the building. The main event is half a mile away, hidden from view in the rubbly hills that make up the Uintah Basin terrain due east of Vernal, Utah. I board the shuttle behind a family of Australians. “Here we

When Did Humans Come to the Americas?

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans. For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse. Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History opened a formal excavation in one particular sink. Below a layer of undisturbed sediment they found nine stone flakes that a person must h

The Komodo Dragon is an All-Purpose Killing Machine

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

It didn’t seem prudent to bring two small children along. We had just docked at a remote island in southeastern Indonesia, and the five-hour hike would traverse a rocky, exposed ridge in the baking heat of the dry season. My companions—a blond Frenchman named Fred, his wife and their two kids—were dressed for a game of shuffleboard. My concern heightened when I saw he had a single water bottle for the four of them. Also, there were dragons. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked Fred, glancing at his sockless feet and leather loafers. We had just met at the tourist dock on Flores the day before. “You are the one who proposed it,” he said, ma

The Building Blocks of Life May Have Come From Outer Space

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Ever since the discovery of organic molecules in a meteorite that landed in Australia about half a century ago, scientists have been tantalized by the possibility that the building blocks of life originated in space. New research is shedding light on how such compounds might have formed and found their way to Earth. Fred Ciesla, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago, and Scott Sanford, a NASA astrophysicist, say our solar system was on the fast track to create life before Earth existed. The scientists made a computer model of the solar nebula—the disk of gas and dust from which the Sun and planets formed 4.6 billion years ago. The primordial debris included icy grains c

Learning From Nature How to Deal With Nature

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:50:23 GMT

The greening of Lower Manhattan. Image courtesy of Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio During his inaugural speech Monday, President Barack Obama uttered a phrase that during last year’s presidential campaign were The-Words-That-Shall-Not-Be-Spoken. He mentioned climate change. In fact, President Obama didn’t just mention it, he declared that a failure to deal with climate change “would betray our children and future generations.” But ask any Washington pundit if Congress will do anything meaningful on the subject and they’ll tell you that that’s as likely as D.C. freezing over in July. Also this week, as it turns out, a study was releas

How Climate Change Affects the Smithsonian

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 04:01:18 GMT

Watching Hurricane Sandy destroy parts of New York City and New Jersey last fall, I was transported back to those painful days spent witnessing Katrina pound the Gulf Coast in 2005. After Katrina killed more than 1,800 people in New Orleans and left the Ninth Ward submerged, I served on the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council’s Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects. That gave me a firsthand view of the storm’s cost, both literal and psychological. Still, because of New Orleans’ uniqueness, lying under sea level, many Americans were able to distance themselves from the tragedy. With Sandy, no such distancing was possible

Origami: A Blend of Sculpture and Mathematics

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 03:17:00 GMT

This origami structure, called “Green Cycles,” by Erik Demaine and his father Martin required a week of improvisation to assemble. Credit: Renwick Gallery The shape of a Pringle, mathematically speaking, is called a hyperbolic paraboloid. Artists have been folding paper into this shape for years. The twist? Hyperbolic paraboloids shouldn’t exist in origami—it’s impossible to make such a 3D shape using only the creases pressed into paper by hand. By that logic, some of Erik Demaine’s artwork shouldn’t exist either. Demaine, the world’s top computational origami theorist, has created a series of sculptures by folding concentric squares into

Men Commit Scientific Fraud Much More Frequently Than Women

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:00:00 GMT

Image via Wikimedia Commons Next time you’re reading about a scientific finding and feeling a bit skeptical, you may want to take a look at the study’s authors. One simple trick could give you a hint on whether the work is fraudulent or not: check whether those authors are male or female. According to a study published yesterday in mBio, men are significantly more likely to commit scientific misconduct—whether fabrication, falsification or plagiarism—than women. Using data from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, this study’s authors (a group that includes two men and one women but we’re still trusting, for now) found that out of 215 life scienc

Nanoparticles With a Heart of Gold Can Kill Cancer Cells

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:23:53 GMT

Gold’s been used for thousands of years to treat disease. Credit: Flickr user covilha Over thousands of years, gold has been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, inner ear infections, facial nerve paralysis, fevers and syphilis. Now, preliminary findings suggest a new application for tiny grains of gold—destroying cancer cells. Gold-carrying nanoparticles are capable of killing a common type of cancer that attacks antibody-making B cells in the blood, according to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This cancer, B-cell lymphoma, originates in the lymph glands and is the most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Last year, it res

Watch Jupiter “Kiss” the Moon Tonight

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 05:27:38 GMT

Jupiter, which is now close to the Moon in the night sky, will be less than a finger’s width from the Moon tonight. Over the weekend, the Sun moved into the constellation Aquarius, blocking it from view in the night sky. Although the “Age of Aquarius” of popular culture is far off, tonight some Western Hemisphere observers will get a little bit of astronomical free love as the Jupiter–the second brightest planet in the night sky (the brightest being Venus)–kisses the Moon. To sky watchers in most of North America, the planet and the Moon will flirt: Jupiter will be less than a finger’s width from the waxing Gibbous Moon. The time of their closest ap

Just Twenty-Nine Dominoes Could Knock Down the Empire State Building

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:01:00 GMT

The domino effect—a cascade, a chain reaction, the propagating consequence of cause and effect—is a familiar metaphor, invoked when people want to convey that an action will have far-reaching effects. As it is usually envisioned, “the domino effect” is a series of similar-sized blocks tumbling down in turn. But in a 1983 study, University of British Columbia physicist Lorne Whitehead demonstrated the true power of the domino effect. As showcased by University of Toronto professor Stephen Morris, dominoes can actually knock down things about one-and-a-half times their size. Starting from a domino just five millimeters tall, says Morris, it would take just 29 progre

The Gory Details of Artist Katrina van Grouw’s Unfeathered Birds

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 03:30:06 GMT

Great Hornbill (Buceros bicornis). © Katrina van Grouw. Katrina van Grouw’s new book The Unfeathered Bird is a work of passion. A former curator in the ornithological division of London’s Natural History Museum, the fine artist, based in Buckinghamshire, England, has used her experience in ornithology and taxidermy to draw, over the course of her career, 385 beautiful illustrations of birds—all, as the book’s title suggests, without their feathers. Her work shows the skeletal and muscular systems of 200 different species, from ostriches to hummingbirds, parrots to penguins, in life-like poses. Collage of Arts and Sciences interviewed van Grouw by email. When did you

A Lucky Two Percent of People Have a Gene for Stink-Free Armpits

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 02:00:00 GMT

Image via SuperFantastic It’s conventional wisdom that three things in life are inevitable: death, taxes and smelly armpits. But the third trouble on that list, it turns out, only afflicts 98% of us. According to a group of researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK, 2 percent of people (at least in their survey) carry a rare version of the gene ABCC11 that prevents their armpits from producing an offensive odor. The study, published yesterday in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, examined 6,495 British mothers who have been part of a longitudinal health study since they gave birth in either 1991 or 1992. About 2 percent—117 mothers, to be exact—had

Researchers Discover New Method of Barnacle Sex

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 02:45:00 GMT

The gooseneck barnacle (with a relaxed penis at arrow) is capable of a method of sex previously unobserved in barnacles, upending 150 years of theory. Image via Barazandeh, et al. Proc. R. Soc. B. Barnacles are renowned for the size of their penises. The strange-looking creatures, which live inside shells glued to rocks or boat hulls, have outsized members that are among the longest in the animal kingdom relative to their size—their penises can stretch up to eight times their body length. Barnacles can even change the size and shape of their penis depending on the amount of wave action in their ocean real estate. Perhaps this is why the sex lives of barnacles have long been of

Can a Buzzing Fork Make You Lose Weight?

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 01:50:00 GMT

The HapiFork wants to make you less piggish. Photo courtesy of HapiLabs. Utensil history was made last week and I, for one, took pleasure in seeing that we had finally evolved beyond the spork or, as some of you may know it, the foon. But sadly, the unveiling of the HapiFork at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was not universally greeted with great jubilation, but rather with a fair amount of ridicule. Produced by a Hong Kong company called HapiLabs, the HapiFork is curious little thing. It looks like a fork and works like a fork, but it vibrates like a cellphone. And why it buzzes is the reason the media largely responded with one big group eyeroll. See, the HapiFork is a fork

New Study Suggests Crabs Can Feel Pain After All

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 11:00:00 GMT

As part of a new study, shore crabs that were given a mild electrical shock responded in a way indicating they felt pain. Credit: Queen’s University Belfast Can crabs feel pain? New research on the clawed crustaceans suggests the answer is yes. A group of UK researchers came to this conclusion by examining the reactions of common shore crabs to mild electric shocks in a study released today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The key to their finding is the distinction between the nervous system activity known as nociception and pain, which is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. For years, many researchers assumed crustaceans such as crabs experienced

Plants Flower Nearly a Month Earlier Than They Did A Century Ago

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

The wild columbine, among other plants, now flowers nearly a month earlier than it did in the 1800s. Image via Wikimedia Commons Compared to extreme drought, blistering heat, massive wildfires and tropical cyclones, the latest indicator of climate change is unexpectedly attractive: early spring flowers. According to a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, unusually warm spring weather in 2010 and 2012 at a pair of notable sites in the eastern U.S. led to the earliest spring flowering times on record—earlier than any other time in the last 161 years. The researchers involved, from Boston University, the University of Wisconsin and Harvard, examined the flowers at two si

NASA Drones to Study Stratosphere for Climate Change Clues

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:15:17 GMT

The unmanned Global Hawk will conduct NASA’s first climate change research in the stratosphere. Image by NASA/Jim Ross NASA first dipped its toe into climate-change research in the 1980s by using satellite and aircraft imaging. Its efforts grew more serious with the launch of a large network of satellites in 1991. And by 2004, the agency was spending $1.3 billion annually on climate science. It now has more than a dozen spacecraft studying everything from the oceans to the atmosphere to the cryosphere (the Earth’s frozen bits). On Friday, it will add the stratosphere to that list when it launches an unmanned Global Hawk aircraft from California’s Edwards Airforce Base. The proje

Covered in Ink, Cross-sections of Trees Make Gorgeous Prints

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:16:00 GMT

Ash, 80 years old. © Bryan Nash Gill. When I phoned Bryan Nash Gill last Thursday morning, he was on his way back from a boneyard. The New Hartford, Connecticut-based artist uses the term not in its traditional sense, but instead to describe a good spot for finding downed trees. “I have a lot of boneyards in Connecticut,” says Gill. “Especially with these big storms that we have had recently. Right now, in the state, the power companies are cutting trees back eight feet from any power line. There is wood everywhere.” Eastern Red Cedar, 77 years old. © Bryan Nash Gill. Gill collects dead and damaged limbs from a variety of indigenous trees—a

Hair and Eye Color Can Now Be Determined for Ancient Human Skeletons

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 02:00:52 GMT

A new DNA analysis method reveals how ancient skeletons would have looked in the flesh. Image via Jolanta Draus-Barini, Susan Walsh, Ewelina Pospiech, Tomasz Kupiec, Henryk Glab, Wojciech Branicki and Manfred Kayser For years, when museums, textbooks or other outlets attempted to illustrate what a particular ancient human skeleton would have looked like in the flesh, their method was admittedly unscientific—they basically had to make an educated guess. Now, though, a group of researchers from Poland and the Netherlands has provided a remarkable new option, described in an article they published in the journal Investigative Genetics on Sunday. By adapting DNA analysis methods originall

Long-Term Marijuana Use Could Have Zero Effect on IQ

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Last summer, a study found that long-term cannabis use reduced cognitive skills. A new study seems to say the opposite. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Bokske Last summer, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sparked a new round of worries about the dangers of smoking pot—especially for those who start smoking at younger ages. The study found that consistent marijuana use gradually eroded cognitive functioning and IQ, and with the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington, it’s made an appearance in a number of articles arguing that legalized pot poses a serious health hazard. Today, though, a new study published in t

Scientists Finally Figure Out How Squids Mate

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 01:51:00 GMT

Image:Smithsonian Animal sex is a strange thing to us. Spiders eat their mates, honey bees’ testicles explode, garter snakes have giant orgies, and snails have their genitals on the necks. But there are also all sorts of animals that we actually have never seen get it on. Squid were one of them. But no longer! Scientists have finally filmed some squid sexy times, and here is the footage: Scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History describe the squid love this way: Undaunted by the bright lights of the remote controlled sub filming their activity some 1,400 meters down in the Gulf of Mexico, the two deep-sea squ

Communication Towers Are Death Traps for Threatened Bird Species

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 04:07:16 GMT

Each year, around 5,300 Golden Warblers – a threatened species – die from collisions with communication towers. Photo: Brian Small Beneath massive communication towers, fallen bird bodies pile up like confetti. They collide with the steel structures—which can reach heights twice that of the Empire State Building—or fly into the miles of cables radiating around the beacons. Each year, nearly 7 million birds lose their lives to these web-like traps of wire and metal—27 times more birds than were killed in the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. The killing season peaks during the time nocturnal migratory birds make their way between Canada and the U.S. Flying in the darkness,

Scorchingly Hot 2012 Riddled With Extreme Weather

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 05:29:00 GMT

New Mexico’s 2012 Gila Wildfire was the largest in the state’s history. By Gila Forest Earlier this week we learned that 2012 ranks as the hottest year on record, with an average temperature more than three degrees higher than the average for the 20th century. But a deeper look into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual climate report shows that, in the United States, 2012 was also riddled with extreme weather events. In fact, it was the second-most extreme year on record for weather, according to the U.S. Climate Extremes Index, which analyzes variations in precipitation, temperatures and land-falling tropical cyclones. There was a fre