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Scientific American - News (38 unread)

Farm Pesticides Linked to Skin Cancer

Posted: March 31st, 2010, 11:35am EDT

Workers who apply certain pesticides to farm fields are twice as likely to contract melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, according to a new scientific study. [More]
Look Sharp: Video Search Engine Helps Monitor Criminals, Employees and Consumers Alike

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 4:30pm EDT

Digital video surveillance has become a staple of security systems used by banks, supermarkets and other businesses in the past few years because the technology produces better quality video that is easier and cheaper to archive than tapes. The technology's Achilles' heel, however, has been its rudimentary search capabilities that use video time stamps to help locate specific footage. This is changing, as technology companies pour resources into making video search engines that they hope will do for surveillance footage what Google, Yahoo and other search engines have done in making the Web's vast resources more accessible. [More]
Can the Green Economy Survive in a Policy Vacuum?

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 12:45pm EDT

SAN FRANCISCO - The green economy continues to show almost remarkable signs of vitality, business leaders say, despite the near-total collapse of global talks, stalemate in Washington, D.C., and polls showing decreased urgency to tackle climate change. [More]
Thinking on the Envelope: Finding a Medical "Silver Bullet" to Disable Many of the World's Deadliest Viruses

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 12:30pm EDT

Benhur Lee may have discovered a medical silver bullet that can disable pandemic HIV, exotic Ebola, the common flu and possibly every kind of enveloped virus on the planet. An added bonus is that those viruses likely are unable to develop resistance to the compound. [More]
Addicted to Fat: Overeating May Alter the Brain as Much as Hard Drugs

Posted: March 28th, 2010, 6:00pm EDT

Like many people, rats are happy to gorge themselves on tasty, high-fat treats. Bacon, sausage, chocolate and even cheesecake quickly became favorites of laboratory rats that recently were given access to these human indulgences--so much so that the animals came to depend on high quantities to feel good, like drug users who need to up their intake to get high. [More]
Climate Change Imperils the State of the Planet--Will the World Act?

Posted: March 26th, 2010, 5:01pm EDT

NEW YORK CITY--More than 100 countries have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord --the nonbinding agreement to combat climate change hastily agreed to this past December at a summit of world leaders. As signatories, the countries agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions to keep global average temperatures from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. The countries that have signed up to date represent more than 80 percent of the global emissions of such heat-trapping gases. [More]
Awash in Awareness: Knowing a Product's "Water Footprint" May Help Consumers Conserve H2O

Posted: March 26th, 2010, 12:40pm EDT

If you think your morning cup of joe only has 12 ounces (35 centiliters) of water in it, you're sorely mistaken--it has closer to 40 gallons (150 liters). Conservation scientists say it's time consumers become aware of the quantity and source of water that goes into growing, manufacturing and shipping food. [More]
Object Lesson: Pluto's Smallest Neighbors Prove Tough to Find

Posted: March 25th, 2010, 4:40pm EDT

For decades Pluto, later joined by its moon Charon, had a wide swath to itself on astronomers' plots of the solar system--no other bodies were known to dwell beyond Neptune in the long-hypothesized debris field known as the Kuiper Belt. But in 1992 a pair of astronomers turned up 1992 QB1 , a body about 200 kilometers wide circling the sun at a distance of about 6.5 billion kilometers, well beyond Neptune's orbit. The Kuiper Belt, populated by leftovers from the solar system's formation, appeared to be real. [More]
Government 'a Counting: Does the U.S. Census Need a 21st-Century Makeover?

Posted: March 25th, 2010, 11:00am EDT

The Internet Age is upon us. But rather than circulating online, the 23rd Decennial Census stuck with the tried-and-true, and flooded the U.S. Postal Service March 16 through 18 with surveys en route to more than 120 million households nationwide. The 10-question form, which probes for demographic information such as age, sex and race, will help determine how more than $400 billion will be allocated to communities across the country. Citizens and noncitizens alike are required by law to complete the form and mail it back to the U.S. Census Bureau in the accompanying prepaid envelope. That's a lot of mail, but that's not all of it.
In case the mail at your household gets picked up and thrown into the "we'll get to it later" pile, the Census Bureau took the extra step this year of sending out a "heads-up" letter in advance--a "state-of-the-art practice in survey research," according to Census Director Robert Grove's blog--to encourage participation. And in case that's not enough paper for you, an extra nudge was mailed out the week of March 22. This might sound excessive, but the mail-out/mail-back response rate for the 2000 census was only 65 percent, and the missing data has to be collected in person by enumerators at a cost of about $57 per household. So the nudge "more than pays for itself," Groves says.
[More]
No Bones about It: Ancient DNA from Siberia Hints at Previously Unknown Human Relative

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 5:30pm EDT

For much of the past five million to seven million years over which humans have been evolving, multiple species of our forebears co-existed. But eventually the other lineages went extinct, leaving only our own, Homo sapiens , to rule Earth. Scientists long thought that by 40,000 years ago H. sapiens shared the planet with only one other human species, or hominin: the Neandertals . In recent years, however, evidence of a more happening hominin scene at that time has emerged. Indications that H. erectus might have persisted on the Indonesian island of Java until 25,000 years ago have surfaced. And then there's H. floresiensis --the mini human species commonly referred to as the hobbits --which lived on Flores, another island in the Indonesian archipelago, as recently as 17,000 years ago.
Now researchers writing in the journal Nature report that they have found a fifth kind of hominin that may have overlapped with these species. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) But unlike all the other known members of the human family, which investigators have described on the basis of the morphological characteristics of their bones, the new hominin has been identified solely on the basis of its DNA.
[More]
Can Climate Models Predict Global Warming's Direct Effects in Your City?

Posted: March 23rd, 2010, 11:01am EDT

Nobody lives in the global average climate. Nor are the massive grid cells favored by climate models run on today's supercomputers as useful as they could be for planning purposes, given that they can encompass 10,000 square kilometers. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments are teaming up to financially support the development of new computer models aimed at revealing the anticipated effects of climate change at the regional level. [More]
How Will Climate Change Affect Arctic Migrations?

Posted: March 23rd, 2010, 11:00am EDT

LAGO DE SAN IGNACIO, Baja California - The season of migration has come again to the warm blue waters off the coast of Mexico. Mother gray whales are nursing their newborn calves, plumping them up for the 6,000-mile trip next month to summer feeding grounds in the Arctic.
[More]
Case Closed: A Fluky Finding Raises Hopes for Mending Wounds

Posted: March 23rd, 2010, 11:00am EDT

Ellen Heber-Katz, a scientist at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, used to study autoimmunity--that was until she noticed something strange in the mice she was using to model lupus: The small holes that she had poked in their ears to distinguish the animals from one another kept closing. At first she thought her postdoc, Lise Clark, had forgotten to make the holes in the first place. But Clark clearly remembered doing it. Together, Heber-Katz and Clark pierced new holes. Within days, they closed, too. “Every day they got smaller and smaller and then just disappeared,” Heber-Katz says. And, there was no scar--the tissue was perfect. They wondered: “If we could find out what it was that was creating this response, we could treat wounds that way!”
[More]
Has Global Warming Slowed?

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 6:30pm EDT

Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies .
[More]
Can Smiley Faces (and a 14-Step Program to Stop Overconsumption) Save the Global Climate?

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 12:01pm EDT

Energy efficiency seems to make rational economic sense--the less energy used, the more money saved. Yet, in the real world it's actually competition with neighbors rather than cost savings that can drive people to turn down their thermostats, install insulation or simply switch off the lights when they leave a room. Such is the lesson of a host of efforts, ranging from a group called OPOWER's comparative use utility billing to switching from miles per gallon to rate vehicle efficiency to gallons per mile . [More]
Thin Wallets, Thick Waistlines: New USDA Effort Targets Link between Obesity and Food Stamps

Posted: March 15th, 2010, 11:00am EDT

NEW YORK CITY--The bustling food market on the corner of 165th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx almost has a casino feel, except that the chips are dull brown, and rather than cherries on a slot machine real fruit and vegetables are lined up on display. But the cheers are no less exuberant: "This is so awesome!" exclaims one happy customer clutching a handful of tokens and tomatoes. "It's just like Atlantic City." [More]
Consciousness-Raising: Kick-Starting the Brain's Dopamine System May Revive Some Vegetative Patients

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 1:23pm EST

A drug targeting dopamine receptors might be able to "kick-start" an injured brain, enabling certain kinds of vegetative and minimally conscious patients to recover faster. [More]
Researchers Gain New Insights into the Mystery of Thalidomide-Caused Birth Defects

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 2:00pm EST

Half a century ago, thousands of pregnant women in 46 countries took a drug for morning sickness that would later be discovered to cause severe malformations in developing fetuses. Worldwide, roughly 10,000 affected children nicknamed "thalidomide babies" were born with multiple defects, including the characteristic shortened upper limbs (a condition known as phocomelia, Greek for "seal limbs"), before the drug was discontinued in 1961 after four years on the market.
[More]
A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 1:20pm EST

An electric insulator, in the simplest terms, blocks the flow of electric current. So it would be a bit counterintuitive, to say the least, if a current on one side of an insulator could produce voltage on the other. [More]
IPCC Errors Prompt Review by International Science Academies

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 6:31pm EST

African crop yields wither, along with the Amazon rainforest; Himalayan glaciers disappear by 2035. These are the erroneous predictions ascribed to the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--a document reviewed by some 2,500 scientists and other experts as well as vetted by more than 190 countries. So does the fact that a few errors crept into a more than 3,000 page report merit a revision of IPCC processes? [More]
Few Studies Compare the Efficacy of Medical Treatments

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 10:00am EST

The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies--and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients. [More]
One's Enough: People Who Donate a Kidney Live Just as Long as Those Who Don't

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 7:00am EST

Every 30 minutes, all of the blood in our bodies is filtered through two fist-size kidneys. But diseases such as diabetes can cause them to fail, leading to a build-up of chemicals in the blood that without dialysis (mechanical blood filtration) or a kidney transplant would be fatal. And the wait for a new kidney can be long, unless someone you know is willing to give one of theirs to you. [More]
Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 3:01pm EST

WASHINGTON--Every second, our bodies capture carbon dioxide in our tissues, transport it via the blood, and dump it in the lungs from where it is exhaled. This unconscious process is yet another way humans contribute to the accumulation of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere--albeit in a minuscule volume compared with burning fossil fuels . The key to this metabolic process is an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase and it's efficiency at capturing and releasing CO2 is what human engineers want to mimic at the power plant scale. [More]
Seeing the Little Picture: Novel Nanocoating Gives Atomic Force Microscope Users a Better Look at Individual Molecules

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 3:20pm EST

Spotting a disease in its earliest stages can help to facilitate its treatment greatly, yet telltale clues are often hidden at a scale too small to study accurately. This hindrance has some researchers looking for ways to use high-powered atomic force microscopes (AFMs) to study individual molecules for disease markers [More]
Genetics in the Gut: Intestinal Microbes Could Drive Obesity and Other Health Issues

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 7:00pm EST

Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions. The lion's share live in the intestinal tract, where they help fend off bad bacteria and aid in digesting our dinners. But as scientists use genetics to uncover what microbes are actually present and what they're doing in there, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected--and perhaps at times exerting more influence than human genes themselves. [More]
Shields Up: Magnetized Rocks Push Back Origin of Earth's Magnetic Field

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 6:22pm EST

Earth's robust magnetic field protects the planet and its inhabitants from the full brunt of the solar wind, a torrent of charged particles that on less shielded planets such as Venus and Mars has over the ages stripped away water reserves and degraded their upper atmospheres. Unraveling the timeline for the emergence of that magnetic field and the mechanism that generates it--a dynamo of convective fluid in Earth's outer core--can help constrain the early history of the planet, including the interplay of geologic, atmospheric and astronomical processes that rendered the world habitable. [More]
A Theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 5:30pm EST

Although any T. Rex –enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away, and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago. [More]
Is ARPA-E Enough to Keep the U.S. on the Cutting-Edge of a Clean Energy Revolution?

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 5:01pm EST

WASHINGTON, D.C.--At the inaugural summit of ARPA–E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy , no less an august personage than Norman Augustine declared that we were possibly witnessing an inflection point--a turn from old thinking to new. As an aerospace business pioneer, Augustine certainly knows when trajectories change and escape velocities are attained. Indeed, a host of speakers regarded ARPA–E's effort as an Apollo project, a Manhattan project, and Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, even called for ARPA–E to be part of a potential Marshall Plan for energy--a road map to a future of clean power, complete with the Hoover Dam of solar, or the like. [More]
Not Just for Fuel Anymore: Hydrocarbons Can Superconduct, Too

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 3:48pm EST

Superconductivity is one of those nearly magical properties that seem to defy all intuition for how the physical world ought to work. In a superconductor, electric currents flow without resistance --an electron passes unimpeded through the material like a torpedo through some frictionless ocean. After discovering the phenomenon in 1911 Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes showed that an electric current in a closed superconducting loop of mercury would keep flowing long after the driving potential was removed; he demonstrated his discovery by carrying such a persistent current from the Netherlands to England. [More]
Next-Gen Scientists Honored for Evolving Medicine and Renewables [Slide Show]

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 3:00pm EST

The more mysteries that scientists unlock, the more opportunities emerge for the next generation of researchers to transform newfound knowledge into tomorrow's breakthroughs that serve society. The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized several potential breakthroughs Wednesday in awarding four of its $30,000 Lemelson–M.I.T. Student Prizes to those from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.). [More]
A Common Herbicide Turns Some Male Frogs into Females

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:31pm EST

The bountiful fields of the U.S. are awash in atrazine . Some 36 million kilograms of the odorless, white powder are applied on farms to control grassy weeds. Some 225,000 kilograms of the herbicide fall with the rain each year, sometimes up to 1,000 kilometers from the source. All that atrazine may be having another effect: turning male frogs female. [More]
No Implants Needed: Movement-Generating Brain Waves Detected and Decoded Outside the Head

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:30pm EST

Our bodies are wired to move, and damaged wiring is often impossible to repair. Strokes and spinal cord injuries can quickly disconnect parts of the brain that initiate movement with the nerves and muscles that execute it, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) draw the process out to the same effect. Scientists have been looking for a way to bypass damaged nerves by directly connecting the brain to an assistive device--like a robotic limb--through brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Now, researchers have demonstrated the ability to nonintrusively record neural signals outside the skull and decode them into information that could be used to move a prosthetic. [More]
Down the Hatch(ling): Nest-Raiding Snake Gulped New Born Titanosaurs

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 9:40pm EST

An extraordinary set of fossils recovered from Cretaceous period rocks in western India has offered a rare glimpse into a baby dinosaur's first--and last--day on Earth about 67 million years ago. The frightful scene, fossilized by a rapid flow of debris, reveals a titanosaur hatchling's unlikely predator--a snake. [More]
Down the Hatch(ling): Nest-Raiding Snake Gulped Newborn Titanosaurs

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 9:40pm EST

An extraordinary set of fossils recovered from Cretaceous period rocks in western India has offered a rare glimpse into a baby dinosaur's first--and last--day on Earth about 67 million years ago. The frightful scene, fossilized by a rapid flow of debris, reveals a titanosaur hatchling's unlikely predator--a snake. [More]
Climate Change Likely Caused Polar Bear to Evolve Quickly

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 6:35pm EST

Climactic changes might currently be threatening the survival of polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ), but similar shifts appear to have played an important part in bringing the species into existence in the not too distant past. [More]
Mars's Environment Shown to Be Hostile, but Not Untenable for Earthly Microbes

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 3:30pm EST

Microbes similar to those on Earth would have a tough time surviving the harsh environment of Mars, but it is not inconceivable that they could persist there given a little protection, according to a new study. The finding supports similar, previous work and lends credence to the theory that if microbial life ever arose on Mars, it could exist below the planet's surface to this day. [More]
Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 12:00pm EST

The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press. [More]
Could Mini Labs and Plant-Based Vaccines Stop the Next Pandemic?

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:00am EST

The H1N1 virus's rapid spread worldwide last year exposed the weaknesses in the global system for swiftly developing, manufacturing and distributing vaccines for newly identified strains of influenza. In Texas, researchers are attacking the first two of these problems through Project GreenVax , which will use a plant-based approach to vaccine development and a modular manufacturing environment that can scale quickly as vaccine demand grows. [More]