Scientific American

30 under 30: Investigating Molecular Messengers and Human Health

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:45:00 EST

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry. The following profile is the 19th in a series of 30.

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Okinawa and the U.S. military, post 1945

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:25:00 EST

By Lane Johnston Okinawa has had a tumultuous history and a scattered identity throughout the twentieth century. As a Japanese territory before World War II, Okinawans did not ever fully adopted Japanese culture as their own. During WWII, Okinawa was a major location used in the U.S. military's island-hopping towards mainland Japan. After the Battle of Okinawa concluded in June 1945, Okinawa was under control of the U.S. Navy. During the war, up to 160,000 Okinawan citizens, young and old, males and females, were sacrificed by the Japanese army or killed by U.S. military personnel in case they were spies for the Japanese side (Sarantakes 2000). This paved an immediately uncertain and distrustful relationship between Okinawans and the U.S. military in the years after WWII. [More]

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet [Excerpt, Part 2]

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EST

The arrival of filtering required spammers to switch strategy. The carpetbaggers of spam’s youth left the scene, ushering in criminal sophisticates who set to work spoofing the filters. The game had changed. As Finn Brunton recounts in his brilliant history of spam, excerpted here for a second day: “Rather than sales pitches for goods or sites, they [messages] could be used for phishing, identity theft, credit card scams, and infecting the recipient’s computer with viruses, worms, adware, and other forms of dangerous and crooked malware. A successful spam message could net many thousands of dollars, rather than $5 or $10 plus whatever the spammer might make selling off their good addresses to other spammers.” Brunton illustrates the ingenuity of this transformation by detailing the highly inventive litspam--the hijacking of entire texts of Borges or Conan Doyle to waltz past spam filtering algorithms.

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D-Wave's Quantum Computer Courts Controversy

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EST

“I've been doing combative stuff since I was born,” says Geordie Rose, leaning back in a chair in his small, windowless office in Burnaby, Canada, as he describes how he has spent most of his life making things difficult for himself. Until his early 20s, that meant an obsession with wrestling -- the sport that, he claims, provides the least reward for the most work. More recently, says Rose, now 41, “that's been D-Wave in a nutshell: an unbearable amount of pain and very little recognition”.

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Particle Containing 4 Quarks Is Confirmed for First Time

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:45:00 EST

Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Z c (3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter.

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Channel Surfing: Are Dry Ice Sleds Carving the Surface of Mars?

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:30:00 EST

Some things are uniquely Martian. And dry ice hovercraft may be one of them.

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California Set to Lift Restrictions on Egg Donation

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:30:00 EST

California is set to pass a bill that would allow payments over and above 'direct expenses' to be made to women who donate eggs for research. The bill promises to increase the supply of eggs to scientists studying reproduction, but will not eliminate restrictions on research supported by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San Francisco, a major funder of stem-cell research in the state.

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Why Are Wetlands So Important to Preserve?

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk : Why are wetlands so important to preserve? --Patricia Mancuso, Erie, Pa.

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Statistics and Magnetic Socks Shape Modern Tae Kwon Do

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:30:00 EST

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service .

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Costanza and the Whale: Could You Make a Blowhole in One?

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:22:00 EST

In between moonlighting as a fake architect and latex salesman, George Costanza was once a fake marine biologist. His story defines sitcom lore.Caught in another lie while walking the beach with a potential girlfriend, Costanza's supposed expertise was tested by a crowd gathered around a beached whale. He reluctantly waded out to assist. Fifty feet out from shore, an enormous tidal wave threw him on top of the great beast. Face-to-face with the whale's blowhole, he could tell that something was blocking its breathing. George reached in, felt around, and pulled out the obstruction. [More]

Arecibo Telescope Gets Detailed Look at Passing Asteroid

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EST

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How to Become More Resilient

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:39:00 EST

I clearly remember the day in the ninth grade that a classmate accosted me in the hallway of my junior high to recruit me for the high school debate team. I thought he was crazy. My heart would beat frantically at the prospect of answering a question in class. I could not talk in front of people--and I made this clear to my classmate. It didn't matter, he said. The coach was looking for smart kids, he went on, and someone (I am not sure who) had decided I was one of those. My scholarly aptitude seemed irrelevant to me, but he spoke as if the decision had already been made. And it is probably fair to say that this brief conversation changed my life.[caption id="attachment_1595" align="alignleft" width="199" caption="Courtesy of magnezja via Flickr."] [/caption] [More]

What's So Hard about Research?

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:38:00 EST

We are told that the students that we teach are "digital natives." This term implies that from the time they were born, technology has played such a large part in students' lives that they know no other way. Also, it has been noted that digital natives have an aptitude for technology that is significantly different from the older generations (who have been dubbed "digital immigrants"); the joke goes that if you give a digital native and a digital immigrant a new digital camera, the native will be taking pictures before the immigrant has finished reading page two of the manual. The assumption is that this new generation is simply better than us at technology.However, as we wrote about in another article for Scientific American , just because students are digital natives, does not mean that they have skills to figure out all technology, or to use technology in a purposeful way. We noticed that, though these digital natives have the world of information at their fingertips, for some reason they are often unable to take basic problem-solving skills and apply them to simple online research. They had no problem figuring out how to work the newest update to Facebook, but when asked to find out any information that required the smallest amount of critical thinking, students were hampered. The best example we have of this is when we asked students what the most important causes of the Revolutionary War were--we heard a student ask Siri: "What are the most important causes of the Revolutionary War?" When Siri did not know the answer, the student said, "I don't know, I can't find it." [More]

More Than Honey: A New Documentary Offers Spectacular Close-Ups of Bees Mid-Flight and Perspective on the Worldwide Honeybee Crisis

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:30:00 EST

[caption id="attachment_917" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Source: Maciej Czy?ewsk, via Wikimedia Commons"] [/caption]A male honey bee is essentially a winged penis doomed to die immediately after losing his virginity. On summer afternoons, male bees--known as drones--emerge from many different hives and gather in a small swarm. No one is sure exactly how drones pick their "congregation areas" or why they are often in exactly the same place year after year, but the answer likely has something to do with fragrant chemical messages known as pheromones. The drones wait for a virgin queen from a nearby colony to make an appearance and compete for the chance to mate with her mid-flight , crashing into one another as they race after her alluring perfume. If a drone is successful, the act of copulation rips his penis and entrails from his abdomen, so he falls to the ground and dies. The queen mates with as many as 20 drones in a single flight and stores millions of their sperm in an internal pouch called a spermatheca--sufficient supplies for a lifetime of egg-laying. [More]

How to Quickly Add the Integers from 1 to N

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:00:00 EST

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips . Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies.

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Group Finds Big Feet Fine

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:45:08 EST

All humans evolved to find certain female traits attractive, across cultures, because they signal a potential mate's reproductive potential. Right? Actually, a new study finds that cultural norms can also play a big part. At least when it comes to big feet.

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Close Shave for Bill Nye the Science Guy

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:50:08 EST

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Colorado Wildfire Snuffs Over 500 homes; California Fire a Threat

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:10:19 EST

By Keith Coffman and Alex Dobuzinskis

DENVER/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The number of homes destroyed by a Colorado wildfire rose above 500 on Tuesday as rain dampened the flames and allowed damage assessment teams to enter charred neighborhoods, as another threatening blaze grew in California.

Authorities said the so-called Black Forest Fire, which has killed at least two people and has burned in the rolling hills outside Colorado Springs for the past week, was 85 percent contained by Tuesday.

The most destructive fire in Colorado's history has charred 22 square miles (57 square km), destroyed 502 homes, and underscored concerns that prolonged drought conditions in the U.S. [More]

NASA's Grand Challenge: Stop Asteroids from Destroying Earth

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:00:00 EST

There may be killer asteroids headed for Earth, and NASA has decided to do something about it. The space agency announced a new "Grand Challenge" today (June 18) to find all dangerous space rocks and figure out how to stop them from destroying Earth.

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Details in Death of Yuri Gagarin, 1st Man in Space, Revealed 45 Years Later

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:00:00 EST

The circumstances surrounding the death of the first man in space Yuri Gagarin, who was killed in a 1968 jet crash, have long been clouded in theories and rumors. Now, the first man to walk in space says he can reveal what really happened to his friend and fellow Russian cosmonaut.

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Pesticides Spark Broad Biodiversity Loss

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:45:00 EST

Agricultural pesticides have been linked to widespread invertebrate biodiversity loss in two new research papers.

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Dog Genetics Spur Scientific Spat

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:00:00 EST

Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.

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30 under 30: Fueling Industry with Sunlight--and Science with Collaboration

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:45:00 EST

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting . There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry. The following profile is the 18th in a series of 30.

[More]

New Astronauts Face Limited Opportunities for Spaceflight

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:04:00 EST

NASA announced on Monday its 2013 class of astronaut candidates, but the current state of the agency's human spaceflight program makes it hard to get excited about what lies ahead for these remarkable individuals.To mark the announcement, NASA hosted a Google Hangout on Air with several administrators and former astronauts. [More]

A Cosmic Map of the Exoplanets [Interactive]

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:00:00 EST

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Astronomers Search for Signs of Life in the Skies of Distant Exoplanets (preview)

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:55:00 EST

Nobody who was there at the time, from the most seasoned astrophysicist to the most inexperienced science reporter, is likely to forget a press co n ference at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in January 1996. It was there that Geoffrey W. Marcy, an observer then at San Francisco State University, announced that he and his observing partner, R. Paul Butler, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had discovered the second and third planets ever found orbiting a sunlike star. The first such planet, 51 Pegasi b, had been announced by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva a few months earlier--but a single detection could have been a fluke or even a mistake. Now Marcy was able to say confidently that it had been neither. “Planets,” he told the crowd, “aren't rare after all.”

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Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet [Excerpt Part One]

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EST

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The Global Citizens of Scientific American

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EST

Fifteen languages, multiple platforms and one great institution: that is Scientific American , which celebrates its 168th year in August. I had another occasion to appreciate all of the above recently when we held our annual meeting of the international editions in New York City for the first time in many years. The multicultural mix, I have always thought, simply reflects the global collaborative nature of science itself.

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The Elements Revealed: An Interactive Periodic Table

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:15:00 EST

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Latin America Enjoys Abundant Renewable Energy but Lacks Policies for Use

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:00:00 EST

Latin America and the Caribbean could meet 100 percent of their electricity needs with renewable energy, a new Inter-American Development Bank study finds.

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U.S. Kids Born in Polluted Areas More Likely to Have Autism

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:00:00 EST

Women who live in areas with polluted air are up to twice as likely to have an autistic child than those living in communities with cleaner air, according to a new study published today.

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Chad Arrests Suspected Member of Elephant Slaughter Gang

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:57:01 EST

N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Authorities in Chad have arrested a suspected member of a poaching gang accused of slaughtering nearly 200 elephants and killing five Cameroonian park rangers, the environment minister said on Tuesday.

Rising demand for ivory among Asia's newly affluent classes has led to a rise in poaching by well-armed, highly organized criminal gangs that take advantage of Central Africa's security void to prey upon the region's forest elephants.

Idriss Hassan was transporting 124 elephant tusks when he was arrested in the village of Gore, near the border with neighboring Central African Republic.

"Idriss Hassan has operated since 2011 in the Salamat and Guera regions and near the borders between Chad, Cameroon and Central African Republic," Environment Minister Mahamat Issa Halikimi said in a statement published on Tuesday.

The ministry accuses Hassan of belonging to a gang responsible for killing 149 elephants in August 2012 and January this year. [More]

Germany Leans on EU States to Weaken Car Emissions Law

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:48:36 EST

By Barbara Lewis and Charlie Dunmore

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Senior members of the German government have warned EU member states that German automakers could scale back or scrap production plans in their countries unless they support weakened carbon emissions rules, according to diplomatic sources.

With EU governments and lawmakers aiming to finalize the rules next week, which most of the 27 member states back, Germany has stepped up the pressure on them to water down limits on vehicle emissions to protect the country's mighty car industry, particularly luxury makers such as BMW and Daimler.

The sources added that some calls warning EU member states of possible consequences have come from members of Chancellor Angela Merkel's office.

Her office declined to comment.

One EU diplomat said Berlin had reminded Lisbon of Portugal's 78 billion euro ($100 billion) euro zone bailout, which was heavily financed by Germany, in its bid to convince the country to drop its opposition to softer limits.

"They have tried everything at the highest level to pressure member states, in particular countries in the bailout club, to support their proposals," said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Germany seems hell-bent on pressing its interests. [More]

Ethiopia, Egypt Tone Down Talk of War Over Nile Dam

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:31:47 EST

By Aaron Maasho

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia and Egypt cooled talk of war on Tuesday and agreed to more dialogue to resolve a row over a giant dam that the Horn of Africa nation is building on the Nile, on which Egyptians depend on for almost all their water.

Africa's second and third most populous nations have traded barbs in past weeks about Ethiopia's new hydroelectric project, which Egypt fears will reduce a water supply vital for its 84 million people, who mostly live in the Nile valley and delta.

Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi said on June 10 he did not want war, but would keep "all options open", prompting Ethiopia to say it was ready to defend its $4.7 billion Great Renaissance Dam, which lies near the border with Sudan.

Ethiopia summoned the Egyptian ambassador this month after politicians in Cairo were shown on television suggesting they supported Ethiopian rebels and military action.

"Some pronouncements were made in the heat of the moment because of emotions. [More]

Eye-Tracking Software May Reveal Autism and other Brain Disorders

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:30:00 EST

Eye-tracking has become the tech trend du jour . Advertisers use data on where you look and when to better capture your attention. Designers employ it to improve products. Game and phone developers utilize it to offer the latest in hands-free interaction .

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Will You or the Grid Control Your Electric Car?

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:01:00 EST

There's a place in Austin, Texas, where the residents have agreed to be the test subjects for a renewable energy and smart grid future--and it's named after a nut. The Pecan Street demonstration project--part of the newly built 280-hectare neighborhood known as Mueller--has become the largest concentrated community of electric vehicle (EV) owners in the world. The community now has nearly 60 Chevy Volt owners alone, thanks to the demonstration project's commitment to match the federal government's $7,500 rebate incentive, effectively halving the price of the hybrid electric cars. And, in addition to learning where and when EV owners charge up their cars, Volt manufacturer General Motors is hoping to learn from the folks in the Pecan Street project how a residential fleet of electric vehicles might change the electric grid.

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Twitter Makes Crowds Less Predictable

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:00:00 EST

Before June 1, 2013 Turkey’s ruling political party and its leader seemed invincible. They were regarded as the architects of a decade-long economic boom and their public support seemed unshakable. This image shattered in less than a week. They were suddenly described as incompetent and backward with an uncertain political future .

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India on 'War Footing' as Monsoon Floods Kill Scores

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:52:58 EST

By Abhishek Madhukar

DHARAMSALA (Reuters) - Early monsoon rains have swollen the Ganges, India's longest river, swept away houses, killed at least 60 people and left tens of thousands stranded, officials said on Tuesday.

The rains are at least twice as heavy as usual in northwest and central India as the June-September monsoon spreads north, covering the whole country a month faster than normal.

The National Disaster Management Authority said a response force of 12 teams of 45 people each had been in action since Sunday, in addition to the army and border police.

In the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, where officials say at least 60 people had been killed, air force helicopters airdropped commandos to help rescue some of the tens of thousands of people unable to move because of the floods.

"We are on a war footing, we are working day and night," said R. [More]

U.S. States, Greens Delay Lawsuit, Await Obama Climate Plan

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:37:20 EST

By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Environmental groups and a dozen states and cities said Monday they will delay planned legal action against the U.S. [More]

Cultural Images Affect Second Language Usage

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:39:08 EST

Ordinarily, you’d call a pistachio a pistachio. But if you’re, for example, an immigrant from China and you’ve just seen a Ming vase, you might call a pistachio a “happy nut.” Because visual cues can affect language in people with multiple cultural experiences. That’s according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [Shu Zhang et al, Heritage-culture images disrupt immigrants’ second-language processing through triggering first-language interference ]

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Warming Proves Bad for Life in Freshwater Lakes and Rivers

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:00:00 EST

London – Austria's alpine lakes are warming, and that's bad news for the region's fish and economy, according to new research in the journal Hydrobiologia .

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Rich Chinese Export Pollution to Poorer Regions

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:00:00 EST

LONDON – Just as rich nations have passed the responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions to the developing nations, so the rich provinces of China have exported the problem to the poorest regions, according to new research.

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What The Ruling on Gene Patenting Means

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:52:00 EST

Although I mostly think about conservation, ecology and nature, I have a soft spot for medicine and, in particular, genetics. It's partly due to my own family history and experience, partly my interest in how people think about medicine and death, and partly my 6-month internship at Nature Medicine , which began more than two years ago this month.So when Arikia Millikan , editor of LadyBits --a space for "tech-savvy women creating the content we want to consume"--asked me to write my own take on the recent Supreme Court case about gene patenting, I had to give it a go. I didn't write about incentivizing innovation, technical details, or loopholes. I just wrote about how the decision that genes can not be patented will affect our healthcare . And, in particular, I thought about how it should create a more open, positive conversation about genetics and medicine, and the choices it will allow us in the future. [More]

Dragonflies with Backpacks May Advance the Science of Prey Capture

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:23:00 EST

[caption id="attachment_2131" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Dragonfly sporting antenna-laden backpack"] [/caption]Dragonflies are straight "A" hunters, capturing fruit flies in mid-air about 95 percent of the time, a grade that puts a head-of-the-class predator like a lion to shame. [More]

U.S. Bioterror Detection Program Comes Under Scrutiny

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:05:00 EST

A cutting-edge biological terror alert system detected a potential threat in the air one morning back in 2008, threatening to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver for his party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Initial results from a pricey national air sampling system suggested that bacteria that could cause tularemia had been detected. The microbe, Francisella tularensis , might have been weaponized to cause the infectious disease.

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Satellites Show Shrinking Aquifers in Drought-Stricken Areas

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:00:00 EST

In New Mexico, the Rio Grande is trickling through Albuquerque at only a quarter of its normal flow. The parched range and pastureland in the southwest part of the state are all rated in poor condition by the Department of Agriculture.

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Make sense of scents: How to make your dog happy

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:43:00 EST

I have good news for all of us who don't look like Ryan Gosling or Gisele Bundchen: your dog doesn't care. Dogs are much more interested in our smells than our looks. Just watch a dog with his head out a car window -- nose forging ahead. Wind brings innumerable scent molecules directly to the dog's face, which in the dog's world, makes for a pretty good day. * You might look like a one-eyed pig , but to your dog, it's your bouquet that makes you beautiful. [More]

30 under 30: Catalyzing Reactions with Renewable Materials

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:15:00 EST

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Cosmic Cartography: Here Is Your (Local) Universe

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:48:00 EST

[caption id="attachment_4099" align="alignleft" width="252" caption="Our local cosmic terrain (Credit: Helene Courtois)"] [/caption] [More]

Night Noise: What a Sleeping Brain Hears

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:49:00 EST

[caption id="attachment_321" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Chinatown. Photo: Patrick Shen"] [/caption]Earlier this year, a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary film called "In Pursuit of Silence" raised $35,371, exceeding its goal in just a few weeks. On a crowdfunding platform where a new film proposal can pull in nearly 100 times that amount--for Zach Braff's follow-up to "Garden State," precisely $3,105,473--the financing feat was modest. Still, hundreds of contributors shelled out cash , remarkably, for nothing but onscreen peace and quiet. By "exploring the value of silence, our relationship with sound, and the implications of living in a noisy world," promised Patrick Shen, the documentary's director, viewers could indulge in 80 minutes of quiescence. And, for over 35 million Americans suffering from hearing loss, toiling in urban cacophonies roughly 1 decibel louder every year, perhaps that was worth the price of admission. [More]