Scientific American

Auto-dicted: Sans a Major Diversion of U.S. Transportation Dollars to Mass Transit, Urban Traffic Congestion May Not Ease

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: Short of massive efforts to build a public transportation infrastructure, which doesn’t appear likely anytime soon, what is being done to address traffic congestion, which is reaching absurd levels almost everywhere? --John Daniels, Baltimore

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Introducing the Newest Scientific Measurement: a "Rosenfeld" for Energy Savings

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:45:00 EST

Energy-efficiency gurus want to create the "Rosenfeld" as a simple unit of energy savings.

It may not roll off the tongue like the ohm, watt or volt, but it would follow in their tradition. Many call Arthur Rosenfeld, a recently retired member of the California Energy Commission , the "godfather of energy efficiency." One Rosenfeld would represent saving 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year -- the same amount generated by a 500-megawatt coal-run power plant .

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Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:35:00 EST

Here's how to make a solar cell from silicon : take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn it into a photovoltaic device. That process has at least two flaws: such silicon is very expensive, as much as $300,000 for a wafer, and sawing it turns as much as half of that very expensive silicon into wasted grit. [More]

Few Studies Compare the Efficacy of Medical Treatments

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:00:00 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]

Message to Mosquitoes: Urine Trouble

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:50:08 EST

You know how uncomfortable it feels when you really have to go to the bathroom? And you have to hold it in? If researchers get their way, disease-carrying mosquitoes will spend their last moments being that uncomfortable. Cornell University scientists [Peter M. Piermarini, et al] have been trying to disrupt the life cycle of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue fever. The mosquitoes pick up the virus when they feed on one human and transmit it in their saliva to their next victim.

There’s no vaccine for dengue, and no fully protective treatment. So the only recourse has been to figure out how to best kill the mosquitoes themselves. Here’s where urination comes in. When the mosquito takes a blood meal, it has to get rid of fluid and salt so it doesn’t overload--and die. Scientists have discovered a key protein in the renal tubes of these mosquitoes that helps with the necessary excretion. Blocking the protein keeps a mosquito from urinating. [See http://bit.ly/defrih ] Without whizzing, they become too heavy to fly away. The researchers say they’re thus more likely to be swatted or eaten. So look for new insecticides that stop mosquitoes from lightening their liquid load. With fatal results.

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How to Make a Cheap Silicon Solar Cell

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:34:59 EST

1366 Technologies can grow a solar cell directly from melted silicon

Chimps Talk with Their Hands

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

The origins of language have long been a mystery, but mounting evidence hints that our unique linguistic abilities could have evolved from gestural communication in our ancestors. Such gesturing may also explain why most people are right-handed.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center recently examined captive chimpanzees and found that most of them predominantly used their right hand when communicating with one another--for example, when greeting another chimp by extending an arm. The animals did not show this hand preference for noncommunicative actions, such as wiping their noses. Such lateralized hand use suggests that chimpanzees have a system in their left brain hemisphere that is coupled to the production of communicative gestures, says study author William Hopkins. The same cerebral hemisphere is host to most language functions in humans, which hints that an ancestral gestural system could have been the precursor for language, he says.

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Why is talking with gestures easier than talking without them?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Why is talking along with gestures so much easier than trying to talk without gesturing? -- Lionel Halvorsen, Cornith, Tex.

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End-of-Days Danger

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

I don’t know how many e-mails I have received from children who are terrified that 2012 will somehow involve the end of life as we know it, all because of an unfounded fringe religious prophecy that has received mass-market exposure with the release of a recent Hollywood movie. I have tried to reassure those children (and not a few adults) that this date represents nothing more cosmically special than the year of the next presidential election.

Having said that, however, I just realized there might be a genuine connection between 2012 and an end-of-days menace!

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Invasion of the Drones: Unmanned Aircraft Take Off in Polar Exploration

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

A multinational, robotic air corps is quietly invading the polar regions of the earth. Some catapult from ships; some launch from running pickup trucks; and some take off the old-fashioned way, from icy airstrips. The aircraft range from remote-controlled propeller planes--of the type found at Toys “R” Us--to sophisticated, high-altitude jets. All are specially outfitted, not with weapons but with scientific instruments.

Unmanned aircraft have made headlines in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the technology has quickly trickled down to scientists seeking a less expensive, safer way to study the earth’s poles. Researchers have begun to put unmanned aerial systems, or UASs, to a variety of tasks, from monitoring the ozone layer to counting seal populations. Thanks to lower costs and improved technologies, “it’s absolutely exploded in the past couple of years,” says Elizabeth Weatherhead, who is an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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One's Enough: People Who Donate a Kidney Live Just as Long as Those Who Don't

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:00:00 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]

Fighting aliens with aliens: U.K. imports insect species to tackle invasive plant

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:14:00 EST

For the first time in U.K. history, an alien species (meaning one that is not native to the area) will be let loose in the kingdom to combat the growth of another species--also introduced. [More]

PET project: Using organic catalysts to make more biodegradable plastics

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST

Whereas most discarded plastic water and beverage bottles (those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow) can be recycled , the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new plastic bottles. This is because the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic polymer used to make the original bottles is often made with the help of metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts that linger in the recycled material and weaken it over time. [More]

Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:31:00 EST

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That's because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode to make, you guessed it, CO2. It takes roughly 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to make just one kilogram of aluminum via electrolysis. [More]

Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:01:00 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]

Liquid Metal Battery Stores Large Amounts of Electricity

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:16:34 EST

Funding from ARPA-E could allow researchers to take a liquid metal battery from a 'shot glass size cell to a pizza box cell.'

Seeking Transformational Energy Technologies

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:01:08 EST

[ This special issue podcast is longer than the usual 60 seconds. ]

Last week, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy held its inaugural conference in Washington, D.C.--a direct response to a growing sense that the U.S. is losing its technology lead when it comes to the race for cleaner ways to produce and use energy. "We have a Sputnik moment right now. We are losing our technology leadership and we are falling behind."

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Trichodesmium : The world's most famous nitrogen fixer

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:42:00 EST

Editor's Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident and scientist Jeremy Jacquot are traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to sample and study nitrogen fixation in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the sixth blog post detailing this ongoing voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com .

Imagine you’re in space, floating high above the Earth. Picture the world’s oceans, glimmering sapphire under the heat of the sun and the protection of the ozone layer. Look closer, there’s a patch of brown in the middle of all that blue. It’s a bloom of phytoplankton called Trichodesmium , a “world famous” nitrogen fixer. [More]

Can Aging Nuclear Reactors Be Safe?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:30:00 EST

On Nov. 4, 2008, two divers were cleaning sludge and silt from an entry bay for water pumps that serve Constellation Energy Nuclear Group's Nine Mile Point nuclear power plant near Oswego, N.Y.

In the midst of the operation, the diver and the hose tender shifted their positions and the diver lost control of a plastic suction hose, leaving its trailing section in front of one of the water pipe entries. The force of the water flow, at 9,000 gallons a minute, severed a section of hose and sucked it into one of the system's pumps, fouling it. As the team tried to cope with that problem, a smaller piece of the unattended free end of the hose was pulled into a second water pump, according to an inspection report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission .

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Belief in the Brain

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Religious belief may seem to be a unique psychological experience, but a growing body of research shows that thinking about religion is no different from thinking about secular things--at least from the standpoint of the brain. In the first imaging study to compare religious and nonreligious thoughts, evaluating the truth of either type of statement was found to involve the same regions of the brain.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used functional MRI to evaluate brain activity in 15 devout Christians and 15 nonbelievers as the volunteers assessed the truth or falsity of a series of statements, some of which were religious (“angels exist”) and others nonreligious (“Alexander the Great was a very famous military ruler”). They found that when a subject believed a statement--whether it was religious or not--activity appeared in an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is an area associated with emotions, rewards and self-representation.

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Does Getting Fat Protect against Fat?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:10:08 EST

Everyone knows that obesity is bad for your health. Packing on the pounds, we’re told, leads to all sorts of medical problems: high cholesterol, insulin resistance, greater risk of diabetes and heart disease. But researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center see things a little differently. In a paper in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism [see http://bit.ly/bKaP33 ], they argue that being fat can actually protect us from these disorders. [More]

Scooting toward Oblivion

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

There’s a story about a truck driver who passed the long, lonely hours in his big rig knitting sweaters. His hands thus otherwise occupied, he steered with his knees. A highway patrol officer noted this behavior and set out after the truck driver. As the cop got close, he commanded via his vehicle’s loudspeaker, “Pull over.” To which the trucker shouted back, “No, it’s a cardigan.”

Though not a bona fide law-enforcement officer myself, I sometimes act in loco centurion while on the road. I do this by sharing safety tips with distracted motorists, such as “Slow down!” or “Pick a lane!” or, my go-to line, “Get off the phone!”

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The Psychology of the Taboo Trade-Off

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST

Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless.

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Shellfish Could Supplant Tree-ring Climate Data

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST

By Richard A. [More]

Seeing the Little Picture: Novel Nanocoating Gives Atomic Force Microscope Users a Better Look at Individual Molecules

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:20:00 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]

Chameleons' tongues still snappy in cool temperatures

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:01:00 EST

When the weather cools, ectothermic (cold-blooded) animals slow down, which should be good news for their potential prey. But the colorful chameleon has found a way to keep feeding at top speeds even in lower temps: an elastic-tissue tongue, which unlike regular muscles, can uncoil nearly as fast in lower temperatures as it can in warmer ones. [More]

Will Politics Slow the Wind?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:30:00 EST

Not many years ago, there wasn't enough wind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying.

A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region's wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward.

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Accents Trump Skin Color

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Children, like adults, use three visible cues--race, gender and age--to arrange their social world. They prefer to make friends with kids similar to them on these traits. New research shows that verbal accents may be equally important in guiding youngsters’ social decisions--in fact, accents may be even more important than race.

Working at Harvard University, developmental psychologist Katherine D. Kinzler and her colleagues first showed American five-year-olds photographs of different children paired with audio clips of voices and asked which ones they preferred as a friend: a child who spoke English, one who spoke French, or one who spoke English with a French accent. Even though the subjects understood the French-accented English, they were almost four times more likely to choose the native English speaker as a friend.

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Attention Shoppers: You Underestimated Your Bill

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:27:08 EST

So, they’re scanning your items at the grocery store, and when the last tomato gets bagged you’re stunned at the cost. How did you spend so much? Maybe those cherries were 12 bucks a pound. Or maybe you should have paid more attention to what you put in the wagon. Then again, maybe not. Because a new study in the Journal of Marketing [see http://tinyurl.com/yl5dbxg ] shows that the harder shoppers try to keep track of what they’re spending, the worse they actually do. [More]

Worm Charmers (preview)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

If you happen to be hiking in the right part of Florida at dawn, you might catch the sound of a predator hidden in the vegetation. Surely an alligator must be the source of these calls, you say to yourself. But the sound does not come from an alligator, or a mother bear, or some newly introduced predator from the Amazon. It comes from a human predator--a “worm grunter.”

Worm grunters have mastered the art of charming worms out of their burrows so they can be collected and sold as bait. First, the hunters pound a stob, or wooden stake, into the soil, and then they rub the stake with a flat piece of metal called a rooping iron. The vibrations resonate through the ground. In response, hundreds of large earthworms emerge, some as far as 12 meters from the baiter.

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USA memory championship

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST

Contestants put their brains to the test at the USA Memory Championship.

Another reason vitamin D is important: It gets T cells going

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:01:00 EST

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a rapidly expanding inventory of ailments--including heart disease , cancer and the common cold . A new discovery demonstrates how the vitamin plays a major role in keeping the body healthy in the first place, by allowing the immune system's T cells to start doing their jobs. [More]

Robotic battles in India

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:30:00 EST

The annual National Robotic Contest put robot-building skills of Indian students to the test.

Happy People Talk More Seriously

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:00:08 EST

[ Hear movie clip by clicking on audio podcast above. ]

That’s a scene from the 1968 movie The Party with Peter Sellers attempting small talk. And sometimes small talk can lead to interesting connections.

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Endangered in a Dangerous Land: Afghanistan expands its protected species list, including the "world's least-known bird"

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST

Nine months after it created its first list of protected endangered species , the government has added 15 more to the list, including what has been billed as "the world's least-known bird." [More]

Genetics in the Gut: Intestinal Microbes Could Drive Obesity and Other Health Issues

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:00:00 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]

Consumer Electronics: More Than Just Fun and Games

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST

Video games, e-readers, smart phones and other gadgets have changed the way we interact with each other and the world around us. What's next? [More]

Magic Fingers: Digging Into Multi-Touch Technology with Both Hands

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST

At Perceptive Pixel 's offices on Manhattan's West Side, Jefferson Han stands in front of a megasize multi-touch screen and runs his fingertips across the display. Each finger leaves a trail of colored pixels in its wake, causing the display to look, briefly, like it has been scratched by a set of digital claws. [More]

Can solid-oxide fuel cells like the Bloom box remake the energy landscape?

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:34:00 EST

The fuel cell has a long history. Various types of fuel cells have been part of the NASA space program, and the basic science of how fuel cells work--an energy carrier comes in, creates a flow of charge in the anode, which migrates to the cathode creating a current, and separated by some form of electrolyte--has been known for more than a century. Yet, Bloom Energy believes the time is finally right for one of the more promising fuel-cell technologies--solid-oxide fuel cells, so-called because the electrolyte is a solid rather than the more common liquids--to produce electricity on a grander scale. [More]

Galileo backed Copernicus despite data

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:22:00 EST

By Katharine Sanderson

Galileo Galilei was right: Earth moves around the Sun, just as Nicolaus Copernicus said it did in 1543. [More]

A need for new nukes? "Modular reactors" for energy attract interest

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:31:00 EST

The entire budget of the U.S. Department of Energy branch that covers today's energy mix--from cleaning up energy generation's environmental aftermath to energy efficiency programs and renewable energy development--is $10 billion. That's enough to "either build one supercollider on the basic end or one nuclear power plant on the applied end," said Kristina Johnson, the undersecretary in charge of the branch, at the ARPA-E conference on March 3. In other words, nuclear power ain't cheap. [More]

Methane Leaks off Siberian Coast, Speeding Climate Change

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:30:00 EST

A large amount of methane is bubbling up from the ocean floor east of Siberia at a surprising rate and could accelerate climate change, researchers said yesterday.

The gas is bubbling up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf because warming ocean water is thawing permafrost , allowing methane trapped underneath to escape. The amount of methane emitted by that one patch of seabed roughly equals the amount scientists believed was released by all of the world's oceans.

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What Can Past Climate Change Reveal about Human Adaptation?

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:30:00 EST

Research on climate change today focuses mostly on the future, taking stock of how humans have influenced the planet and using computer models to project unwanted changes like warming temperatures or rising seas and ways we might avoid them.

But a new report suggests that there's value in looking at not just how humans shape the climate, but how the climate shaped human development going back millions of years.

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Want TV in 3-D? Then You'll Still Have to Wear Silly Glasses--At Least for Another Decade

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:15:00 EST

Hold onto your remote control: 3-D television is on the way . By the end of the year, most of the major TV manufacturers, including LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony, will be selling displays capable of showing 3-D movies and other programming. Unfortunately, none of the models going on sale this year will eliminate the least pleasant aspect of the 3-D viewing experience--those often uncomfortable and frequently silly-looking spectacles. 3-D TV for the naked eye does not exist--at least not yet. [More]

Mosquitoes, Not Birds, Made West Nile National

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:40:08 EST

In 1999 West Nile virus infected its first American, in New York. By 2004, the disease had spread across the country. Researchers speculated that, for the disease to spread so far so quickly, birds must have helped. Some species could carry the disease and pass it on to mosquitoes, which would then infect humans. But a report published March 2nd in the journal Molecular Ecology [not available online as this episode was posted] says mosquitoes didn’t need a middleman. Or in this case, a middle bird. [More]

Keeping math whizzes off the street--Off Wall Street, that is

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Launching a successful start-up these days takes more than a good idea--in the digital age a revolutionary quantitative approach can be just as effective as a solid business plan, if not more so. Take Google --it was hardly the first search engine to come along (remember Lycos ? AltaVista ?). But the company's PageRank algorithm vaulted it over superficially similar competitors in just a few short years. [More]

Playing the Body Electric

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Each new generation of astronomers discovers that the universe is much bigger than their predecessors imagined. The same is also true of brain complexity. Every era’s most advanced technologies, when applied to the study of the brain, keep uncovering more layers of nested complexity, like a set of never ending Russian dolls. We now know that there are up to 1,000 different subtypes of nerve cells and supporting actors--the glia and astrocytes--within the nervous system. Each cell type is defined by its chemical constituents, neuronal morphology, synaptic architecture and input-output processing.

Different cell types are wired up in specific ways. For example, a deep layer 5 pyramidal neuron might snake its gossamer-thin output wire, the axon, to a subcortical target area while also extending a connection to an inhibitory local neuron. Understanding how the brain’s corticothalamic complex creates any one conscious sensation necessitates delineating these underlying circuits for the 100 billion cells in the brain.

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MIND Reviews: Temple Grandin

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Temple Grandin HBO Films [More]

Recommended: Amazing Animals ... And More

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

Life: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behaviour by Martha Holmes and Michael Gunton. University of California Press, 2010

[More]

Heavy antimatter created in gold collisions

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST

By Geoff Brumfiel

Physicists have rooted through a morass of collisions to find the heaviest antimatter nucleus yet inside one of their particle accelerators.

Collisions between gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York, have yielded heavy isotopes of antihydrogen that include a subatomic particle known as an antistrange quark, which is heavier than less unusual up or down quarks. [More]