Scientific American - News

Consciousness-Raising: Kick-Starting the Brain's Dopamine System May Revive Some Vegetative Patients

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:23:00 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

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:00:00 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

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:20:00 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

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:31:00 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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Shields Up: Magnetized Rocks Push Back Origin of Earth's Magnetic Field

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:22:00 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

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:30:00 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?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:01:00 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

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:48:00 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]

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:00 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

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:31:00 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

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:30:00 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 Newborn Titanosaurs

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:40:00 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

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:35:00 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

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:30:00 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

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST

The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press. [More]