Scientific American - News

Is It Ethical to Own an iPhone?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:30:00 EST

Recent media reports and ongoing protests over the reportedly abhorrent working conditions at factories where Apple's iPhones are produced have left socially conscious Americans with a dilemma: Is it ethical to own an iPhone?

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Virtual Reality Contact Lenses Could Be Available by 2014

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:00:00 EST

Contact lenses that help enhance normal vision with megapixel 3D panoramic images are being designed by scientists using military funding.

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Temperatures--Not Acid--Could Cook Coral to Death

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:01:00 EST

One of the biggest natural tragedies of recent years is the deterioration of Australia's Great Barrier Reef , a vast structure of coral off the continent's east coast that supports a profusion of wildlife. In addition to overfishing and nutrient pollution, the world's largest natural structure has suffered from rising ocean temperatures. But, perhaps less well known, Australia's west coast has some massive reefs of its own, offshore in the southeastern Indian Ocean. Massive stony corals of the genus Porites swell to the surface, and new research published February 2 in Science suggests those located in the colder waters farthest south are growing better than ever --thanks to warming ocean temperatures.

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Newfound Alien Planet Is Best Candidate Yet to Support Life, Scientists Say

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:15:00 EST

A potentially habitable alien planet -- one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface -- has been found around a nearby star.

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Thanks to Plants, We Will Never Find a Planet Like Earth

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

Astronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants.

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Word-of-Mind: Researchers Decode Words from the Brain's Auditory Activity

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST

Oh, to be a fly on the auditory cortex!

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Volcanoes May Have Sparked Little Ice Age

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:15:00 EST

A mysterious, centuries-long cool spell, dubbed the Little Ice Age, appears to have been caused by a series of volcanic eruptions and sustained by sea ice, a new study indicates.

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Gigantic Radio Telescope to Search for First Stars and Galaxies

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:00:00 EST

More than 20,000 radio antennas will soon connect over the Internet to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and potentially signals of extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Did Leonardo da Vinci Copy His Famous "Vitruvian Man"?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:45:00 EST

Leonardo da Vinci 's drawing of a male figure perfectly inscribed in a circle and square, known as the "Vitruvian Man," illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world. However, new research suggests that the work, which dates to 1490, may be a copy of an earlier drawing by Leonardo's friend.

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Marijuana Mouth Spray: Will Cancer Pain Reliever Be Abused?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:30:00 EST

The medical marijuana drug Sativex, which could be approved in the United States in the coming years as a treatment for pain relief, has little potential for abuse, experts say.

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Fear-Resistance: How Worried Should We Be about "Totally Drug-Resistant" Tuberculosis?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

A few weeks ago a clinic in Mumbai claimed to have identified a dozen patients with a strain of tuberculosis (TB) resistant to all known treatments. TB is a highly contagious lung infection that kills about 1.5 million people each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), so the development of a totally untreatable form of the disease would be cause for alarm. "It conveys that there is no hope, that not a single drug works," says Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal.

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By the Numbers: Autism Is Not a Math Problem

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

At a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association last week, Yale University child psychologist Fred Volkmar gave a presentation on how the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is changing the definition of autism. In his talk, Volkmar came to a startling conclusion: more than half of the people who meet the existing criteria for autism would not meet the APA’s new definition of autism and, therefore, may not receive state educational and medical services.

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Redefining Autism: Will New DSM-5 Criteria for ASD Exclude Some People?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

People have been arguing about autism for a long time--about what causes it , how to treat it and whether it qualifies as a mental disorder. The controversial idea that childhood vaccines trigger autism also persists, despite the fact that study after study has failed to find any evidence of such a link. Now, psychiatrists and members of the autistic community are embroiled in a more legitimate kerfuffle that centers on the definition of autism and how clinicians diagnose the disorder. The debate is not pointless semantics. In many cases, the type and number of symptoms clinicians look for when diagnosing autism determines how easy or difficult it is for autistic people to access medical, social and educational services. [More]

How Google's New Privacy Policy Could Affect You

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST

You’re on the way to a meeting. Traffic seems to be slowing. A text comes in: “You’re going to be late. Take the next exit for alternate route.” It’s from Google.

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Primitive Attraction: Magnetized Moon Rock Points to Lunar Core's Active Past

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:01:00 EST

The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world. But billions of years ago the moon may have been a place of far more dynamism--literally.

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Race and Religion at the Ballot Box: Building a Better Bias Detector

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EST

The color of a candidate’s skin failed to sway voters to depress the lever for either Obama or McCain in the 2008 election, immediate analyses of that contest seemed to suggest. Some pundits hailed it as the first postracial election.

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Children May Be Exposed to Higher Chemical Concentrations Than Their Mothers

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

Children living near DuPont’s plant in West Virginia are exposed to much higher concentrations of an industrial chemical than their mothers, according to a newly published study.

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Has Petroleum Production Peaked, Ending the Era of Easy Oil?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:31:00 EST

Despite major oil finds off Brazil's coast, new fields in North Dakota and ongoing increases in the conversion of tar sands to oil in Canada , fresh supplies of petroleum are only just enough to offset the production decline from older fields. At best, the world is now living off an oil plateau--roughly 75 million barrels of oil produced each and every day--since at least 2005, according to a new comment published in Nature on January 26. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) That is a year earlier than estimated by the International Energy Agency--an energy cartel for oil consuming nations.

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Tame Theory: Did Bonobos Domesticate Themselves?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:50:00 EST

Time and again humans have domesticated wild animals, producing tame individuals with softer appearances and more docile temperaments, such as dogs and guinea pigs. But a new study suggests that one of our primate cousins--the African ape known as the bonobo --did something similar without human involvement. It domesticated itself.

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Why the Supreme Court GPS Decision Won't Stop Warrantless Digital Surveillance

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:10:00 EST

On January 23 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that law enforcement authorities do not generally have a right to affix a GPS tracking device to a suspect's car without first obtaining a valid warrant. Of the many things that can be said about the case, which has been called the most important Fourth Amendment test in a decade , perhaps the most sobering in the long run will be this: the decision is based on technology assumptions that are rapidly becoming irrelevant.

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