Scientific American - Observations

Software behaving badly: Machine learning could resolve issues raised by multi-core processors

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:47:00 EST

What computers have gained in speed with the introduction of multicore processors that split up workloads they may be losing in reliability. This is because software applications are written to execute different actions in a specific order. When different pieces of code are processed out of order (thanks to multi-processors' division of labor), it may cause computers to crash, leaving office workers, researchers, students, gamers and other users staring at a frozen screen. [More]

Condoms for the World Cup and other ways to keep HIV at bay

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:15:00 EST

MIAMI--In three months hundreds of thousands of soccer fans are expected to descend on nine South African cities for the 2010 World Cup. But for so many visitors going to a country where more than 10 percent of the population is estimated to have HIV/AIDS, many public health experts are worried that the event will kick off a spike in transmission. South Africa, in turn, has responded by requesting one billion condoms for the year (many of which will be supplied by the U.K.)--more than twice as many as usual, the BBC noted . [More]

Will the Clean Tech Bubble Burst?

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:45:00 EST

BOSTON--Economic bubbles are now famous, and the collapse of the dot-com business a decade ago made the bursting of bubbles infamous. A panel of experts here at the Going Green East conference yesterday ended up in a lively, entertaining and, at times, contentious debate over whether the growth of so-called clean tech--renewable energy and environmentally friendly technologies--has entered the bubble stage, if that bubble is bursting...or if a bubble has ever existed.

Lucky for anyone reading these words, the conference organizers at Always On videotaped the panel and have already posted it online for viewing. (Use this link then scroll two thirds down the page to the embedded session title "The Cleantech Bubble?".) The first 10 minutes have some of the best fireworks from two pioneers of major technology ramp-ups, including Bob Metcalfe , who invented the Ethernet and drove the vast growth of the Internet, and George Gilder , whose prognostications about hot telecomm technologies and the darling companies behind them greatly pumped up the dot-com bubble. If you listen even longer you'll hear all four panelists ultimately bash subsidies for technology of all kinds, itself worth the price of admission--which in this case, is free.

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Malaria rates drop in the Americas, but travelers still worry

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

MIAMI--Malaria continues to be a global scourge, sickening some 300 million to 500 million people annually. Most of the resulting one million to three million malaria deaths occur in regions where it is highly endemic, such as sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south Asia. [More]

FCC reveals additional details of its plan to blanket the country with broadband

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:57:00 EST

About a third of all Americans still lack broadband access to the Internet. At its Digital Inclusion Summit, held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provided a preview of its upcoming National Broadband Plan (NBP) to provide high-speed Internet access to the estimated 93 million people in the U.S. without it. The plan, mandated by Congress last year as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act , aims to increase home broadband use to 90 percent of the population by 2020. [More]

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 expensive, contributing more than half to the final price of a solar photovoltaic, and sawing it turns as much as half of that silicon into wasted grit.* [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Dinosaurlike creature spread in Triassic times

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:45:00 EST

It looked like a dinosaur , walked like a dinosaur, and ate like, well, some dinosaurs, but a newly discovered species of archosaur, which lived 240 million years ago, was not a dinosaur. [More]

Shift happens: Will artificial photosynthesis power the world?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:31:00 EST

One drinking- water bottle could provide enough energy for an entire household in the developing world if Dan Nocera has his way. A chemist from M.I.T. and founder of the company Sun Catalytix, Nocera has developed a cobalt-based catalyst that allows him to store energy the same way plants do: by splitting water. [More]

Climate change will impact infectious diseases worldwide, but questions remain as to how

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST

NEW YORK--As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy , another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases --threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth's climate . [More]

More evidence piles up that the moon harbors lots of ice

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:55:00 EST

Chandrayaan 1, the first moon mission launched by the Indian Space Research Organization, did not last long-- in August 2009, controllers lost contact with the probe 10 months into its two-year mission . But the data Chandrayaan gathered while orbiting the moon continues to inform lunar science, especially in the realm of identifying potential stores of water on the moon. [More]

How the earthquake in Chile could change Earth's axis

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:30:00 EST

The magnitude 8.8 earthquake that jolted Chile on Saturday was felt as far away as São Paulo. But NASA scientists are proposing that its repercussions are truly global in a geophysical sense: it likely shifted Earth's axis by about eight centimeters. [More]

Engraved Ostrich Eggshell Fragments Reveal 60,000-Year-Old Graphic Design Tradition

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:30:00 EST

Archaeologists have unearthed 270 pieces of engraved ostrich eggshell dated to around 60,000 years ago from a site called Diepkloof in South Africa’s Western Cape province. The fragments constitute what the researchers say is the “earliest evidence of a graphic tradition among prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations.” As such, the finds help to illuminate the emergence of symbolic representation --a hallmark of modern human behavior.

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Scientists observe protein folding in living cells for the first time

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:01:00 EST

Even in sleep , the human body is rarely still--and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. [More]