Scientific American

Early Land Animals Lacked Good Bites

Fri, 24 May 2013 23:42:08 EST

What had the legs of a ‘gator and the jaws of a fish? Why, the earliest land animals. Because a new study shows that animals evolved weight-bearing limbs long before they had the chompers to really take advantage of a terrestrial diet. The research is in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology . [Philip S. L. Anderson, Matt Friedman and Marcello Ruta, Late to the Table: Diversification of Tetrapod Mandibular Biomechanics Lagged Behind the Evolution of Terrestriality ]

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Net Loss: How We Continually Forget What the Oceans Really Used to Be Like [Excerpt]

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:00:00 EST

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Mary Roach Takes A Trip Down the Alimentary Canal

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

Groucho Marx said, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” With this wisdom available for decades, the question arises: Why did author Mary Roach stick her arm inside a living cow's stomach, where it's too dark to write? Answer: Because that's the kind of thing Roach does when she's researching books that will be read outside of a dog. Also, the bovine was what's called a fistulated cow, meaning that you can get in through a hidey-hole, which is important because it's exceedingly messy to go in any other way.

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Sonic Science: The High-Frequency Hearing Test

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

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Brain's Glial Cells Spark Seizures

Thu, 23 May 2013 08:00:00 EST

When neurons fire together uncontrollably, epileptic seizures ensue. Yet what sparks the cells to go haywire in the first place? In January scientists found an unexpected answer. When glial cells in the cortex of fruit flies cannot properly control their calcium levels, they leave neighboring neurons vulnerable to seizures.

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Hard to Beat Feet for Fostering Fungus

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:30:08 EST

Do fungi have a foot fetish? When researchers mapped the fungal species living on the surface of the human body, they found the skin on the feet harbors the most diverse fungal community. The work is in the journal Nature . [Keisha Findley et al, Topographic diversity of fungal and bacterial communities in human skin ]

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Is Ketamine the Next Big Depression Drug? (preview)

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:00:00 EST

For 20 years Joan * quietly suffered from an unrelenting desire to commit suicide. She held down a job as a special-education teacher and helped care for her family in the northeastern U.S. Yet day after day she struggled through a crushing depression and felt neither joy nor pleasure. Except for the stream of psychiatrists recommending different antidepression treatments--all of which failed to provide relief--Joan kept her condition private. She says it was the fear of hurting her students or abandoning her father that kept her alive. “I really don't know how I survived,” she says.

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Genomics Reveals Great Famine Culprit

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:09:08 EST

The potato famine in Ireland killed a million people and led to mass emigration. The potatoes were destroyed by late blight, caused by the water mold Phytophthora infestans . And we now know exactly which strain of the water mold did the dirty work.

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Why Penguins Cannot Fly

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:30:00 EST

From Nature magazine

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Good Gut Bacteria May Keep Bad at Bay

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:59:08 EST

Most E. coli bacteria are harmless. It’s the rare, pathogenic strains that can cause bloody diarrhea, kidney disease, or death. But many of us may already be carrying the antidote--a healthy colony of gut bacteria. Because a study finds that when bad E. coli get in, beneficial microbes appear to keep them at bay. In mice, at least.

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Very Fine Art: 6 Stunningly Beautiful Nanoscale Sculptures [Slide Show]

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

Artists and material scientists alike bend, melt and mold materials into useful and aesthetically pleasing forms. But nothing human hands have made can match the intricacy of convoluted corals or the delicate and unique geometry of a snowflake. In a study published yesterday in Science researchers exploited nature’s sculpting methods to create visually stunning 3-D structures that may change the way nano- and micro-materials are made.

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What Is It? Mystery Spots

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

Mystery spots: In southwestern Africa's Namib Desert, the lack of rainfall keeps vegetation sparse. Yet in some areas, mysterious rings of grass with bare centers appear and thrive. Now scientists have discovered these so-called fairy circles are indeed created by wee little creatures--termites.

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Invasive Ladybug Thanks Its Parasite for Competitive Advantage

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:28:08 EST

Ladybugs love to snack on aphids and other pests. So people began importing an Asian species called the harlequin ladybird as natural pest control. But in their new environments, the harlequins wiped out native ladybugs. And they have their parasites to thank. That’s according to research in the journal Science . [Andreas Vilcinskas et al., Invasive Harlequin Ladybird Carries Biological Weapons Against Native Competitors ]

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Audubon's Birds Live On Long after His Death [Slide Show]

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:45:00 EST

A portrait of John James Audubon shows the artist and naturalist in a dark wolf-skin cloak, cradling a gun and sporting curly dark hair that was likely smoothed back with bear grease. The picture was painted during Audubon's 1826 trip to England and Scotland, when he was playing up his role as the American woodsman to raise money for his opus, The Birds of America . Once completed, the collection included 435 prints of birds flying , eating, perching and fighting. Audubon is still lauded for his contributions to the fields of ornithology and art.

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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out--and Accidentally Discover LSD [Excerpt]

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:00:00 EST

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Why Manhattan's Green Roofs Don't Work--and How to Fix Them

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

On a rooftop in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, two students are collecting soil samples from boxes planted with species from two native plant communities: Hempstead Plains, which are grasses belonging to a prairie community originally found on Long Island, and Rocky Summit grasslands,which grow on the tops of mountains and ridges throughout southern New England and all of New York State. They carefully place the dirt from the soil core into a plastic bag and seal it up to be taken to the lab for analysis.

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Rise in Roadkill Requires New Solutions

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:00:00 EST

In the 1960s widening U.S. Highway 27 just north of Tallahassee cut Florida's Lake Jackson into two sections. When water levels fell too low in either part, thousands of turtles, frogs, snakes and alligators would hit the road to head for the other side--where cars and trucks often hit the animals . In February of 2000 Matt Aresco, then a PhD student at The Florida State University in Tallahassee, drove through and was stunned at the sight of dozens of crushed turtles. For the next five weeks he patrolled the road between the lakes, once counting 343 dead turtles in 10 days. "It was so heartbreaking to see dozens of turtles, animals that could be 50 or 60 years old, smashed before they make it two feet onto the road," he says.

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The Strange Beauty of the Sea s Microscopic Plants [Slide Show]

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:00 EST

In the June issue of Scientific American, Ronald Martin of the University of Delaware and Antonietta Quigg of Texas A&M University at Galveston explain how increases in the quantity and nutrient content of tiny plants called phytoplankton probably helped power the rise of the modern marine mammals. As so-called green phytoplankton gave way to red phytoplankton, so named for the type of chlorophyll they use during photosynthesis, a host of new sea creatures emerged, starting around 250 million years ago. The slide show below showcases some of the myriad intricate forms of red phytoplankton--a group that includes coccolithophores, dinoflagellates and diatoms--that populate the world’s oceans today.

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Tiny Plants That Once Ruled the Seas (preview)

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

If you could hop onboard a time machine and visit the earth as it was 500 million years ago, during the Paleozoic era, you'd be forgiven for thinking you had traveled not to another time period but to another planet altogether. In essence, you would have. The continents mostly sat in the Southern Hemisphere, the oceans had vastly different configurations and currents, the Alps and the Sahara had yet to form. Land plants had not even evolved. Perhaps the most dramatic difference, however, would lie in the animals that inhabited this primeval earth. Back then, most of the world's multicellular creatures lived in the sea. Clamlike creatures called brachiopods and trilobites--those extinct cousins of today's lobsters and insects, with their hard exoskeletons, long antennae and compound eyes--reigned supreme.

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Journeying to the Ancient Earth and the Quantum Realm

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:15:00 EST

One of the pleasures of Scientific American is the way it invites us to journey to the frontiers of knowledge, accompanied by the scientists who are working on the boundaries. In this issue's cover story, “ Tiny Plants That Once Ruled the Seas ,” researchers Ronald Martin and Antonietta Quigg conjure the idea of stepping into an imaginary time machine, with the dial turned back to 500 million years ago. There we witness the watery ways of early life on the earth, when clamlike creatures and trilobites dominated the seas. We watch as the millennia then unfold before us in subsequent eras, with marine life diversifying with remarkable speed. What was the root cause that enabled the early blooming of species?

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