Scientific American
Science news and technology updates from Scientific American
This blog is one of the best psychology, goodtweet, recovery, math blogs out there. Add this blog to My Feeds.
Report: Climate change is taking a toll on U.S. bird populations
Mar 14, 2010 5:00am
North American bird species are "facing a new threat--climate change--that could dramatically alter their habitat and food supply and push many species towards extinction," said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Thursday when he announced the new report, " The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate...
Advances in disease surveillance: Putting the "public" into public health
Mar 13, 2010 5:00am
MIAMI--Before a government reports a disease outbreak, cases must usually be counted, verified and assessed--a process that can take days, weeks or months. [More] ...
Software behaving badly: Machine learning could resolve issues raised by multi-core processors
Mar 12, 2010 1:47pm
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...
6 Fun Facts about the James Webb Space Telescope [Slide Show]
Mar 12, 2010 12:30pm
The Hubble Space Telescope is an iconic observatory, a triumph of space science that may be the most famous unmanned spacecraft since Sputnik. Hubble's renown is certainly well-deserved, but the spacecraft is aging--it will mark its 20th anniversary of reaching orbit in April. Hubble's services are still in...
Mine Injuries Rise Right after Daylight Saving Time
Mar 12, 2010 10:30am
Don’t forget to move your clocks forward this weekend. And then don’t forget to be more careful in the days after you adjust your clocks. Because a recent study found that the hour of lost sleep was related to increased job-related injuries. Probably because sleepy workers were less alert. The...
Consciousness-Raising: Kick-Starting the Brain's Dopamine System May Revive Some Vegetative Patients
Mar 12, 2010 10:23am
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] ...
Bluefin fishing ban to be proposed
Mar 12, 2010 9:30am
A complete ban of the international commercial trade in bluefin tuna is to be proposed at an upcoming world conservation conference ...
Gene Target Beats Oil Remedy
Mar 12, 2010 6:00am
The 1992 tearjerker Lorenzo’s Oil told the true story of one family’s struggle to save their son from X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a deadly degenerative brain disease. Unfortunately, over the ensuing years, the oil of the film’s title, a dietary supplement, has not panned out as the cure many people hoped...
MIND Reviews: The Other Brain
Mar 12, 2010 6:00am
The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science by R. Douglas Fields. [More] ...
Readers Respond on "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030"
Mar 12, 2010 5:00am
Winds of Change I found it surprising that in “ A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030 ,” Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi do not mention the effects of the suggested energy sources on climate. The authors propose to absorb about six terawatts of energy from...
Condoms for the World Cup and other ways to keep HIV at bay
Mar 12, 2010 4:15am
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...
3D TV hits homes
Mar 11, 2010 4:30pm
Consumers can now bring the 3D experience into their homes, but programming is limited, and the prices can be high. ...
Sushi chef, restaurant charged with serving whale
Mar 11, 2010 11:05am
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A California sushi chef and the restaurant in which he worked have been charged with illegally serving meat from an endangered Sei whale, the Justice Department said on Thursday. ...
Researchers Gain New Insights into the Mystery of Thalidomide-Caused Birth Defects
Mar 11, 2010 11:00am
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...
A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator
Mar 11, 2010 10:20am
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] ...
Floor Plan: Linoleum May Be Green, but Is There an Ecofriendly Way to Keep It Clean?
Mar 11, 2010 10:00am
Dear EarthTalk: I have a new linoleum floor, which I chose partly for its ecofriendliness. How do I clean and maintain it without using harsh or toxic chemicals? --A. J. Maimbourg, via e-mail [More] ...
Arranged Marriages Can Be Real Love Connection
Mar 11, 2010 7:30am
Think arranged marriages are loveless? Not so, says psychologist Robert Epstein, a contributing editor for Scientific American MIND magazine. He spoke March 10 at the 92nd Street Y’s Tribeca site in New York City:“And there’s even a study published in India [Usha Gupta and Pushpa Singh of the...
New Hope for Battling Brain Cancer (preview)
Mar 11, 2010 6:00am
In May 2006 Dwayne Berg woke up on a gurney in a Seattle emergency room, an IV in his arm and a team of doctors and nurses working him up. The last thing the 42-year-old financial executive could remember was running on a treadmill at his gym, part of his...
Divining the Right Drug
Mar 11, 2010 6:00am
Imagine suffering from the crushing weight of major depression, then finally getting diagnosed and starting treatment with a drug--only to realize after two months that the medication, despite its unpleasant side effects, is not alleviating your depression. Unfortunately, this experience is far from rare: more than two thirds of patients...
Will the Clean Tech Bubble Burst?
Mar 11, 2010 5:45am
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...
Malaria rates drop in the Americas, but travelers still worry
Mar 11, 2010 5:00am
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. ...
Japan fish sellers blasts tuna ban
Mar 11, 2010 1:30am
Japan is opposing a proposed Atlantic bluefin tuna ban, with everyone from fish sellers to the government calling it unnecessary. ...
Genomes for the whole family
Mar 10, 2010 7:01pm
By Janelle WeaverBy sequencing the genomes of three patients with rare genetic disorders, and comparing them with genetic information from unaffected family members, two studies have managed to narrow down the causes of the diseases.Between them, the analyses bring the number of individuals who have had their full genomes sequenced...
IPCC Errors Prompt Review by International Science Academies
Mar 10, 2010 3:31pm
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...
Einstein passes cosmic test
Mar 10, 2010 3:01pm
By Zeeya MeraliIt's another victory for Einstein -- albeit not a resounding one. [More] ...
Chicken's split sex identity revealed
Mar 10, 2010 3:00pm
By Janet FangA study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies--from wattle to toe--has an inherent sex...
TB or Not TB?: Novel Detector Could Shorten Testing Times, Aid Treatment Efforts
Mar 10, 2010 12:30pm
Tuberculosis is a serious public health challenge in the developing world, where the infection claims roughly two million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) . Yet the disease, which is a leading killer of patients with HIV/AIDS, is cumbersome to detect, resulting in...
FCC reveals additional details of its plan to blanket the country with broadband
Mar 10, 2010 11:57am
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...
Auto-dicted: Sans a Major Diversion of U.S. Transportation Dollars to Mass Transit, Urban Traffic Congestion May Not Ease
Mar 10, 2010 10:00am
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 [More] ...
Introducing the Newest Scientific Measurement: A "Rosenfeld" for Energy Savings
Mar 10, 2010 9:45am
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...
Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap?
Mar 10, 2010 9:35am
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...
How to Make a Cheap Silicon Solar Cell
Mar 10, 2010 8:45am
1366 Technologies can grow a photovoltaic wafer directly from melted silicon ...
Few Studies Compare the Efficacy of Medical Treatments
Mar 10, 2010 7:00am
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...
Message to Mosquitoes: Urine Trouble
Mar 10, 2010 6:50am
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...
Chimps Talk with Their Hands
Mar 10, 2010 6:00am
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...
Why is talking with gestures easier than talking without them?
Mar 10, 2010 6:00am
Why is talking along with gestures so much easier than trying to talk without gesturing? -- Lionel Halvorsen, Cornith, Tex. [More] ...
End-of-Days Danger
Mar 10, 2010 5:00am
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...
Invasion of the Drones: Unmanned Aircraft Take Off in Polar Exploration
Mar 10, 2010 5:00am
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...
One's Enough: People Who Donate a Kidney Live Just as Long as Those Who Don't
Mar 10, 2010 4:00am
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....
Pristine DNA discovered in fossilized eggshells
Mar 9, 2010 9:01pm
By Matt KaplanExtremely well-preserved DNA discovered in the fossilized eggshells of extinct bird species suggests that they could be a source of ancient genetic material for sequencing efforts.Eggshells are commonly found at fossil sites worldwide. [More] ...
Fighting aliens with aliens: U.K. imports insect species to tackle invasive plant
Mar 9, 2010 3:14pm
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
Mar 9, 2010 2:30pm
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...
Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity
Mar 9, 2010 1:31pm
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...
Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology
Mar 9, 2010 12:01pm
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...
Liquid Metal Battery Stores Large Amounts of Electricity
Mar 9, 2010 11:16am
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
Mar 9, 2010 9:01am
[ 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...
Trichodesmium : The world's most famous nitrogen fixer
Mar 9, 2010 8:42am
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...
Claim your "Top 100 Blogs" award now!
Top 100 Blogs Size: 125x125 px. Copy and paste the following code to your blog or website.