Scientific American - More Science

Science news and technology updates from Scientific American

Sunday Photoblogging: Overbaked Sunset

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:56:00 EST

I don’t typically like such “overbaked,” overprocessed photos. [More]

Russian Scientists Poised to be First to Reach Ice-Buried Antarctic Lake

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

At a tiny outpost in the middle of Antarctica, Russian scientists are poised to become the first humans to reach a massive liquid lake that has been cut off from the sunlit world for millennia, and may house uniquely adapted life forms that are new to science.    

[More]

Swept from Africa to the Amazon (preview)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The Bodele depression at the southern edge of the Sahara is a fearsome, forsaken place. Winds howl through the nearby Tebesti Mountains and Ennedi Plateau, picking up speed as they funnel into a parched wasteland nearly the size of California. Once there was a massive freshwater lake here. Now the lake is a shrunken puddle of its former self. Across most of the landscape, there is nothing.

[More]

My story from the ScienceOnline 2012 banquet.

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:22:00 EST

This year at ScienceOnline , the conference banquet featured storytelling organized by The Monti , a North Carolina non-profit organization dedicated to building community by getting people to share their true stories with each other. Conference goers were asked to share stories on the theme of “connections” . The stories had to be true, and storytellers had to tell them without notes.

The seven stories told at the banquet provided a kaleidoscopic view of what “connections” might mean to a bunch of people involved in doing science, or teaching science, or communicating science, or trying to negotiate their own relationship with science in their personal and professional lives.

[More]

Astrobiology: We are the Aliens

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

Bacterial aliens (NASA)

A funny thing happened recently on the way to Mars.

[More]

Undergraduate Adventures with the Thermally Responsive Nanoparticles

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:02:00 EST

Last October I attended the National Women in Physics Conference at Lincoln Nebraska. For an undergraduate women in Physics this is an amazing conference that offers a great opportunity to network with other young physicists and learn about the research going on around the country. While at the conference, I met many great people who got me connected with the Scientific American blogs and ScienceOnline. I also presented a poster of my research on the Design and Characterization of Thermally Responsive Nanoparticles. I was fortunate enough to win one of the top poster prizes at the conference and the chance to write about my work in blog form.

I work with thermally responsive nanoparticles. That may sound a bit scary but it s not hard to break down those words and understand what I work with. These thermally responsive (responds to temperature change) particles are called Elastin-Like polypeptides (ELP). ELP s are a single chain of amino acids that bond together (Glycine, Valine, and Proline).

[More]

Thinking About Mortality Changes How We Act

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

The thought of shuffling off our mortal coil can make all of us a little squeamish. But avoiding the idea of death entirely means ignoring the role it can play in determining our actions. Consider the following scenario:

[More]

Brain Injury Rate 7 Times Greater among U.S. Prisoners

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

A car accident, a rough tackle, an unexpected tumble. The number of ways to bang up the brain are almost as numerous as the people who sustain these injuries. And only recently has it become clear just how damaging a seemingly minor knock can be. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no longer just a condition acknowledged in military personnel or football players and other professional athletes. Each year some 1.7 million civilians will suffer an injury that disrupts the function of their brains, qualifying it as a TBI.

[More]

Willy Chyr's Neuroplastic Dreams - pop!

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:06:00 EST

Willy Chyr is a fine artist and designer interested in emergent properties and systems: and he sometimes works in balloons.

I’ll be presenting an interview with Chyr here on Symbiartic soon; we met recently over coffee and from such fun, complicated work, Willy is refreshingly unpretentious and creatively versatile.

[More]

Spectacular Plumes of Dust Reach across the World [Slide Show]

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

We don't hear too much about natural dust, the kind that the winds loft from deserts and dry lakebeds into the air and carries for hundreds of kilometers, crossing oceans and continents, but we should. Plumes of dust connect the atmosphere, the oceans and the forests, and affect the most fundamental processes of life on our planet. Scientists believe that dust has profound and somewhat mysterious influences on atmospheric chemistry, solar heat exchange and nutrient supply to the oceans and rain forests. What those influences are, exactly, is the subject of much study and is still somewhat mysterious--the story of dust shows just how complex our natural world is, and how difficult it is to understand it. For more, see our February feature story, 'Swept From Africa to the Amazon '.

[More]

Anthrax Toxicity Depends on Human Genetics

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:06:00 EST

Anthrax courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Marcus007

The white powder that arrived in envelopes addressed to lawmakers and journalists in 2001 proved to be a deadly delivery for several people. The lethal substance spores commonly known as Anthrax (from the bacterium Bactillus anthracis ) can cause a toxic reaction in a host’s blood stream , killing cells and leading to tissue damage, bleeding and death.

[More]

Monday Music Video: Klebsiella, Salmonella, Legionella (ella, ella, ella)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:51:00 EST

This week’s music video comes from Aryeh Rosenbaum, a medical student at the Albert Einstein College of medicine. [More]

The Quantum Physics of Free Will

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST

[More]

Let's Ban Research That Makes the Bird-Flu Virus and Other Pathogens Deadlier

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:24:00 EST

In my classes, I often ask my students to wrestle with what I call damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemmas, which offer no easy solutions. Every choice would pose certain risks and violate one valued principle or another. We often must choose what we deem to be the “least bad” option, and hope things work out. Research involving the bird-flu virus H5N1 poses an especially knotty dilemma, in which scientists’ commitment to openness and to reducing humanity’s vulnerability to potential health threats collides with broader security concerns.

The H5N1 virus normally only infects humans who come into direct contact with infected birds; so far there have been no reported cases of airborne transmission among birds and humans. Of the 583 people known to have been infected with the virus, 344 have died as a result, a mortality rate of 59 percent. To be sure, many other infected people may have recovered without coming to the attention of medical authorities. But in comparison, the infamous flu pandemic of 1918, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide, had a mortality rate of two percent.

[More]

Orange Rinds May Help Rid Cows of E. Coli

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Name : Todd Callaway [More]

Lake Vostok is (Almost) Breached After 20 Million Years

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:58:00 EST

Satellite composite showing location of Vostok within the Antarctic continent (NASA)

Two and a half miles beneath the surface of Antarctica’s central Eastern ice sheet is a body of water 160 miles by 30 miles across known as Lake Vostok , after the Vostok research station above it, built by the former Soviet Union in 1957 and now operated by Russia.

[More]

Science Explainer: The Physics of Football [Video]

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:00:00 EST

Slow-motion replays of deep passes have mesmerized fans of American football for decades. The impossibly long, steady arc of a well-thrown ball is a thing of beauty.  In contrast, players sometimes refer to wobbly passes as ugly ducks, although just why isn't entirely clear, since ducks fly pretty well.

[More]

Baby-Led Weaning Leads to Leaner Kids

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:30:00 EST

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/lisegagne

Those little pursed lips and that tiny crinkled nose might not just mean that your baby isn’t a fan of pureed peas or mashed sweet potatoes. Some of the refusals to all of those “here-comes-the-airplane” attempts to feed a weaning infant might also be the child s way of saying that she or he is just not hungry.

[More]

ScienceOnline2012 - thoughts about present and future

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

On your way to ScienceOnline2012 , your plane finally lands at Raleigh-Durham International airport. While you slowly taxi to the gate, what do you do? Naturally, you turn on your smart-phone, open up your favorite Twitter app, and announce to the world: “#scio12 – I have landed at RDU. Anyone else here? Want to share a ride to the hotel?”.

If you are lucky, you’ll find a couple of other attendees have landed at about the same time, so you meet them at the baggage claim (fortunately, Terminal 1 is under renovation so everyone had to land at the same over-crowded Terminal 2), and share a shuttle or cab into town.

[More]

Flame Dances on Board Space Station

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:00:08 EST

Starting a fire on the International Space Station might not sound like such a good idea.

[More]