Scientific American - Basic Science
Science news and technology updates from Scientific American
How Can Los Angeles Adapt to Coming Climate Change?
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:01:00 EST
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Matthew Kahn's book Climatopolis .
Los Angeles is a hedonist’s paradise. At night, you can cruise the Sunset Strip. Although The Doors no longer play there, you may run into Paris Hilton or Britney Spears before seeing Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at a red-carpet event. During the winter, you might venture downtown to watch Kobe Bryant and the Lakers play. Every day of the year you can sit outside at Starbucks and try to identify professional basketball players looking for a latte in West Los Angeles. In spring 2009 I spotted Baron Davis of the Los Angeles Clippers at a Westwood Starbucks (but he didn’t seem to recognize me). In fall 2009 I spotted Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys as he strolled in Little Holmby Park (he didn’t give me a knowing nod or wink either). I saw Vin Diesel jog past my house not long ago (again, no seeming recognition on his part). Even the dignified former secretary of state, Warren Christopher, didn’t recognize me as he got out of his car while parking on my block. These cases suggest that I’m not a VIP, but a player such as you will have the option of ending the night at a party at the Playboy Mansion near UCLA.
[More]
Los Angeles Clippers - Baron Davis - Los Angeles - Basketball - Kobe Bryant
Mapping the Mind: Online Interactive Atlas Shows Activity of 20,000 Brain-Related Genes (preview)
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EST
Scientists have long sought to understand the biological basis of thought. In the second century A.D., physician and philosopher Claudius Galen held that the brain was a gland that secreted fluids to the body via the nerves--a view that went unchallenged for centuries. In the late 1800s clinical researchers tied specific brain areas to dedicated functions by correlating anatomical abnormalities in the brain after death with behavioral or cognitive impairments. French surgeon Pierre Paul Broca, for example, found that a region on the brain’s left side controls speech. In the first half of the 20th century, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield mapped the brain’s functions by electrically stimulating different places in conscious patients during neurosurgery, triggering vivid memories, localized body sensations, or movement of an arm or toe.
In recent years new noninvasive ways of viewing the human brain in action have helped neuroscientists trace the anatomy of thought and behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, for instance, researchers can see which areas of the brain “light up” when people perform simple movements such as lifting a finger or more complex mental leaps such as recognizing someone or making a moral judgment. These images reveal not only how the brain is divided functionally but also how the different areas work together while people go about their daily activities. Some investigators are using the technology in an attempt to detect lies and even to predict what kinds of items people will buy; others are seeking to understand the brain alterations that occur in disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, autism and dementia.
[More]
Brain - Functional magnetic resonance imaging - Neurosurgery - Health - Human brain
New Microscope Enables Real-Time 3-D Movies of Developing Embryos [Slide Show]
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:50:00 EST
Using a revolutionary new microscope, scientists can now peer into embryos and watch, in one of the world's smallest 3-D movies, as brains, eyes and other organs form. A team at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, watched zebra fish and fruit fly embryos develop under the scope for as long as 58 hours, charting the location of every cell as it danced around the embryo. This experiment would have been impossible a mere two years ago before a recent spate of innovations advanced microscopy years into the future.
When it comes to watching the inner workings of cells , fluorescence microscopy is second to none. In this technique, scientists attach fluorescent tags to cellular proteins and, by shining a laser on the cells, cause them to light up.
[More]
European Molecular Biology Laboratory - Heidelberg - Zebrafish - Biology - Embryo
Lased and Confused: Off-the-Shelf Infrared Lasers Could Ward Off Missile Attacks on Military Helicopters
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:30:00 EST
Helicopter-mounted lasers that can dazzle and defend against heat-seeking missiles are now under development, researchers reveal. [More]
Laser - Missile - Infrared homing - Helicopter - Business
Ancient Brewmasters Made Medicinal Beer
Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:42:08 EST
In 1980, a scientist looking at bone fragments under an ultraviolet microscope noticed the bones were glowing green--a hallmark of the antibiotic tetracycline. The drug latches onto calcium and gets deposited in bone. Nothing unusual. Except these bones were from a Nubian mummy buried 1,600 years ago in Sudan--long before scientists discovered tetracycline, in 1948. [More]
Sudan - Antibiotic - nubian - Ancient Egypt - Social Sciences
Rabbit Rest: Can Lab-grown Human Skin Replace Animals in Toxicity Testing?
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:10:00 EST
It likely comes as no surprise that many common household chemicals and medical products as well as industrial and agricultural chemicals, may irritate human skin temporarily or, worse, cause permanent, corrosive burns. In order to prevent undue harm regulators in the U.S. and beyond require safety testing of many substances to identify their potential hazards and to ensure that the appropriate warning label appears on a product. Traditionally, such skin tests have been done on live animals--although in recent decades efforts to develop humane approaches , along with ones that are more relevant to people have resulted in new models based on laboratory-grown human skin.
The most recent chapter of this ongoing effort was written on July 22 when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)--an international group that, among other things, provides guidelines to its 32-member countries on methods to assess chemical safety--officially approved three commercially available in vitro models of human skin for use in chemical testing. Specifically, the new guideline ( OECD Test No. 439 ) stipulates that the models can serve as an alternative to animals in tests for skin irritation, one of several human health endpoints for which chemicals are tested. Similar 3-D models were approved for corrosion tests in 2004, leaving many hopeful that soon it may be possible to the assess the full spectrum of a chemical's effects on human skin--from irritation to corrosion--without using live animals.
[More]
United States - Health - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - Toxicity - Medicine
Contemplating the end of the world, math, mystery and other things
Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:00:00 EST
I suffer from eschatological obsession. That is, I spend lots of time brooding about ends. So the cover of the September Scientific American --which reads simply "the end."--made me all shivery, like when I hear the spooky sitar opening of The Doors' apocalyptic rock poem "The End." (I'm never more Freudian than when I hear Morrison's Oedipal yowl.) [More]
Door - Rock music - Oedipus complex - Education - Arts
MIND Reviews: The Art of Choosing
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EST
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar. Hachette Book Group, 2010
[More]
Sheena Iyengar - Arts - Literature - TED - Coca-Cola
Nearby asteroids are a diverse bunch in terms of reflectivity and composition
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:06:00 EST
A space-based survey of 101 objects that pass relatively close to Earth has found they have a wide range of reflectivity, indicating that their composition is varied as well. [More]
Asteroid - Earth - Solar System - Astronomy - Small Bodies
Sounds like art fraud: Acoustic waves give clues to paintings' provenance
Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:00:00 EST
Theft, imitation and outright deception can make a painting's history even murkier than centuries of accumulated grime. But getting to the bottom of a piece of art's origins can be crucial for restoration --and forensics. [More]
Fraud - Crime - Theft - Provenance - Art and Antiquities
Shaky Ground: Can Seismologists Be Charged with a Crime for Not Predicting Deadly Quakes?
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EST
The adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” does not quite capture the following pair of situations. It’s more like “damned if you could (but you can’t), damned if you couldn’t (but you kind of did).”
First, the “damned if you could (but you can’t)”. On April 4 at 3:40 p.m., a magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocked Baja, Mexico, and was felt well north. The event elicited the following post on Twitter 16 minutes later from New Age lifemeister Deepak Chopra: “Had a powerful meditation just now--caused an earthquake in Southern California.” (Lawrence Krauss, too, lays into Deepak on page 36 for his lack of understanding of quantum physics. There’s plenty to bust Chopra about.)
[More]
Mexico - Southern California - Earthquake - New Age - California
New science blog networks mushroom to life
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST
The science blogosphere is shrinking and growing at the same time. Today, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) starts a new network called PLoS Blogs . A nonprofit publisher of open-access journals focused on biological sciences, PLoS will fold its three existing blogs under its new network, managed by Brian Mossop (the author of a recent Mind Matters column on fatherhood here). [More]
Public Library of Science - Publishing - Open access journal - Biology - Blog
Wee ants protect African savanna trees from elephants
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:06:00 EST
It's a David versus Goliath kind of story, with an ecological twist: In African savannas (regions with both trees and grass), acacia-dwelling ants can repel voracious, tree-eating elephants, according to new research by published online September 2 in Current Biology . [More]
Tree - Savanna - Current Biology - Goliath - Biology
Worms for brains: Can genes point the way to the cerebral cortex's common ancestor with marine annelids?
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:10:00 EST
Marine worms might seem like lowly, slow-witted creatures, but new gene mapping shows that we might share an ancient brainy ancestor with them. [More]
Gene - Annelid - Cerebral cortex - Common descent - Worms
Man's new best friend? A forgotten Russian experiment in fox domestication
Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EST
Dmitri K. Belyaev, a Russian scientist, may be the man most responsible for our understanding of the process by which wolves were domesticated into our canine companions. Dogs began making for themselves a social niche within human culture as early as 12,000 years ago in the Middle East . But Belyaev didn’t study dogs or wolves; his research focused instead on foxes. What might foxes be able to tell us about the domestication of dogs?
Domesticated animals of widely different species seem to share some common traits: changes in body size, in fur coloration, in the timing of the reproductive cycle. Their hair or fur becomes wavy or curly; they have floppy ears and shortened or curly tails. Even Darwin noted , in On the Origin of Species, that “not a single domestic animal can be named which has not, in some country, drooping ears.” Drooping ears is a feature that does not ever occur in the wild, except for in elephants. And domesticated animals possess characteristic changes in behavior compared with their wild brethren, such as a willingness or even an eagerness to hang out with humans.
[More]
Origin of Species - Dmitri K. Belyaev - Middle East - Domestication - Dog
Readers Respond on "Revolutionary Rail"
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EST
Digital Revolution Pathologists are traditionally seen as being detached from everyday clinical practice, which explains why we were so pleasantly surprised when we came across the interesting article “ A Better Lens on Disease ,” by Mike May. Even before the digital revolution, pathologists had developed rudimentary ways (mainly photographs) to capture histological images and submit them to one another for a second opinion. Nowadays such a procedure is adopted usefully at small hospitals in developing countries to refer unusual or difficult cases to internationally recognized European or U.S. pathology departments.
[More]
Pathology - Medicine - Histology - Health - Second opinion
Physics of free kicks: The hidden advantage of long-distance soccer shots
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:10:00 EST
When Brazilian defender Roberto Carlos struck a powerful free-kick from about 30 meters out in a 1997 international match against France, he could not have known that scientists would still be discussing his feat more than a dozen years later. Indeed, he could not even have known that the ball would improbably find the back of the net . But find the net it did, swinging well wide of a wall of French defenders, hooking viciously to the left, and glancing off the inside of the goalpost. The French goalkeeper could only turn and watch in apparent disbelief as the ball came to rest in his goal. [More]
Roberto Carlos - Physics - France - Association football - Goalkeeper
A Few Drug-Resistant Bacteria May Keep the Whole Colony Alive
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:58:08 EST
There’s been an unexpected development in our understanding of drug resistance in bacteria. The accepted scenario was a simple case of evolutionary selection. In a bacterial population exposed to a killer drug, a few lucky individuals might have a genetic mutation that kept them alive. They survived to reproduce, while the rest of the population perished. In short order, the entire colony consisted only of the offspring of the drug-resistant founders. [More]
Bacteria - Drug resistance - Population - Mutation - Health
Cooking For Geeks: Jeff Potter on Experimenting in the Kitchen
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:05:08 EST
Jeff Potter, author of Cooking For Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks and Good Food , talks with daily podcast correspondent Cynthia Graber, and podcast host Steve Mirsky (picture left) tests your knowledge of some recent science in the news. [More]
Steve Mirsky - Podcast - Good Food - Cooking - Author
Ants Protect Acacia Trees from Elephants
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:08:08 EST
We all know that elephants aren’t really scared of mice. But a new study shows that they’re really not crazy about something even smaller: ants. In fact, elephants dislike ants so much that they avoid acacia trees that harbor the tiny, six-legged nectar-suckers. [More]
Biology - Flora and Fauna - Animalia - Insecta - Hymenoptera
