This is a powerful team: atmospheric scientist Michael Mann and political cartoonist Tom Toles. Both are standouts in their fields. Both have been trying to alert the world to the threat of climate change even as they are attacked by political and business leaders. And both recently realized that if they combined their talents they might find a way to break what they see as a concerted effort to fool the public....
Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain. What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have. The event took place on June 25, 2014. On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany....
For many people, asteroids are big rocks that drift menacingly through space and are great places to have a laser cannon dogfight. Conventional scientific wisdom holds that they are the leftover scraps of planet formation. Their full story, though, is rather more complex and still only dimly glimpsed. What planetary scientists lump together as asteroids are far too diverse—from boulders to floating heaps of gravel to mini planets with signs of past volcanic activity and even liquid water—to have a single common origin....
Scientists have, for the first time, spied moving hot spots on the surfaces of neutron stars more than 500 light-years away from Earth. The results represent some of the first successful imaging of relatively small features–measuring less than 100 meters across–on such faraway stellar objects. The findings should help astronomers elucidate the thermal profiles of these extremely dense stars, which are comprised of neutrons and rotate quickly. A team of researchers led by Andrea De Luca of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Milan studied three neutron stars dubbed PSR B0656-14, PSR B1055-52 and Geminga using the XMM-Newton satellite....
Name: J. Craig Venter Title: CEO, Synthetic Genomics Location: La Jolla, Calif. Why algae? You look at the potential output from algae, and it’s one to two orders of magnitude better than the best agricultural system. If we were trying to make liquid transportation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S., and you try and do that from corn, it would take a facility three times the size of the continental U....
You may have seen the Parks and Recreation episode where Tom Haverford makes 26 different online dating profiles to increase his odds of matching with every woman possible (after his nerd profile matched with his boss Leslie). You may also have watched someone swipe right on every single Tinder option until they run out of every candidate within 100 miles or make joke profiles just for a laugh. Preventing these types of misuse and play is a big job for online dating companies....
The oldest fossilized dinosaur embryos yet discovered are revealing tantalizing clues about dinosaur evolution, scientists say. Findings published today in the journal Science indicate that some of the prehistoric creatures started out on four legs before growing into bipedal behemoths. They also support the notion that newly hatched dinos did not fend for themselves and instead relied on their parents for nourishment. Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto at Mississauga and his colleagues studied five fossilized embryos inside dinosaur eggs recovered from Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa....
An ambitious plan to build a pipeline to carry water from the Red Sea to the shrinking Dead Sea lurched forward this month, after the World Bank held hearings to gather public comments on the proposal. But environmentalists charge that alternative plans to save the Dead Sea would be cheaper, more flexible and would have less impact on the region’s ecosystems. If the project proceeds, a 180-kilometer buried pipeline will carry up to 2 billion cubic meters (m3) of sea water per year from the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea through Jordanian territory to the Dead Sea....
Anthony Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 36 years and has helped guide responses to a succession of viral epidemics: HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Ebola and Zika, among others. President-elect Joe Biden recently appointed Fauci as his chief medical adviser. A voice of reason on the Trump administration’s novel coronavirus task force, the physician spoke to Scientific American about next steps in the response to the COVID pandemic....
A tiny galaxy circling the Milky Way may be a fossil left over from the early universe, astronomers say. A recent study found that the stars in the galaxy, called Segue 1, contain fewer heavy elements than those of any other galaxy known, implying that the object may have stopped evolving almost 13 billion years ago. If true, Segue 1 could offer a window into the conditions of the early universe and reveal how some of the first galaxies came to be....
NEW YORK—A privately funded team will attempt this year to break a 50-year-old record for the highest-altitude parachute jump, floating a balloon well into the stratosphere before its pilot leaps out for a supersonic free fall. The team behind the Red Bull Stratos mission announced details of the attempt here Friday morning in a media briefing. If all goes as planned, a towering helium balloon will loft Austrian-born skydiver and BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner, 40, roughly 37 kilometers into the air before he begins his descent....
Shoppers who miss the taste of farm-grown tomatoes may find solace in a new technology that puts back what generations of breeding for hardiness and shelf life have taken out. A new variety of tomato has been genetically modified (GM) to produce geraniol, a rose-smelling compound found in fruits and flowers. In a blind taste test, 60 percent of 37 testers preferred the flavor of the GM tomato, according to a study published online this week in Nature Biotechnology....
Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Chameleons stand out among the lizard species for their uniquely shaped heads, their very long, fast-moving tongues, and their distinct long, thin feet. Due to the subset of chameleons that can change color, they have also long been used in literature, music, and the arts to represent characters that alter themselves according to their surroundings....
The Head Lines section of Scientific American Mind’s July/August issue mentioned the following articles in brief. Click on the links to learn more about them. Bullies suffer for their actions. They tend to feel guilt, shame, anger and a sense of social disconnection. Creativity is often overlooked in schools. Only nine U.S. states include creativity as a criterion for gifted education. Rats who were tickled once a day for two weeks later responded less to stress....
The Head Lines section of Scientific American MIND’s November/December issue mentioned the following articles in brief. Click on the links to learn more about them. When a wolf leaves its pack, its closest lupine pals are the ones most likely to howl. Biologists have grown mini brains, akin to that of a nine-week-old fetus, out of stem cells derived from skin. A computer scientist’s interest in stylometry, the study of writing style, helped to unveil J....
If you had 1,000 butts, what would you do with them? The marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata is one of only two known animals to find itself in this rather awkward situation (shopping for pants must be a nightmare)—and it isn’t yet telling. But given that that many booties doesn’t “just happen” to a worm, there must be a pretty good reason, and a new anatomical study has offered up some tasty clues....
Readers of this column will recall from last month Sir Birnie, the aristocratic landowner whose bequests used geometry to define his heirs’ inheritance. When his first great-grandchild, Emma May, came of age, there was again great excitement. The fortunes of the family had risen and his eldest grandchild, Johanna, had been able to buy out the southern neighbor, so the entire property shown in the original map now belonged to the family—although only after the former neighbor to the south had heavily logged his portion....
By Toni Clarke WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People who smoke high-voltage e-cigarettes have greater exposure to formaldehyde, a suspected carcinogen, than those who keep the voltage low, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. The study, which critics say is misleading and lacks context, is the latest contribution to a debate on the safety of e-cigarettes that has so far has yielded little long-term data, though most experts believe they are less toxic than combustible cigarettes....
THE PHILOSOPHICAL BABY: WHAT CHILDREN’S MINDS TELL US ABOUT TRUTH, LOVE, AND THE MEANING OF LIFEby Alison Gopnik Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009 (($25))Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that far from being irrational and limited in their ability to think, babies are smarter, more imaginative and more conscious than adults. Along the way, she examines such fascinating topics as why children pretend, how they discover the truth, the origins of love and morality, and how early life shapes later life....
With some 30 to 50 million Americans suffering from various degrees of lactose intolerance, and an estimated three million of us now eating animal-free (vegan) diets for humane, environmental and/or health reasons, the production of alternatives to dairy products has started to become big business. But while substitutes for milks and ice creams abound, mostly soy- or rice-based blends that have come a long way since they first appeared on grocery shelves, finding satisfactory alternatives to the many varieties of cheese can be a challenge....
