Editor’s Note: The online puzzles mentioned in the July magazine can be found here. Millions of people have been perplexed at one time or another by Rubik’s Cube, a fascinating puzzle that took the world by storm in the 1980s. If you somehow missed the puzzle—or the 1980s—the cube is a plastic gizmo that appears to be made up of 27 small cubes, or “cubies,” stacked into a larger cube, three cubies to an edge....
It’s about four o’clock in the afternoon on a clear day last November onboard the S/Y Christianshavn, a 54-foot Danish steel sailboat, which is bound to Honolulu from Los Angeles, across the most famous plastic-clogged place on Earth: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. As most days on the 23-day journey, I spend my free time in the cockpit on the lookout for trash. Every once in awhile I see disturbingly familiar plastic items float by—a pink dustpan, a punctured green condiment bottle, a barnacle-covered Tupperware lid, a white Styrofoam packing wedge....
The ability to distinguish multiple fantasy worlds may be an innate skill. “Children’s metaphysical reasoning is much more complicated than previously thought,” says Deena Skolnick, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University. In a recent study entitled “What Does Batman Think about SpongeBob?” Skolnick and Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom asked 24 adults and 24 children ages four to six questions about familiar fictional characters. For example: Is Batman real?...
To study the oceans, scientists rely on a network of orbiting satellites and surface vessels. But space-borne instruments cannot penetrate the inky surface, and ship time remains expensive and scarce. These frustrations, compounded by the growing need to understand global changes, have spurred researchers to design the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI)—a $330-million project that promises to herald the next generation of oceanographic study. At the heart of the OOI lies an infrastructure expected to operate for 25 to 30 years....
Dear EarthTalk: I’m getting my roof redone and have heard about solar shingles. Are they available—and are they practical for the Northeast?—John Denson, Glastonbury, Conn. Solar shingles are photovoltaic cells designed to look like and integrate with conventional asphalt roof shingles. First commercially available in 2005, solar shingles were much more costly than traditional “bolt-on” photovoltaic panels, and thus were used mainly by those wanting to go solar but maintain a traditional roofline....
Providing directions instantly online has until recently meant that navigational mapping programs, such as MapQuest and Google Maps, often simplify the problem by not considering every possible route to a destination. Scientists at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany have designed a computer application that can quickly calculate the most expedient of all possible driving routes without the need for excessive computation. Dominik Schultes, one of the project’s scientists, designed the program around a simple premise: driving somewhere usually requires crossing major intersections that are sparsely interconnected....
Climate change appears to have climbed to the summit of policy promises yesterday when President Obama vowed in his second inaugural address to confront carbon emissions, because anything less would “betray our children.” He lingered on the issue in a speech filled with snap references to national priorities, devoting more time to the interwoven policies of climate, energy and environmental hazards than to war, deficits and immigration. It was a promise for action that stood in dramatic contrast to his near-silence on the politically difficult issue in the months preceding the November election....
When people have their feelings hurt, what is actually happening inside the body to cause the physical pain in the chest? —Josh Ceddia, Melbourne, Australia Robert Emery and Jim Coan, professors of psychology at the University of Virginia, reply: TERMS SUCH AS “heartache” and “gut wrenching” are more than mere metaphors: they describe the experience of both physical and emotional pain. When we feel heartache, for example, we are experiencing a blend of emotional stress and the stress-induced sensations in our chest—muscle tightness, increased heart rate, abnormal stomach activity and shortness of breath....
There was a time when neuroscientists could only dream of having such a problem. Now the fantasy has come true, and they are struggling to solve it. Brilliant new exploratory devices are overwhelming the field with an avalanche of raw data about the nervous system’s inner workings. The trouble is that even starting to make sense of this bonanza of information has become a superhuman challenge. Just about every branch of science is facing a similar disruption....
The seahorse head’s shape helps the fish stealthily ambush prey, researchers say. Seahorses are unique among fish for having bent necks and long-snouted heads that make them resemble horses. The overall shape of their body, including the lack of a tail fin, helps make them “one of the slowest swimmers on the planet,” said Brad Gemmell, a marine biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “They don’t swim very much — they tend to anchor themselves to surfaces like seagrass with their prehensile tails....
We all feel unique, believing that our inner lives and our physical selves are different somehow than those of others. Various methods for identifying an individual confirm our intuitions, whether through inspecting the whorls of a fingerprint or by sequencing a strand of DNA. Scientists also look to the source of that feeling of being special. But a common form of brain imaging used over the past few decades—functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—has been unable to provide the desired specificity to derive an individual “brainprint....
After a 170-year delay, the discovery of a strange, metallic-looking rock found in the Ural Mountains in Russia in 1839 has ignited a global technology race for a cheaper, more efficient solar cell. It could seriously disrupt the world’s solar market, currently dominated by China. The features of the rock led to the understanding that there was not a particular mineral involved, but a class of minerals that share a common crystalline structure of cubes and diamondlike shapes....
Subconscious, split-second time measurements occur all the time in daily life. When the brain is processing speech, judging the trajectory of a speeding ball, playing (and even appreciating) music it requires using past and present knowledge of the latest stimulus—be it spoken syllables, points in space or musical notes. Dean Buonomano, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Brain Research Institute, and Uma Karmarkar, a postdoc researcher at U....
Carbon monoxide is a poison. Can it also be a medicine? Dr. Augustine Choi has spent two decades trying to figure that out. And he’s inching toward a surprising answer: yes. Most of the research so far has been conducted in animals; just a few early-stage clinical trials are underway in patients. But the data look promising enough that several companies — including one Choi cofounded — are jumping into the field, developing ways to deliver small amounts of carbon monoxide to damaged tissues through pills, lotions, beverages, and inhalable gas....
Democrats savaged each other during last night’s presidential debate, but their attacks mostly stopped when the moderators shifted to a 15-minute discussion on climate change. The candidates still distinguished themselves. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont thundered denouncements of natural gas, while Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar sounded ambivalent about the fossil fuel. Former Vice President Joe Biden threatened China over its coal exports, while media mogul Michael Bloomberg urged a more conciliatory approach....
The Argentine ant has spread to every continent except Antarctica, overwhelming native ants with sheer numbers and fierce battle tactics. But they may have met their match in a recent arrival: the Asian needle ant. The cross-species face-off, a surprise to entomologists, could topple ecosystems where the battle lines are drawn. Invading ants make up just handfuls of the more than 12,400 described ant species in the world, says Jes Søe Pedersen, an associate professor at the Center for Social Evolution at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark....
The online retail platform Shopify, Canada’s most valuable company, yesterday inked a deal to suck out of the atmosphere 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and store it permanently underground. Shopify Inc.’s agreement is the largest publicly announced corporate purchase of direct air capture, or DAC, for carbon offsets, according to Carbon Engineering, a Canadian firm seeking to commercialize the nascent climate-change-fighting technology. Carbon Engineering promised Shopify it would store the e-commerce company’s carbon offsets—roughly equivalent to the emissions from 132 tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline—in a DAC facility it expects to bring online in 2024....
You’ve probably heard about microdosing, the “productivity hack” popular among Silicon Valley engineers and business leaders. Microdosers take regular small doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. At these doses, they don’t experience mind-bending, hallucinatory trips, but they say they get a jolt in creativity and focus that can elevate work performance, help relationships, and generally improve a stressful and demanding daily life. If its proponents are to be believed, microdosing offers the cure for an era dominated by digital distractions and existential anxiety—a cup of coffee with a little Tony Robbins stirred in....
Other species are capable of displaying dazzling feats of intelligence. Crows can solve multistep problems. Apes display numerical skills and empathy. Yet, neither species has the capacity to conduct scientific investigations into other species’ cognitive abilities. This type of behavior provides solid evidence that humans are by far the smartest species on the planet. Besides just elevated IQs, however, humans set themselves apart in another way: Their offspring are among the most helpless of any species....
U.S. public health officials are bracing for a wave of babies with severe Zika-related birth defects. The latest official numbers suggest 808 pregnant women in the U.S. appear to have been infected with Zika. Yet doctors are also steeling themselves for the possibility of birth abnormalities in another population: babies born to women who did not know they were infected. Preparing for the potential deluge—both physically and psychologically—remains daunting. “There will be an extraordinary demand on special-needs care,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health....
