Posts

At the start of the 20th century scientists had little knowledge of the building blocks that form our physical world. By the end of the century they had discovered not just all the elements that are the basis of all observed matter but a slew of even more fundamental particles that make up our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. The tool responsible for this revolution was the particle accelerator. The pinnacle achievement of particle accelerators came in 2012, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) uncovered the long-sought Higgs boson particle....

A fierce crustacean known as the peacock mantis shrimp has eyes so refined they can perceive polarized light, including information that is invisible to nearly every other member of the animal kingdom. Not only can the ocean dweller extract polarization information from light, it can do so when the light is circularly polarized—an ability unknown outside a few species of the order of stomatopods to which the peacock mantis belongs....

ASTRO-NAUGHT In “Mission: Risk Averse” [Graphic Science], John Matson expresses concern about the apparent risk-averse attitude at nasa leading to a preponderance of Mars missions at the expense of exploration of the rest of the more challenging parts of the solar system. I would suggest that there is another psychology at play: catering to the persistent hope of manned exploration. If such exploration is at all feasible, then Mars is the place (never mind that it is also an obvious dead end), and it is then natural to put so many eggs in the Mars basket....

We now look back with pity on old computer printers, with their glacial bizz-buzz and annoying perforated-edge paper. A decade from now people will surely look back in pity on the things we call printers today. Three-dimensional printers, capable of producing entire objects, are already coming down in price, and new types of printers can output electronic circuit boards or even entire functional circuits. Now researchers have a printer that outputs silicon chips....

Finding the world’s oldest ice core is a bit of a Goldilocks problem, Hubertus Fischer says. There are many places where the ice is too thick, or perhaps too thin. The bedrock beneath could be too warm, melting important layers from below, or the ice could have folded and buckled, mixing up the layers in the core. That’s one reason Fischer and his colleagues, part of an international effort called the International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences, or IPICS, have published a sort of “how to” guide for scientists seeking to find the location that might be just right to drill a 1....

One of the seemingly ideal and direct solutions to climate change is to efficiently vacuum up greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere. But a new study finds that such a proposal is very far-fetched and tremendously expensive. The president’s science adviser, John Holdren, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have expressed support in the past for capturing and storing pollution from the air as a measure to mitigate global temperature increases. However, in a paper published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that trying to scrub the air is much more expensive than keeping it from getting dirty in the first place....

Lightning storms on Jupiter are much more frequent, and much less alien, than previously thought, a pair of new studies suggests. The first evidence of lightning on Jupiter was detected nearly 40 years ago. Electrical currents in lightning bolts generate a broad range of radio frequencies known as atmospherics, or “sferics” for short. And in 1979, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft detected very low-frequency radio emissions from the solar system’s largest planet—emissions that one might expect from lightning....

On a sparkling July morning on Yellowstone Lake the nine-meter aluminum boat Hammerhead putts over to a yellow-flagged buoy lolling on the glassy surface. The buoy marks a 275-meter-long net that’s been hanging in the lake for the last 24 hours. Two crew members pull the net up with a hydraulic winch—it’s empty. Most fishermen would be disappointed, but Phil Doepke is encouraged. To Doepke, a fisheries biologist at the National Park Service (NPS), the empty net is a sign that he and his colleagues may be winning their battle against the lake trout, Salvelinus namaycush, an infamous invasive species that has been devastating the lake, one of the world’s iconic ecosystems....

MAY 1962 First Gamma-Ray Satellite “Within the past year or so the merest glimpse has been obtained of the universe as revealed by the very-high-energy photons called gamma rays. The glimpse has been provided by fewer than 100 energetic photons, recorded by a gamma ray ‘telescope’ carried into orbit on April 27, 1961, by the artificial satellite Explorer XI. It is doubtful whether such a small number of particles have ever before been analyzed so intensively in an effort to extract information about the uni­verse....

The common pesticide chlorpyrifos has been banned for indoor use since 2000, but its effects can still be found in the brains of young children now approaching puberty. A recent study used magnetic resonance imaging to reveal that children exposed to chlorpyrifos in the womb had changes in the brain that persisted throughout childhood. Researchers examined the brain scans of 20 children exposed to higher levels of chlorpyrifos in their mother’s blood (as measured by serum from the umbilical cord) and found that they looked markedly different compared with those of children exposed to lower levels of the chemical, says epidemiologist Virginia Rauh of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University....

The power to control living things and objects from a distance is a popular supernatural talent in science fiction and fantasy: Witches fling spells at foes and X-Men send chairs and tables flying with telekinesis, for example. But when it comes to remotely controlling biological organisms, science has a few tricks up its sleeve, too—although there’s nothing metaphysical about them. Manipulating biological processes with minimal interference, from the cellular level to the behavior of whole organisms, is a burgeoning scientific effort to better understand how living things work and to develop more effective treatments for a range of medical disorders....

Asian elephants go where roads cannot. Their talent for navigating difficult terrain, coupled with their strength and smarts, has led humans to seek them out as cavalry and work animals for centuries. In rich detail, geographer Shell recounts this history and describes all the ways pachyderms collaborate with humans—for example, as draught animals for logging companies along the Indian-Burmese border and with Kachin Independence Army fighters, who run the world’s only existing bureaucratically administered elephant-based transportation network....

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015 (($19.99)) In this investigation of the psychology behind conspiracy theories, psychologist Brotherton explores how different people can reach wildly divergent conclusions about reality. He casts doubt on the assumption that far-fetched beliefs are reserved for the simple-minded or the exceedingly paranoid. “We are all natural-born conspiracy theorists,” Brotherton writes. He delves into the nature of belief to illustrate the ways that our susceptibility to tall tales is related to other natural tendencies, such as our inclination to arrange random data points into a seemingly meaningful pattern and our propensity to ascribe intentions behind sometimes random events....

From Nature magazine Sixty-five-year-old Ann Linsey was starting to worry about how easily she got distracted from whatever she was doing. “As you get older, it seems harder to do more things at once,” she says. Then she enrolled in a study to test whether playing a game could improve fading cognitive skills in older people — and was impressed by what it did for her. “I was frustrated because I felt I was losing my faculties....

Dark matter scientists are doubling down on efforts to catch the elusive particles thought to constitute most of the matter in the universe. These theorized particles make themselves felt through gravity: They appear to tug on the normal matter throughout the universe but they otherwise can’t be seen or touched. Experiments aiming to observe the rare occasions when dark matter particles interact with normal atoms have been operating for decades without success and have already ruled out many of the most basic explanations for dark matter....

Hints of a mysterious new particle at the world’s largest particle accelerator just got a little stronger. The excess of photons produced by particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has kept physicists abuzz since it was discovered three months ago: it is now slightly more statistically significant but still falls well short of the certainty needed to claim a discovery. In December, physicists announced that they had seen an excess of pairs of γ-ray photons with a combined energy of around 750 gigaelectronvolts....

But NASCAR is hardly alone: U.S. IndyCar has run exclusively on ethanol at times since 2007. Of course, ethanol made from fermented corn starch plays a more prosaic role in the U.S. these days, making up some 10 percent of national passenger vehicle fuel. In fact, in 2010 the U.S. took roughly 40 percent of the national corn crop that grows on some 30 million hectares of prime farmland and turned it into roughly 50 billion liters of the alcohol fuel....

By Dan WhitcombLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Authorities have evacuated and shut down a section of a national forest outside Los Angeles for at least a week after a ground squirrel was found there infected with the plague, county public health officials said on Thursday.The squirrel tested positive for plague after it was trapped in the Angeles National Forest during “routine surveillance activities,” the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in a written health advisory....

For a slick, supple mouthfeel, there’s nothing like a suspension of fine droplets of oil in water (or vice versa)—what scientists call an emulsion. Cream, butter and chocolate are emulsions, as are gravy, vinaigrette and cheese. But when an emulsion breaks, the results can get ugly: a layer of clear fat floating on top of the gravy boat, a salad dressing that comes out of the bottle all oil and no vinegar, a plate of nachos covered in greasy goo....

As the H1N1 swine flu pandemic swept the world in 2009, China saw a spike in cases of narcolepsy — a mysterious disorder that involves sudden, uncontrollable sleepiness. Meanwhile, in Europe, around 1 in 15,000 children who were given Pandemrix — a now-defunct flu vaccine that contained fragments of the pandemic virus — also developed narcolepsy, a chronic disease. Immunologist Elizabeth Mellins and narcolepsy researcher Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University School of Medicine in California and their collaborators have now partly solved the mystery behind these events, while also confirming a longstanding hypothesis that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system attacks healthy cells....