SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Parkinson’s disease is coming to prime time. Tomorrow night Michael J. Fox returns to television as the star of his own sitcom nearly 15 years after retiring from Spin City to focus on finding a cure for his disease. Michael has been careful to emphasize that the show isn’t really about Parkinson’s. Based loosely on his real life, The Michael J....
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the resulting deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese citizens in the summer of 1945 did more than decisively end World War II. The U.S. strikes that brought nuclear destruction of those two cities also thrust the world onto a new trajectory—one that led to the terrifying development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb and the ruinous arms races of the cold war it entailed....
A number of recent news stories have had a similar kind of message: animals viscerally understand certain mathematical operations better than humans do. Such stories are always interesting in a Sunday-newspaper sort of way, but do the abilities of animals to calculate really exceed those of humans? It may help to examine some of these claims. In the infamous Monty Hall Problem, named after the television game show, human subjects seem to pale next to pigeons in mathematical reasoning....
The first images released from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed new views of the cosmos in exquisite, never-before-seen detail. This was thanks in large part to the careful construction of the telescope. There will be a lot to learn from JWST during its mission, from how galaxies evolve to the composition of exoplanet atmospheres. The data from this telescope have already started going public. Eventually, all of its measurements will be available for anyone to use....
An international team of scientists has discovered a massive new planet thanks to a phenomenon predicted by Einstein 70 years ago. Microlensing occurs when a star crosses in front of another star and bends the light from the more distant star, magnifying it like a lens. Astronomers recently took advantage of one such occlusion to get a better look at a red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years from Earth, known as BLG-169....
In 1984 the Hatch-Waxman Act made it cheaper and easier to put generic versions of a drug on the market. As a result of the expedited approval process, generics now make up more than 60 percent of prescription drugs sold in the U.S. and have saved the health care system $734 billion between 1999 and 2008 alone. By the end of 2011 the FDA plans to release a similar set of guidelines to approve generic versions of biological drugs—a newer breed of pharmaceuticals that includes enzymes, antibodies and other molecules derived from living cells....
Key concepts Physics Water Buoyancy Archimedes’ principle Introduction Have you ever thought about why most fishes never sink to the bottom of the ocean or float to the water’s surface? How is it that they can stay so perfectly buoyant underwater? You might be surprised to hear most bony fishes have a special organ to help them with that: a swim bladder. This is a thin-walled sac located inside the body of a fish that is usually filled with gas....
Scientists who study a rare brain disease that once devastated entire communities in Papua New Guinea have described a genetic variant that appears to stop misfolded proteins known as prions from propagating in the brain. Kuru was first observed in the mid-twentieth century among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. At its peak in the late 1950s, the disease killed up to 2% of the group’s population each year. Scientists later traced the illness to ritual cannibalism, in which tribe members ate the brains and nervous systems of their dead....
The world’s cities are absorbing one million additional people every week—and by 2030, they could consume an extra 1.5 million square kilometers of land, or roughly the area of France, Germany and Spain combined. What would be the best ways for those cities to grow? A new study examines how—before urban planners existed—a group of Italian villages evolved into suburbs outside Milan today. Such studies may eventually help planners optimize future developments....
The Geysers—a geothermal power plant in northern California operated by Calpine—has been pumping out electricity harvested from steam heated deep within Earth since the 1920s. Since the 1990s Calpine has been pumping in treated wastewater from surrounding communities to replenish water lost during all those years of power production. And since 2000 the plant began producing more than six million megawatt-hours—enough to power 750,000 homes—annually, all while operating nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week....
President Obama’s highly anticipated power plant rules have come a long way from a relatively low-profile legal settlement in 2010. Obama is set to unveil a proposed rule that for the first time will limit greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s power plants. He officially directed EPA to craft regulations to control greenhouse gases in his Climate Action Plan last year, but the effort to curb the largest chunk of CO2 emissions in the country has been mounting for years....
Despite the naive storylines about interstellar travel in science fiction, biological creatures were not selected by Darwinian evolution to survive travel between stars. Such a trip would necessarily span many generations, since even at the speed of light, it would take tens of thousands of years to travel between stars in our galaxy’s disk and 10 times longer across its halo. If we ever encounter traces of aliens, therefore, it will likely be in the form of technology, not biology....
Just like the human brain itself, the European Commission’s billion-euro Human Brain Project (HBP) defies easy explanation. Launched 18 months ago, the massive project is complex and, to most observers, confusing. Many people—both scientists and non-scientists—have thus accepted a description of the project that emerged from its leaders and its publicity machine: the aim of simulating the entire human brain in a supercomputer and so find cures for psychiatric and neurological disorders....
By Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s massive 2011 earthquake may trigger more, and larger, volcanic eruptions over the next few decades, perhaps even that of Mount Fuji - but predicting them remains close to impossible, a volcano expert said on Friday. The nation last month suffered its worst volcanic disaster in nearly 90 years when Mount Ontake, its second tallest active volcano at 3,067 meters (10,062 feet), suddenly erupted, raining down ash and stone on hikers crowding the summit....
IDEAS ABOUT ATTACHMENT The biggest takeaway for me from “Get Attached,” by Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller, was how much my attachment style affects all my relationships, especially with friends and family. The need for independence does not limit itself to romance only. Thanks for the great article. Vern Martin Alliance, Ohio I’m increasingly inclined to view Scientific American Mind as a kind of snobbish self-help exercise. I confess that I love doing the Mensa puzzles and getting the instant gratification that most of the articles provide, but science?...
Songbirds stutter, babble when young, become mute if parts of their brains are damaged, learn how to sing from their elders and can even be “bilingual”—in other words, songbirds’ vocalizations share a lot of traits with human speech. However, that similarity goes beyond behavior, researchers have found. Even though humans and birds are separated by millions of years of evolution, the genes that give us our ability to learn speech have much in common with those that lend birds their warble....
TOM’S COACH looks at him and begins: “The big conference room is full, and all eyes are on you at the podium. Try to picture it. Can you sense the crowd’s anticipation? Who’s sitting in the front row? How do you feel standing at the microphone?” These words awaken in Tom memories of earlier presentations, and the 33-year-old business manager gets queasy. He knows his company’s future could hang on his upcoming pitch....
QUITO, ECUADOR—Long before the Spanish conquered the Incas in 1533, and centuries before the Incas inhabited this area, the present-day site of Quito International Airport was a marshy lake surrounded by Indian settlements—the Quitus on one shore and the Ipias on the other. Between A.D. 200 and 800 these cultures prospered here, fishing the lake, growing corn, beans and potatoes in the fertile soil, and fermenting an alcoholic drink—chicha—made of a watery corn broth....
Liquid crystals, as the name suggests, occupy a state somewhere between a liquid and a solid. Researchers long ago learned how to exploit the unique properties of liquid crystals by manipulating the crystals’ rod-shaped molecules to control light in digital displays. Now a University of Pennsylvania team has developed a new optical approach. When the researchers dropped a silica bead into a layer of liquid crystals, capillary forces drew the crystals into hundreds of tiny petals around the bead to form the flowerlike pattern pictured here....
Key concepts Chemistry Property of matter Solutions Solubility Introduction Have you ever added a spoon of sugar to your tea and wondered why it disappeared? Where did it go? The sugar did not actually disappear—it changed from its solid form into a dissolved form in a process called chemical dissolution. The result is a tea–sugar solution in which individual sugar molecules become uniformly distributed in the tea. But what happens if you increase the amount of sugar that you add to your tea?...
