When you look up at the night sky, the stars that you see all reside in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The nearest large galaxy to us, Andromeda, is more than two million light-years away, a distance 20 times the size of the main disk of our galaxy. With the unaided eye, you cannot make out its stars individually; they blend together into a faint fuzz. As far as our galaxy is concerned, those stars might as well inhabit a separate universe....
The chicken egg has a storied history in medicine. Even today, millions of ordinary fertilized eggs are each punctured with a drill and injected with flu virus to make vaccines. Now, scientists at the same research institute that cloned Dolly the sheep have produced a genetically modified rooster whose female descendants lay eggs that produce medicines in place of a protein in egg whites. Helen Sang of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, and her colleagues used lentivirus to introduce a gene into freshly fertilized chicken embryos that trigger the production of various drugs rather than the protein ovalbumin, which normally makes up roughly 54 percent of egg whites....
The beloved Harry Potter series has enthralled a generation of readers with tales of enchanted elixirs and magical devices, including such things as invisibility cloaks, edible chocolate frogs, talking pictures, and a resurrection stone. Most of these extraordinary items are purely fantastical, but a few novelties from the series are now available for purchase by Muggles (if you haven’t read the Potter books, that’s you and me). One such item is a package of Bertie Bott’s Jelly Beans – a small box with uniquely flavored candies, including appealing tastes like blueberry, tutti-fruitti, and marshmallow along with disgusting flavors like ear wax, vomit, dirt, and boogers....
SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Editor’s Note: As leaders from business, politics and science convene this week at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss pressing matters of the day, Scientific American is publishing a series of interviews with leading scientists, produced in conjunction with the forum. This is the first of four interviews for the WEF by Katia Moskvitch....
By Alison AbbottPeople have used mind control to change images on a video screen, a study reports. The volunteers, whose brains were wired up to a computer, enhanced one of two competing images of famous people or objects by changing firing rates in individual brain cells.[See a video on this finding here.]The research, by Moran Cerf from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues, demonstrates how our brains, which are constantly bombarded with images, noise and smells, can, through conscious thought, select what stimuli to notice and what to ignore....
1970 Era of Microelectronics “Since the introduction of the transistor in 1948—which in its day seemed a marvel of compactness compared with the glass vacuum tube—the size of electronic devices has been reduced by a factor of 10 roughly every five years. A great part of the stimulus for miniaturizing electronic circuits came from ballistic-missile programs. As the microtechnology was developed, however, it was speedily applied to commercial computers. It now seems inevitable that microelectronic circuits will soon find their way into a variety of new applications whose impact on everyday life—in the home, in the office, in the school and on the highway—will be profound....
A SAVVY HANDICAPPER would never have put money on the continued existence of this evolutionary dark horse. Nearly hairless, weak—no sharp claws or slicing teeth here—and slow, with a bumpy bipedal gait, humans might initially appear to be one of the unlikeliest survivors on earth. Except for the oversize brains. As the articles in this special edition collectively underscore, so much of the rise of our ancestors from humble beginnings to today’s world-dominant swell of humanity tracked the stunning growth of all that furrowed cortex....
The record heat wave sweeping through Europe sent daytime temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit last week in France as soccer players squared off in the quarterfinals of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Temperatures soared even higher during the concurrent Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt. One player for Nigeria was hospitalized and missed his team’s first game after collapsing during a training session due to “severe dehydration,” according to his former soccer club....
Can you experience déjà vu of a place or situation you’ve never encountered? — Ellen Smucker-Green Nashville, Tenn. Alan Brown, professor in the department of psychology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, responds: Déjà vu is a startling mental event. The phenomenon involves a strong feeling that an experience is familiar, despite sensing or knowing that it never happened before. Most people have experienced déjà vu at some point in their life, but it occurs infrequently, perhaps once or twice a year at most....
The United States is poised to bet its energy future on natural gas as a clean, plentiful fuel that can supplant coal and oil. But new research by the Environmental Protection Agency—and a growing understanding of the pollution associated with the full “life cycle” of gas production—is casting doubt on the assumption that gas offers a quick and easy solution to climate change. Advocates for natural gas routinely assert that it produces 50 percent less greenhouse gases than coal and is a significant step toward a greener energy future....
It’s a rare kind of research that incites a frenzied panic before it’s even published. But it’s flu season, and influenza science has a way of causing a stir this time of year. Epidemiologists have long debated the pandemic potential of H5N1, a.k.a. avian bird flu. On one hand, the virus spreads too inefficiently between humans to seem like much of a threat: it has caused less than 600 known cases of human flu since first emerging in 1997....
When the physicians found the nine-year-old boy he was scared and barely had a pulse. He had been locked in a house with his mother for four days by community members in a corner of southwest Guinea, the hotbed of Africa’s current Ebola crisis. The boy’s neighbors were frightened of contracting the virus that causes the highly lethal illness (which kills between 50 and 90 percent of its victims) and did not want to risk coming into contact with either of them....
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A faulty blowout preventer and weaknesses in how companies analyze potential hazards in offshore oil and gas operations contributed to BP Plc’s deadly Gulf of Mexico oil spill more than four years ago, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board said on Thursday. Despite tougher regulations, a slew of other investigations and an ongoing federal civil trial with potentially billions of dollars at stake, companies may still drill without demonstrating that they have adequate barriers to deadly accidents in place, the agency said....
A fleet of robots, trolling the oceans and measuring their heat content, has revolutionized scientists’ ability to study how climate change is affecting the seas. Now the aquatic machines called Argo floats are going into the deepest ocean abyss. “We know a lot from Argo now that we have over a decade’s worth of temperature data,” said Gregory Johnson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory....
The COVID-19 pandemic is, first and foremost, a health crisis. However, it is rapidly becoming an economic one too. This is not, of course, the first global economic crisis. However, this time it is different. The 20th century experienced the 1929 Wall Street crash and the 1973 oil-price shock, as well as numerous regional crises in East Asia, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America. The early years of the 21st century saw the global financial crisis that started in 2007....
America’s leading professional group of clinical psychologists has denied for years that it has been playing fast and loose with ethics. Now the American Psychological Association (APA) can no longer hide. A deeply troubling report, completed early this month, shows the association twisted its policies after the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack to allow members to help interrogate suspected terrorists, aiding the Pentagon and CIA in sessions that medical professionals have called harmful and abusive....
(Reuters) - Three people died and at least eight others were injured on Saturday in a landslide that destroyed six or more homes along a state highway in northwest Washington state, officials said. Mud, possibly produced by recent heavy rain, slid across part of State Route 530 near Oso, Washington, north of Seattle, Washington state trooper Mark Francis said. The three deaths were confirmed by the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. Eight people were rescued and were being treated at area hospitals and at least six houses were destroyed, the sheriff’s office said in a statement....
NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection has just one officer, Catharine Conley. Her job is to ensure that nasa and other U.S. organizations that journey into space adhere to the regulations put in place by the International Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which aims to preserve scientists’ ability to study other worlds in their natural states, avoid biological contamination of environments we explore and protect Earth’s biosphere in case alien life exists....
When we wrote the words you are now reading, we were typing on the best computers that technology now offers: machines that are terribly wasteful of energy and slow when tackling important scientific calculations. And they are typical of every computer that exists today, from the smartphone in your hand to the multimillion-dollar supercomputers humming along in the world’s most advanced computing facilities. We were writing in Word, a perfectly fine program that you probably use as well....
Survivors of childhood sexual abuse commonly report lingering feelings of being contaminated. This effect can lead to problems with self-esteem and body image, relationship trouble, and behavioral issues such as obsessive washing. Now a study in the January issue of Behavior Modification finds that a treatment that appeals to both logic and emotion, via mental imagery, can help relieve these intrusive feelings. Psychologists at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany tested a brief treatment consisting of one session and a follow-up “booster” meeting....
