After more than 30 years of declared war on cancer, a few important victories can be claimed, such as 85 percent survival rates for some childhood cancers whose diagnoses once represented a death sentence. In other malignancies, new drugs are able to at least hold the disease at bay, making it a condition with which a patient can live. In 2001, for example, Gleevec was approved for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML)....
Mental health care is one of the biggest unmet needs of our time. Nearly one in two people in the U.S. will suffer from depression, anxiety disorders or another mental health ailment at some point in their life, and about one in 17 Americans currently has a serious mental illness. Young people are especially prone to these troubles. Yet millions of people living with these conditions do not receive the care they require....
Charles Kane never thought he would be cavorting with topologists. “I don’t think like a mathematician,” admits Kane, a theoretical physicist who has tended to focus on tangible problems about solid materials. He is not alone. Physicists have typically paid little attention to topology—the mathematical study of shapes and their arrangement in space. But now Kane and other physicists are flocking to the field. In the past decade, they have found that topology provides unique insight into the physics of materials, such as how some insulators can sneakily conduct electricity along a single-atom layer on their surfaces....
Excerpt from Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, by Ben Goldacre. Published by Faber and Faber, Inc. © 2013 Ben Goldacre. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. All Rights Reserved. Before we get going, we need to establish one thing beyond any doubt: industry-funded trials are more likely to produce a positive, flattering result than independently funded trials. This is our core premise, and you’re about to read a very short chapter, because this is one of the most well-documented phenomena in the growing field of “research about research”....
Suspended near the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea off France and Italy, 126 football-sized glass spheres are already using the ocean itself as an instrument to search for signals from dark matter, supernovae and neutron star collisions. These are the first of many such globes deployed for a project called the Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NeT. Its target, neutrinos, are fundamental particles that have no electrical charge and almost no mass....
By Serena Maria Daniels FLINT, Mich. (Reuters) - Three Michigan state and local officials were criminally charged on Wednesday in an investigation into dangerous lead levels in the city of Flint’s drinking water, and the state attorney general said there would be more to come. Genesee District Judge Tracy Collier-Nix authorized charges against Flint employee Michael Glasgow and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) employees Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby. Glasgow, 40, was charged with tampering with evidence and willful neglect of duty, according to court documents....
In stories about the universe gravity plays a starring role. It is the force that best explains not only the motions of the planets, stars and galaxies, but also their origins and evolution—how order coalesced from the chaos of the primordial cosmos. Yet for all of gravity’s importance, physicists’ understanding of it is in many respects woefully incomplete. After famously watching an apple fall from a tree, Isaac Newton recognized gravity as a fundamental force acting on all things, yet he failed to explain its origins....
A close-up of a computer-simulated human eye during fixation, with an inset view of the central retina. Although the eye is voluntarily “fixated” on the edge of a figure, it nevertheless makes tiny eye movements with distinct characteristics. The moving position of one point of the figure is displayed as a line on the retina in the inset. This plot reveals three types of fixational eye movements: fast microsaccades, slow drift, and oscillatory tremor, all of which move the stimulus by different amounts across the photoreceptor cells of the retina....
Deep in a laboratory freezer, 100,000 vials of blood have been frozen for the better part of five decades. For scientist Barbara Cohn, it’s a treasure trove. Collected from more than 15,000 San Francisco Bay Area women after they gave birth in the 1960s, each vial of blood holds a woman’s lifetime of secrets. Scientists say these vials could help them unravel one of the most enduring medical mysteries: Why do some women, with no family history, develop breast cancer?...
In December 2005, when winter the bottlenose dolphin was just a few months old, she was swimming with her mother in Mosquito Lagoon, along central Florida’s Atlantic coast. Somehow she got herself tangled in a crab trap. An eagle-eyed fisherman spotted her struggling and called in a wildlife rescue team. The volunteers gently positioned the dolphin on a stretcher, carried her out of the water and drove her across the state to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium....
From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. Dryland rancher Vivan Mawhinney spends a lot of his time thinking about invasive African lovegrass. As he drives around his property in Australia’s Bega Valley, halfway between Melbourne and Sydney, he’s continually planning how and when he’ll move his Angus cows and Merino ewes around so that he can beat the spread of the densely tufted weed. Mawhinney’s property covers 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of gently undulating country, 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of a line of blue hills that mark the edge of the Great Dividing Range....
The perfect sleight is a flawlessly coordinated act of deception. Magicians dedicate hours to bullying their fingers into precise positions and years mastering the art of misdirection. The best illusionists spend a lifetime honing their prestidigitations. Now, there’s a computer can do it, too—all in a matter of seconds. Yesterday programmers at Queen Mary University of London unveiled a system that uses artificial intelligence to perform magic tricks. The program not only calculates probabilities—it can capture every potential outcome of most card tricks—the system also evaluates how human spectators will perceive its performances, based on behavioral and cognitive studies....
Birds of a feather don’t just flock together—they also work together to obtain food. Recent research makes rooks the first nonprimates observed to successfully cooperate to retrieve a food-laden platform, according to a June 22 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Scientists at the University of Cambridge tested the rooks, which are Eurasian members of the crow family, by placing dishes of food on a platform out of reach of a bird enclosure....
Last December’s agreement in Bali to launch a two-year negotiation on climate change was good news, a rare example of international cooperation in a world seemingly stuck in a spiral of conflict. Cynics might note that the only accomplishment was an agreement to talk some more, and their cynicism may yet be confirmed. Nevertheless, the growing understanding that serious climate-control measures are feasible at modest cost is welcome. The arithmetic is becoming clearer....
The Heartbleed Internet security flaw discovered this week continues to affect thousands of websites, and even some Android phones, home wireless routers and embedded devices. It’s likely that this mess won’t be cleaned up for quite a while. In the meantime, here are the basics and some useful links. MORE: Best PC Antivirus Software 2014 Heartbleed basic facts What’s affected: Some (but not all) secure Web, email, instant-messaging and mobile-app communications Some (but not all) home wireless routers, printers and firewalls Some (but not all) Internet networking equipment Some (but not all) Internet-connected devices running embedded software Smartphones and tablets running Android 4....
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the February 1999 edition of Scientific American. We are posting it in light of recent news involving Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Individual investors and professional stock and currency traders know better than ever that prices quoted in any financial market often change with heart-stopping swiftness. Fortunes are made and lost in sudden bursts of activity when the market seems to speed up and the volatility soars....
Obesity stems primarily from the overconsumption of food paired with insufficient exercise. But this elementary formula cannot explain how quickly the obesity epidemic has spread globally in the past several decades nor why more than one third of adults in the U.S. are now obese. Many researchers believe that a more complex mix of environmental exposures, lifestyle, genetics and the microbiome’s makeup help explain that phenomenon. And a growing body of work suggests that exposure to certain chemicals—found in nature as well as industry—may play an essential role by driving the body to produce and store surplus fat in its tissues....
Let’s talk about building an offshore wind farm. For starters, it’s not your average construction job. Vineyard Wind I, the country’s first major project, is planning to use turbines longer than the John Hancock building, which is Boston’s tallest skyscraper at 790 feet. And whoa, boy, these things are heavy. Just take the nacelle—that’s the long narrow piece that houses the motor and sits right behind the blades. It weighs a whopping 794 tons....
In 1944 researchers recognized that millions of people were at risk of famine as a result of the ravages of World War II. To investigate the impact of food deprivation on the human body, 36 healthy men volunteered to endure a six-month semistarvation diet and be observed by scientists and doctors. The result? Hunger made the men obsessed with food. They would dream and fantasize about eating. They reported fatigue, irritability and depression, along with decreased concentration, comprehension and judgment....
When Japan’s SpriteSat research satellite launches in October on its three-year mission to study Earth’s magnetic field, it will be equipped with a special type of computer memory that will allow it to operate despite extreme temperatures and radiation in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) made by Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., in Austin, Tex., (and integrated into the satellite built by the Ångström Aerospace Corporation) is smaller, leaving more space for transponders and other signal transmitters and receivers....
