Posts

Despite its frigid temperatures, Mars might be able to host lakes of water on its surface today, a new study suggests. Although extremely small amounts of water would quickly evaporate in Mars’ low-pressure atmosphere, water from sources such as aquifers could last long enough to pool, with larger pools remaining liquid for at least a year, researchers said. “Nobody’s doubting that liquid water was on Marsat some point,” Jules Goldspiel, of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, told Space....

In 2005 engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Jaguar, a system that would later be upgraded into a world-beating supercomputer. By 2011 it had swelled to a room-size system that used seven megawatts of energy, ran nearly 225,000 processor cores and had a peak performance of 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. Still, to keep up with ever more sophisticated problems in energy research, the engineers had to scale Jaguar’s processing power 10-fold....

The shadowy nature of illegal media down­loading makes it difficult for researchers to analyze the true relation between piracy and lost sales. Does every movie download represent a theater ticket left unpurchased, as the movie industry contends? Or are most downloaders people who never would have bought a ticket in the first place? Two researchers have come up with a clever strategy to untangle one cause-and-effect re­lation. Economists Brett Danaher of Wellesley College and Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota noticed that Hollywood studios often wait weeks after the U....

Size matters to some smartphone consumers. While Apple may have already sold millions of iPhone 5 smartphones since its launch in September, not every iPhone fan is thrilled with the new design of the device. And some say the iPhone 5 falls short of expectations, especially in the size department. In this edition of Ask Maggie, I help one such reader decide if it’s worth the hassle of switching from Apple iOS to Google Android for a bigger smartphone....

The push to prevent skin cancer may have come with unintended consequences—impaired brain function because of a deficiency of vitamin D. The “sunshine vitamin” is synthesized in our skin when we are exposed to direct sunlight, but sunblock impedes this process. And although vitamin D is well known for promoting bone health and regulating vital calcium levels—hence its addition to milk—it does more than that. Scientists have now linked this fat-soluble nutrient’s hormonelike activity to a number of functions throughout the body, including the workings of the brain....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. When you think of Albert Einstein, what do you think of? General relativity? Black holes? Crazy hair? While he certainly made significant contributions to all of those topics during his lifetime, Albert Einstein was perhaps even more well known in his time for his work to understand the photoelectric effect....

Rats don’t usually come out into daylight, especially not on a busy morning in New York City. But there it was, head awkwardly jutting out in front of its body, swinging from side to side. What injured the creature, I have no idea, but its hind legs could no longer support its weight. The rat dragged them like a kid drags a garbage bag that parents have asked be taken out–reluctantly....

“There is a popular belief that wheat found in the ancient sepulchres of Egypt will not only germinate after the lapse of 3,000 years, but produce ears of extraordinary size and beauty. The question is undecided; but Antonio Figari-Bey’s paper, addressed to the Egyptian Institute at Alexandria, appears much against it. One kind of wheat which Figari-Bey employed for his experiments had been found in Upper Egypt, at the bottom of a tomb at Medinet-Aboo....

Meteorite researcher Alan E. Rubin of the University of California, Los Angeles, recently examined 91 thin sections of 53 chondrites (fragments of ancient asteroids) to learn something about the environment that surrounded the chondrites when they first formed—before they became constituents of asteroids and before planets made their debut in the solar system. He recounts his efforts, and what he learned, in his article “Secrets of Primitive Meteorites,” in the February 2013 issue of Scientific American....

I am standing in front of a gigantic touch screen in a garagelike laboratory at Google’s facility in Goleta, Calif., using my finger to move little squares containing symbols—an X, a Y, an H and other, more arcane glyphs—across the display. The squares represent functions that can be performed on a quantum bit—a qubit—inside a large, silvery cylinder nearby. Of the myriad functions on offer, some cause the bit to flip from 1 to 0 (or from 0 to 1); one makes it rotate around an axis....

Mice don’t actually scare elephants, but there is one tiny animal that the pachyderms definitely steer clear of: bees. It’s a fear conservationists have begun to harness to keep elephants out of crops in Africa—a point of conflict that leaves hundreds of humans and elephants dead every year. The Elephants and Bees Project, run by the nonprofit Save the Elephants, seeks to keep elephants from trampling and eating crops by building bee fences: wire fences strung with hives....

By Katharine SandersonA seemingly unremarkable ocean microbe turns out to be a multitasker – it can not only photosynthesize, but can also produce large amounts of hydrogen, opening up a potential way to make the gas cheaply for fuel.The single-celled cyanobacteriumCyanothece 51142 can make hydrogen in air, Himadri Pakrasi of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues report in Nature Communications1. Until now, the only organisms known to make hydrogen could only produce it in an oxygen-free environment – making it a potentially expensive process to scale-up....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida wildlife and water managers are worried about an invasive snail that is wreaking havoc on the state’s billion-dollar effort to remove chemicals from the fragile Everglades. The South American apple snail first appeared in large numbers in 2010, according to Audubon Florida science coordinator Paul Gray, and was initially seen as a potential savior of an endangered bird, the snail kite. During the prior decade the number of kites, a gray bird with a hooked beak, had fallen to about 700 from 3,400 as their main food source, the native apple snail, became scarce after years of drought and hurricanes....

The international body representing stem-cell scientists has torn up a decades-old limit on the length of time that scientists should grow human embryos in the lab, giving more leeway to researchers who are studying human development and disease. Previously, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) recommended that scientists culture human embryos for no more than two weeks after fertilization. But on 26 May, the society said it was relaxing this famous limit, known as the ‘14-day rule’....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Scientists have long understood that the Arctic is affected by mercury pollution, but know less about how it happens. Remote, cold and seemingly pristine, why is such an idyllic landscape so contaminated with this highly toxic metal? I recently returned from a two-year research project in Alaska, where I led field research into this issue alongside fellow scientists from the University of Colorado; the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute; the University of Toulouse and the Sorbonne University in France; and the Gas Technology Institute in Illinois....

By Geoff BrumfielA U.S.-based researcher has claimed to solve the sexiest problem in computer science. On the line are a million-dollar prize, a host of scientific breakthroughs and the secure cryptographic systems used for everything from e-mail to banking.The 100-plus-paged proof was posted on August 6 and has computer scientists and mathematicians around the world buzzing. “It’s definitely an approach that we haven’t seen before,” says Richard Lipton, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who dropped everything to take a look at the new paper....

Launch $1-billion-worth of spare parts to the International Space Station, and you can keep Earth’s orbital outpost going for another decade. Send up some 3D-printing devices, and you invest in the ability to build everything on demand in space: space-station parts, astronaut tools, satellites, even spacecraft. A first step toward space factories may come from NASA’s recent selection of a U.S. startup’s proposal to build a 3D printer for the space station....

DALLAS—It can’t happen here. Or can it? Many reactors in the U.S. have a similar design to the General Electric units that are spewing radioactive clouds into Japan’s skies and keeping the world on edge. So, the U.S. should learn lessons from that ongoing disaster and seriously consider retrofitting at least some of its reactors, Raymond L. Orbach, former undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy, said here this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society....

A coalition of oil and gas companies announced a new emissions target yesterday to reduce the “carbon intensity” of their operations over the next five years, but critics said the plan didn’t go far enough. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), a coalition aiming to “accelerate the transition to a low-carbon future,” said its member companies pledged to lower the intensity—or emissions per unit of output—of their aggregated upstream oil and gas operations by as much as 13% from 2017 levels....

Hurricane Maria’s destruction on Puerto Rico could spawn one of the largest mass migration events in the United States’ recent history, experts say, as tens of thousands of storm victims flee the island territory to rebuild their lives on the U.S. mainland. The displaced islanders, thousands of whom were awaiting flights yesterday from San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín airport, might be among the nation’s newest “climate refugees,” a demographic that includes former residents of southernmost Louisiana and the shrinking islands of Alaska’s Bering Strait....