In a bid to restore lost fish abundance, the Haida Salmon Restoration Corp. (HSRC) undertook to mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption by fertilizing the ocean with iron. The idea was to provide the missing nutrient for a plankton bloom that would then trickle up the food web and restore salmon—with the ancillary effects of gathering data on the ocean food web and, potentially, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere....
Canadians head to the polls today to determine their next prime minister in an election that could spur a dramatic U-turn on energy policies critical to the United States, from the Keystone XL pipeline to regional carbon trading. Prime Minister Stephen Harper—who has been in office nearly a decade and is derided by environmentalists for his climate and pro-oil positions—is in an intense political fight against Justin Trudeau, the 43-year-old leader of the Liberal Party and son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau....
The Norse came to a new land around the end of the first millennium, borne on the backs of their Viking long ships and lured away from Iceland by the promise of Erik the Red’s Greenland. The land was indeed green when they landed—and stayed that way for several centuries until natural variations in the planet’s climate cooled the world’s largest island by 4 degrees Celsius. Years of such cool summers doomed the Greenland Norse, and their outpost froze to death by 1500....
A boy in Pakistan became a local legend as a street performer in recent years by traversing hot coals and lancing his arms with knives without so much as a wince. A thousand miles away, in China, lived a family wracked by excruciating bouts of inexplicable pain, passed down generation after generation. Scientists eventually determined what the boy and the family had in common: mutations in a gene that functions like an on-off switch for agony....
On a muddy, rubble-strewn field on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, a five-foot-tall pyramidal robot with twin camera eyes slowly rotates on four metal wheels, its electric motors emitting a low whine. In a nearby trailer, students from Carnegie Mellon University huddle around a laptop to watch the world through the robot’s eyes. In the low-resolution grayscale images on the laptop’s screen, the rutted landscape looks a lot like the moon, which is the robot’s ultimate destination....
On New Year’s day more than a few of us resolved to change our lives, or at least our more self-indulgent habits. On the hunch that all things flow from good health, Scientific American has based this year’s list of five resolutions on the advice of health professionals and the scientific literature. Whatever your goals, we’ll help you understand why there’s hardly anything you could choose to do that could have a bigger impact on your quality of life....
During her 12-year marriage, “Chandra” says, her husband routinely cheated and then told her she was “crazy,” “jealous” and “paranoid” when she produced evidence of his affairs. He often used the word “irrational,” historically a term used to demean women. Chandra worked, went to school and provided all of the care for their children, yet her husband convinced her that she needed him. He would, for instance, intentionally delay paying bills and then blame her when the lights were shut off—a strategy of financial control that made her feel dependent on him....
Over the years there has been a lot of talk about Moore’s Law and the way that doubling the power and memory of computer semiconductors every 18 months has driven technological advance. But from where Mark Kryder sits, another force is at least as powerful, perhaps more: the cramming of as many bits as possible onto shrinking magnetic hard drives. The 61-year-old engineer might be on to something. Since the introduction of the disk drive in 1956, the density of information it can record has swelled from a paltry 2,000 bits to 100 billion bits (gigabits), all crowded in the small space of a square inch....
Political conservatives become more open to environmentalism after seeing climate change messages rooted in nostalgia, found a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany ran several experiments with self-identified liberals and conservatives to evaluate their feelings about environmental conservation, depending on how the issue was presented. For example, participants were given a $0.50 donation to split between two fictional climate change charities: one that emphasized preventing future environmental degradation and one that highlighted reinstating a healthier Earth from yesteryear....
We know it’s there, but we don’t know what it is: this invisible stuff is dark matter. Scientists are fairly certain it dominates the cosmos, yet its ingredients are unclear. For a while astrophysicists have been excited by two potential signals of dark matter in space: an unexplained excess of gamma-ray light in the center of the Milky Way and a mysterious spike in x-ray light spotted in some other galaxies and galaxy clusters....
Wearing high-grade filter masks can help protect against the novel coronavirus. But after a few hours, these tight-fitting devices can also make it really hard to breathe. N95 respirators, for example, are famously good at blocking viral particles—but they can also reduce the amount of available oxygen by up to 20 percent. Now some Stanford University researchers are addressing this problem with a portable device that pumps pure O2 directly to the wearer....
Japan’s electric utilities are putting the brakes on the country’s fast-growing renewable energy sector as concerns mount that the addition of large amounts of solar power is creating oversupply problems for some regions while stressing the country’s decentralized power grid. In the last week, half the country’s 10 general electricity utilities have announced that they would suspend reviews of proposals for new generation from renewable energy producers or take measures to ensure that the addition of that energy does not compromise their transmission and distribution networks....
Cognitive-enhancement drugs have been in the headlines a great deal lately—they stoke your gray matter, enabling greater focus and attention for longer periods of time, users say. But their long-term effects are uncertain and unknown, on both brain and body. In the meantime, there’s something you can do that helps both areas but that doesn’t have any known mental health risks. As study after study has shown, simple physical activity not only builds your physique and cardiovascular health: it also helps to sharpen the wetware in your skull and thwarts mental decline as you advance in years....
Charles Darwin surely had no clue of the technological advances that his studies of beetles and birds would unleash. Our progress in comprehending the history and mechanisms of evolution has led to powerful applications that shape a wide variety of fields today. For instance—as the CSI franchise of television shows has popularized—law-enforcement agencies now commonly use evolutionary analyses in their investigations. Knowledge of how different genes evolve determines the kind of information they can extract from DNA evidence....
Mysterious dense bodies outside the Solar System could be the remnants of ice giants similar to Neptune that wandered too close to their suns, according to results presented this week at a meeting on exoplanets at the Royal Society in London. Among the most puzzling finds of NASA’s Kepler space mission to find exoplanets, which launched in 2009, are bodies too heavy for their size. In some of the rare cases in which astronomers can estimate both the mass and the size of distant planets discovered by the probe, the objects have radiuses similar to that of Earth but are denser than pure iron....
Herding cats is a cakewalk compared with getting people to take flu vaccine shots in the last weeks of summer—work, school, limited pharmacy hours, beach days and countless other factors conspire to interfere. As a result, vaccinations tend to trickle in over many months. Rather than resisting this tendency, some mathematicians now think that public health officials may one day embrace it. A bit of randomness in treatment schedules may actually help manage a disease outbreak....
Using stem cells for clinical therapies is an idea still bathed in a futuristic glow, but one such treatment already has a history of success going back almost 40 years. Tens of thousands of patients treated with bone marrow transplants have shown that an infusion of healthy stem cells can regenerate a failing body part. In most of these cases, the patients suffered from congenital blood or immune disorders, or their bone marrow had been damaged by cancer treatment....
Update: Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. When Russia annexed Crimea and meddled in Ukraine’s Donets Basin, or Donbas, region in 2014, its military revealed new technology, organization and tactics—and upended much of the U.S. military’s thinking about modern warfare. Now, as Moscow keeps U.S. and European leaders guessing about whether it will invade Ukraine again, the Pentagon is pushing forward with projects that reflect priorities set after the onset of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict....
Do any habitable worlds exist in the closest stellar system to our own, Alpha Centauri? For years scientists have struggled to answer this question, unsuccessfully seeking to pierce the overpowering glare of the two sunlike stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, to see signs of orbiting planets (a third member of the system, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, is already known to possess at least one companion). The scientific payoff for unveiling Alpha Centauri’s planetary retinue could be tremendous....
Five years ago Viviana Gradinaru was slicing thin pieces of mouse brain in a neurobiology lab, slowly compiling images of the two-dimensional slivers for a three-dimensional computer rendering. In her spare time, she would go to see the Body Worlds exhibit. She was especially fascinated by the “plasticized” remains of the human circulatory system on display. It struck her that much of what she was doing in the lab could be done more efficiently with a similar process....
