On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the “inside man” in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I co-hosted called Exploring the Unknown (type “Shermer, con games” into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan (the “outside man”) moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground....
Haggar Physicists Develop ‘Quantum Slacks,’ ” read a headline in the satirical weekly the Onion. By exploiting a bizarre “Schrödinger’s Pants” duality, the article explained, these non-Newtonian pants could paradoxically behave like formal wear and casual wear at the same time. Onion writers were apparently spoofing the breathless articles about quantum computing that have filled the popular science press for a decade. A common mistake—see for instance the February 15, 2007, issue of the Economist—is to claim that, in principle, quantum computers could rapidly solve a particularly difficult set of mathematical challenges called NP-complete problems, which even the best existing computers cannot solve quickly (so far as anyone knows)....
By Declan ButlerThe push to open up scientific knowledge to all looks set to go into overdrive. Over the past decade, the accessibility offered by the Internet has transformed science publishing. Several efforts have already tried to harness the web’s power to make research papers available for free. Now two parallel efforts from the U.S. government could see almost all federally funded research made available in free, publicly accessible repositories.Traditional science publishing relies on institutions and libraries buying subscriptions and site licences to academic journals....
It’s been nearly four years since the Woolsey Fire ripped through Southern California, burning nearly 100,000 acres and destroying hundreds of homes in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Now, new research finds that human communities weren’t the only ones to suffer. An elusive population of mountain lions living in and around Los Angeles also found their habitats scarred by the fire. The big cats were forced to adjust their behavior in dangerous ways to avoid the burn zones after the blaze, the study finds....
February 1962 Error Codes “Until quite recently the engineer who wanted to improve the quality of a communication channel concentrated his attention on reducing noise, or, to be more precise, on increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. The most direct way to achieve this is to increase the power of the signal. Within the past 15 years a host of new signal-processing devices—notably the electronic computer—have stimulated a different approach for transmitting signals with a minimum of error: the use of error-detecting codes....
NEW YORK – Investors are laying the groundwork for another bull run on the energy and commodities markets, in spite of signs suggesting the overall economy is still deteriorating. Analysts and economists are saying with some confidence that oil prices have bottomed out. And Wall Street is taking notice that spot and futures prices for West Texas Intermediate crude have risen by nearly 40 percent since hitting $33 in December. At press time, benchmark WTI was trading at close to $54 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX)....
How does gene therapy work? Arthur Nienhuis, a hematologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and outgoing president of the American Society of Gene Therapy, responds: Gene therapy is the addition of new genes to a patient’s cells to replace missing or malfunctioning genes. Researchers typically use a virus to carry the genetic cargo into cells, because that is what viruses evolved to do with their own genetic material....
As efforts to combat climate change falter despite ever-rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, some scientists and other experts have begun to consider the possibility of using so-called geoengineering to fix the problem. Such “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment” as the Royal Society of London puts it, is fraught with peril, of course. For example, one of the first scientists to predict global warming as a result of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius—thought this might be a good way to ameliorate the winters of his native land and increase its growing season....
By Nicola Jones A study transplanting gut bacteria from human twins into mice could help to explain why some malnourished children develop kwashiorkor – a condition that triggers swelling in the belly, fatigue and vulnerability to disease. Researchers hope the work will point the way to better emergency rations for sick children.The study, presented yesterday by Michelle Smith, a postdoc at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, at the International Human Microbiome congress in Vancouver, Canada, looked at kwashiorkor in children in Malawi....
One of the few exceptions to the old saying “everybody is afraid of something” is a 44-year-old woman known to psychologists as patient SM. She suffers from a rare case of brain damage to an almond-shaped region of her brain called the amygdala that, according to a paper published online December 16 in Current Biology, makes her incapable of experiencing fear. For three months researchers did everything they could to scare SM....
Attempts to cure HIV have been thwarted by a particular type of immune-system cell that can hide the virus. These long-lived infected T cells can evade detection by the body for years, and are hard to find, study and kill. Reliably identifying these covert reservoirs is top of the wish-list for HIV researchers, but they’ve had limited success. That may soon change with the identification of a protein called CD32a. It sits on the surface of T cells that are infected, but lie dormant....
Hummingbirds are famous for their hovering ability, which lets them linger in front of flowers and feast on their nectar. But just how the creatures manage to stay aloft has intrigued researchers for years. New findings published this week in the journal Nature indicate that when it comes to flying, a hummingbird’s style is halfway between that of a bird and an insect. Previous investigations into the flight of the hummingbird had suggested that it could be employing the same mechanisms as insects, which often hover and dart in a manner similar to the bird....
The Horn of Africa is warming and drying faster now than in the past 2,000 years, new research into ancient marine sediments found. That contradicts global climate models, which show the geopolitically unstable region getting wetter as emissions boost temperatures worldwide. “It changes our view of how greenhouse gases will affect future warming in the Horn, as we had all assumed, myself included, that rising emissions would lead to rainier seasons,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and the lead author of the new paper, published in Science Advances last Friday....
In February 2016 I sat in a conference room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with about 35 other people attempting to answer what seemed like a straightforward question: What is racism? I—a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman in my 30s—thought that racism was prejudice against an individual because of race or ethnicity. That’s why I had signed up for the Undoing Racism Workshop, a two-and-a-half-day antiracist training that analyzes race and power structures in the U....
This weekend, children armed with pillowcases and plastic pumpkins will haul in millions of pounds of Halloween candy wafting familiar scents like chocolate, peanut butter and the luxurious, uniquely enticing aroma of caramel. Until recently, scientists did not know precisely how humans process this rich, buttery smell. But now a new study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry pinpoints the specific sensor, called an olfactory receptor, responsible for detecting it....
Physicists have been scratching their heads since July, when a research team announced that the proton, the basic building block of matter, is 4 percent smaller than previously thought. The finding, published in Nature, clashes with theoretical predictions based on quantum electrodynamics, or QED, the fundamental theory of the electromagnetic force that had passed the most stringent tests in physics. Randolf Pohl of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and his collaborators used a laser to probe exotic, man-made hydrogen atoms in which elementary particles known as muons replaced the usual electrons orbiting the single-proton nuclei....
What do you do as a scientist when you discover something that clearly contradicts the textbooks? The two of us faced this problem head-on when experiments we were running in 2005 showed that living vegetation produces the greenhouse gas methane. The established view held that only microbes that thrive without oxygen (anaerobic bacteria) can manufacture this gas. But our tests unexpectedly revealed that green plants also make methane–and quite a lot of it....
Although it might seem that the glowing lights from smartphones and other trappings of modern life reduce people’s ability to get a decent amount of shut-eye, scientists now suggest that people do not get any less sleep today than they did in prehistoric times. The researchers looked at people living in three hunter-gatherer societies in rural parts of Africa and South America. Investigations showed that these traditional peoples slept slightly less than 6....
DENVER — NASA’s next Mars lander, now under construction, will probe the inner workings and early stages of the Red Planet’s development billions of years ago. The InSight mission (short for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), a NASA Discovery Program spacecraft, is built to respond to highly focused scientific goals. “Things are coming together,” said Stu Spath, InSight program manager here at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, the aerospace firm building the Mars spacecraft for its 2016 liftoff....
Stuck several states away and wondering if your vacation home on the shore is still standing in Hurricane Sandy’s wake? Or simply curious to see the power and breadth of the Oct. 30 storm’s reach? Uncle Sam can offer some insight. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been sending airplanes along the East Coast capturing the shoreline’s changes. The planes fly at 5,000 feet, taking high-resolution images of the coast....
