A British fighter jet was returning to its base in Kuwait after a mission on the third day of the 2003 Iraq War when a U.S. anti-missile system spotted it, identified it as an enemy missile, and fired. The two men in the plane were both killed. A week and a half later, the same system—the vaunted Patriot—made the same mistake. This time, it was an American plane downed, and an American pilot killed....
It was on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. And the cover of Time Magazine. Suddenly, the obscure science of “fetal origins” is getting popular, in the pages of a new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.” Written by science journalist Annie Murphy Paul, “Origins” explores the still-murky but growing research into how the environment in the womb can affect a baby’s life ever after – including the life of the mind....
Although astronomers only slowly came to realize dark matter’s importance in the universe, for me personally it happened in an instant. In my first project as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978, I measured the rotational velocities of star-forming giant molecular clouds in the outer part of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. I worked out what was then the most accurate method to determine those velocities, and I sat down to plot out the results (by hand on graph paper) in the astronomy department lounge....
COMPUTERS CAN calculate at staggering speed, but they cannot match the human visual system’s uncanny ability to assemble a coherent picture from ambiguous fragments in an image. The brain seems to home in effortlessly on the correct interpretation by using built-in knowledge of the statistics of the world to eliminate improbable solutions. This problem-solving aspect of perception is strikingly illustrated in a by the famous illusory rectangle of Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa and neuropsychologist Richard L....
Editor’s Note (10/4/19): This story is being republished today because the New York State Department of Health has announced that the state no longer has any active measles cases linked with the outbreak that started in October 2018. As of mid-June, there have been more than 1,000 cases of measles across 28 U.S. states this year. The disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has reappeared with a vengeance, mainly in isolated pockets of unvaccinated people....
Editor’s Note: The World Wide Web went live 20 years ago this month, on a single computer in Geneva, Switzerland. For the anniversary the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has written an exclusive article for Scientific American. In it he confronts various threats that could ruin the Web, and explains why preserving the basic principles that have allowed the Web to flourish is essential to preventing its destruction. While preparing the article, Berners-Lee also spoke to Scientific American about emerging Web capabilities that could change how the online and physical worlds work....
You definitely want to avoid an encounter with a banded krait. A single bite from this snake delivers enough venom to spell the end for a dozen people. Working like a chemical brake, the active toxin finds its way to your neurons, and snuffs out the signals that would otherwise animate your muscles. It’s bad stuff. Which makes it all the more surprising that the venom, or something very close, is found in our heads....
Jeffrey Cutler, senior scientific adviser for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, explains. Blood pressure readings include two numbers: systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure. The top number is the systolic pressure, which is the pressure within the arteries while the heart is pumping, whereas the bottom number is the diastolic pressure, a measure of pressure within the arteries while the heart is resting and refilling with blood....
Dear EarthTalk: Wouldn’t a return to installing bidets in bathrooms at home go a long way toward cutting disposable tissue use and saving forests? —Peter K., Albany, Ga. Besides being more sanitary than toilet tissue, bidets—those squirty accessories so popular in Europe, Japan and elsewhere that clean your underside using a jet of water—are also much less stressful on the environment than using paper. Justin Thomas, editor of the website metaefficient....
Nancy Hopkins was “thrilled” this week when two women, Frances H. Arnold and Donna Strickland, were among the eight scientists awarded Nobel Prizes. Hopkins, an accomplished microbiologist, has been advocating for women in science for decades—ever since she realized in the 1990s that her own lab space at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was smaller than her male peers’ for no apparent reason other than her gender. When Hopkins was an undergraduate at Harvard University in the 1960s, working in the lab of Nobel laureate James Watson, she assumed advancement in science was all about ability: Write a great paper, push the field forward and then reap the rewards....
By Alla Katsnelson of Nature magazineDNA origami, a technique for making structures from DNA, may be more than just a cool design concept. It can also be used to build devices that can seek out and destroy living cells. [View a “DNA Origami” Slide Show.]The nanorobots, as the researchers call them, use a similar system to cells in the immune system to engage with receptors on the outside of cells.“We call it a nanorobot because it is capable of some robotic tasks,” says Ido Bachelet, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the authors of the study, which is published in the February 17 issue of Science....
People regularly see themselves as more attractive and talented than others see them. Now the rise of selfies has deepened the hue of this rose-tinted mirror. According to new research, people who take frequent self-portraits think these pics put them in the best light, even when others see selfies as, frankly, unflattering. For this study, published online in April in Social Psychological and Personality Science, college students were asked to take a selfie in the laboratory, and a researcher took a nearly identical picture of them....
In last month’s column I recounted how my replication of Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments revealed that although most people can be inveigled to obey authorities if they are asked to hurt others, they do so reluctantly and with much moral conflict. Milgram’s explanation was an “agentic state,” or “the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes.” As agents in an experiment, subjects shift from being moral agents in society to obedient agents in a hierarchy....
Data stored in the cloud is nearly always stored in an encrypted form that would need to be cracked before an intruder could read the information. But as a scholar of cloud computing and cloud security, I’ve seen that where the keys to that encryption are held varies among cloud storage services. In addition, there are relatively simple ways users can boost their own data’s security beyond what’s built into systems they use....
Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In the past few months, I’ve received a large number of virus and malware related questions. So I’ve decided to do a more advanced episode on computer recovery and virus management. Some of the strategies I mention in this episode may be above your tech comfort level, but it is always good to have a working knowledge of what to do in case your computer is infected with a nasty piece of malware....
By Jean-Francois Rosnoblet and Tim Hepher SEYNE-LES-ALPES/PARIS, March 25 (Reuters) - Investigators have retrieved cockpit voice recordings from one of the black boxes of the German Airbus plane that smashed into the Alps, killing everyone onboard, and they expect a preliminary read-out of their content in days, an official said on Wednesday. The development came as French President Francois Hollande, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Spain’s Mariano Rajoy travelled to the crash site in a remote French Alpine region to pay tribute to the 150 victims, mostly Germany and Spanish....
Palaeontologists are fighting to save a site in China that contains fossils of some of the earliest animals on record. This month they gained a temporary halt to the phosphate mining that has already destroyed some fossil beds. The threatened site is part of the Doushantuo geological formation in the Weng’an region of Guizhou province in southern China. It is rich in minerals that preserve soft tissues and cellular structures and became famous in the late 1990s, after scientists began finding well-preserved fossils of sponges and embryos of other unusual animals, dating to around 600 million years ago....
By 2050, half the world’s population could be at risk of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever or the Zika virus, new research suggests. Climate change may put even more people at risk further into the future. A combination of environmental change, urbanization and human movements around the world are helping mosquitoes spread into new areas, according to the findings, reported Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology. “We find evidence that if no action is taken to reduce the current rate at which the climate is warming, pockets of habitat will open up across many urban areas with vast amounts of individuals susceptible to infection,” said lead study author Moritz Kraemer, with the Boston Children’s Hospital and University of Oxford, in a statement....
Every 30 minutes all the blood in our bodies is filtered through two kidneys. But diabetes can cause these fist-size organs to fail, leading to a buildup of chemicals in the blood that would be fatal without dialysis or a kidney transplant. At least 6,000 healthy people every year in the U.S. donate a kidney to someone they know, and about 100 more come forward to anonymously give the gift of glomeruli (the basic filtration units of the kidney)....
Scientists in London have asked for permission to edit the genomes of human embryos—a request that could lead to the world’s first approval of such research by a national regulatory body. Kathy Niakan, a researcher affiliated with the Francis Crick Institute, London’s new £700-million (US$1.1-billion) biomedical-research centre, said on September 18 that she is proposing to use gene editing to provide “fundamental insights into early human development”. In a statement released through the Crick, Niakan said that her team wanted to use technology based on the CRISPR/Cas9 system—a recently developed technique for precisely editing genomes that has become hugely popular in the biology community....
