The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The brain is truly a marvel. A seemingly endless library, whose shelves house our most precious memories as well as our lifetime’s knowledge. But is there a point where it reaches capacity? In other words, can the brain be “full”? The answer is a resounding no, because, well, brains are more sophisticated than that....
As a young course instructor in seminars for medical students, I faithfully taught neurophysiology by the book, enthusiastically explaining how the brain perceives the world and controls the body. Sensory stimuli from the eyes, ears, and such are converted to electrical signals and then transmitted to the relevant parts of the sensory cortex that process these inputs and induce perception. To initiate a movement, impulses from the motor cortex instruct the spinal cord neurons to produce muscular contraction....
To unlock new secrets of the universe, Stephanie Majewski has to brush up on her French. The 27-year-old particle physicist is part of an international collaboration working on ATLAS, one of two experiments the size of small apartment buildings that will soon come online near Geneva, Switzerland. Majewski, a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., knew when she got her PhD last year that she wanted to work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the circular particle accelerator 17 miles (27 kilometers) in circumference straddling the Franco-Swiss border....
“Our army’s youngest, smallest, toughest baby has many pet names: jeep, peep, blitz buggy, jitterbug, beetlebug, iron pony, leaping Lena, panzerkiller. The names are all affectionate, for the jeep has made good. I was standing in the hot Mississippi sun while Lieutenant Patrick Summerour, of Camp Shelby, explained the jeep. In front of me was a car 11 feet long, 56 inches wide, 40 inches high—half the height of your family auto and three feet shorter....
The Kepler spacecraft’s mission is a straightforward one: keep a vigilant watch on a large patch of stars to see if they dim, even just slightly, on a regular basis. The idea is that a planet passing in front of its host star will reveal itself to Kepler by blotting out a fraction of the star’s light. This transit method has already borne fruit: NASA’s Kepler spotted five planets in the first few weeks after its 2009 launch, and dozens more have been detected over the past decade from the ground and from other spacecraft....
Thousands of jumbo squid have beached themselves on central California shores this week, committing mass “suicide.” But despite decades of study into the phenomenon in which the squid essentially fling themselves onto shore, the cause of these mass beachings have been a mystery. But a few intriguing clues suggest poisonous algae that form so-called red tides may be intoxicating the Humboldt squid and causing the disoriented animals to swim ashore in Monterey Bay, said William Gilly, a marine biologist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, Calif....
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are encouraging U.S. policymakers to consider the nation’s growing supply of natural gas as a short-term substitute for aging coal-fired power plants. In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas....
By Barbara Goldberg HARRIMAN STATE PARK N.Y. (Reuters) - Maybe it was guilt over alarming her parents when she inadvertently dialed 911 from the Appalachian Trail, but Caitlin Belcher wishes she could ditch her cell phone for the rest of the 2,180-mile (3,508-km) hike. “It would really be cool to not have it. I just want to be out in the woods, isolated,” said Belcher, 23, who has called home to Fredericksburg, Virginia, twice weekly since her journey began in April and gets constant texts from her parents, who even call her hiking partner’s phone as well....
Just before the release in June of the much-anticipated Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), I sat down to try to create a list of the greatest hurdles to UAPs’ scientific analysis. What I came up with were five major challenges that are described here, together with a cross-comparison with some of the statements made in the published government report. Although only nine pages long, that report turns out to be thorough, careful and scientifically accurate in that it fully expresses how little certainty can be drawn from the data to hand....
When people read or hear news about abortion, George W. Bush or Democrats, do they evaluate it fairly before reaching a conclusion? Not at all, say two political scientists at Stony Brook University. Milton Lodge and Charles Taber maintain that people react automatically to “hot button” terms. “Our experiments reveal that they react so quickly—in less than 300 milliseconds—that they cannot be consciously [evaluating] the information,” Taber says. In tests of Stony Brook undergraduates, Lodge and Taber displayed a “prime” word—the name of a politician, such as “Bush” or “Gore,” or an issue, such as “death penalty” or “affirmative action”—for 200 milliseconds, long enough to register in perception centers of the brain but not long enough to reach conscious awareness....
This is the fourth of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters. The last time Olivier Ameisen formally practiced medicine was in the early summer of 1997. After two decades in the field, the French-born physician, then running a clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, abruptly rang up his secretary one morning and told her to clear his schedule. She laughed in disbelief when he explained why. He was ill, he told her; he was an alcoholic, and he was afraid his drinking might interfere with his patients’ care....
Key concepts Chemistry Dyes Dyeing eggs Chemical reactions Introduction Have you ever dyed eggs? Turning eggshells from white into different, dazzling colors can be a lot of fun! Many people do this around Easter time using dye tablets to make different colors in liquid form. They then dip the egg into the liquid and wait until it turns the desired color. Eggs can be dyed in many other ways, and one neat method uses silk ties....
Key concepts Height Distance Walking Estimation Introduction Do you ever find that you need to walk faster to keep up with some people whereas you have to decrease your pace to walk with others? This is likely because of the difference in leg length between you and the person you are walking with. In this science activity you’ll get to investigate just how much faster or slower different people walk, and see if you can use the relationship between a person’s walking pace and their height to estimate your own height....
Using “superlenses” that can amplify rapidly decaying light that normal lenses cannot, light microscopes can now see details smaller than a wavelength of light buried below a surface. Researchers say their new method could help peer into artificial or biological structures and scan the molecular compositions of objects. Normally light microscopy can at most resolve details roughly half the wavelength of the light used. If light is squeezed past this limit, it flares out from an aperture as two portions: a far-field part that spreads out, and a near-field fraction that remains close, decaying rapidly once emitted....
In the 1990s I had the opportunity to dine with the late musician Isaac Hayes, whose career fortunes had just made a stunning turnabout upward, which he attributed to Scientology. It was a glowing testimonial by a sincere follower of the Church, but is it evidence that Scientology works? Two recently published books argue that there is no science in Scientology, only quasireligious doctrines wrapped in New Age flapdoodle masquerading as science....
The mass extinction that wiped out many species at the end of the Triassic period some 200 million years ago made way for the dinosaurs’ domination of Earth for the next 135 million years. Now, researchers have determined the timing of a possible trigger for that Triassic extinction event with unprecedented precision. Scientists have long suspected a link between the Triassic die-offs — one of the five largest mass extinctions to have struck Earth in the past 542 million years — and widespread volcanic activity that occurred at around the same time....
COPENHAGEN—Since the 1970s, refrigerators in the U.S. have swelled from 18 cubic feet to 22 cubic feet. But, at the same time, the energy consumption of such gargantuan coolers has dropped by 75 percent, down to roughly 40 watts, saving countless tons of coal from being burned. And a five-year global program that reached all the refrigerators in the world with similar efficiency improvements might save 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over that span, a significant contribution to combating climate change....
KAMPALA (Reuters) - Ugandan authorities said the east African country was free of Marburg, a virus similar to Ebola, after no new cases had been reported more than a month after a hospital worker died of the disease in the capital. Transmitted through bodily fluids or by handling infected wild animals, Marburg starts with a severe headache followed by hemorrhaging and kills in 80 percent or more cases within about a week....
The wildfire season is off to a roaring start. The hot summer is worsening drought and drying out vegetation—an unfortunately ideal environment for wildfires to rage. But that’s just one consequence of global warming; it’s also leading to flooding, torrential rainstorms and heat-related deaths. In fact, the climate crisis has led to a widespread public health crisis. And as an ear, nose and throat physician, I see the effects more and more often....
The baby-faced gunman of Mumbai, Azam Amir Kasab, now in the custody of Indian police, is the sole surviving attacker in the three-day rampage that began on the night of November 26 and left more than 170 people dead and scores of others injured. After the attacks, Indian officials immediately began pointing fingers at longtime rival, Pakistan, as the source of the 10 militants—a charge that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari disputed last night on CNN....
