Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Now that we’ve successfully completed our journey through the wonderful world of working with mixed fractions, it’s time to spend a few weeks stretching out our brains in an entirely different direction. Which is why we’re about to embark on a trip back through time to the birth of numbers....
The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that doctors inquire about poverty-related stress during a child’s regular checkups. Such stress is a strong risk factor for asthma, obesity and other health problems. U.K. A self-propelling underwater drone began patrolling the area around the Pitcairn Islands, the world’s largest continuous marine reserve. The autonomous vehicle takes photographs of illegal fishing vessels and reports the boats’ locations to a monitoring team in Oxfordshire, which can alert the proper authorities....
By Manipadma Jena VADODARA, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As India moves to ramp up investment in solar power, it is exploring innovative places to install solar plants, including across the top of canals. Last weekend, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon inaugurated a new “canal-top” solar energy plant in Vadodara district in India’s western state of Gujarat. “I saw more than glittering panels – I saw the future of India and the future of our world,” said Ban....
In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die. —William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984 Sometimes a solution just appears out of nowhere....
As a boy in the 1980s James Wexler, an engineer in Boston, spent his summers covered in furious, itchy welts. Every July his parents sent him to Camp Becket in the Berkshires, a boys-in-the-woods kind of place with musty cabins and no electricity. Despite applying thick coats of DEET-based Off! repellent, Wexler always returned from his month in western Massachusetts with dozens of mosquito bites and what felt like a pint less blood....
POMONA, Calif. – A robotics team from South Korea took home the $2 million first-place prize in a competition last weekend to design robots that could aid humans in a natural or man-made disaster. During the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, which took place here June 5 and 6, the winning team’s DRC-HUBO robot finished all eight tasks in less than 45 minutes. The winning bot had a humanoid design that could transform itself into a wheeled kneeling position for faster, more stable movement....
A NASA spacecraft speeding toward an epic Pluto encounter this summer has captured a new movie of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon. The new Pluto-Charon video was shot by NASA’s New Horizons probe, which will make the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14. The time-lapse movie consists of a series of images taken by New Horizons’ long-range camera from Jan. 25 to Jan. 31. That’s just long enough to cover one day on these icy, distant worlds; Pluto and Charon both rotate once every 6....
A drug that treats poisoning from heavy metals may also offer a fighting chance at surviving a venomous snakebite. In a study published in May in Science Translational Medicine, researchers show that oral doses of the medication can reduce viper venom’s effects in mice. Saw-scaled or carpet vipers are a group of aggressive venomous snake species found in Asia and Africa, including some densely populated regions with limited access to modern medical facilities....
SIDE-EFFECTIVE USE Claudia Wallis’s account of how her opinion regarding treatment options for osteoporosis has changed in “A Perfectly Avoidable Crisis” [The Science of Health] was interesting. But I was disappointed that she did not back up her claim that “new drugs have emerged that do not have the same risks” of osteonecrosis of the jaw and atypical femoral fracture that oral bisphosphonates do. I would have appreciated knowing the names of those drugs and at least a little something about the research that suggests their greater safety....
A Shadow Falls by Nick Brandt. Abrams, 2009 Wildlife photographer Nick Brandt’s stunning images of African animals reveal such familiar creatures as lions, zebras, giraffes and elephants in a remarkable new light. Here a lion faces an oncoming storm in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Slideshow: Selection of photographs from A Shadow Falls Excerpt Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly by Michael D. Gordin....
DARMSTADT, Germany—For the last two years, the Rosetta spacecraft has danced around a comet. Today, it finally made contact with the icy body—and sent its last signal. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta probe ended its historic mission with a controlled descent to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early this morning (Sept. 30). Scientists here at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) received the confirmation of landing from the spacecraft at about 1:19 p....
In 1961 a child psychologist proposed a radical idea to the American Psychological Association: What if dogs could help therapists connect to troubled patients? Perhaps the animals would help soothe anxiety and help people open up. When Boris Levinson of Yeshiva University presented this idea, many of his colleagues thought it was laughable. Yet the idea that humans might derive therapeutic effects from animals would go on to capture the attention of many future researchers....
Key concepts Physics Gases Temperature Expansion and contraction Introduction You may know many objects expand (or get bigger) when they get hot and shrink when they cool down. For example, this is true for metals, wood and concrete. But did you know that gases do the same? It is just difficult to see when it happens. This activity will let you “see” air contract using water! Background Matter, such as a solid, liquid or gas, is defined as “a substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume....
A week after Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, parts of the Northeast are still reeling from the wind, rain and flooding. Though the darkened Manhattan skyline may be the hurricane’s most obvious consequence, the storm’s health impacts may be the more significant and longest-lasting. The hurricane’s death toll in the United States climbed to 113 over the weekend, with 48 fatalities in New York and 24 in New Jersey, the Los Angeles Times reported....
Within a decade, a small rover on Mars will pick up samples of rock left by a previous mission. It will then load them into a rocket secured within a small platform on a flat patch of the planet’s surface. Once the rocket’s hatch has closed, the platform will toss it upward on its side, a bit like a thrown American football. The rocket’s engines will ignite, propelling it into Martian orbit—where a waiting spacecraft will grab its invaluable samples for ferrying back to Earth and into the hands of researchers eager to study them for signs of past life on the Red Planet....
You can learn a lot from a dummy, but the auto industry’s standardized—and federally mandated—crash test dummies are left wanting. Biological engineers often find it difficult to use them to model body blows coming from certain directions or to predict trauma to areas such as the lumbar spine and abdomen. To make a more accurate, responsive model of human injury, nearly two dozen automakers and research institutes have set out together to build a digital complement: an elaborate, 3-D computer model depicting bone, tissue and internal organs from head to toe....
The push toward electronic medical records has made storing personal health information in a locked filing cabinet in your doctor’s office an outmoded guarantee of confidentiality. Today, patients can gather their jumbled health information—hospital visits, drug prescriptions and health insurance plans—and manage them through a number of different online services, including Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault and AOL co-founder Steve Case’s Revolution Health. Privacy advocates, however, point out that even though these companies are storing sensitive medical information, they are not bound by the strict data sharing and protection laws that govern the health care industry....
The past six months have felt like an eternity for those of us isolating and staying home. And I imagine they’ve also felt like a stressful slog to every essential worker who has showed up day in, day out, to keep people fed and healthy. But for science and medical research, six months is a relative blink of an eye. Scientific understanding about new diseases such as SARS-CoV-2 usually takes years, not months....
Scientists worldwide have been capturing and analyzing detailed data about the atmosphere for decades. Information about the oceans has been much more spotty, however. Ships have taken readings along many isolated transects, but each effort has occurred at a moment in time, and significant portions of the seas have gone unexamined. That is changing. Since 2007 a network of thousands of floating robots covering the seven seas, named Argo, has been generating real-time data for use in ocean and climate research....
During the period known as the New Kingdom (1539–1075 B.C.E.), Egypts southern capital city of Thebes developed into one of the great urban centers of the ancient world. The massive temple complexes of Karnak and Luxor were built during this time, and the two monuments still dominate the east bank of the Nile in the modern city, now called Luxor. The nearby Valley of the Kings, on the west bank of the Nile, contains some 60 tombs, including that of the pharaoh Tutankhamen....
