Hudson the polar bear is a star attraction at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, where visitors come to watch him romp and swim in the new “Great Bear Wilderness” exhibit. But the bear’s keepers, gravely concerned about climate change, have their eye on a different wilderness: the tangle of conflicting opinions about climate change among Americans. They see a captive audience in the roughly 180 million Americans who visit a zoo or aquarium each year....
Hara hatchi bu, the Okinawan people’s habit of eating only till they are 80 percent full, is thought to be one of the secrets of their extraordinary health and longevity. In addition to one of the highest percentages of people in the world who live past 100, Okinawans appear to be less prone to heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Indeed, ever since it was discovered in the 1930s that laboratory rats fed a caloric-restricted (CR) diet lived almost twice as long as their well fed counterparts, scientists have pursued caloric restriction research in the hopes of finding novel strategies for extending human life and preventing disease....
LONDON − Big dams built in the tropics to produce hydroelectricity have long been highly controversial − and data gathered in Laos by a French team studying methane emissions confirms that dams can add to global warming, not reduce it. In many rocky regions low on vegetation and population, such as in Iceland and other northern mountainous regions, the production of electricity from hydropower is clearly a net gain in the battle against climate change....
From Nature magazine. Hair-like filaments called pili enable some bacteria to remove uranium from contaminated groundwater. The discovery, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could aid in the development of radioactivity clean-up technologies. Some bacteria, including a species called Geobacter sulfurreducens, are known to get their energy from reducing — or adding electrons to — metals in the environment. When uranium dissolved in groundwater is reduced in this way, the metal becomes much less soluble, reducing the spread of contamination....
Do you remember how your breakfast plate was arranged this morning? Even if you don’t, your hippocampus might—and growing evidence suggests that there is a way to retrieve this unconscious memory: through your eye movements. The latest study comes from the University of California, Davis, where neuroscientist Deborah Hannula and her team showed participants photographs of faces superimposed on scenes. Later the volunteers saw the individual scenes again and had to pick the matching faces....
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of online exclusives about natural phenomena and human endeavors we’d like to see come to an end. They are connected with the September 2010 special issue of Scientific American called “The End”. Every day, about 350,000 people are born and 150,000 die. Run this loop for a few decades, and the United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050....
At the Cleveland Indians home opener on April 10 crowds can expect to hear super fan John Adams pound away on a bass drum in left center field as he has in virtually every home game since 1973. Over by the first base side of the field—and commanding a bit less attention—game- goers may also notice another distinguishing feature at Cleveland’s Progressive Field: an upper deck solar panel array. The Indians were the first American League team to install an alt-energy power source in 2007, making it a member of the growing number of ball clubs whose stadiums are going green....
A.D. 375 Monks living in the desert in Egypt identify eight thoughts that weaken their devotion. Talking Back, a book by Roman monk Evagrius of Pontus, instructs monks on how to fight gluttony, lust, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory and pride. Early fifth century John Cassian, a student of Evagrius, proposes that the sins connect sequentially. For example, he suggests that lust comes from gluttony and avarice arises from lust....
The story of Twitch illustrates an important lesson about the digital economy: at the same time it has generated enormous wealth for shareholders and entrepreneurs, it has resulted in few new jobs. In fact, the digitization of the economy may have far-reaching implications for the future of growth and employment. In a series of recent articles on the state of the digital economy, former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers revived the notion of secular stagnation, an idea first presented by economist Alvin Hansen during the Great Depression....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? Both Mr. B and Mr. X received deep brain stimulation (DBS), a procedure involving an implant that sends electric impulses to specific targets in the brain to alter neural activity....
Editor’s Note (4/3/2018): This interview with Jane Goodall was originally published in October 2017. It is being republished today in honor of her 84th birthday. People regularly approach Jane Goodall in airports, tears in their eyes, and tell her she’s their idol. She travels 300 days a year, and at 83, she speaks dreamily about her home in England, the house she grew up in, where her sister still lives with her own family....
By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineFor now, physicists are only willing to call them “excess events,” but fresh data from two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hinting at something unusual–and it could be the most sought-after particle in all of physics.Both ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments are seeing an unusual surplus of events in a rough mass range of 130-150 gigaelectronvolts (energy and mass are used interchangeably in particle physics)....
Our Inflated Universe —Clara Moskowitz Want more on this groundbreaking discovery about the early universe? Check out the study. The Little Volcanoes That Could —David Biello Read about how volcanoes have temporarily mitigated global warming in Nature Geoscience. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Extinction Countdown: Hawaiian Hawk —John R. Platt A proposal to delist the Hawaiian hawk, or ‘io, from the Endangered Species Act has ruffled the feathers of some state residents, reports West Hawaii Today....
Steven Pinker, the Harvard University psychologist, has called it “auditory cheesecake.” It is noted for its powerful influence on mood. Many studies have even looked at it as another form of language. “It,” of course, is music—what Albert Einstein said gave him the “most joy in life.” And indeed, as psychologist William Forde Thompson and neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug write in this issue’s cover story, “The Healing Power of Music,” tunes do evince a beneficial lift in mood....
Originally posted on SoapBox Science, a community guest blog from Nature.com Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. A popular American astrophysicist, author, science communicator and educator, Tyson hosted the science educational show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS for five years. He received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Harvard University and a doctorate in Astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991....
Don’t judge a cat by its cover. Oncillas are housecat-size felines found throughout much of South America, and are also known as little tiger cats, little spotted cats or tigrinas. But not all oncillas are the same: New research suggests that little tiger cats in northeastern Brazil belong to a different species from those elsewhere on the continent, although they look virtually identical. Researchers analyzed the genetic material of oncillas in northeastern Brazil, and compared them with nearby populations in the south....
The Advances section of Scientific American’s October issue includes coverage of preschoolers’ innate sense of the scientific method, a report suggesting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is failing to do enough to regulate contaminants in tap water, recently re-discovered texts by Archimedes, and more. For those interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of selected further reading follows. “More Than Child’s Play” In “Where Science Starts: Spontaneous Experiments in Preschoolers’ Exploratory Play,” Noah Goodman and colleagues show four- and five-year-olds know how to isolate variables and set up scientific experiments....
Electrons are proficient little magicians. They seem to flit about an atom without tracing a particular path, they frequently appear to be in two places at once, and their behavior in silicon microchips powers the computing infrastructure of the modern world. But one of their most impressive tricks is deceptively simple, like all the best magic. Electrons always seem to spin. Every electron ever observed, whether it’s just ambling its way about a carbon atom in your fingernail or speeding through a particle accelerator, looks like it’s constantly doing tiny pirouettes as it makes its way through the world....
INCOME INEQUALITY In arguing that wealth inequality has not grown in the U.S. as much as is perceived in “The Myth of Income Inequality” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer ignores that poverty among Americans, particularly youths, is far worse than in other advanced nations. It ruins the lives and educational chances of at least a fifth of young Americans, which makes a mockery of his claim that the U.S. is still the land of equal opportunity....
Nut-obsessed squirrels scurry around collecting and secreting away food for the future. The amount of acorns they find, though, is not what determines how many baby squirrels there will be in the spring. Instead, squirrels predict how abundant their food supply will be the following year and coordinate a second litter to be born during times of bountiful harvests, says a new study. Some trees, including those with seeds favored by red squirrels, have years of very high seed yields, followed by years of lower seed production, creating what Stan Boutin, a biologist at the University of Alberta, calls a “swamp and starve” strategy....
