Posts

Smaller than a virus and used in more than 200 consumer products, silver nanoparticles can kill and mutate fish embryos, new research shows. Tiny particles of silver – potent anti-microbial agents that can kill bacteria on contact – are becoming increasingly popular in consumer goods, including washing machines, refrigerators, clothing and toys. But as use of these microscopic silver particles grows, some scientists now are raising concerns about potential effects on the environment and human health....

I’ve written before about the health benefits enjoyed by coffee drinkers. But some people find that coffee hurts their stomachs. There are a lot of brands of coffee that are promoted as being lower in acid and good for people with sensitive stomachs. For example, Trücup coffee recently sent me some samples of their low acid coffee to try. I definitely noticed the difference in the acidity; the Trücup brand coffee is very smooth and mild tasting....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineAs species go, humans aren’t renowned for their sense of smell. But an improved ability to suss out scents in our 200-million-year old ancestors may have laid the groundwork for the bulging brains of humans and all other mammals.Virtual three-dimensional ‘casts’ of the fossilized skulls of animals that preceded the first true mammals suggest that brain areas involved in smell, or olfaction, catalysed brain growth in the evolutionary branch that gave rise to mammals....

Cosmologists talk about the cosmic microwave background radiation, their snapshot of the universe at the tender age of 400,000 years, so much that it might seem pretty well mined out by now. After all, the European Space Agency intends for its new Planck satellite to extract “essentially all the information available” in the radiation’s spatial patterns. But cosmologists looking beyond Planck say the radiation has a barely explored aspect that, if it could be observed with enough precision, would reveal new details about the early universe: its spectrum....

In his speech this morning to the U.N. General Assembly, Pope Francis called on world leaders to pay more attention to the condition of humankind and to the environment, which he considers inseparable. So much so, he said, that “Any harm done to the environment, therefore, is harm done to humanity.” Francis noted that humans are violating a fundamental “right of the environment,” and he said science offers solutions. He also implored the world to end human trafficking, stop the drug trade and reduce the likelihood of nuclear war....

A restful night’s sleep might make a cup of coffee less of a desperate need first thing in the morning. But pharmaceutical companies are looking into whether the latest pills to promise sound, natural sleep could also play an active role in overcoming even the most powerful addictions. The new sleep aids block the activity of brain peptides called orexins. These tiny proteins keep us wide awake and attentive during the day, and they also govern some stimulating effects of addictive drugs....

ALONG THE GUNFLINT TRAIL, Minn. – If moose disappear from the boreal forest of northern Minnesota, as some biologists predict, they will not exit with a thunderous crash. Climate extinctions come quietly, even when they involve 1,000-pound herbivores. Experts who have studied the Northwestern moose – Alces alces andersoni – believe they are witnessing one of the most precipitous nonhunting declines of a major species in the modern era, yet few outside Minnesota fully appreciate the loss....

There may be a significant problem with the measuring stick scientists use to account for how much methane is affecting climate change, according to a recent study led by researchers at Oxford University.The long-term effect of methane emissions might appear to be a lot greater than it really is when compared to carbon dioxide in terms of both gases’ potential to warm the climate. The Oxford researchers suggest a new way to account for methane that highlights the considerable differences in how each gas turns up the atmospheric furnace....

Just as sailboats use wind pressure to propel through water, solar sails use the pressure from light radiated by the sun to move through space. Once the province of science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, solar sailing is gradually moving into the realm of reality. A privately funded $4.5-million mission to test solar sailing technology called LightSail now has a launch date in April 2016 and a ride to space onboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket....

A privately built robotic space capsule arrived at the International Space Station early Wednesday (Oct. 10) to make the first-ever commercial cargo delivery to the orbiting lab under a billion-dollar deal with NASA. The unmanned Dragon spacecraft was captured by station astronauts using a robotic arm after an apparently flawless approach by the cargo-laden space capsule, which was built by the private spaceflight company SpaceX. It is the first of 12 resupply flights SpaceX will fly for NASA under a $1....

After more than 30 years of declared war on cancer, a few important victories can be claimed, such as 85 percent survival rates for some childhood cancers whose diagnoses once represented a death sentence. In other malignancies, new drugs are able to at least hold the disease at bay, making it a condition with which a patient can live. In 2001, for example, Gleevec was approved for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML)....

Over coffee a couple of years ago, Javaan Chahl, a remote sensing engineer at the University of South Australia, was geeking out about vital signs. Specifically, he and a few of his colleagues were discussing how they might use cameras to take precise readings of people’s breathing and heart rates. The engineers were confident they could make such a tool, but they were not so sure about its applications. After all, someone joked, people don’t bite when a medical professional applies a stethoscope to them....

In 2016 scientists made a discovery sure to usher in a new era of physics: for the first time, they detected gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago. Meanwhile the Zika virus, after lying low for nearly 70 years, mounted an aggressive global attack. Climate change aggravated social crises in the Middle East, contributing to a mass exodus of refugees. Scientific American covered all these events in print or on digital platforms....

The United States holds enough oil, gas and coal in reserves to burn through the world’s remaining carbon budget and topple existing international climate targets, according to a first-of-its kind database of global fossil fuel stores launched Monday by the think tank Carbon Tracker. Intended to be an ongoing public resource, the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels was published to coincide with climate talks at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, as well as to kick-start a reckoning about the amount of fossil fuels being invested in and developed around the world despite international promises to stem emissions....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to the January 2015 issue of Scientific American Classics: The Rise of the Automobile. The automobile has arguably shaped the modern world more than any other invention, and it has come to mean much more than a way to get from point A to point B. Two developments from the late 19th century led to the automobile of today. One was the introduction of the internal-combustion engine to power the horseless carriage—an innovation that might have remained out of reach for the middle class had not Henry Ford successfully challenged a patent held by George Selden, who tried to keep the breakthrough proprietary....

UNTIL ABOUT 35 years ago scientists believed there was only a single visual-processing area, called the visual cortex, situated at the back of the brain. We now know more than 30 areas in the brains of primates—including humans—are involved in handling aspects of vision such as the perception of motion, color and depth. Vision, it turns out, is a much more complex and sophisticated affair than anyone had imagined. It makes sense that responsibility for processing is divided into various areas that have different computational objectives....

One of the biggest sky shows of the year peaks the evening of August 12, when the Perseid meteor shower will be most active in the night sky. The Perseids, which may deliver as many as 80 meteors per hour, should also be visible on the night of August 13. The Perseid shower reaches its peak once a year, in mid-August, when Earth’s orbit carries the planet through the debris stream left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle, a 26-kilometer body that sheds ice and dust as it orbits the sun....

(Credit:Apple/CNET)For all its talk of doubling down on secrecy, Apple’s efforts to keep its upcoming iPhones under wraps seems all for naught. Over the past few weeks there have been a flurry of photos of both plastic and metal iPhones that may or may not be (but probably are) its next-generation devices. Most notable is that it looks very much like Apple’s going to introduce not one but two new iPhones for the first time since the device first hit the market in 2007....

With 90-minute games, soccer is usually considered an endurance sport. But strength is also key to avoiding injury and improving performance, according to research presented this month at the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. Now teams from youth leagues to the World Cup are kicking this science into practice. When it comes to keeping athletes healthy, “strength training plays a huge role,” says Shawn Arent, an exercise physiologist at Rutgers University who led the work....

You might have thought that President Obama’s recent order earlier this month, lifting restrictions on federally funded stem cell research, would render obsolete the opinions of a Bush-appointed council tasked with advising the former chief executive on stem cells and other hot-button bioethics issues. Evidently not. Ten members of The President’s Council on Bioethics, an 18-member bioethics advisory panel appointed by President Bush but still active until the end of September 2009, wrote in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum blog that Obama’s description of his March 9 executive order as “lift[ing] the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research” was an inaccurate characterization of Bush’s restrictions, which limited federally funded stem cell research to cell lines created before August 9, 2001....