The year 2003 witnessed the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNAs double-helix structure by James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick. Their discovery reduced genetics to chemistry and laid the foundations for the next half a century of biology. Today thousands of researchers are hard at work deciphering the myriad ways that genes control the development and functioning of organisms. All those genes are written in the medium that is DNA....
Just weeks after NASA’s Europa Clipper mission quietly received a formal commitment to a final cost and timeline from the agency, it looks increasingly like the spacecraft will not fly on its legally mandated megarocket, the Space Launch System (SLS)—at least, not in the timeline outlined by Congress—documents and experts confirm. Because of the severe radiation challenges of the Jovian system, Europa Clipper is one of the most ambitious flagship missions ever attempted by NASA, with seismic implications for the agency’s search for life beyond Earth....
A new face has been added to the solar system’s family portrait: Scientists have discovered a new dwarf planet looping around the sun in the region beyond Pluto. The dwarf planet, called 2014 UZ224, measures about 330 miles (530 kilometers) across and is located about 8.5 billion miles (13.7 billion km) from the sun, NPR reported today (Oct. 11). For comparison, Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is about 750 miles (1,200 km) in diameter, and reaches a maximum distance of about 4....
In 1981, as a young scientist, I applied for my dream job as a geologist with the British Antarctic Survey. As a child, I had adored snow and ice. Winter was my favorite season (and still is). My most cherished book was Wilson A. Bentley’s atlas of snowflake photographs, and I avidly read the accounts by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton of their Antarctic expeditions. As a teenager, I enjoyed hiking and camping....
PARIS, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Eating processed meat can cause bowel cancer in humans while red meat is a likely cause of the disease, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts said on Monday in findings that could sharpen debate over the merits of a meat-based diet. The France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the WHO, put processed meat like hot dogs and ham in its group 1 list, which already includes tobacco, asbestos and diesel fumes, for which there is “sufficient evidence” of cancer links....
In the summer action film The Fantastic Four, intrepid space travelers are exposed to an intense radiation burst that gives them superpowers–from immense strength to invisibility–once they return to Earth. That premise is science fiction, but radiation encircling our planet does affect both astronauts and orbiting satellites. The activity of the two Van Allen radiation belts has now been explained in a report that should help scientists better predict their behavior and reduce the risk to humans and spacecraft....
It might look docile lolling among the water lilies, but bad-tempered and surprisingly swift on terra firma, the hippopotamus has a deservedly fearsome public image in its African homeland. It also has a formidable reputation among evolutionary biologists: the beast has defied attempts to pinpoint its origin for nearly two centuries. To that end, recent findings may finally put the hippo in its place. With its gaping maw, hairless body and eyes that sit high on its head, the semiaquatic hippo is one of the most distinctive members of Africa’s mammalian menagerie....
With all the “hot air” surrounding climate change discussions, none has been hotter in recent weeks than that spewed over a trove of stolen e-mails and computer code from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. Longstanding contrarians, such as Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.), who famously dubbed climate change a “hoax” in a 2003 speech, has pointed to the stolen e-mails as information that overturns the scientific evidence for global warming and called on U....
From of Nature magazine For centuries, the people of the Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific Ocean have crafted weapons from shark teeth. Joshua Drew, a conservation biologist at Columbia University in New York, has used these teeth to show that the waters around the islands — part of the Republic of Kiribati — were once home to three species of shark that no longer live in the area. “This is shadow biodiversity,” said Drew, presenting his results at the 2012 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, last week....
Addressing the climate change crisis will require Washington to do the one thing America seems to hate most of all: planning. There is a myth in America that markets, not plans, are the key to success. Markets will supposedly decide our climate future on their own once we institute cap-and-trade legislation to put a market price on carbon emissions. Yet this is silly: both markets and planning are essential, as is evident in any successful large-scale undertaking, whether public or private....
Early in the morning of January 23, 1999, a robotic telescope in New Mexico picked up a faint flash of light in the constellation Corona Borealis. Though just barely visible through binoculars, it turned out to be the most brilliant explosion ever witnessed by humanity. We could see it nine billion light-years away, more than halfway across the observable universe. If the event had instead taken place a few thousand light-years away, it would have been as bright as the midday sun, and it would have dosed Earth with enough radiation to kill off nearly every living thing....
SAN DIEGO—After more than a year of practicing for the America’s Cup, the U.S. team is replacing its boat’s lofty 60-meter mast and 620-square-meter cloth mainsail with a hard, fixed wing that is 80 percent larger than a Boeing 747 wing and will tower 58 meters above their giant trimaran’s deck. The team, known as the BMW ORACLE Racing Team, will start to practice with and evaluate the high-strength yet lightweight carbon-fiber wing on its 27-meter carbon-composite trimaran later this week....
On the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda, septic trucks full of human excrement bump and slosh their way up orange dirt roads to their final destination: the Nduba landfill. Until recently, the trucks would spill their contents into giant open pits. But since 2015, workers in green jumpsuits have greeted them outside a row of sheds and plastic-roofed greenhouses, ready to process the faecal sludge into a dry, powdery fuel. The facility is called Pivot, and its founder is Ashley Muspratt, a sanitation engineer who lived in Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda for more than seven years before moving back to the United States last year....
Joseph Jimenez retires at the end of the month after eight years in the top job at Novartis, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Under his leadership the company sold off its vaccine division and shifted its focus to developing generic drugs as well as products for treating retinal diseases, glaucoma and dry eye, among other conditions. But his tenure will be remembered largely for putting gene therapies on the map....
One of 100 billion nerve cells in the human brain, the neuron waits, ready. Suddenly, a neighbor releases signaling molecules with an attention-getting message, like the irresistible chatter of a next-door gossip who has a hot tidbit. The receiving cell, excited, experiences fluctuations in ion concentration, creating a small electric current flow. Then it, too, releases communication signals down the line. The cascade continues until a large region of the brain is buzzing with heightened processing....
On January 18, 2011, Kevin Benefield was convicted of the rape and murder of Barbara Pelkey in Wallingford, Conn. Benefield was deemed guilty on the basis of DNA evidence, which exonerated Kenneth Ireland, the man initially convicted of the crimes. Ireland’s newfound freedom was bittersweet. It arrived only after he had spent more than 20 years in prison, having been arrested at age 18 and convicted wrongfully in 1989. Ireland is hardly alone....
At any given moment, about seven microliters of tears are present in each of our eyes—about a tenth of a drop of water. You might think of them as nothing more than salty water, but it’s more accurate to think if them filtered blood; they deliver oxygen and nutrients to our eyes, removing waste, serving as the first line of defense against pathogens and helping to heal injuries. Tears also contain traces of the various chemicals originally present in blood, some of which serve as markers of illness—glucose, for example, which can signal diabetes, or enzymes that point to possible liver disease....
By Will Boggs MD (Reuters Health) – There are so many different genetic forms of autism that using the singular term, autism, is misleading, researchers say. “We believe a better term to use is ‘the autisms,’ or ‘the autism spectrum disorders’ (that is, plural),” Dr. Stephen W. Scherer told Reuters Health by email. “There are many different forms of autism. In other words, autism is more of a collection of different disorders that have a common clinical manifestation....
“The most outrageous object that most people have never heard of,” as one scientist calls it, is the subject of our cover story—and, to my mind at least, such amazing adventures in discovery make up a theme that resounds throughout this Scientific American issue, among many others. What’s this intriguing object? In “The Inner Lives of Neutron Stars,” senior editor Clara Moskowitz writes about these strange cosmic things, which pack the mass of roughly two suns into a space no wider than a city....
The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....
