Basic chemistry teaches that dissolving carbon dioxide in seawater will increase acidity. With atmospheric CO2 levels rising—touching 400 parts per million for the first time in millennia this past May—it is therefore a safe bet that the world’s oceans are becoming more acidic. But just how much more? And how much do those levels change from place to place—at the coast or out in open waters, or at the surface versus in the depths?...
A large area of the Greenland ice sheet once considered stable is actually shedding massive amounts of ice, suggesting that future sea-level rise may be worse than expected, a team of scientists warned yesterday in a new study. The research in Nature Climate Change signals that many climate models may be too conservative in their projections through this century, as they are not considering ice loss from the northeast portion of Greenland....
Given a choice between dengue fever and another mosquito-borne disease called chikungunya fever, most would choose dengue. Neither has an available vaccine or specific treatment, but chikungunya is far more debilitating. The disease has long been a problem in Africa and southern Asia, causing high fever and severe joint pain. The name “chikungunya,” meaning roughly “that which bends up” in the Makonde language of southeastern Africa, describes the doubled-over posture of the afflicted....
We may be living in a material world but being a material girl is definitely not the path to happiness. In fact, the latest experimental evidence hints that letting go of all of that stuff is a surer route to satisfaction. Psychologist Tim Kasser at Knox College is among the researchers who have studied how the importance of making and spending money compares with other values, such as focusing on the community or self-growth....
Sometimes a single patient can inspire a new line of investigation. In the Scientific American article “Is Anybody in There?” neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Western University in Ontario describes how his 1997 encounter with a patient named Kate led him to explore new ways to detect consciousness in patients who appear to be in a vegetative state. Kate, a young schoolteacher, fell into a coma following a flulike illness. For weeks she lingered in what appeared to be a vegetative state: Her eyes were sometimes open but she was unresponsive to her family, doctors and environment....
A new weather pattern that sends blasts of warm southern air into the Arctic each June has fueled the recent, dramatic decline of the region’s sea ice, according to a new government-funded study. But that is not all it has done, the analysis suggests, linking the shifting summer winds to record thaws of the Greenland ice sheet, unusually wet European summers and Rocky Mountain wildfires. Researchers say the switch from light, variable east-west winds to stronger, warmer blasts of southern air appears to have strengthened a climate feedback loop they call “Arctic amplification....
This is the sixth of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters. When Seth Roberts began suffering from insomnia in the early 1980s, waking up tired in the morning only to nod off again within a few hours, he could easily have taken sleeping pills for relief. But that would have deprived the Berkeley, Calif., experimental psychologist the satisfaction of spending the next decade trying to solve the problem himself....
A growing feud over the use of American wood to fuel power production in Europe came into sharp relief yesterday as an environmental group staged a seafaring protest during a forest industry conference. Participants at this week’s Mid-Atlantic Forest Products Conference toured a deepwater export terminal near Norfolk, Va., owned by Enviva LP, a major wood pellet manufacturer and conference sponsor. The tour group was met by about 16 protesters on a party boat circling Enviva’s Port of Chesapeake, brandishing a 16-foot banner reading “SOS—Save our Southern Forests” and waving smaller signs that read “Stop Enviva....
Splashes of fuchsia, streaks of crimson and a smattering of taupe. When these dazzling displays of color—each hue denoting a different neuron—first appeared in the neuroscientific community in 2007, researchers hailed them as a novel way to understand brain structure. By inserting genes from bacteria, corals and jellyfish to code for three different fluorescent proteins into mouse nerve cells, Harvard University neuroscientists created neurons that would express a random combination of the proteins....
As of late August, there had been more than 1,200 cases of measles across 31 U.S. states this year. It’s a dispiriting comeback for a disease that was declared eliminated in this country in 2000. If the disease has not stopped spreading by the time you read this, the U.S. will likely have lost this status. The illness has been cropping up mainly in pockets of unvaccinated people. Those who choose not to immunize their families are placing at risk not only themselves and their children but also others who cannot be vaccinated because they are too young or have medical issues....
Sometimes it is the strange similarities and symmetries of unrelated historical moments that most clearly display the patterns of human experience. Archives separated by oceans can be in dialogue with each other. A case in point: in the National Library of Scotland and the national archives in Cuba, you can find unsettling documents detailing the skull measurements of two renowned Black leaders of the 19th century. These peculiar archival records demonstrate the long relationship between scientific inquiry and racism....
A CHANCE TO PEEK INTO THE FUTURE—at least one possible future—is always a tempting fantasy. But would you take it? And if you didn’t like what you saw, how hard would you try to change it? After almost 20 years spent reading, mapping and analyzing human DNA, researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) believe that personal genetic information is nearly ready for use by consumers in managing their health....
By Shereen Lehman (Reuters Health) – Obese patients who have weight loss surgery often see their diabetes improve, but whether the surgery helps prevent diabetes in the first place hasn’t been clear. A new study suggests that weight loss surgery does help prevent diabetes, but experts say the data still don’t allow for a definite answer. In the study, obese patients who underwent so-called bariatric surgery were less likely to develop type 2, or “adult onset” diabetes compared to similar patients who did not have the surgery....
The United Kingdom on Thursday is taking a historic vote on whether to remain a part of the European Union or to exit the economic and political bloc in a scenario referred to as “Brexit”. The run-up to the referendum has been caustically divisive in the U.K., and polls have indicated a nearly even split among voters. [Update June 24, 2016: The BBC called the race for the Leave campaign shortly before 5 a....
TRANEBJERG, Samso, Denmark—It can seem as if the icy, cutting wind off the North Sea never stops blowing on this Danish island in winter, bending back the grass, whipping straight the flags, and setting mammoth wind turbines to their stately spinning. That’s good news for Samso’s 4,000 or so inhabitants, seeing as they own shares in 20 of the 21 turbines that either tower over the island or rise from the offshore waters of the Kattegat Strait, which connects the Baltic and North seas....
Since 2014 a small group of environmentalists has been using satellites to track fishing vessels across the world’s oceans, alerting authorities when boats appear to violate protected marine areas. Now these watchdogs are opening their system to the public with an online mapping tool called Global Fishing Watch—and they are inviting anyone who can to put eyes on rogue fishers. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a longtime environmental activist, was set to formally unveil the tool on Thursday at a conference in Washington, D....
Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of nuclear fission? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? In fact, no serious technical obstacles exist that would hamper the expansion of nuclear energy in the U.S. The newest generation of nuclear power plants builds on a foundation of excellence spanning decades and supported by significant improvement in plant efficiency....
In America’s nascent electric-car industry, there is little doubt that markets will also flourish in China, Europe and elsewhere. Does that mean there will be a sizable export market? American companies are concluding that the answer is no. The companies that make electric cars, hybrids and batteries still expect to do business abroad, but only by manufacturing on foreign shores, and by giving up the hope that American workers can export to rich foreign markets....
Three days after California businesses began selling marijuana for recreational use, a policy change by the federal government has sparked uncertainty about the future of legalized cannabis and provoked sharp reactions from officials in the state and around the nation. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions Thursday rescinded an Obama-era policy that discouraged federal prosecutors from cracking down on the sale and consumption of pot. Sessions issued a memo directing prosecutors to enforce federal marijuana laws to “disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis and thwart violent crime across our country....
Deborah Lacks wanted answers. In 1974, she asked a leading medical geneticist to tell her about HeLa cells, a tissue-culture cell line derived from the cancer that had killed her mother Henrietta in 1951. The researcher, who was collecting blood from the Lacks family to map HeLa genes, autographed a medical textbook he had written and said that everything she needed to know lay within its dense pages. It would be more than 30 years before the family got a better explanation....
