How long does it take you to add 3,456,732 and 2,245,678? Ten seconds? Not bad–for a human. The average new PC can perform the calculation in 0.000000018 second. How about your memory? Can you remember a shopping list of 10 items? Maybe 20? Compare that with 125 million items for the PC. On the other hand, computers are stumped by faces, which people recognize instantly. Machines lack the creativity for novel ideas and have no feelings and no fond memories of their youth....
Scientists and science fiction writers alike have long wondered about what forms alien life might take on other worlds. Now researchers have strengthened the case that, at least on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, some alien life might closely resemble a specific type of microbe found deep in our own planet’s seas. Such alien organisms may even be living there now, and if so, could conceivably become the first discovered beyond Earth....
For most people, the acronym NASH won’t ring any bells. But NASH, or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, is stealthily showing up in the livers of millions of Americans. Marked by the accumulation of an unhealthy amount of fat and scar tissue in the liver, NASH is quietly reaching epidemic proportions across the globe. By 2020, NASH is projected to overtake hepatitis C as the leading cause of liver transplants in the U.S. The disease is poised to win that dubious honor because an alarming rise in obesity and type-2 diabetes—key risk factors for NASH—is coinciding with far better treatments for hepatitis C....
Cooking is crucial to our diets. It helps us digest food without expending huge amounts of energy. It softens food, such as cellulose fiber and raw meat, that our small teeth, weak jaws and digestive systems aren’t equipped to handle. And while we might hear from raw foodists that cooking kills vitamins and minerals in food (while also denaturing enzymes that aid digestion), it turns out raw vegetables are not always healthier....
From Nature. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first seasonal flu vaccine comprised of recombinant proteins, rather than inactivated or weakened virus. The 16 January approval of Flublok, developed by Protein Sciences Corporation in Meriden, Connecticut, arrives as US emergency rooms are clogged with victims of an early and severe flu season. Thirty states are reporting high levels of flu-like illness this season, and New York state and the city of Boston have declared public health emergencies....
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft probably won’t bounce back completely from the malfunction that stalled its planet-hunting efforts two months ago, mission officials say. The Kepler space telescope was hobbled in May when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, robbing the instrument of its precision pointing ability. Engineers managed to get the balky wheels turning again recently, but both devices are far from healthy, showing much higher levels of friction than they once did....
Researchers in the US have created a chemically-responsive fluid to efficiently fracture rocks that could decrease the amount of energy required for fracking. Current hydraulic fracturing methods are energy-intensive due to the need to pump, on average, 4 million gallons of water per reservoir, at very high pressures and flow rates deep into the ground. This water also contains additives including biocides, corrosion inhibitors and friction reducers. The fluid, developed by Carlos Fernandez of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and coworkers, expands by up to 2....
Physicists are drawing closer to answering a long-standing mystery of the universe: how long a neutron lives. Neutrons are electrically neutral particles that usually combine with protons to make up atomic nuclei. Some neutrons are not bound up in atoms; these free-floating neutrons decay radioactively into other particles in a matter of minutes. But physicists can’t agree on precisely how long it takes a neutron to die. Using one laboratory approach, they measure the average neutron lifetime as 14 minutes 39 seconds....
Species with symmetrical body plans have been roaming the earth for about 400 million years. Human beings have long shown an intense interest in this property in our own species—take the importance of symmetry in perceptions of beauty or the famous depiction of the outstretched human body in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Now scientists have gone a step further. Alberto Roselló-Díez, a developmental biologist currently at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, led a study of how a mouse fetus maintains symmetry as it develops....
Childhood, argues the critic Alexandra Lange, has become too circumscribed, too controlled, too “safe.” In “The Design of Childhood,” Lange looks at the world we’ve designed for our kids, from toys to schools, playgrounds and entire cities. It is a fascinating and sobering story. “Our built environment is making children less healthy, less healthy, and less imaginative,” she writes. With Lange’s historical perspective, though, solutions emerge. Most fundamental, perhaps, is that children should be considered citizens, not consumers....
Walking in crowds means predicting the future. When navigating heavily trafficked areas, people adjust their paths after subconsciously calculating how long it would take to collide with another person. Researchers have come to this conclusion by analysing videos of crowds. They say that it could lead to safer design of public spaces and help in the development of crowd-monitoring methods to prevent deadly stampedes. Brian Skinner, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and his colleagues will publish the work in an upcoming Physical Review Letters....
Women see fewer advertisements about entering into science and technology professions than men do. But it’s not because companies are preferentially targeting men—rather it appears to result from the economics of ad sales. Surprisingly, when an advertiser pays for digital ads, including postings for jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), it is more expensive to get female views than male ones. As a result, ad algorithms designed to get the most bang for one’s buck consequently go for the cheaper eyeballs—men’s....
1968 Radio-Wave Astronomy “Almost exactly a year ago a small group of workers operating a new radio telescope at the University of Cambridge were surprised to find that weak and spasmodic radio signals coming from a point among the stars were, on closer inspection, a succession of pulses as regularly spaced as a broadcast time service. With skepticism bordering on incredulity, the Cambridge group began systematic observations intended to reveal the nature of these strange signals....
With this final column I will transition Sustainable Developments from Scientific American to the home page of the Earth Institute (www.earth.columbia.edu). Although I will continue to contribute occasional essays to the magazine, I will use this last regular column to say thank you and take stock of the deepening crisis of sustainable development. During the four years of this column, the world’s inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis has become even more palpable....
Wrong. A new paper to be published later this year in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law argues that the Federal Communications Commission—the agency responsible for licensing the operation of these constellations in the U.S.—should have considered the impact these satellites would have on the night sky. In ignoring a key piece of federal environmental legislation, the FCC could be sued in a court of law—and lose—potentially halting further launches of mega constellations until a proper review is carried out....
Editor’s Note: Neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine in 1986, died December 30 at the age of 103. We are making this article co-authored by her free online for the next 30 days. This story was originally published in June 1979 issue of Scientific American. The human nervous system is a vast network of several billion neurons, or nerve cells, endowed with the remarkable ability to receive, store and transmit information....
When physicists petitioned the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) in the early 1980s to build a particle accelerator that would recreate the fiery conditions of the big bang, they picked a name worthy of its magnitude. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) located south of Dallas, Tex., would have outshined even the Large Hadron Collider, which after 14 years and $8 billion is about to start shooting particles around its 17-mile (27-kilometer) beam pipe on the Franco-Swiss border....
SAN DIEGO—A wireless device that decodes brain waves has enabled a woman paralyzed by locked-in syndrome to communicate from the comfort of her home, researchers announced this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The 59-year-old patient, who prefers to remain anonymous but goes by the initials HB, is “trapped” inside her own body, with full mental acuity but completely paralyzed by a disease that struck in 2008 and attacked the neurons that make her muscles move....
This story is a supplement to the feature “Self-Cleaning Materials: Lotus Leaf-Inspired Nanotechnology” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Thin films of titania have the very opposite property to the lotus—superhydrophilicity—yet they, too, shrug off dirt, and they are also antimicrobial. What the Water Does Water on a superhydrophilic material forms a sheet across the surface and easily dislodges and removes dirt as it flows. Superhydrophilicity also prevents a surface from fogging because water spreads instead of forming the innumerable tiny droplets that constitute a fog....
The summer of 2016 was one of dire warnings for Southern California energy consumers. A massive methane leak from the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility outside Los Angeles had drained the region’s natural gas supply, and the word went out that gas shortages could disrupt the region’s power deliveries by the summer of 2017. Amid fears of rolling blackouts across the nation’s second-largest metro area and beyond, utilities like Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric latched on to a solution that for years had been quietly deployed, but needed an event like a looming gas shortage to be thrust into prime time....
