Posts

She probably didn’t realize it, but your preschool teacher very likely provided your first reading lesson when she cranked up “Yellow Submarine” and handed you a noisemaker. Today a symphony of research trumpets the many links among language, reading and music, including several that reveal a connection between rhythm and reading skills. Nina Kraus of Northwestern University has discovered a possible explanation: the brains of good beat keepers respond to speech more consistently than the brains of people whose toes do not tap in time....

NASA has launched its most ambitious scientific balloon ever. On December 28 at 21:16 London time, technicians inflated and released a 532,000-cubic-metre aerostatic balloon from near McMurdo Station in Antarctica. It is the biggest test yet of a ‘super-pressure’ design that enables a balloon to stay aloft much longer than a conventional scientific balloon. If all continues smoothly, experts expect the flight to last for 100 days or longer. The current record for the longest NASA scientific ballooning flight is 55 days, using a traditional balloon....

Laboratory-grown organoids—tiny cellular structures that mimic an organ’s anatomy and functions—are becoming increasingly useful in medical research. Such micro-models of the brain, lungs and other organs have been around for years, but creating them for bone tissue has proved uniquely difficult. Bone stands apart because its different cell types exist within an extracellular matrix, a continuously remodeled network of collagen and minerals. Previous organoid attempts have failed to capture how human bone cells form in parallel with this matrix and interact with it....

Cobra venom is among the more noxious toxins in the animal kingdom—potent enough to fell an elephant. But researchers have found that tacking a snippet of protein from cobra venom onto human immune molecules is a novel and effective way of suppressing inflammatory chemicals involved in several difficult-to-treat ailments, such as rheumatoid arthritis, heart attacks and strokes. The new technique takes aim at the body’s complement system, a group of proteins in the blood that take a scattershot approach to killing invading microbes....

IT HAD BEEN FOUR YEARS since 13-year-old Mohamed Abdul escaped civil war in Somalia, but he still had nightmares and flashbacks. When he was nine years old, a crowd fleeing a street shooting trampled him, putting him in the hospital for two weeks. A month later he saw the aftermath of an apparent massacre: about 20 corpses floating in the ocean. Soon after, militia-men shot him in the leg, knocked him unconscious, then raped his best friend, a girl named Halimo....

Boosting levels of the chemical messenger serotonin makes mice that model autism more social, according to a study published in Nature. The study suggests the approach may do the same in people with autism. It also offers an explanation for why antidepressants do not ease autism traits: They may increase serotonin levels too slowly to be effective. The researchers used a technique that rapidly increases serotonin levels in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region that mediates social reward....

Ever since the artist Beeple sold a piece of digital art for nearly $70 million, a craze has swept through the world of cryptocurrency, ensnaring crypto evangelists and even the general public. That’s because the piece was a nonfungible token (NFT), essentially a one-of-a-kind digital trading card that can also serve as proof of ownership for a physical or digital object. Every time this digital asset changes hands, the exchanges are recorded on a type of public ledger called the blockchain....

The year was 1665. a young english scientist named robert hooke had published a book called Micrographia that was soon to become a best seller. The book contained Hooke’s descriptions and exquisite illustrations of previously invisible details of the natural world, made using the compound microscope he invented: the jointed legs of a flea, the many-lensed eyes of a drone fly, the stellar shapes of snowflakes. Perhaps most remarkable of all were his observations of thin slices of cork (a plant material), which, his microscope revealed, were composed of a honeycomblike array of compartments....

Editor’s Note (10/3/17): This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” This article is being resurfaced to highlight scientists’ plans to hunt for the elusive spacetime ripples in the near and far future. A century ago, when Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational waves—subtle ripples in spacetime produced by massive objects hurtling through the cosmos—he also guessed they could not ever be seen....

When Hurricane Harvey’s record-busting rains drenched Texas in August 2017, they triggered a cascade of chaos. Widespread flooding turned roads into rivers, impeding evacuations and access to emergency services. Stormwater swept up pathogens from wastewater treatment plants and toxins from Superfund sites, posing health threats. Phone and internet services failed in some areas, and 300,000 people in Texas lost power. Harvey also temporarily shut down a quarter of U.S. oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, raising gas prices....

At nighttime, ominous lightning flashes above erupting volcanoes light up the sky like a living nightmare. Now, scientists are closer to understanding volcanic lightning, which stems from both ash and ice, two new studies reveal. Unraveling the origin of volcanic lightning has been difficult. In thunderstorms, the culprits are colliding ice crystals, which generate enough of an electric charge to trigger lightning. But ash clouds are less predictable and harder to study than supercells (thunderstorms), so scientists are still trying to figure out what sets off volcanic lightning....

Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery. “It must have evolutionary roots somewhere, but where?” wrote Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, in an essay published in the journal’s March 15 issue. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Years of study of common invertebrate lab subjects, such as amphioxus (Branchiostoma lanceolatum) or nematodes, have yielded scant evidence as to the origins of the big, centralized brains we all develop as embryos....

An ultraporous compound can extract water molecules from dry desert air, store them as tiny “icicles” and then release them as clean drinking water. A new study has shown this novel humidity sponge’s developers how it works in detail, taking it a step closer to practical applications. Along with government, industry and university partners, the researchers are working to turn their project into portable hydration systems capable of conjuring fresh water almost anywhere in an increasingly thirsty world....

Mayor Rick Eberlin of Grafton, Ill., knows that by the end of this week he will probably be in another fight with the Mississippi River. But sandbags and flood walls are not in his arsenal. The city of 640 people just below the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers will allow floodwaters to sweep across its low-lying areas, enveloping roads, parks, docks and a strip of scruffy riverside lots where no one has lived since the Great Flood of 1993....

By Nichola Groom (Reuters) - For years, the utilities responsible for providing electricity to the nation have treated residential solar systems as a threat. Now, they want a piece of the action, and they are having to fight for the chance. If utilities embrace home solar, their deep pockets and access to customers could transform what has been a fast-growing, but niche industry. Solar powers only half a million U.S. homes and businesses, according to solar market research firm GTM Research....

In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. That idea did not last for long. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation. The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience....

Eat right and exercise, conventional wisdom has it, if you want to avoid joining the diabetes epidemic. But a new study adds some muscle to a growing body of research suggesting those steps, though beneficial, might not be enough for people exposed to chemicals in the environment. The scientists linked diabetes and people’s body burdens of DDE, a chemical produced as the body breaks down the pesticide DDT, banned in the United States more than 35 years ago....

Crime, congestion and pollution mar all cities, from Los Angeles to Mumbai. But another force trumps the drawbacks of urban living: cities bring opportunities for wealth and for the creative inspiration that can result only from face-to-face contact with others. In fact, the crush of people living in close quarters fosters the kind of collaborative creativity that has produced some of humanity’s best ideas, including the industrial revolution and the digital age....

By Geoff BrumfielThe European Union (EU) is backing away from a 2018 start date for ITER, a multi-billion-euro fusion reactor under construction in the south of France.At an ITER council meeting on 18-19 November, which was held near the reactor’s site in St Paul-lez-Durance, delegates from the EU told the project’s six other member states that the start date was no longer realistic, according to a source close to the negotiations....

Editor’s Note (10/15/19): The study this story was based on has been retracted because of technical errors in how a particular mutation was identified in a genetic database, which made the central finding invalid. When Chinese scientist He Jiankui edited the genes of twin baby girls last year, he said he was doing it to protect them against HIV infection; their father was HIV-positive. The now-disgraced scientist has said he did not want the girls to get the virus, which causes AIDS, because of a severe stigma against it in China....