Sciam 50 Material World

Cut your finger, and your body starts mending the wound even before you have had time to go and find a Band-Aid. Synthetic materials are not so forgiving, but Nancy R. Sottos, Scott R. White and their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are looking to change all that. They developed a self-healing plastic that contains a three-dimensional network of microscopic capillaries filled with a liquid healing agent. When the material is cracked, the released fluid is hardened by particles of a catalyst that are also sprinkled through­out....

January 28, 2023 · 4 min · 716 words · Barbara Alvarez

Strange Hole On Asteroid Vesta Poses Puzzle

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine Planetary scientists thought they knew what to expect when NASA’s Dawn spacecraft returned the first close-up portrait of the giant asteroid Vesta last month. Fuzzy images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) taken in 1996 seemed to show that something had taken a big bite out of the asteroid’s south polar region. The crater was posited as the source of Vesta-like fragments that populate the asteroid belt, and of a surprisingly large fraction of the meteorites found on Earth....

January 28, 2023 · 4 min · 764 words · Jose Nez

The First Billion Covid Vaccinations Have Been Given

The world has reached the milestone of administering one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, just four months after the World Health Organization (WHO) approved the first vaccine for emergency use, and roll-outs began in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. The speed at which they have been administered is remarkable, but unequal distribution of the vaccinations highlights global disparities, say researchers. “It is an unprecedented scientific achievement....

January 28, 2023 · 5 min · 921 words · Tonda Schenck

The Smallest Hitchhikers

We know that at the heart of at least two ocean basins—the North Pacific and the North Atlantic—tiny plastic fragments the size of confetti or smaller are accumulating on the sea surface by the tens of thousands, the remnants of discarded grocery bags, cups, bottles and other waste. Last year a group of researchers publishing in the journal Science reported a mystery: during a 22-year survey of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic, the scientists saw no increase in the amount of plastic, despite a surge in annual global plastic production from about 75 million to 245 million metric tons over the same period....

January 28, 2023 · 4 min · 676 words · Howard Garland

Unweaving The Heart

These good acts give us pleasure, but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses. –Thomas Jefferson, 1814 Nineteenth-century English poet John Keats once bemoaned that Isaac Newton had “Destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism....

January 28, 2023 · 5 min · 859 words · Albert Perez

What Inequality Does To The Brain

Growing up poor does more than deprive a billion children and adolescents worldwide of basic material necessities. Poverty places the young child’s brain at much greater risk of not going through the paces of normal development to eventually become the three-pound wonder able to perform intellectual feats, whether composing symphonies or solving differential equations. Children who live in poverty tend to perform worse than their more advantaged peers on IQ, reading and other tests....

January 28, 2023 · 26 min · 5454 words · Karen Marron

Accident Epidemiology An Unsinkable Ship Truth Serum

AUGUST 1957ROAD DATA— “Automobile accidents in the U.S. are now the subject of a large-scale investigation as if they were an epidemic—as they are. The Department of the Army, the American Medical Association and other major groups are studying many phases of the matter, from the design of tollbooths to the personality of truck drivers. Among other significant findings are that sedatives and tranquilizing drugs dull a driver’s skill, and that the dangerous effects of an evening of drinking may last as long as 18 hours, regardless of coffee therapy....

January 27, 2023 · 1 min · 200 words · Mary Giles

Ancient Peruvian Farmers Harnessed El Ni O Floodwaters

Peru’s northern coast has one of the world’s driest deserts, except for when El Niño drowns it with massive flooding. Rainwater from the nearby Andean foothills gushes down parched ravines, often tearing up modern agricultural fields in the sediment-rich plains of the desert’s few rivers. Ari Caramanica, an archaeologist at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, had long been intrigued by what looked like lengthy, straight, ancient “structures” crisscrossing parts of this desert, which is called the Pampa de Mocan....

January 27, 2023 · 4 min · 766 words · Andrew Carroll

Biologist Resurrects Prehistoric Proteins

By Helen Pearson of Nature magazineHalfway through breakfast, Joe Thornton gets a call from his freezer. A local power cut has triggered an alarm on the -80 °C appliance in his lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and it has sent out an automatic call. Thornton breaks off our conversation and calls his senior research scientist, Jamie Bridgham, to make sure that the back-up generator has kicked in. If the freezer starts warming up, a lot could be lost - not least a valuable collection of proteins that had been extinct for hundreds of millions of years until Thornton and his team brought them back from the dead....

January 27, 2023 · 15 min · 3070 words · Ann Hansen

Brightest Gamma Ray Burst Packed A One Two Punch

A new study of a stellar explosion visible from halfway across the universe finds that the blast had an unusual structure that researchers heretofore had never observed. Gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B was already on record as the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded. Now astronomers have analyzed the visible afterglow of the burst and found that the emitted light peaked initially an hour after the burst and a second time 11 days later....

January 27, 2023 · 4 min · 815 words · Iris Peachey

Charge Under Control Lithium Ion Car Batteries Get Crash Tested

The forthcoming Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf rely on lithium-ion battery packs, as do other contenders on the electric-car circuit. Yet perhaps mindful of a few highly publicized fires touched off by early lithium-ion power packs in laptops, are consumers assured that their car batteries will remain safe, even in an accident? Much of the assurance falls under the purview of Sandia National Laboratories’ Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory, which has become the de facto automotive battery-testing shop in the U....

January 27, 2023 · 4 min · 832 words · Greg Maples

Cynicism May Cost You

Most of the world’s population now lives in cities, which means fewer of us know our neighbors. Should we adapt to modern society by raising our guards and looking over our shoulder? Research says no—we are actually not trusting enough, and it could be costing us money. A growing body of work has established that in laboratory studies, subjects who are less trusting of their peers make less money in investment and economic scenarios....

January 27, 2023 · 3 min · 549 words · Larry Conforti

Foraging Monkeys Make Use Of Meteorology

Apparently humans aren’t the only primates that plan outdoor events based on weather. Gray-cheeked mangabey monkeys rely on recent trends in temperature and solar radiation to forage for figs and insect larvae, report Karline Janmaat and her colleagues of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The results support a lesser-studied notion that primate cognition evolved to solve problems rooted in ecology–such as foraging–instead of the more favored viewpoint, that cognition evolved as a way to cope within a complex society....

January 27, 2023 · 2 min · 391 words · Theodore Koch

Gene Therapy Successes Spur Hope For Embattled Field

From Nature magazine. When it was first used in the 1990s to treat an immune deficiency, gene therapy — treating diseases by correcting a patient’s faulty genes — was touted as a breakthrough that was likely to cure scores of hereditary diseases. But when 18-year-old Jessie Gelsinger died in 1999 after having a corrected gene injected to treat his liver disease, the field became wary, and researchers found it difficult to fix the problems associated with the technique....

January 27, 2023 · 7 min · 1359 words · Richard Shively

How Mobile Payments Are Failing And Credit Cards Are Getting Better

It really is time for credit cards to go. We’re still using a payment technology that hasn’t changed in more than 50 years. We carry around a piece of plastic with an easily demagnetized stripe, whose account number is all too easily hacked or stolen. (Just ask Target, Home Depot or TJ Maxx.) Why not allow people to pay by waving their cell phones? It works well in Europe. It uses a device we are already carrying....

January 27, 2023 · 6 min · 1201 words · Larry Winner

Lawmakers Terrorists May Tap Same Web 2 0 Tools As Military

The tools of the so-called Web 2.0 world—including social networking sites, virtual worlds and wikis—have introduced new and creative ways to tap the Internet’s potential. They have also drawn the concern of lawmakers, who are searching for ways to make them available to the military and intelligence communities as well as understand how terrorists might also be employing them to train for and plan attacks. The Congressional Research Service (CSR) recently released a report warning that enemies may be using the same Web-based, collaborative technology to prepare for future strikes that the U....

January 27, 2023 · 4 min · 751 words · Lynne King

Microsoft Attacks Ipad To Unload Surface Rt Inventory

Despite a $900 million write-down against its quarterly earnings for excess Surface RT inventory, or more precisely because of it, Microsoft launched a new ad to promote the hybrid tablet/laptop at a $150 discount from its original $499 price. The 32GB $349 unit is compared to a 32GB $599 iPad in the ad, with an Apple Siri-like voice, representing the iPad, saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t have a USB port…This is not going to end well for me,” and concluding with the question, “Do you still think I’m pretty?...

January 27, 2023 · 5 min · 868 words · Anthony Wilson

Moles Cancer Brake

Most moles harbor mutations that can trigger deadly skin cancer, but many do not ful-fill any cancerous destiny. Researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor pinpointed a series of mechanisms that prevent cells in a particular type of mole from continuing to divide, despite having various mutations and tumor-promoting oncogenes. The scientists found that the endoplasmic reticulum, the organelle inside cells that folds amino acids into proteins, can sense the presence of oncogenes and stop its protein folding, thereby shutting down the cancerous cell prematurely....

January 27, 2023 · 1 min · 201 words · Thomas Oconnell

Nih Retires Research Chimps At Troubled Facility

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine Early on 21 September, Francis Collins called Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in Washington DC, with news that the animal activist had been waiting for. Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), told Pacelle that the agency is to cease funding the troubled New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana, and will retire the 110 NIH-owned chimpanzees there....

January 27, 2023 · 6 min · 1160 words · Lois Becker

Plastic Surf The Unhealthful Afterlife Of Toys And Packaging

By now even schoolchildren know that the plastics we discard every year in the millions of tons persist in the environment for hundreds of years. And we have all heard of the horrors caused by such debris in the sea: fur seals entangled by nylon nets, sea otters choking on polyethylene six-pack rings, and plastic bags or toys stuck in the guts of sea turtles. This photograph, showing plastic fragments collected in just an hour at a cove near Gloucester, Mass....

January 27, 2023 · 3 min · 535 words · Michael Arendt