When Apple unveiled its Retina screen on the iPhone 4, the world gasped. “There has never been a more detailed, clear, or viewable screen,” read a review on the tech Web site Engadget. “Staring at that screen is addictive,” said Wired magazine. What they were reacting to was the superhigh resolution. The iPhone 4 packed in 326 pixels per inch (ppi)—pixels so tiny that you can’t discern them at standard viewing distance....
Nigeria becomes the first-ever African team to compete in the Bobsled and Skeleton events in the next few days at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. That team joins Jamaica’s women bobsledders—also making their Winter Olympics debut (exactly 30 years after the Jamaican men’s team of Cool Runnings fame competed at the 1998 Winter Games)—and a handful of other competitors who hail from places where it rarely, if ever, gets cold enough to snow....
A study on the development of priapulids or ‘penis’ worms throws doubt on a feature that has been thought for more than 100 years to define the largest branch of the animal tree of life. Members of this branch — the protostomes — have historically been defined by the order in which they develop a mouth and an anus as embryos. But gene-expression data suggest that this definition is incorrect, researchers report this week in Current Biology....
Dear EarthTalk: What’s the nutritional difference between the carrot I ate in 1970 and one I eat today? I’ve heard that that there’s very little nutrition left. Is that true?—Esther G., Newark, N.J. It would be overkill to say that the carrot you eat today has very little nutrition in it—especially compared to some of the other less healthy foods you likely also eat—but it is true that fruits and vegetables grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today....
1967 Solid-State Science “If you take a paper clip and bend it, it stays bent; it doesn’t spring back and it doesn’t break. The metal of which the clip is made is said to be ductile. If you try to bend a glass rod (unless you are holding it in a flame), it will simply break. It is said to be brittle. In this respect, as in many others, glass behaves quite differently from a metal....
If you watch TV, read magazines or surf the Web, you have probably encountered advertisements urging you to exercise your mind. Various brain fitness programs encourage people to stay mentally limber by giving their brain a daily workout—doing everything from memorizing lists and solving puzzles to estimating the number of trees in Central Park. It sounds a bit gimmicky, but such programs may have a real basis in neurobiology. Recent work, albeit mostly in rats, indicates that learning enhances the survival of new neurons in the adult brain....
As you may have noticed at your last high school reunion, some people age more gracefully than others. Jean Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 and is the world record holder for longest human lifespan, is reported to have stayed mentally sharp her entire life. She took up fencing at 85 and rode a bike until she was 100. At the other extreme, people with early-onset Alzheimer’s may begin experiencing cognitive deficits in their 30s....
Editor’s Note: In mid-May, Scientific American will announce the winners of this year’s Scientific American 10. Every Monday, starting April 13, we will profile a previous Scientific American 50 winner. Year in Scientific American 50: 2005 Recognized for: Seeking ways to mend heart tissue damaged by heart attacks. Although recent research indicates that adult heart cells can regenerate, overturning a long-held medical tenet, they still do so very slowly. Back in 2005 Mark Keating and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School succeeded in getting heart cells in two commonly used animal models—zebra fish and rats—to mend much faster by blocking a growth-inhibiting enzyme with a drug....
In 2018 the Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever built, will blast off into deep space. The event will serve as an astronaut-readiness test, but 13 shoe-box-sized satellites—called CubeSats—will take advantage of the “free” ride off Earth. NASA recently announced a handful of these mini missions, and their goals are as different from one another as the moon is from an asteroid. A sampling includes: NEAR-EARTH ASTEROID SCOUT The NEA Scout satellite will collect data about the spin, topography and surface compositions of asteroid 1991 VG, a near-earth object that could become a landing site for future spacecraft....
Jainey Bavishi is all business as she takes off from Battery Park to walk the perimeter of lower Manhattan. It’s a muggy afternoon, a breeze barely lifting off of the New York Harbor, after days of heavy rain. She manoeuvres throngs of tourists, construction workers and suits streaming out of office tours for lunch as she walks north from the waterfront park toward the Brooklyn Bridge. In a skirt suit and flats, Bavishi fits in among lower Manhattan’s workday hustle....
NASA’s New Horizons probe wowed the world in 2015 with unprecedented pictures of Pluto, and, more recently, with the first close-up images of an object in the Kuiper belt of asteroids. Now the mission has achieved yet another first: measuring the distances of two stars from the outer reaches of the Solar System. “It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement released 11 June....
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the renowned science communicator, earned his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991. About 4,000 astrophysicists resided in the country at the time. Tyson brought the total number of African-Americans among them to a paltry seven. In a convocation address, he spoke openly about the challenges he faced: “In the perception of society … my academic failures are expected and my academic successes are attributed to others,” Tyson said....
The police sergeant’s voice was quiet but firm. She told the college student exactly what he was going to do, and then he did it. “You’re going to take a series of nine heel-to-toe steps,” she said. “You’re going to look at your feet, you’re going to count your steps out loud, you’re going to keep your hands by your side, and you’re not going to stop once you start. … Then you’re going to come back....
The controversial proposed Keystone XL Pipeline put Canada’s vast carbon-laden tar sands on the map for many Americans, with its builders promising that it would carry 800,000 barrels of petroleum per day from Alberta’s tar sands to oil refineries in Texas. But a group of 100 scientists on Wednesday called for a moratorium on further oil sands development, saying it isn’t compatible with stabilizing the climate and meeting greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets....
TUPPER LAKE, N.Y. – Scott Lizotte was hopeful as he pulled his iPhone out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. “It’s going to be six degrees tonight,” he said, studying the 10-day forecast. It’s mid-March, and he’s standing between a skidder and a log loader in a snowy clearing of a 12,000-acre private forest near Tupper Lake, a former lumber town in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The ground is deeply rutted from rain two days ago, but the return of cold has frozen it hard as blacktop....
When a frigid cold wave knocked out 50 power plants in Texas during February’s Super Bowl week, utilities had to impose rolling blackouts across entire communities with a “blunt ax,” said Robert Shapard, CEO of Dallas-based Oncor, the state’s largest transmission company. Next year, when Oncor completes installing 3.4 million smart meters throughout its system, future rolling blackouts could be tailored to protect nursing homes, compressor stations that keep natural gas flowing and other priority facilities, Shapard said....
Last week’s Wall Street Journal featured a special section on “The Future of Food” and the cover story by Annie Gasparro was on “The Search for Sweet”—how food manufacturers are racing to identify or develop new ingredients that can be used to sweeten foods and beverages without adding calories or worrisome chemicals. The American consumer, you see, has decided that sugar is bad for them. This is hardly surprising, given the steady drumbeat of public health messaging about the evils of sweetened beverages and added sugars....
On the morning of August 21, 2017, in a grassy field in Midvale, Idaho, my family and I waited with great anticipation. In a few minutes we would be enveloped by the moon’s shadow. Along with millions of other people who had made their way to a narrow strip of land extending from Oregon to South Carolina, we were about to see a total eclipse of the sun. Afterward I wondered how many budding young astronomers had been created at that moment, captivated by the eerie daytime twilight and the rare view of the sun’s white-hot corona....
A stronger immune system, more energy, improved endurance, and better stamina … one ingredient promises all of that. Whether it’s as an extract, a pill, or powdered into your coffee, the cordyceps fungus is promoted as a one-stop-shop to cure what ails you. Known as Himalayan Gold because it is often farmed in the Himalayan plateaus, cordyceps has long been used in ancient Chinese and Tibetan medicine for curing diarrhea, headache, cough, rheumatism, liver disease, kidney disease, and much more....
Sometimes shaming, whether it’s online or in person, can be fatal. In Beyond Bullying: Breaking the Cycle of Shame, Bullying, and Violence (Oxford University Press, 2015; 256 pages), Jonathan Fast, associate professor of social work at Yeshiva University, describes the dark underbelly of shame. Fast admits that at low levels, shame can be beneficial—signaling, for instance, when we have behaved inappropriately—but when unhinged, it can become a weapon. Fast delves into the psychology and sociology of shame and concludes that this powerful emotion is the common thread explaining the recent rise in domestic terrorism and gun violence, school and online bullying, and suicide among adolescents....
