Posts

Can aquatic snails better remember lessons learned when they are hopped up on methamphetamine? Barbara Sorg of Washington State University in Pullman teamed up with Ken Lukowiak of the University of Calgary Medicine to see if working with snails might provide clues as to why drug memories are so strong that they seem to draw addicts back into repetitive use and addiction. The team experimented with so-called great pond snails, Lymnaea stagnalis....

If you’re in an airplane and suddenly hear a loud bang or see a flash outside the window, your plane may have just been hit by lightning. When this happens, pilots are supposed to land as soon as possible so the craft can be inspected for potential damage to its skin, structure or electronics. This protocol is paramount for safety but can create costly flight delays and cancellations. Recent tests show that, perhaps counterintuitively, the best way to reduce the chances of a strike may be to add an electrical charge to the outside of the aircraft....

Despite the rising menace of bacteria—at roughly 19,000 a year, more Americans die from drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections than from HIV/AIDS—the microorganisms do deserve some credit for their cleverness. Antibiotic-resistant strains reared their heads 60 years ago, and ever since scientists have been struggling to develop second-generation drugs that attack not the bacteria themselves—which promotes resistance—but rather their cell-to-cell communication with one another. Progress has been slow, however, as bacteria have once again proved more complex than anticipated....

In 1971 then New York Times columnist James Reston had his appendix removed at a hospital in China. The article he wrote about his experience still reverberates today. His doctors used a standard set of injectable drugs—lidocaine and benzocaine—to anesthetize him before surgery, he explained. But they controlled his postoperative pain with something quite different: a Chinese medical practice known as acupuncture, which involved sticking tiny needles into his skin at very specific locations and gently twisting them....

A bold plan to synthesize an entire human genome has been scaled back, aiming at a more technically attainable near-term goal. Instead of synthesizing all of the human genome’s 3 billion DNA base pairs, the project will now attempt to recode the genome to produce cells immune to viral infection. Organizers of Genome Project–Write (GP-write), a global public–private partnership that includes around 200 scientists, announced the priority shift at a meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 May....

The moon and the word “astrobiology” don’t often appear in the same sentence—even with a handful of government space agencies and private corporations planning crewed forays to the lunar surface for the first time since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. That final Apollo lunar landing took place after it became clear the moon was lifeless—a shift from the initial landings, which subjected their crews to quarantine after returning to Earth....

An elegant presence in a dark suit with tie neatly knotted, he reclined with eyes closed, hands clasped. His face was still boyishly handsome at 57 under the sweep of silver hair. My father rested in his open casket, and as I stood alone in the funeral home room, I at last understood the clich of the crushing weight of grief. Moments later face after friendly face poured into the room, smiling encouragingly at me, touching my arm, murmuring words of support, sharing memories....

The discovery of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century spawned a revolution that tore through scientific disciplines with abandon. It helped to explain, among many other things, the structure of the atom; the periodic nature of the elements in chemistry; and why some solids conduct electricity while others do not. Armed with this foundational knowledge, scientists and engineers developed transistors, which were assembled into integrated circuits, which became the central architectural elements of sophisticated processors of information....

Children often learn new languages more easily than adults do, but it’s unclear why. Some hypothesize that grasping a language requires absorbing subtle patterns unconsciously and that adults’ superior conscious reasoning interferes. New research suggests that, indeed, grown-ups might just be too smart for their own good. For a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, a group of Belgian adults simultaneously read and heard strings of four made-up words (such as “kieng nief siet hiem”)....

NO ONE DOUBTS that the words we write or speak are an expression of our inner thoughts and personalities. But beyond the meaningful content of language, a wealth of unique insights into an author’s mind are hidden in the style of a text—in such elements as how often certain words and word categories are used, regardless of context. It is how an author expresses his or her thoughts that reveals character, asserts social psychologist James W....

When the now-famous neurological patient Henry Molaison had his brain’s hippocampus surgically sectioned to treat seizures in 1953, science’s understanding of memory inadvertently received perhaps its biggest boost ever. Molaison lost the ability to form new memories of events, and his recollection of anything that had happened during the preceding year was severely impaired. Other types of memory such as learning physical skills were unaffected, suggesting the hippocampus specifically handles the recall of events—known as “episodic” memories....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Editor’s Note: As leaders from business, politics and science convene this week at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss pressing matters of the day, Scientific American is publishing a series of interviews with leading scientists, produced in conjunction with the forum. This is the third of four interviews for the WEF by Katia Moskvitch....

A radio signal detected by an Australian telescope in 2019, which seemed to be coming from the star closest to the sun, was not from aliens, researchers reported in October 2021 in two papers in Nature Astronomy. “It is human-made radio interference from some technology, probably on the surface of Earth,” says Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and a co-author of both papers. But the disturbance, detected by Breakthrough Listen—an ambitious and privately funded $100-million effort—looked intriguing enough at first that it sent astronomers on a nearly yearlong quest to understand its origins....

A supermassive black hole has been gobbling up a star for more than a decade — about 10 times longer than any previously known such meal, a new study finds. The extreme duration of this meal suggests that the star is incredibly large, or that it’s being consumed more completely than any other known star that has fallen prey to a black hole, study team members said. The astronomers in the study used three space telescopes — NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift satellite, and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton craft — to examine an X-ray source known as XJ1500+154, which lies 1....

FORTAZELA, Brazil — In this historic city by the sea in northeast Brazil, burn patients look as if they’ve emerged from the waves. They are covered in fish skin — specifically strips of sterilized tilapia. Doctors here are testing the skin of the popular fish as a bandage for second- and third-degree burns. The innovation arose from an unmet need. Animal skin has long been used in the treatment of burns in developed countries....

The U.S. Coast Guard is chronicling BP’s efforts to contain a massive oil leak 1,524 meters down in the Gulf of Mexico and corral the extensive oil slick heading toward the coast. The oil, as much as 757,000 liters per day, has been spewing into the gulf since April 20, when an explosion aboard the mobile offshore drilling unit Deepwater Horizon destroyed and later sunk the rig. The Coast Guard is coordinating the response to the underwater oil geyser, although most of the work is being done by booms and skimmers that BP is paying for, a Coast Guard spokesman says....

Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, made a bold promise in June. Standing next to US President Joe Biden at a press conference in St Ives, UK, just before the G7 summit meeting, Bourla said that should the need arise for a new COVID-19 vaccine, his company could get one ready within 100 days. The need he was referring to is the possible emergence of an ‘escape variant’ — a dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 that evades the fledgling immunity established through vaccines and previous infections....

Last week two American aid workers who had contracted Ebola while working in west Africa were released from a U.S. hospital and pronounced “recovered.” They had been flown to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta from Liberia earlier this month to receive care in the hospital’s specialized infectious disease unit. Kent Brantly, a physician with the humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse, and missionary Nancy Writebol, of SIM USA, beat the strain of the disease they had contracted, which kills 52 percent of its victims....

The rat is on a carousel with clear plastic sides, rotating slowly in a small room. As it looks out through the plastic, it sees markings on the walls of the room from which it can determine its position. At a certain location it receives a foot shock—or, in experimenters’ jargon, a negative reinforcement.* When that happens, the rat turns sharply around and walks tirelessly in the opposite direction, so it never reaches that same place in the room again....

Gerald F. Joyce admits that when he saw the results of the experiment, he was tempted to halt further work and publish the results immediately. After years of trying, he and his student Tracey Lincoln had finally found a couple of short but powerful RNA sequences that when mixed together along with a slurry of simpler RNA building blocks will double in number again and again, expanding 10-fold in a few hours and continuing to replicate as long as they have space and raw material....