Just in time for the half-century anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing [see our special report], the White House has declared the U.S. is going back to the moon within the next five years. “The first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil,” said Vice President Mike Pence during remarks in late March at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala....
The growing familiarity of the statistics does little to ease the painful realization of how disturbing they are. About a third of Americans are overweight, and another third are obese—a jump from just 13 percent obese in 1962—and as a nation we are growing fatter all the time. The excess weight has severe consequences. It causes more than 160,000 additional deaths in the U.S. annually and exacts a financial toll: health care for a person who is 70 pounds or more overweight can cost an additional $30,000 over a lifetime....
By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazineThe research on which this story is based has now been published in the New Journal of Physics. Nature’s coverage, published on 22 February, 2011 and presented again below, is based on the version of the paper submitted to ArXiv.The bandwidth available to mobile phones, digital television and other communication technologies could be expanded enormously by exploiting the twistedness as well as wavelength of radio waves....
Editor’s Note (10/19/21): On October 19, 2021, LHCb physicists unveiled two more small anomalies that continue a curious pattern of “missing” muons, which collectively hint that these exotic subatomic particles are being produced at lower-than-expected rates. With further validation, these results could become the most promising pathway toward new physics beyond the Standard Model. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then consider a tantalizing new result beguiling the world’s particle physicists....
What do you imagine when you think of a tropical ecosystem—lush rainforests or maybe coral reefs teeming with life? Whatever you’re picturing, it probably doesn’t involve too much grass. But tropical grasslands and savannas, including Africa’s Serengeti and Brazil’s Cerrado, are also important tropical ecosystems. They are home to many of the world’s large mammals and they provide important livestock grazing lands and sources of food for vast numbers of people....
In this month’s Scientific American I took a big-picture look at all the different ways people have invented to input text on phones that don’t have keyboards. You can have speed without much accuracy (dictation), you can have accuracy but not much speed (on-screen keyboards)—and sometimes you can have software assistance to get your typing done faster and more accurately (predictive-text keyboards). Both Android phones and iPhones let you install alternate on-screen keyboards to replace the one that came with your set....
Until Galileo kick-started modern astronomy in the early 1600s, the record of the sun’s activities was basically blank—or so scientists thought. To shed light on our star’s history, researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have begun to comb through ancient texts. So far they have found dozens of apparent references to sunspots, auroras and other solar events that date as far back as the seventh century—albeit in terms that require more interpretation than Galileo’s drawings....
Human exposure to extreme heat could increase dramatically across U.S. cities by the end of the century, a new study finds. As climate change worsens, urban development expands and populations grow, more people will experience high temperatures for longer periods of time. In a severe scenario, according to the study, exposure could increase twelvefold to thirtyfold across the country. It’s alarming news, as extreme summer temperatures are already wreaking havoc across the United States this year....
The first direct detection of gravitational waves is now widely expected to be announced on February 11 by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Using LIGO’s twin giant detectors—one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington—researchers are said to have measured ripples in space-time produced by a collision between two black holes. Such an announcement would vindicate Albert Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves, which he made almost exactly 100 years ago as part of his general theory of relativity—but it would also have much further significance....
Researchers have devised a new way to get a sneak peek into what’s going on deep in your digestive system, creating a swallowable sensor that, with the help of engineered bacteria and a tiny electrical circuit, can detect the presence of molecules that might be signs of disease and then beam the results to a smartphone app. The device, which scientists validated in pigs, remains a prototype and needs to be refined before it could be used in people....
On a gray day in mid-January, Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences in the build of the male and female brain might be one factor underlying the relative scarcity of women in science. His remarks reignited a debate that has been smoldering for a century, ever since some scientists sizing up the brains of both sexes began using their main finding–that female brains tend to be smaller–to bolster the view that women are intellectually inferior to men....
Most teachers would agree that it is important that students remember much of what they read. Yet one of the most common sights on high school and college campuses across the land is that of students poring over textbooks, yellow marker in hand, highlighting pertinent passages—which often end up including most of the page. Later in the semester, to prepare for their exams, students hit the textbooks again, rereading the yellow blocks of text....
Snorting chemicals has a bad rap. But as a method of drug delivery, it may be on the verge of a renaissance. Unlike medications taken orally, intravenously or otherwise, those sniffed up the nose gain direct access to the brain. Recent findings that intranasal administration is indeed safe and effective—and a revamped delivery system more elegant than a rolled-up twenty—have inspired a new appreciation of the sniff. Below we list a few of the drugs that researchers are experimenting with, including molecules of new shapes and sizes as well as novel uses of medications developed decades ago....
In 1997, when Massachusetts began making health records of state employees available to medical researchers, the government removed patients’ names, addresses, and Social Security numbers. William Weld, then the governor, assured the public that identifying individual patients in the records would be impossible. Within days, an envelope from a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology arrived at Weld’s office. It contained the governor’s health records. Although the state had removed all obvious identifiers, it had left each patient’s date of birth, sex and ZIP code....
Sex can be a costly endeavor—biologically, that is. Combining genetic material can of course bring beneficial new combinations, but even for tiny organisms that are barely visible to the naked eye, mating is fraught with all kinds of hazards, such as a long wait for offspring, sexually transmitted diseases, and the risk of getting eaten during or after sex. So why, if many of these bitty beasts can produce asexually, do some of them do it anyway?...
As hard as it is for scientists to develop new drugs, sometimes just getting the drug to where it needs to act is equally challenging. Nowhere is this more true than in the brain, where blood vessel walls are tightly knit, keeping most large molecules from seeping out of the bloodstream and into brain tissue. This blood-brain barrier is a formidable obstacle to delivering certain types of treatments for neurological diseases, but Manjunath N....
Even as species around the globe are rapidly falling prey to extinction, and countless others are threatened, scientists are still turning up new species of plants and animals every year—thousands of them. From the longest insect to the smallest snake, a fascinating diversity of organisms has remained unknown until the past year. In 2007—the last year for which data is available—18,516 new species were described, according to this year’s “State of Observed Species” report, which was released last week....
From cereals that boost immunity to yogurts that regulate digestion and juices that keep heart disease at bay, grocery stores in the U.S. are brimming with packaged foods and beverages that claim to improve health. Such declarations are good for business: sales of “functional foods”—those that manufacturers have modified to provide supposed health benefits—generated $31 billion in the U.S. in 2008, a 14 percent increase over 2006, according to Rockville, Md....
In the midst of an active hurricane season, Puerto Rico has suffered yet again. Thanks to Fiona, which crashed into the territory a few days before Ian hit Florida, we were without critical services like electricity, water, hospitals and fuel supplies. Fiona’s destruction was a sharp reminder of the life-threatening effects of Hurricane Maria, which caused $90 billion in damage five years ago. More than 30 people died because of Fiona and as we recover from yet another destructive hurricane, our leaders have ignored the planning and preparedness lessons made clear by Maria....
The white tiger is produced by a genetic fluke that occurs when two orange tigers with rare recessive forms of a gene, called alleles, happen to breed. White tigers are so rare in the wild that they have been seen only a few times in recorded history, with the last known wild white tiger killed in 1958. Their rarity could be because the recessive allele is the result of a one-time mutation or because white tigers lack adequate camouflage, reducing their ability to stalk prey or avoid other predators....
