Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness....
Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables. The traces of these sequences were so durably etched in his brain that he could reproduce them years later, according to Russian psychologist Alexander R. Luria, who wrote about the man he called, simply, “S” in The Mind of a Mnemonist....
Greenpeace this week ripped into Apple for failing to make “early progress” with the iPhone toward the company’s stated goals for ecofriendliness. The report touched off a debate over whether the hugely popular mobile device is safe for its users and for the environment (after the iPhone is tossed into the recycling bin). Apple responded by reiterating its intent to give itself a year to clean up its act. End of debate?...
Most of Simon Gröblacher’s handiwork is invisible to the naked eye. One of the mechanical devices he fashioned in his laboratory at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is just a few millionths of a meter long—not much bigger than a bacterium—and 250 nanometers thick, or about a thousandth of the thickness of a sheet of paper. Gröblacher no doubt could continue to shrink his designs, but he has a different goal: he wants to scale things up, not down....
Humans are willful creatures. No other species on the planet has gained so much mastery over its own fate. We have neutralized countless threats that once killed us in the millions: we have learned to protect ourselves from the elements and predators in the wild; we have developed cures and treatments for many deadly diseases; we have transformed the small gardens of our agrarian ancestors into the vast fields of industrial agriculture; and we have dramatically increased our chances of bearing healthy children despite all the usual difficulties....
The Environmental Protection Agency is changing its approach to chemical toxicity oversight, according to a report issued recently by the Government Accountability Office. In the overhaul, the EPA reassigned staff from its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS)—a program that conducts comprehensive scientific reviews—to duties related to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which has a narrower mandate. The agency has also reduced the number of its ongoing chemical toxicity assessments from 20 to three....
LONDON – The race is on to develop a new breed of small nuclear reactors that will be operated underground and need refueling as seldom as once a decade. Small modular reactors – or SMRs, as they are known – are seen by the nuclear power industry as the most promising technology of the future because they avoid many of the safety problems of much larger power plants and are also easier and quicker to construct....
The narwhal’s single, spiral tusk has always been a mystery. Now a Connecticut dentist has discovered that the eight-foot-long modified tooth has as many as 10 million tiny nerves reaching from its surface to the central core and, ultimately, the whale’s brain. Although various scientific theories of what purpose the tusk serves have been put forth–from piercing through ice to jousting for dominance–none have proposed it as a sensory organ. But Martin Nweeia, who is also a Harvard University professor and marine mammal researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, believes on the basis of his finding that the tusk is capable of detecting changes in pressure, temperature and, most significantly, the relative concentration of various particles at varying depths....
From Nature magazine Palaeontologists working in China have unearthed the earliest collection of fossilized dinosaur embryos to date. The trove includes remains from many individuals at different developmental stages, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the embryonic development of a prehistoric species. Robert Reisz, a palaeontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada, and his colleagues discovered the sauropodomorph fossils in a bone bed in Lufeng County that dates to the Early Jurassic period, 197 million to 190 million years ago....
CERN has unveiled its bold dream to build a new accelerator nearly four times as long as its 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider—currently the world’s largest—and up to six times more powerful. The European particle physics laboratory, outside Geneva, Switzerland, outlined the plan in a technical report on January 15. The document offers several preliminary designs for a Future Circular Collider (FCC)—which would be the most powerful particle-smasher ever built—with different types of colliders ranging in cost from around €9 billion (U....
By Ana BelluscioPlanting trees, which can significantly help to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, nevertheless comes with potentially damaging side effects. According to two new studies, planting forests in areas that currently don’t have trees – a process called afforestation – can reduce the local availability of water.One key measure of water flow is ‘base flow’, the proportion of a stream or river not attributable to direct run-off from precipitation or melting snow....
Why do fitness device makers claim you need to take 10,000 steps every day? Do you also really need to drink eight glasses of water daily? The scientific basis for popular health claims is often thin. A piece in the New York Times, for example, notes that the idea of 10,000 steps was based more on marketing—it was the name of an early pedometer—than science. Data point to clear benefits from moderate exercise—perhaps 7,000 steps or so but not necessarily more....
By Zeeya MeraliQuantum cryptography isn’t as invincible as many researchers thought: a commercial quantum key has been fully hacked for the first time.In theory, quantum cryptography–the use of quantum systems to encrypt information securely–is perfectly secure. It exploits the fact that it is impossible to make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it in some way. So, if two people–Alice and Bob, say–produce a shared quantum key to encode their messages, they can be safe in the knowledge that no third party can eavesdrop without introducing errors that will show up when they compare their keys, setting off warning bells....
Brushfires are raging all across America over the teaching of evolution, as various antievolution interests attempt to give religiously based views equal footing in science classes. These fires are fueled by so-called creation scientists, who allege that they have scientific evidence against evolution. (They don’t.) Their co-conspirators, the “intelligent design” crowd, go with the full-blown intellectual surrender strategy–they say that life on earth is so complex that the only way to explain it is through the intercession of an intelligent superbeing....
A long time ago, by the shores of a lake in East Africa, a group of hungry foragers tucked into a primeval steak dinner. They carved the meat of cow- and goat-sized animals with sharp stone tools and smashed the bones to get at the rich marrow inside. The scene is remarkable mainly because it happened 3.4 million years ago, pushing back by 800,000 years the earliest known example of hominids using stone tools and eating meat....
“Ego is able to convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”—Chögyam Trungpa A purported benefit of mind-body spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation and energy healing is that they will help “quiet the ego,” providing an effective antidote to the exalted self. Indeed, such practices do have the potential for such an awakening, allowing us to get more in touch with reality as it is right here and now, including the qualities we don’t like about ourselves....
Genetic testing company 23AndMe is back with a controversial new offering, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday green-lighted the company’s request to market a fresh batch of direct-to-consumer tests. Soon, with a simple saliva swab dropped in the mail, customers will be able to get answers about their genetic risk for developing 10 maladies—including Parkinson’s disease and late-onset Alzheimer’s. The FDA approval will likely reignite a long-simmering debate about when and how such tests should be used....
One of the noticeable things about microbiologist Christian Rinke’s laboratory is the startlingly loud crunching noise of wormlike larvae chewing their way through polystyrene, burrowing into blocks of the plastic foam. Before he discards a chewed-through block, Rinke says he raises it to his ear to check for stragglers. “If the worm is still eating in there,” he says, “you can actually hear it.” Rinke and his colleagues have been feeding plastic to Zophobas morio beetle larvae—dubbed “superworms” for their large size—to see if the microbes and enzymes in their gut might offer insights into how to break down some of the staggering amount of plastic waste humans generate....
1969 Bubble Computers “The Bell Telephone Laboratories have disclosed a new way to build electronic data-processing circuits by manipulating the flow of tiny magnetic ‘bubbles’—actually magnetic domains in the form of microscopic cylinders embedded in thin sheets of ferrite. The bubbles can be moved around with less energy than is needed to switch a transistor and, being only a few wavelengths of light across, they can be packed with a density of a million or more to the square inch....
Moderate exercise, little booze intake and holding down one’s weight might be key strategies that reduce the odds of getting breast cancer—even if a woman’s mother or sister has had the disease. New data from 85,644 U.S. women, who were followed for an average of about five and a half years as part of the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study, confirms earlier evidence that healthy lifestyle choices can sometimes trump genes and environment when it comes to breast cancer....
