The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You’re sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating....
The sign reads “Share the Road.” It’s usually a bright yellow diamond featuring a black line drawing of a bicycle. Variations on the sign exist, but they all pretty much send the message that cars should be on the lookout for cyclists and give them some breathing room. Or at least that’s what I, a cyclist sometimes and a motor vehicle operator other times, assumed was the message they sent. Especially given that the occupants of even a small automobile will barely feel a car-bicycle crash that will at the very least likely bust a bike rider’s ribs and crack a collarbone....
Where others might seek to reconstruct a woolly mammoth from centuries-old sequences, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is part of an interdisciplinary project to recreate the scents of plant species lost to human colonial destruction of their habitat. Ginsberg trained in architecture and design, earning a PhD from the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art in London. For her art installation Resurrecting the Sublime, she collaborated with the scent researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas and the biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks....
Birds have been a great source of joy for many of us at Scientific American and, I hope, for many of you. We’ve been working at home during the pandemic and paying more attention to the wildlife in our neighborhoods, and we now take walks during the mornings and evenings rather than commuting during the best birding hours of the day. Seth Fletcher, who runs our features department, was entertained recently by a Carolina Wren shrieking like its dinosaur ancestors....
The White House and Congress have lost their way when it comes to science. Notions unsupported by evidence are informing decisions about environmental policy and other areas of national interest, including public health, food safety, mental health and biomedical research. The president has not asked for much advice from his Office of Science and Technology Policy, evidently. The congressional committees that craft legislation on these matters do not even have formal designated science advisers....
We use tools that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) every day, with voice assistants like Alexa and Siri being among the most common. These consumer products work reasonably well—Siri understands most of what we say—but they are by no means perfect. We accept their limitations and adapt how we use them until they get the right answer, or we give up. After all, the consequences of Siri or Alexa misunderstanding a user request are usually minor....
The human brain frequently undergoes changes in acidity, with spikes from time to time. One main cause of these temporary surges is carbon dioxide gas, which is constantly released as the brain breaks down sugar to generate energy. Yet the overall chemistry in a healthy brain remains relatively neutral because processes such as respiration—which expels carbon dioxide—help to maintain the status quo. As a result, fleeting acid-base fluctuations usually go unnoticed....
Researchers have spotted what might be the farthest astronomical object ever found — a galaxy candidate named HD1 that they estimate is 13.5 billion light-years away. That’s an astonishing 100 million light-years more distant than the current farthest galaxy, GN-z11. HD1 is particularly bright in ultraviolet light, indicating highly energetic activity in the galaxy. As such, scientists originally theorized it might be a starburst galaxy, or one that produces stars at a relatively high rate....
A new report is urging lawmakers to fight the affordable housing crisis as part of a larger effort to prepare communities against the worst effects of climate change. The Center for American Progress report released Thursday found that there is a national shortage of 7 million homes for low-income renters. This shortage disproportionately affects disabled people and minority communities that also have the fewest resources to recover from natural disasters linked to climate change....
Editor’s note: The original online version of this story was posted on September 20, 2009. In patients who have survived severe brain damage, judging the level of actual awareness has proved a difficult process. And the prognosis can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. New research suggests that some vegetative patients are capable of simple learning—a sign of consciousness in many who had failed other traditional cognitive tests. To determine whether patients are in a minimally conscious state (in which there is some evidence of perception or intentional movement) or have sunk into a vegetative state (in which neither exists), doctors have traditionally used a battery of tests and observations....
Some floated here on boats. Others flew. Still others arrived on the sole of a dirty boot. Many were invited, but some arrived unannounced. At this point, however, no one really cares how so-called alien species like the ash borer and the zebra mussel got here. Scientists are more focused on how to get rid of these pests. Not every alien species becomes invasive, but those that do can wreak serious havoc....
More than 10,000 apps in the Apple and Google Play stores claim to treat psychological difficulties, and the list doesn’t stop with downloads for your smartphone. Wearables, artificial intelligence software, augmented and virtual reality, and video games all have arrived to address mental health needs in creative ways. To be sure, those needs are great. “The global burden of disease attributable to mental disorders has risen inexorably in all countries in the context of major demographic, environmental, and socio-political transitions,” noted the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development in 2018....
It took Timothy Farkas less than a week to catch and relocate 1,500 stick insects in the Santa Ynez mountains in southern California. His main tool was an actual stick. “It feels kind of brutish,” says Farkas. “You just pick a stick up off the ground and beat the crap out of a bush.” That low-tech approach dislodged hordes of stick insects that the team easily plucked off the dirt. On this hillside outside Santa Barbara, there are two kinds of bush that the stick insect (Timema cristinae) inhabits....
The illegal ivory trade is fuelled almost entirely by elephants that have been recently killed, say researchers who carbon-dated hundreds of ivory tusks seized by law-enforcement officials. “That puts to rest a speculation which has been at the back of everyone’s mind,” says George Wittemyer, a conservation ecologist and elephant specialist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Some had wondered whether corrupt governments were contributing to the ivory trade by selling off old ivory, bit by bit, from stockpiles built up over years....
Even in the teeming and varied world of bacteria, Wolbachia is something of a standout. Within its insect host, the bacterium acts as a gender-bending, egg-killing, DNA-hijacking parasite that is passed down from one generation to the next via the female to her eggs. Hosted by at least one fifth of all insect species, it is possibly the most prolific parasite on earth. But now Wolbachia itself is being hijacked, to help humans gain the upper hand in the long-running war against mosquito-borne diseases....
The brain processes sights, sounds and other sensory information—and even makes decisions—based on a calculation of probabilities. At least, that’s what a number of leading theories of mental processing tell us: The body’s master controller builds an internal model from past experiences, and then predicts how best to behave. Although studies have shown humans and other animals make varied behavioral choices even when performing the same task in an identical environment, these hypotheses often attribute such fluctuations to “noise”—to an error in the system....
For several months in 1999, a fluffy seven-foot bunny with floppy ears and large, doleful eyes chased presidential candidate Al Gore around the campaign trail. Gore’s crime: as vice president, he had initiated a chemical toxicity testing program that would cause the suffering or death of close to a million animals. To most observers, though, such a testing program seemed long overdue. Two years earlier the group now called Environmental Defense had pointed out that adequate information exists on the safety of perhaps only a fourth of 100,000 commonly used chemicals, and both the Environmental Protection Agency and the trade group now known as the American Chemistry Council had come to agree....
POLITICAL NECESSITY I do not think Scientific American should have endorsed Joe Biden for U.S. president in “From Fear to Hope” [Science Agenda]. I do strongly dislike Donald Trump as a president and understand and share the editors’ frustration with a leader whose focus is not on being scientifically correct but on being politically viable. The U.S. will be a better place without his reelection. Yet 175 years of political neutrality should have been more jealously protected....
Silver nanoparticles, used for their potent antimicrobial properties in hospitals and consumer products, may negatively impact plant growth as they make their way into the environment, according to a new study. Whereas it may not spell the end of all flora as we know it, the findings suggest that the nanomaterial has environmental impacts worthy of further investigation. The antimicrobial properties of silver in its ionized form have been recognized for centuries....
Not bored any more. (Credit: The Fumble/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET) The lovely thing about snowboarders at the Winter Olympics is that they’re devoid of political correctness. They’re just as full of “dude” and “cool” as they would be on a normal, pot-filled day in the mountains. Some, though, don’t always think through the consequences of their free style. Take Russian slopestyle snowboarder Alexey Sobolev. His iPhone wishes you would. For Sobolev had the, um, cool idea of putting his phone number on his helmet....
