Posts

By Alla KatsnelsonBiomedical engineers have built many types of human organs in the lab, but they’ve lagged on lung tissue–until now. Two new studies have used very different approaches to do the job.One team has grown lung cells that performed their gas-exchange functions when transplanted into living rats. The study provides proof of principle that such regenerated tissue may one day be used to treat patients with serious lung disorders.The other has built a microfluidic chip that mimics lung function, resulting in a biologically relevant model for testing medicines for lung disorders or conducting toxicity screens for nanoparticles....

National security experts urged the elimination of all greenhouse gas emissions in a report yesterday that warns of international catastrophe if the global temperatures continue to rise on their current trajectory. The report by the Center for Climate and Security, an independent think tank, describes familiar scenarios of escalating conflict as climate change diminishes food and water supplies, displacing millions of people. But the report, written by a team of experts and former U....

Using a revolutionary new microscope, scientists can now peer into embryos and watch, in one of the world’s smallest 3-D movies, as brains, eyes and other organs form. A team at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, watched zebra fish and fruit fly embryos develop under the scope for as long as 58 hours, charting the location of every cell as it danced around the embryo. This experiment would have been impossible a mere two years ago before a recent spate of innovations advanced microscopy years into the future....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The countries posing the greatest cyberthreats to the United States are Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Like its counterparts, Kim Jong Un’s regime engages in substantial cyber espionage. And like Russia and Iran, it launches damaging cyberattacks that wipe data from computer disks and shut down online services. But the North Korean cyberthreat is different in two ways....

As the Federal Bureau of Investigation was about to move in, U.S. Army biodefense scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide, thus possibly closing the chapter on the first—and so far only—fatal bioattack in U.S. history. The FBI alleges that Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md., mailed anthrax-laden letters in September and October 2001 that killed five people. The incidents sparked a massive infusion of research funds to counter civilian bioterrorism, $41 billion spread over seven federal departments and agencies....

Sex differences in the body’s response to medication have long been overlooked. In fact, until the 1990s women were banned from participating in clinical trials in the U.S. Yet women are now almost twice as likely to be prescribed psychotropic medication as men, and research suggests that their different hormones, body composition and metabolism may make them more sensitive to certain drugs. Further, women are between 50 and 75 percent more likely to experience side effects....

The gibbons came to depend on just two places to cross the tree chasm, and sometimes they would barely make it—breaking their fall only by managing to grab hold of the tip of a particular palm frond. “It was very scary!” says Bosco Chan, head of the Chinese conservation department at the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden in Hong Kong, who manages its Hainan gibbon conservation project. As months passed, Chan noticed that constant use was causing the frond to fray and droop, threatening to bring the gibbons crashing down with it—and breaking the critically endangered species’ habitat into disparate islands....

By Nicola JonesKiller whales are notoriously picky eaters. Now one type of killer whale, or orca, has been found to dine on an unusual dish: shark. But these ‘offshore’ killer whales of the northeastern Pacific pay a high price for their tough-skinned preference – their teeth become worn right down to the gums.The documenting of their unusual diet adds weight to the notion that the region’s three orca lineages are separate species, which has implications for both future studies and conservation strategies....

Portable consumer products such as music players, cameras and cell phones are becoming ever smaller. Miniaturized electronics deserve some of the credit, but so do ever shrinking motors. Most of them exploit the same physics principles as their bigger kin; the key is design and manufacturing ingenuity. MP3 players such as the iPod provide an instructive example. They cram about 1,500 songs, or six gigabytes of data, per square inch of magnetic hard disk that is thinner than a dime....

When you hit “send” on a text message, it is easy to imagine that the note will travel directly from your phone to your friend’s. In fact, it typically goes on a long journey through a cellular network or the Internet, both of which rely on centralized infrastructure that can be damaged by natural disasters or shut down by repressive governments. For fear of state surveillance or interference, tech-savvy protesters in Hong Kong avoided the Internet by using software such as FireChat and Bridgefy to send messages directly between nearby phones....

Editor’s note: Climate Query is a semi-weekly feature offered by Daily Climate, presenting short Q&A’s with players large and small in the climate arena. Read others in the series at http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/query/climate-queries. James E. Hansen never thought his decision to study atmospheric models would lead to his arrest. But there he was in handcuffs this summer, protesting at the White House against a pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico....

NOAA is lending technical support to the United Nations in its battle against a massive locust infestation that’s spread from Africa into the Middle East and Asia. NOAA’s assistance is helping officials control the spread of the pests, but the U.N. says new desert locust swarms are advancing into India, threatening food supplies there. Meanwhile, heavy rainfall and devastating flash flooding are hampering efforts to knock out the infestation for good....

Ever idly wondered if a capybara could somehow take down an elephant in a beachfront brawl? That’s the kind of thinking behind March Mammal Madness (MMM), an annual social media event based on the March Madness NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament. Like its namesake, this educational project encourages viewers to fill out brackets predicting which teams would triumph in a hypothetical head-to-head showdown—with the “teams” in this version being specific mammals....

By Geoff BrumfielResearchers are once again proposing that an orbiting telescope may have seen evidence for dark matter – the undetected material that is believed to permeate the Universe.The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has captured flashes of high-energy -ray light that might come from dark matter, according to Lisa Goodenough of New York University in New York City and Dan Hooper at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois....

Editor’s note (4/2/2017): This week marks the 100-year anniversary of the U.S. entry into the First World War. Scientific American, founded in 1845, spent the war years covering the monumental innovations that changed the course of history, from the first tanks and aerial combat to the first widespread attacks with chemical weapons. To mark the centennial, we are republishing the article below and many others. For full access to our archival coverage of the Great War sign up for an All Access subscription today....

How can mathematical theory predict the strongest knots in real life? The answer to that question has remained elusive despite humans relying on knots for thousands of years while fishing, hunting, building shelters and harnessing animal power. By using color-changing fibers to experimentally test a mathematical theory, researchers have begun developing more realistic models that can elucidate the rules governing stability in knots. The mathematical theory of knots has typically focused on classifying their different entangled structures without accounting for mechanical stress and strain....

The West is burning, and Congress is responding with a fire hose of money. The bipartisan infrastructure deal that advanced yesterday through the Senate would spend billions of dollars on wildfire policy, with much of it earmarked for cutting trees and planting new ones. Some experts warn that approach could backfire. “The infrastructure package, as written, is wrongheaded on so many levels. It’s a climate change nightmare,” said Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and co-founder of the John Muir Project....

Alda is practiced at getting scientists to explain their research to a broad audience. The longtime MAS*H actor hosted Scientific American Frontiers (produced in association with this magazine) on PBS for more than 11 years. The program took viewers to research sites and inside laboratories, with Alda as their inquisitive guide. In this book, he proposes improv classes for scientists in which they participate in games that require close observation, active listening and mirroring emotions....

Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life. A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean....

An investigational Alzheimer’s drug significantly slowed patients’ cognitive decline in a large clinical trial, unexpected and unprecedented results that could move the treatment’s makers to roll the dice on an early approval. In the study, the highest-tested dose of a drug from Biogen and Eisai was markedly better than placebo at delaying the memory-destroying effects of Alzheimer’s. After 18 months, patients who got the drug, called BAN2401, performed 30 percent better on a cognitive test than those getting placebo....