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Scientific AmericanScience news and technology updates from Scientific American
One brisk wintry day in 1639, a young man named Jeremiah Horrocks — barely 20 — set up a telescope in his quarters near Preston, England and focused an indirect image of the sun onto a small card. Lack of finances had cut short his brief academic career at Cambridge, despite his intelligence, but he still had a passion for the stars, bolstered by reading the works of Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe.
Kepler’s writings were the reason for Horrocks’ homemade experiment. In 1627, Kepler was the first scientist to predict a transit of Venus — a very rare astronomical event during which the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, a black dot obscuring part of of the solar disk. It’s similar to a solar eclipse by the moon — we witnessed an annular eclipse just last week! — except transits of Venus occur every 243 years. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, because they usually happen in pairs: the pattern is eight years, 105.5 years, eight years, and 120.5 years.
[More]Jared At Bat. Photo: Erica Angiolillo
I love optical illusions. They make me feel clever if I can figure them out and even when I have to peek at the answer, it s still fun to find out how my brain was tricked. But do they serve any purpose in the real world? Can we use them to make us sharper in our everyday lives? Well if you are an athlete or just play sports for fun on the weekends then the answer may be yes. Using illusions to your advantage may help you hit the free throw, putt the ball in the hole in less strokes or even successfully knock one out of the park.
[More]Two spacecraft, one public and one private, linked in orbit today when SpaceX's Dragon was attached to the International Space Station .
[More]By Duncan Graham-Rowe of Nature magazine
Identifying people by scanning the irises of their eyes may not be as reliable as some governments and the public might think. [More]
Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok [Excerpt]Fri, 25 May 2012 12:00:00 EST
Adapted from The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It , by Fred Guterl (Bloomsbury USA, 2012).
[More] Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet [More]
Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [More]
By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine
The battle for the world's largest radio telescope has ended in a draw.
South Africa and Australia will split the Square Kilometer Array, a €1.5-billion (US$1.9-billion) project made up of 3,000 15-metre-wide dishes and an even larger number of simple antennas. [More]
By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Cleanup workers will soon attack a jumble of debris from Japan's 2011 tsunami that litters an Alaskan island, as residents in the state gear up to scour their shores for everything from buoys to building material that has floated across the Pacific.
The cleansing project slated to start on Friday on Montague Island is expected to last a couple weeks, and organizers say it marks the first major project in Alaska to collect and dispose of debris from the tsunami.
The March 2011 tsunami, caused by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, killed nearly 16,000 people and left over 3,000 missing on Japan's main island of Honshu, and precipitated a major radiation release at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
A U.S. [More]
By David Alire Garcia
MANZANILLO, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Bud lost some strength as it moved closer to Mexico's Pacific coast on Friday and was forecast to hit land south of the popular tourist town of Puerto Vallarta, the U.S. [More]
By Roberta Rampton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Thursday he will nominate Allison Macfarlane, an expert in nuclear waste, as the nation's top nuclear safety cop, seeking to turn the page on a period of bitter acrimony at the U.S. [More]
As the docking attempt between the Dragon cargo vehicle and the International Space Station gets underway, here are some of the latest images, plus the LIVE stream to the Dragon/ISS docking at the bottom! [Note: recorded video of final moments of capture by ISS arm now added below]
Dragon capsule during 'fly-under' of ISS at a distance of 2.4 kilometers (May 24th 2012). Image taken from ISS (NASA). Click for bigger view.
[More]The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from June 20-22. It's the third conference of its kind. (picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Our planet’s health is ailing. That’s the message in short from the 2012 Living Planet Report . Its content is sobering. We are devouring 50 percent more resources than the Earth produces annually. Species populations have plummeted by 30 percent in the last 40 years. Freshwater scarcity abounds, and CO2 levels are soaring.
[More]In the fall of 2009 a group of biology students at Tufts University sat down together and ate some dirt. They ground up small clay tablets and swallowed the powder to find out, firsthand, what clay tastes like. This unusual taste test was part of a Darwinian medicine class taught by one of us (Starks). The students were studying the evolution of geophagia--the practice of eating dirt, especially claylike soils, which is something animals and people have been doing for millennia.
[More]Plants seem so passive. Tree branches bow to the wind, losing their leaves. Lettuce just sits there as snails help themselves to a free salad bar. And grass lets everyone walk all over it.
[More]The nation's oil and gas wells produce at least nine billion liters of contaminated water per day, according to an Argonne National Laboratory report. And that is an underestimate of the amount of brine, fracking fluid and other contaminated water that flows back up a well along with the natural gas or oil, because it is based on incomplete data from state governments gathered in 2007.
[More]Tens of millions of years ago, cephalopods were hiding from their enemies in clouds of ink. And it turns out that cuttlefish today produce ink that's almost identical.
[More]WELLINGTON (Reuters) - The captain and the navigation officer of a container ship which smashed into a reef off a popular New Zealand holiday spot were jailed on Friday for causing the country's worst environmental disaster in decades.
The two men, captain Mauro Balomaga and navigation officer Leonil Relon, both Filipino nationals, were jailed for seven months.
They had faced maximum terms of seven years imprisonment.
The men pleaded guilty to charges of operating the 47,230-tonne Liberian-flagged Rena in a dangerous manner, releasing toxic substances, and attempting to pervert the course of justice by altering the ship's documents.
The 236-metre (775-foot) vessel struck a reef about 20 km (12 miles) off Tauranga, New Zealand's biggest export port, in October last year, spewing around 300 metric tons (330.69 tons) of toxic fuel oil into the ocean, killing thousands of sea birds and fouling beaches up to 100 km (60 miles) from the reef.
"This was an event unlike this country has ever seen," said Judge Robert Wolff. [More]
Getting around is complicated business. Every year, animals traverse miles of sky and sea (and land), chasing warmth or food or mates as the planet rotates and the seasons change. And with such precision! Some animals rely on visual landmarks, others on subtle changes in magnetic fields, and yet others match their internal clocks with the movement of the sun and stars across the sky.
[More] California Condor Populations Hit Important Milestone, but Still Face ThreatsThu, 24 May 2012 17:12:00 EST
The population of endangered California condors ( Gymnogyps californianus ) hit an important milestone last month, reaching a high of 405 birds quite an achievement for a species that was down to its last 22 individuals just 25 years ago.
California condors North America’s largest birds, with a wingspan of up to 2.8 meters were almost wiped out by poaching, DDT and lead poisoning before all of the remaining birds at the time were brought in from the wild in 1987. Captive breeding programs have increased the number of condors dramatically since then, and according to the April 30 census cited by The Oregonian , there are now 226 California condors living in the wild in California, Arizona and nearby Baja, Mexico. An additional 179 birds live in zoos and breeding centers. The population has increased more than 20 percent in the last two and a half years alone.
[More]The once rare brown argus butterfly is on the move , expanding its range and numbers in the U.K. and it’s all thanks to climate change.
Thus far, the world’s climate has warmed roughly 0.8 degree Celsius over the course of the last century or so, thanks to a rise in greenhouse gas concentrations now approaching 400 parts-per-million. With that amount of warming, biologists expect some species ranges to expand and others to contract but, thus far, many wily animals and plants have been confounding scientists’ expectations. In some cases, species that favor a warmer climate have actually retreated (think: lizards or amphibians). Or others have expanded even faster than the climate has warmed (think: tree species moving up a mountain slope).
[More]By Tim Gaynor
PHOENIX (Reuters) - Winds bringing a blast of damp Pacific Ocean air cut firefighters a break on Thursday as they battled to stamp out several dangerous forest and brush fires burning in five Southwestern U.S. [More]
By Jane Sutton
MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) - The 2012 Atlantic hurricane season will be "near normal" with nine to 15 tropical storms and four to eight of those will strengthen into hurricanes, the U.S. [More]
Drivers may feel spooked by seeing the first self-driving cars appear in coming years. But the new era could prove far less disruptive and bloody than the automobile's 20th-century battle to push pedestrians off U.S. streets.
[More]The typical supermarket tomato: ripe red, firm to the touch, free of blemishes--and of flavor. Since at least the 1970s, U.S. consumers have lamented the beautiful but bland fruits that farmers breed not for taste, but rather for high yield and durability during shipping. Recently, organic farmers and foodies have championed the superior flavors of heirloom tomatoes --older varieties that come in an assortment of shapes, sizes and colors. In a new study, researchers took a close look at the chemical composition of both standard tomatoes and hundreds of different heirloom varieties, which they also fed to 170 volunteers in a taste test. Their new findings confirm what scientists have learned in recent years: a tomato's flavor depends not only on the balance of sugars and acids within the fruit, but also on subtle aromatic compounds--many of which are lacking in the modern supermarket tomato. In the future the researchers hope to work with seed companies and farmers to breed tomatoes that produce large quantities of flavorful fruits packed with aromatic compounds--a healthier solution than engineering super-sugary tomatoes. [More]
This week marks the anniversary of the largest earthquake ever recorded -- a magnitude-9.5 earthquake that ripped along the coast of southern Chile on May 22, 1960.
[More] Which of the Basic Assumptions of Modern Physics are Wrong? Announcing the 4th Foundational Questions Institute Essay ContestThu, 24 May 2012 13:14:00 EST
There’s something unnerving about unifying physics. The two theories that need to be unified, quantum field theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are both highly successful. Both make predictions good to as many decimal places as experimentalists can manage. Both are grounded in compelling principles. Both do have flaws — including an unfortunate tendency to produce the number — but those flaws remain safely behind the scenes, never undermining the theories’ empirical successes.
And yet, if the theories are incompatible, something has to give. That is what makes unification so hard. In conferences, I see physicists go down the list of assumptions that underpin their theories. Each, it seems, is rock solid. But they can’t all be right. Maybe one will, on closer inspection, prove to be not like the others. Or maybe physicists have left the culprit off their list because it is so deeply embedded in their way of thinking that they don’t even recognize as an assumption. As economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify… into every corner of our minds.”
[More]CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Two days after announcing his resignation from the chairmanship of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko took the podium before an assembly of industry representatives to detail his vision of the future.
[More]Someone doing a survey calls and asks: "How many times a week would you say you exercise?" What do you tell them? And would it be different if the survey was being done via text rather than telephone?
[More]By Wan Xu and Don Durfee
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's central government plans to spend 170 billion yuan ($27 billion) this year to promote energy conservation, emission reductions and renewable energy, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement on its website on Thursday.
The ministry said China plans to promote more use of energy-saving products and low or no-emission power generation such as solar and wind. [More]
By Michel Rose
PARIS (Reuters) - China spurred a jump in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to their highest ever recorded level in 2011, offsetting falls in the United States and Europe, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday.
CO2 emissions rose by 3.2 percent last year to 31.6 billion metric tons (34.83 billion tons), preliminary estimates from the Paris-based IEA showed.
China, the world's biggest emitter of CO2, made the largest contribution to the global rise, its emissions increasing by 9.3 percent, the body said, driven mainly by higher coal use.
"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist told Reuters.
Scientists say ensuring global average temperatures this century do not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is needed to limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.
They believe that is only possible if emission levels are kept to around 44 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020.
Negotiators from over 180 nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany, until Friday to work towards getting a new global climate pact signed by 2015.
The aim is to ensure ambitious emissions cuts are made after the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of this year.
Procedural wrangling and a reluctance to raise ambitions to cut emissions due to economic constraints is threatening progress, however. [More]
If you could add cells anywhere in your body, you might pick your brain. More brain cells should make you smarter, right? Well, a new study shows that they might just make you fatter. Because animals that make new nerve cells in a brain region that controls hunger tend to pack on the pounds. The results appear in the journal Nature Neuroscience . [Daniel A. Lee et al., " Tanycytes of the hypothalamic median eminence form a diet-responsive neurogenic niche "]
[More]By Nina Chestney
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 could rise to nine billion metric tons (9.92 billion tons) above what is needed to limit global warming as some countries look set to miss their emissions cut targets, a report by three climate research groups said on Wednesday.
Countries have agreed that deep emissions cuts are needed to limit an increase in global average temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius this century above pre-industrial levels, a threshold that scientists say is the minimum required to limit devastating effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.
They believe the 2 degree limit is only possible if emissions levels are kept to around 44 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020.
The report by non-governmental organization Climate Analytics, consultancy Ecofys and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said many governments are not implementing policies to meet their emissions reduction pledges for 2020, and could increase rather than close the gap between real emissions and what is needed to limit warming,
Negotiators from over 180 nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany, until Friday, to work towards getting a new global climate pact signed by 2015 and to ensure ambitious emissions cuts are made after the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of this year.
Procedural wrangling and a reluctance to raise ambitions to cut emissions due to economic constraints is threatening progress, however.
"It's clear that many governments are nowhere near putting in place the policies they have committed to, policies that are not enough to keep temperature rise to below 2 degrees," said Bill Hare, Director of Climate Analytics.
"We've already identified a major emissions gap and the action being taken is highly unlikely to shrink that gap - indeed it seems that the opposite is happening," he added.
In a separate report, the International Energy Agency said China had spurred a jump in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to their highest ever recorded level in 2011, offsetting falls the United States and Europe.
OFF COURSE
The planet is heading to a temperature rise of at least 3.5 degrees, but that could be even higher if 2020 pledges are not met, the report warned.
"There would be quite profound effects on developing countries," Hare told reporters at a briefing.
"And there would be a big impact on Europe with extensive heatwaves, water shortages and (...) health risks we have not seen before."
Even if governments adopted the most ambitious emissions cut pledges and used very strict accounting, the emissions gap would only shrink to 9 billion metric tons, the report said.
The forecast is at the high end of some previous estimates.
Last November, the United Nations' Environment Programme said emissions in 2020 could rise to between 6 billion and 11 billion metric tons above what is needed to limit global warming, depending on how stringently policies are implemented.
"Most of the policies we have analyzed are not yet concrete enough to be quantified, not yet implemented and/or not yet sufficiently ambitious to ensure countries achieve their pledge. [More]
Key concepts: [More]
By Kevin Krolicki
TOKYO (Reuters) - The radiation released in the first days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster was almost 2-1/2 times the amount first estimated by Japanese safety regulators, the operator of the crippled plant said in a report released on Thursday.
Tokyo Electric Power said its own analysis conducted over the past year put the amount of radiation released in the first three weeks of the accident at about one-sixth the radiation released during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
"If this information had been available at the time, we could have used it in planning evacuations," Tepco spokesman Junichi Matsumoto told a news conference.
Because radiation sensors closest to the plant were knocked out by the March 11, 2011 quake and the tsunami, the utility based its estimate on other monitoring posts and data collected by Japanese government agencies.
Tepco, set to be nationalized in July in exchange for a Japanese government bailout, estimated meltdowns at three Fukushima reactors released about 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances into the air during March.
That was 2-1/2 times the amount of the first estimate by Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency in April last year and about 17 percent more than the highest estimate provided by the government safety agency.
The estimate was based on measurements suggesting the amount of Iodine-131 released by the nuclear accident was three times higher than previous estimates, the utility said in the report.
Iodine-131 is a fast-decaying radioactive substance produced by fission that takes place inside a nuclear reactor. [More]
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Hurricane Bud formed off Mexico's Pacific coast early on Thursday, and could threaten parts of southwestern Mexico with heavy rainfall and flooding on Friday, the National Hurricane Center said.
The first hurricane off the Pacific coast this season, Bud is located about 315 miles southwest of the major port of Manzanillo, and is moving north-northeast at around 7 mph, the Miami-based center said on Thursday.
Bud, a Category 1 hurricane, is producing maximum sustained winds of 90 mph and stronger gusts, but should start to weaken by Friday, the center said.
A spokesman for the center said Bud may not make landfall but could still generate hurricane force winds off southwestern Mexico by late on Friday. [More]
Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn't misbehave or find a job. It also doesn't love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself. And it may throw out a lot.
[More]By Melissa C. Lott and Scott McNally
According to Dr. James Hansen, developing Canada s tar sands would mean game over for the climate. And, the current Director of NASA s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is disappointed with President Obama for not taking action to stop Canada from causing a climate change-induced apocalypse . But, what Dr. Hansen fails to acknowledge in his May 9 th NY Times Op-Ed is that demand drives supply. The tar sands are not the climate endgame we are.
[More]It's a confusing world for babies. To make sense of it, they look for intellectual stimulation. But they're only interested if what they look at is not too hard to comprehend--or boringly easy. Researchers call it the Goldilocks effect, in a study in the journal Public Library of Science One . [Celeste Kidd, Steven T. Piantadosi and Richard N. Aslin, " The Goldilocks Effect: Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex "]
[More]"My biological clock is ticking." The phrase typically pops up in movies about middle-aged women who want to start a family before menopause makes it impossible. But a new study published May 23 in PLoS ONE indicates that another clock may also be important for females trying to conceive: the one that regulates our waking and sleeping cycles.
[More]By Caroline Stauffer
LIMA (Reuters) - The mystery surrounding the deaths of at least 877 dolphins in Peru deepened on Wednesday as the government said human activity was not to blame but failed to pinpoint a natural cause for the massive die-off.
A final report from the Peruvian government's Ocean Institute, which manages one of the world's richest marine ecosystems, said the dolphins did not die from a lack of food, hunting by fishermen, poison from pesticides, heavy metal contamination, an infection or a virus.
It also said there was no conclusive evidence that linked seismic offshore exploration by oil companies to the deaths of the long-beaked common dolphins along the Andean country's northern coast.
But it did leave open the possibility that abnormally warm surface water temperatures and high levels of algae may have played a role, saying further analysis would be needed to determine if any red and brown plankton species in the sea were toxic.
"The dolphins were killed by natural causes and not due to any human activity - that is what you might say is the major conclusion," said Minister of Production Gladys Triveno, who oversees the government's Ocean Institute.
However, ORCA, a local NGO, says the deaths occurred after seismic events - which locals attribute to exploration by oil companies - damaged the ears of the sound-sensitive mammals and caused them to surface too rapidly.
"We found cells that had injuries due to bubbles that are associated with decompression sickness," said Carlos Yaipén-Llanos, director of ORCA.
The government and many independent scientists say it is impossible to prove the bubbles were caused by decompression sickness, known by divers as the bends.
Houston-based BPZ Resources Inc has said it conducted seismic surveys starting on February 8 in part of the area but that it adheres to strict environmental standards and that the first deaths happened before it began exploration work.
Another company, Savia Peru, has said it was not working on its concessions in the area at the time of the deaths.
Both companies have said seismic exploration technology is used widely around the world and has never been linked to massive die-offs.
Large-scale dolphin deaths are relatively common globally and often go unexplained, though algae has at times been cited as a cause.
Between 1987 and 1988 as many as a thousand bottlenose dolphins died off the East Coast of the United States. [More]
In 1991, when I was a staff writer for Scientific American , I wrote a letter to Thomas Kuhn, then at MIT. I said I wanted to profile him for Scientific American and “tell readers how you developed your views of the process of science.” When he didn’t respond, I called. Kuhn was reluctant to do the interview. He distrusted journalists, and he was still peeved by an old Scientific American review of his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . When I persisted, Kuhn asked to see other profiles I had done, and I mailed him pieces on his MIT colleagues Claude Shannon and Noam Chomsky.
I finally wore Kuhn down, and in February 1991 I interviewed him for more than three hours in his cluttered office. He was one of the most ambiguous, ambivalent thinkers I have ever encountered, which helps explain why he is still interpreted in so many divergent and even contradictory ways. Whatever you may think of Kuhn, his view of science has become “a permanent part of the repertoire of historians and philosophers and people in science studies in general,” as philosopher Ian Hacking, editor of a new edition of Structure , recently told Scientific American’s Gary Stix .
[More]With U.S. demand for nuclear energy projected to flatline over the next decade, the success or failure of the American nuclear industry will depend on its ability to forge partnerships overseas, particularly in the developing world.
[More] Radiation from Fukushima Nuclear Accident Was Mostly Below Cancer-Causing LevelWed, 23 May 2012 13:27:52 EST
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA (Reuters) - Spikes in radiation caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster were below cancer-causing levels in almost all of Japan, but infants in one town appear to be at a higher risk of developing thyroid cancer, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.
In a preliminary report, independent experts said that people in two locations in Fukushima prefecture may have received a radiation dose of 10-50 millisieverts (mSv) in the year after the accident at the power station operated by TEPCO.
Separately on Wednesday, a U.N. [More]
Shooting beyond the Moon: "Part-Time" Scientists Aim to Develop Autonomous Rover to Compete for Lunar X PRIZEWed, 23 May 2012 12:00:00 EST
Some people try to make the most of their spare time by exercising, volunteering or simply recharging their batteries. Others like to use that time to build robots that can be blasted to the moon and then set free to roam the lunar landscape. A group of engineers and researchers calling themselves Team Part-Time Scientists have chosen the latter, and are building a moon rover named Asimov they hope will win the coveted Google Lunar X PRIZE by early 2014. [More]
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Tough new limits on the maximum sulphur content of shipping fuels will come into effect in Europe at the end of the decade, after EU governments agreed on draft legislation on Wednesday.
Air pollution from marine fuels with a high sulphur content is estimated to cause 50,000 premature deaths a year in Europe, the European Parliament has said.
"This is excellent news for our health and the environment, especially in ports and coastal areas," EU Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik said in a statement.
"Without this directive, emissions from shipping would exceed emissions from all land-based sources by 2020."
The European Commission has said switching fuels or fitting exhaust filters to meet the new limits will cost the shipping industry between 2.6 billion and 11 billion euros ($3.3 billion-$14 billion). [More]
