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Sun Apr 24 04:43:51 EDT 2011
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What makes the luminous star known as Object X look so dim? -

One might think that it would be hard to hide a star some 500,000 times more radiant than the sun, but distance and dust seem to have conspired to do just that. [More]

When Cars Are Greener Than People -

Hybrid cars have become so eco-friendly they now trump at least one form of human locomotion. [More]

A rose is a...galaxy collision: Hubble sends the people of Earth a flower on its 21st anniversary - [More]

Black Plant Life Could Thrive on Other Planets -

Most plants capture sunlight. And the results are usually green. Because in photosynthesis, plant chlorophyll uses wavelengths of blue and our sun’s abundant red, and reflects green. But what if--as many sci-fi scenarios suggest--there’s an Earth-like planet with multiple suns? Researchers at England’s University of Saint Andrews say that photosynthetic life on such a planet might end up as a drab black or gray . Or even with a high SPF.

A quarter of all stars like our sun actually exist in multi-star systems. Plants on a planet with two sunlike stars could need protection against too much radiation--they might evolve their own UV-blocking sunscreens.

Songs about or just inspired by science are by no means hard to find, but it seems the same few are continually bandied about (e.g., "I Am a Scientist" by Guided By Voices), so we thought it would be fun to list what are, depending on your level of music knowledge, perhaps some lesser known examples. These 10 songs, listed in no particular order, cover the gamut of genres, from ambient to pop to rock to metal, and were inspired by a wide range of scientific disciplines, including mathematics, robotics, climate science and cosmology. They include both a number 1 hit and an obscurity released by the very author of this list. Feel free to add your own suggestions for future installments in the comments.

1. Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army [More]

Telescope will track space junk -

By Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib of Nature magazine

A ground-based telescope that can scan the skies faster than any other of its size could help to protect satellites from collisions with space debris and each other. [More]

Too Hard for Science? Philip Zimbardo--creating millions of heroes -

If outside influences can make people act badly, can they also be used to help people do good?

In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science. However, the question mark at the end of "Too Hard for Science?" suggests that nothing might be impossible.

The beautiful thing about disposing of your old electronics is that doing the right thing gives you more than a rosy feeling; it can actually pay you. The trick is to hand off your own gear immediately, while it still has some value.

For example, suppose you had a 32-gigabyte AT&T iPhone at the time the Verizon iPhone 4 came out. You could have sold it to online buy-back site Gazelle.com for $430, which would have easily covered the AT&T fee for terminating your contract early. Similarly, buyback sites NextWorth and ReCellular.com were offering $155 for a year-old iPhone 3GS, or $145 for a working BlackBerry Bold 9700.

Every now and then the public rises up to make an industry clean up its environmental act. As a result, car companies now offer hybrids, electrics and alternative-fuel cars. Beverage companies are making their bottles with a lot less plastic. New laws have reduced the chemicals that cause acid rain by 76 percent since 1980. And so on.

One industry in particular, however, continues to leave a disastrous eco-wake, because no such public pressure exists: consumer electronics.

Dear EarthTalk : My daughter loves those press-on tattoos, and they’re frequently given out at birthday parties and other events. But I’ve noticed the labels say they’re only for ages three and up. Are they safe? If not, are there alternatives? --Debra Jones, Lansing, Mich.

For the most part, so-called temporary tattoos are safe for kids and grown-ups alike, even if they do contain a long list of scary sounding ingredients including resins, polymers, varnishes and dyes. But if they are sold legitimately in the U.S., their ingredients have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as cosmetics, meaning the agency has found them to be safe for “direct dermal contact.” The FDA has received reports of minor skin irritation including redness and swelling, but such cases have been deemed “child specific” and were not widespread enough to warrant general warnings to the public.

These coeds may be spending some time down at the beach, but as students of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Holl, Mass., it’s for work rather than play.

Each year, new electronics hit the market and capture consumers' attention, giving them reason to throw away the old VCR or standard television and engross themselves in state-of-the-art gadgetry.

Most of the time, the old electronics end up in the garbage, despite holding plenty of reusable material. But a push for recycling them has gained ground in recent years through both new state laws and a developing "e-recycling" industry.

The fuel of the future isn't gasoline, ethanol or even hydrogen--it's education. Specifically, the science and engineering education that will enable a fresh group of smart young people to tackle the world's ongoing energy crisis. Solve the energy crisis and you go a long way's toward solving a host of environmental problems: pollution, environmental health risks, climate change, to name just a few. [More]

Trains, nukes, marriage, and vaccines (and anything else): Why the facts don't matter -

A lot has been written about why people deny the findings of science. Why, ask the devotees of reason, do people’s views on vaccines or climate change not match the overwhelming bulk of the evidence? To that question I would add this; why are these views so fiercely held? Why do disagreements about the facts generate such deep passions, and arguments that are often angry and sometimes violent? It’s almost like people whose views conflict with the bulk of the evidence feel personally threatened when their views are challenged.

This is no small matter. These disagreements can cause great harm – declining vaccination rates, or inaction on climate change, or the fiercely polarized closed-mindedness that precludes compromise and progress. Understanding the phenomenon that Michael Specter observed, but failed to explain in Denialism , is important for reducing these harms.

SciCafe American Museum of Natural History [More]

Readers Respond to "Flu Factories" and Other Articles -

FLU NETWORK The title of Helen Branswell’s “ Flu Factories ” is the type of sensationalism that has to be overcome for influenza surveillance to be effective and was in stark contrast to the balanced report that followed. Also, since the article was written, there has been significant progress on the implementation of a national influenza surveillance program in swine. In the program, which started in May 2009, pork producers and their veterinarians submit tissues to one of 37 veterinary diagnostic laboratories nationwide. Genetic sequences of isolated flu virus are entered into a database, then published and made available for review by experts and the public. Should there be a sequence of interest, the public or animal health surveillance systems in the state of origin can be alerted. To educate pork producers about this surveillance plan, direct mailings and other communications have been sent to more than 67,000 producers and to all state animal health officials and public health veterinarians. The results have been remarkable. During November 2010 alone, 490 samples were tested, compared with a previous monthly average of fewer than 200. U.S. pork producers and their families live with these animals, and they take the role they have in protecting public health very seriously. [More]

Deadly forest fire leads to resurrection of endangered tree -

In 2009 six weeks of wildfires in Victoria, Australia, killed 173 people and injured hundreds more, but the fires may have also led to the resurrection of a rare tree that was previously on a path to extinction.

Only about 670 Buxton silver gum trees ( Eucalyptus crenulata ) were left in the wild before the devastating Black Sunday bushfires , and they weren't healthy. After several years of drought at the beginning of the century, a 2005 survey of the trees found no new seedlings. Officials worried that the fires could have put the final nail in the coffin for the endangered trees.

Editor's note: This article was printed with the title, "O Mercaptan, My Mercaptan" in the May issue.

Friday, February 25, 2011: A date which will live in odiferous infamy. At least at my house.

Scientific American editors Christine Gorman, Robin Lloyd, Michael Moyer and Kate Wong talk about their recent trips to different science conferences: the meetings of the Association for Health Care Journalists, the Paleoanthropology Society, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and an M.I.T. 150th-anniversary conference called Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything.

Related articles:

As officials in Japan deal with the accumulation of radioactive seawater near the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the wake of last month's earthquake and tsunami, the U.S. Department of Energy is investing in fundamental research it hopes can be used to build safer nuclear reactors and avoid reactor emergencies. [More]

Early riser: Pre-hurricane season, a storm system appears in the Atlantic - [More]

Deep Freeze: Mars Orbiter Finds Massive Stores of Buried Dry Ice -

Buried under the south pole of Mars are the makings of one heck of a Halloween party. [More]

Health care reform in one state may be a harbinger for national effort -

Health care reform became law, and within four years, 98 percent of the population was covered by insurance. Only 0.2 percent of all children remained uncovered. Racial and ethnic disparities in coverage largely disappeared. Public support for reform hovered at 65 percent, and there was no movement to repeal the law. [More]

Puzzle Persists for 'Degradeable' Plastics -

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine

The environmentally friendly version of polythene might not be so friendly after all.

Polyethylene is one of the most widely used materials in the world, and the discarded plastic bag has become one of the most potent symbols of human impact on the environment. [More]

The Japan nuclear crisis at Fukushima: A video summary -

On March 11, a powerful earthquake set off a tsunam i that swamped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant , cutting off power and causing nuclear fuel rods to overheat and melt. Explosions damaged containment housing and released radioactive particles, and contaminated seawater has flowed into the ocean. Workers are attempting to control the mess, but high radiation levels permeate the plant, making the task difficult and slow. [More]

Ozone hole dominates shifting Southern Hemisphere climate -

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Climate policymakers and scientists need to look beyond global warming emissions of carbon dioxide and take the loss of stratospheric ozone into account, researchers said on Thursday.

COCODRIE, La.--Eating at North America's southern rim, where the land fades into the water, demands a stomach for seafood particularly shrimp, crab and fish, such as sea bass. After all, Louisiana alone pulls in some six million metric tons of seafood per decade, and Terrebonne Parish, which encompasses Cocodrie, is responsible for 20 percent of the state's oyster, crab and shrimp harvest. But the dark line that runs along the underbelly of locally caught fresh shrimp--the aquatic creature's gut--is full these days of the residue from last year's BP oil spill , along with the microscopic plants and animals that make up the shrimp's diet. [More]

Ancient Europeans Were Mostly Righties -

When it comes to handedness, righties rule. And according to a new study, they have for a long time. Because even half a million years ago, nine out of 10 European humans favored their right hands. The finding appears in the journal Laterality . [David Frayer et al., " More than 500,000 years of right-handedness in Europe "] [More]

South Africa imposes "fracking" moratorium in Karoo -

By Ruona Agbroko

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's cabinet placed a moratorium on Thursday on oil and gas exploration licenses in the semi-arid Karoo region, where the controversial shale extraction technique of "fracking" might be deployed.

Entrepreneur and adventure-seeker Sir Richard Branson wants to import endangered lemurs to one of his two private islands in the British Virgin Islands (B.V.I.), giving them a safe haven from the political unrest and habitat destruction on their native Madagasca r. But scientists and conservationists aren't exactly hopping with pleasure over the plan.

Operating under the auspices of his Virgin Unite nonprofit, Branson plans to bring 30 ring-tailed lemurs ( Lemur catta ) from zoos in Sweden, South Africa and Canada to the B.V.I.'s Moskito Island in the next few weeks. Ring-tailed lemurs are listed as "near threatened" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

More than 1 million acres of Texas plains and forests has gone up in smoke this month as hundreds of fires blazed through the Lone Star State.

Gusting winds, statewide drought and low humidity have created tinderbox conditions that state and federal firefighters are still struggling to contain. Lacking a forecast of steady downpours to cool the scorching earth, the Texas Forest Service is expecting the fire conditions to continue wreaking havoc throughout the state.

* Penalty charge for entering no-go zone

* PM Kan harangued by homeless quake survivors

By Martin Petty

It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

Science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft considered The Colour Out of Space his best story. In this 1927 classic tale of cosmic horror, a small Massachusetts farming community faces unspeakable evil from the outer reaches of the universe. The extraterrestrial villain is not a face-hugging or chest-bursting alien but something far more terrifying: a weird color.

30 minutes, 70 fates.

By Melissa Gaskill of Nature magazine

There is only one official source of data on pollution caused by offshore drilling in U.S. [More]

What's in your gut? Microbiota categories might help simplify personalized medicine -

The diverse wilderness of life inside of our bodies is just starting to gain the attention of scientists. The human gut alone typically holds some 100,000 billion bitty bacteria, and with no two people's microbiomes being the same, classifying these crucial organisms has been challenging. [More]

Heal thyself: Rubbery polymer self-repairs under light exposure -

What if mending a ripped garment, or repairing a leaky storage container, was as easy as shining a light on the damage? [More]

Coating Heals Itself with Phase Change -

Are your car’s bumpers riddled with scars from encounters with tight parking spaces? Did the furniture movers scratch your floor? Wouldn’t it be great if those marks could just disappear? Well, thanks to the magic of chemistry, maybe such nicks will soon be nipped. Because scientists have produced a material that can actually heal itself, work published in the journal Nature . [Mark Burnworth et al., " Optically Healable Supramolecular Polymers "]

The paint on your car, the varnish on your floor, even the nylon in your panty hose are all polymers--extremely long chains of molecules held together by strong chemical bonds. But this new material isn’t like any old polymer. It’s a supramolecular polymer, made of smaller molecules held together by weak interactions with metals, which act like a kind of molecular Velcro. [More]

Seafood at risk: Dispersed oil poses a long-term threat -

The two-hour drive from New Orleans to Venice, La., is like cutting into a slice of apple pie--it’s as American as it gets. Busy streets and high-rise buildings give way to farms, fields, and wetlands, in the perfect picture of rural, small-town America. With the exception of the occasional oil refinery or church, most buildings in Plaquemines Parish stand no more than a single story high. Driving down Louisiana Highway 23, the sole road in and out of the parish, it is clear to see that fishing is a way of life down here; boats or fishing traps are present in the front yards of most homes. The community here is evidence of the seafood industry being one of the leading sources of income and the highest employers in Louisiana. According to a fisheries economics report from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico harvested 1.27 billion pounds of finfish and shellfish and earned $659 million in total landings revenue in 2008.

Seafood is more than just catch sizes and dollar signs, though. Go to any restaurant along any beach in the Gulf, and you’ll likely find a menu full of grouper sandwiches and crab legs, shrimp baskets and oysters on the half shell. Seafood isn’t just a source of food or a way to make a living here--it’s a way of life, and an inherent piece of Gulf Coast culture. It is a culture that has been put in jeopardy as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

COCODRIE, La.--The tendrils of coastline here were some of the first shores to see oil after BP's Macondo well blowout last year. On May 7, 2010--two days before the start of the annual fishing season--oil bounced off Grand Isle and flowed into Terrebonne Bay, remembers Michel Claudet, Terrebonne Parish president. In fact, oil fouled 35 percent of the U.S. Gulf Coast's 2,625 kilometers of shoreline before the spill was done.

"The people of Terrebonne are still trying to recover from the spill," Claudet says. "No one knew and we still do not know what might be the long-term effects ."

Gold-hungry Peruvian miners are eroding the country's portion of the Amazon rainforest at an alarming rate, according to a new study.

Small-scale gold panners in the Andean nation have responded to soaring gold prices by revving up the pace of gold mining, stripping the region of its forests. Since 2003, deforestation linked to gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, has increased sixfold in conjunction with the annual increase in gold prices -- far outpacing the deforestation due to human settlement and development in the surrounding areas.

As if worrying about the vulnerability of your PC and smart phone to hackers were not enough, could your car be the next target? Maybe not today, but engineers are transforming automobiles from a collection of mechanical devices crowded around a combustion engine to a sophisticated network of as many as 70 computers--called electronic control units (ECUs) . These computers are linked to one another and to the Internet, making the car a mini mobile data center susceptible to many of the same digital dangers--viruses, denial-of-service attacks, etcetera--that have long plagued PCs and other networked devices. [More]

The Catlin Arctic Survey: A melting ocean -

There have been many media headlines recently concerning the melting of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, often focused on the opening of the North West Passage and further commercial opportunities in this region. Current predictions are that there will be no summer time sea ice coverage by 2050. This increased flux of fresh water from the melting of the sea ice could contribute to the slowing of the thermohaline circulation, as I mentioned in my previous blog post .

What's melting the sea ice?

By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - Gradually rising sea levels caused by global warming over the past 30 years have contributed to a growing number of disasters along China's coast, state news agency Xinhua said on Wednesday.

By Aizhu Chen

YUANBA, China (Reuters) - China has spent tens of billions of dollars buying into energy resources from Africa to Latin America to slake the unquenched thirst for fuel from its growing industry and burgeoning cities.

By Joseph Milton of Nature magazine

A key feature of human childbirth, long thought to be unique to Homo sapiens --the arrival of the baby facing backwards relative to its mother--has been observed in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees.

The discovery, reported April 19 in Biology Letters , calls into question the argument that backwards-facing babies were an important factor in the evolution of midwifery in humans. [More]

Refuse to learn from experience? Thank your genes -

Some people are incurable contrarians or imperturbable logicians . But most of us, whether we like it or not, allow other people's opinions and advice to color our own experiences and opinions. Have you found that restaurant to really be as good as people say it is? [More]