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Traces of radiation from Japan’s earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are showing up in the muscles of bluefin tuna off California. Although this sounds like bad news, the levels are too low to harm humans or fish but just high enough to help conservation scientists track and protect the overfished species. Last spring Dan Madigan, a doctoral student at Stanford University, and his colleagues found traces of cesium 137 and cesium 134 in the flesh of bluefin tuna caught off the San Diego coast, which the fish probably picked up by feeding on contaminated plankton and small fish near Japan....

The benefits of breast milk for babies are numerous. Lower rates of childhood obesity, decreased incidence of asthma and even better brain development are all linked with drinking more of mother’s milk in infancy, and despite decades of research and promising marketing claims, the formula industry has not caught up to mother nature in the milk department. But even if technicians could develop a better food for infants, researchers are now realizing that skipping the lactation phase would be problematic for mothers’ health....

Dear EarthTalk: What kind of job opportunities might be opened up by the new federal emphasis on green projects? – Dick Wetzler, St. Paul, MN If it’s a U.S. industry that has the potential to be cleaner and greener, chances are the Obama administration has already set aside some stimulus money for it. In February 2009, the new president signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Besides creating jobs, the bill promises to spur American companies to greener heights through investments totaling over $75 billion....

Key concepts Physics Engineering Ratio Stability Forces Introduction If you’ve ever built towers with blocks, you’ve probably knocked some of them over—either on purpose or by accident. Sometimes your tower gets too tall and wobbly, and you just can’t keep it standing! In this activity you’ll learn about the trade-offs you need to make when building a tower that is tall and stable. Background What determines if a block tower will stay standing or fall over?...

Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. How do we prevent a pandemic like this from happening again? As we start to tackle that question, inevitably part of it will involve looking back at the mistakes that were made with COVID-19, and rightly so....

“We did get some funny looks when we first started wheeling carts of rocks into a state-of-the-art neuroimaging lab,” writes Dietrich Stout in this issue’s cover story, “Tales of a Stone Age Neuroscientist.” What were they doing? A bit of experimental archaeology designed to help scientists understand the evolution of our higher mental faculties. Among other experiments, volunteers chipped away at hunks of stone, shaping them into an ax or a knife....

Mice may not sing for their supper but male mice seem to sing to their prospective mates. Researchers at Washington University made this discovery when they eavesdropped on male mice that had been exposed to the scent of female urine. “We started recording the vocalizations to assess the factors that lead to recognition of female pheromones but the vocalizations turned out to be much more complicated and interesting than we expected,” says Timothy E....

Boosting Self-Awareness Familiar music may be a safe and effective way to help patients with Alzheimer’s become more self-conscious, which improves overall mental processing and leads to a more accurate examination of the world. In a study published in September 2013 by Eva M. Arroyo-Anlló of the University of Salamanca in Spain and her colleagues, patients listened to either familiar or unfamiliar music three times a week for three months. Those who heard tunes they knew showed an immediate improvement in identity, mood, moral judgment and body awareness—elements of self-consciousness that are adversely affected by Alzheimer’s....

By Sharon Weinberger of Nature magazineThe Pentagon’s forays into social science–what the military calls “human terrain”–have raised ethics concerns among academics. But now, a cultural analyst working as a contractor for the military has said that she helped to interrogate detainees in Afghanistan.Cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”, said Julia Bowers, principal senior analyst for human terrain at SCIA, a company based in Tampa, Florida, that provides socio-cultural services for the military and intelligence community, at a conference in San Antonio, Texas, on 16 October....

In the January 2013 issue of Scientific American, D. Kacy Cullen and Douglas H. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania reported on their work using stretch-grown axons (the long thin “arm” of a nerve cell) to some day connect prosthetic devices to the peripheral nervous systems of people who had to have part of their arm amputated. There wasn’t enough room to talk about it in the article, but there is another way that these “living bridges” could be used to help people with devastating injuries....

No well-intentioned researcher expects that their work will be used to justify violence. But following the racist massacre of 10 Black people in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket on May 14, one of us experienced just that. We join other researchers in condemning any use of genetics to justify racism or hate. In a rambling 180-page screed posted online just before the shooting, the Buffalo shooter appears to write so as to emulate an academic monograph....

Whistle. Pop. Whirrrr. Zzzt. Repeat. Many, many, many times. That’s the song, if you want to call it that, of the European starling. Two of these relatively drab, chunky little birds are now my next-door neighbors—the pair moved into a hole in the maple tree in front of my house. Whistle. Pop. Whirrrr. Zzzt. Repeat. Incessantly. They fly into the hole. They fly out of the hole. They dig away at the tree’s innards and fling the detritus onto the sidewalk below with their little yellow beaks....

BY ED STODDARD KLERKSDORP, South Africa - South Africa will decide this month whether to push to end a global ban on buying and selling rhino horn, a move that could unlock a $2 billion bonanza and determine the fate of a critically endangered species. Rhino horn is prized in Asia for use in traditional remedies and surging demand has meant more poaching. A record 1,305 of the animals were illegally killed in Africa last year....

By Geoff Brumfiel When members of international scientific projects meet, it’s typically a mild affair. But at the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) there is a sense that the stakes are considerably higher. At a gathering last year, project members held a minute of silence in remembrance of Masoud Alimohammadi, the Iranian physicist and fellow participant who was killed by a car bomb in Tehran....

HUMANS, LIKE ALL PRIMATES, are highly visual creatures. Most of the back of our brain is devoted to visual processing, and half of the cortex is involved with sight. In addition, when visual inputs conflict with clues from other senses, vision tends to dominate. This supremacy is why, for example, ventriloquists are so compelling. We see the dummy talking, and we are fooled into hearing the voice coming from it—a case of what scientists call “visual capture....

A few years ago, film director James Cameron spent hours scouring the world’s deepest ocean canyon for any sign of life. He found a few bizarre animals, but it turns out the real action in the Mariana Trench happens beyond the reach of a submersible’s camera. Researchers from Japan discovered microscopic bacteria thrive in the canyon called Challenger Deep, which is the lowest point on Earth’s surface and the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, the team reports Feb....

More than a century and a half after the publication of Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking book On the Origin of Species, the theory of evolution through natural selection has been tested and confirmed innumerable times. It is a cornerstone of modern biology. As the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky observed, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” And yet the teaching of evolution in schools continues to come under attack from creationists....

June 1965 Interior of the Earth “Our experiments with the 90:10 iron-nickel alloy and extrapolations from these results indicate that under the assumed high pressures and temperatures of the earth’s core the density of the alloy is about 10 percent less than that of pure iron. Our density values for this alloy agree with the density of the core, as estimated by K. E. Bullen of the University of Sydney and Francis Birch of Harvard University on the basis of seismic data, the moment of inertia and the earth’s mass....

Scent has been used as a diagnostic tool by physicians for thousands of years. But smell tests are not common in modern medicine—when’s the last time you were smelled by your doctor or received a batch of smell results back from the lab? Now, new research suggests that odors can be used to screen for Parkinson’s disease, which currently is without a definitive diagnostic. In the animal kingdom, scents emitted from a body often signal information about an individual’s mental or physical state....

DNA has a knotty problem. Thousands of times longer than the cell that contains it, this intricate strand of As, Ts, Gs and Cs must fold itself into a compact package. But the thin double helix molecule can’t jam itself in any which way, lest it wind up horribly knotted. What’s more, the cell needs certain segments of the strand—particular genes—to remain accessible to protein-making machinery while keeping others tucked away and turned off....