They come in pairs, just like the ears and eyes, yet far less is known about how our nostrils send sweet and stinky scents alike to the brain. In fact, until now, no one had noticed that the process often involves a duel of sorts. “Human olfaction is not well understood,” says Denise Chen, a psychology professor at Rice University in Houston and co-author of a study on the rivalry of nostrils published in Current Biology....
Neutrinos are famously antisocial. Of all the characters in the particle physics cast, they are the most reluctant to interact with other particles. Among the hundred trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, only about one per week actually grazes a particle in your body. That rarity has made life miserable for physicists, who resort to building huge underground detector tanks for a chance at catching the odd neutrino. But in a study published today in Science, researchers working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) detected never-before-seen neutrino interactions using a detector the size of a fire extinguisher....
As parents have long known, children in day care centers and schools readily spread respiratory diseases among one another. Chimpanzee communities seem to suffer in a similar way: playdates drive the dissemination of respiratory infections among the primates, according to a new study. Scientists led by Hjalmar Kuehl and Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, examined two chimpanzee groups in Taï National Park in Ivory Coast....
The fearsome sea monster of Greek and Norse tales — and the creature that fought Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — was once driven close to extinction, gene sequencing suggests. The genetic uniformity of giant squid across distant oceans hints at a past evolutionary bottleneck, but also at low resiliency toward future crises. The finding comes from an analysis of tissue samples from 43 giant squid (Architeuthis spp....
This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. It’s part of their “Politics of Poison” series. Republicans for years have accused the Environmental Protection Agency of killing jobs with needless regulations. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his first priority is to rein in the agency. But Republicans were not always so hostile to the EPA. It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who created the agency....
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET) Earlier this month we asked you, the esteemed CNET reader, to tell us the features you most wanted in Apple’s next iPhone, and you delivered. Now it’s our turn. With the likely arrival of the iPhone 5S right around the corner, we’ve compiled the results (see below – just click to enlarge), and asked a range of technology experts to help explain why some desired features make more sense than others....
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are first and second on a list of 100 wealthy individuals who have made hefty investments in clean technology or environmental causes. The Times of London news organization, which examined dossiers of the world’s richest people, says the 100 tycoons on its Green List are together worth $375 billion. According to the Times, Buffett, who runs the Berkshire Hathaway investment firm, has poured $230 million into BYD, a Hong Kong company that makes batteries for electric cars....
For preventive cardiologist Michele Mietus-Snyder, the quest to understand and address the early causes of heart disease is like going down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “When I’m seeing my adolescent patients, I’m not just trying to prevent heart disease for that child, but for that child’s children,” she says. Initially, risk factors might seem to be an individual’s lifestyle—poor diet or lack of physical activity, for example....
November weather in most of North America is synonymous with chilly breezes rustling through red, yellow and orange leaves as fall edges closer to winter. It’s generally not a time people associate with destructive tropical cyclones churning toward the U.S.—but that’s exactly what is happening as Tropical Storm Nicole bears down on Florida, where it is expected to make landfall as a hurricane. Though such tropical systems are less common at this time of year, the official Atlantic hurricane season actually lasts through November 30....
When the U.S. men’s basketball team takes the court on August 6, at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, its most powerful asset will be a five-foot 10-inch grizzled veteran with an unmatched record of wins. That would be coach Mike Krzyzewski, who led Team USA to Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012. Of the 76 games played under the watchful eye of “Coach K,” the national squad won 75....
People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science. The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief....
By Joe Penney BAMAKO (Reuters) - Authorities in Mali quarantined dozens of people on Wednesday at the home of a 25-year-old nurse who died from Ebola in the capital, Bamako, and at the clinic where he treated an imam from Guinea who died with Ebola-like symptoms. The imam from the border town of Kouremale was never tested for the disease and his body was washed in Mali and returned to Guinea for burial without precautions against the virus....
Men diagnosed with early prostate cancer can safely choose active monitoring rather than surgery or radiation without cutting their lives short, according to an eagerly awaited landmark study published on Wednesday. Although research dating back to the 1970s has hinted that many prostate cancers are too slow-growing to threaten a man’s life, the new study is the most definitive ever to test that premise. It is also the first to compare modern forms of active monitoring not only to surgery but also to radiation—the two treatments available for early, localized prostate cancer....
An inactivated form of the poliovirus used to treat recurrent brain tumors is showing what researchers called encouraging long-term survival in a Phase 1 clinical trial published Tuesday. The authors reported that 21 percent of patients were still alive three years after the recurrence of glioblastoma, an aggressive and quickly lethal form of brain cancer that is stubbornly resistant to treatment—even the new crop of immunotherapies have proven to be ineffective....
Pregnant women who eat canned vegetables daily have elevated levels of bisphenol A, an estrogenic chemical found in food containers and other consumer products, according to new research published today. More than 90 percent of pregnant women have detectable levels of bisphenol A, according to the study, and a variety of sources of the chemical were identified. Pregnant women who were exposed to tobacco smoke or worked as cashiers also had above-average concentrations in their bodies....
A needling twinge in the torso or a tense interaction with a boss is all you need to get your nerves on edge. The bills are piling up and—of course—your spouse is on your case about them. You feel as if an extra weight is pressing down on your mind. The all too familiar sensation of stress can preoccupy your thoughts, narrowing attention to the sphere of your concerns. But its effects do not end there—stress also causes physical changes in the body....
In the late 1970s American television viewers were captivated by a weekly drama called The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as secret agent Steve Austin. Austin was a cyborg, a flesh-and-blood man brought back from near death and bioengineered to be superhuman in strength, speed and vision. During the series’s five-year run, Austin entered the popular idiom as the bionic man. An era of technological optimism had been gathering momentum since the 1960s, in large part following the stunning successes of the space program....
Dear EarthTalk: Has the recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo threatened the populations of lowland gorillas? How many are left? – Glenn Hammond, San Francisco, CA The short answer is yes, dramatically. Not to be confused with Western Lowland Gorillas, which are thriving in significant numbers in neighboring Congo (a recent census counted 125,000), today fewer than 5,000 Eastern Lowland Gorillas are estimated to remain in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire....
A devastating earthquake that rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 1861 was long thought to be a sudden rupture on a previously quiescent fault. But new research finds that the tectonic plates below the island had been slowly and quietly rumbling against each other for 32 years before the cataclysmic event. This decades-long, silent earthquake—known as a “slow-slip event”—was the longest sequence of its kind ever detected. It was too subtle and gradual to be noticed during its course, but a new study indicates it may have precipitated the massive 1861 temblor of at least magnitude 8....
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May 1961 issue of Scientific American. Sherman K. Stein is currently professor emeritus of mathematics at University of California, Davis. He is the author of several popular books on mathematics published after this article; his latest is “Survival Guide for Outsiders: How to Protect Yourself from Politicians, Experts and Other Insiders: (BookSurge Publishing, 2010). The nature of mathematics is elucidated by one mathematician’s account of how a memory word used by drummers in ancient India led him to the classic problem of the traveling salesman’s route Mathematics, like every branch of knowledge, is the product of the interplay between past and present, between accumulated knowledge and curiosity, between an autonomous structure and the tastes and needs of the time....
