Posts

See a video of the monkey operating the robot arm at the end of this article. Researchers report that monkeys fed themselves using robotic arms controlled mentally—no joystick required. The findings, reported today in Nature, suggest that patients with neuromuscular disorders, spinal cord injuries or lost limbs may one day be able to use their own brain power to operate prosthetics to carry out routine tasks. “This is the first reported demonstration of the use of [brain–machine interface] technology by subjects to perform a practical behavioral act,” John Kalaska, a physiologist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study....

Here’s a new twist on an old drink: gluten-free hard liquor. Vodkas marketed as “gluten-free” hit the market last year, after a 2012 interim ruling by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) opened the door to such labels. The labeling allows liquor companies to join a burgeoning industry of gluten-free products. The gluten protein, which is found in wheat, barley and rye, causes severe gastrointestinal symptoms in the roughly three million Americans suffering from celiac disease....

Night owls might think staying up late is a real hoot, but a new study hints that delayed sleep might have a sinister side. People who hit the sack late might have a greater risk of experiencing nightmares, according to scientists, although they add that follow-up research is needed to confirm the link. “It’s a very interesting preliminary study, and we desperately need more research in this area,” says Jessica Payne, director of the Sleep, Stress and Memory Lab at the University of Notre Dame, commenting on the new findings....

Dogs or cats that live in a household with people who have COVID often become infected and sick themselves. Experts advise infected individuals to keep a distance from their animals if possible. New research shows that people who become infected with the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, and fall ill often pass the pathogen on to their pets. The animals sometimes also become sick from the infection, occasionally severely, according to the results of two separate studies presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases....

The skeleton of a person who lived 31,000 years ago bears hallmarks of the deliberate removal of their lower left leg — the earliest known evidence of surgical amputation. Discovered on the island of Borneo, the remains pre-date the previous oldest known case of limb amputation by more than 20,000 years and indicate that the individual survived for several years after the surgery. The finding, published on 7 September in Nature, suggests that some ancient people were proficient nurses and performed sophisticated medical procedures much earlier than scientists have thought....

As nations repeatedly fail to make major cuts in their greenhouse gas production, scientists and others have begun to wonder if climate change might be halted not by emissions cuts but by technology that removes those gases from the atmosphere. The approach is called geoengineering. Unfortunately, a recent simulation of its effects on the oceans found that even extreme methods would not be able to completely rehabilitate the ocean environment. The work was published in Nature Climate Change on August 3....

One of the challenges of understanding large amounts of data is to characterize them using a few numbers that somehow reflect the whole. Statistics such as the minimum, maximum and the various kinds of averages tell you global properties of your data set. Sometimes they are enough to reveal information about individuals. This is why even databases that contain only statistical information about people are a privacy issue: enough statistical questions can reveal personal data....

Perhaps more than any other profession, science places a premium on being correct. Of course, most scientists—like most living humans—make plenty of mistakes along the way. Yet not all errors are created equal. Historians have unearthed a number of instances in which an incorrect idea proved far more potent than thousands of others that were trivially mistaken or narrowly correct. These are the productive mistakes: errors that touch on deep, fundamental features of the world around us and prompt further research that leads to major breakthroughs....

A long-fingered lemur has been caught on camera picking its nose—and eating the slimy goods. The culprit was Kali, an aye-aye at the Duke Lemur Center who now has the dubious honor of being the first of her species ever recorded nose picking, researchers say. What’s more, Kali earned this distinction with an aye-aye’s bizarrely long middle finger; when fully inserted in her nose, it reached all the way into her throat....

A federal plan to tackle ocean acidification must focus more on how the changes will affect people and the economy, according to a review of the effort by a panel of the National Research Council. “Social issues clearly can’t drive everything but when it’s possible they should,” said George Somero, chair of the committee that wrote the report and associate director at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. “If you’re setting up a monitoring station, it should be where there’s a shellfish industry, for example....

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It is an often-used quote, and for good reason. Juliet tragically underestimated the impact of the Montague surname. She was not the first, nor the last, to underestimate the power of the names we give. In psychiatry, handbooks determine which names (or classifications) we give to the difficulties that people face. We use them so that when we say ADHD, schizophrenia or depression, people have a more or less consistent idea of what we mean....

Around July and August of 2016 in a remote corner of Siberia called the Yamal Penninsula, more than 2,000 reindeer unexpectedly perished. Initially, a heat wave was suspected to have caused heatstroke in the reindeer, but doctors soon realized they had also become infected by bacillus anthracis, the bacterium responsible for anthrax. (Yes, the same anthrax that gained notoriety after being sent in powdered form to United States senators in 2001....

For those of us who frittered our formative years away blasting blocky space invaders, video games today can widen the eyes and slacken the jaw. The primitive pixelated ape of Donkey Kong has evolved into a three-dimensional King Kong of startling detail. Some newer Xbox 360 games render their lead characters from an intricate mesh of more than 20,000 polygons, each tiny patch drawn dozens of times a second with its own subtle texture, shading and gloss....

Battery-powered electric vehicles that give off no carbon dioxide as they drive are about to become mainstream. Today they constitute less than 1 percent of all rolling stock on the road globally, but multiple innovations in features such as the battery’s cost and lifetime have made prices so competitive that Tesla has more than 400,000 advance orders for its $35,000 Model 3, which is slated to hit the road in the middle of 2018....

Recently I had the opportunity to visit the future. It was located in Kristie Ford’s classroom in Detroit. On the day I was invited, the class of fifth and sixth graders was a hive of activity and motion, which Ford did not need to closely direct. Instead as she talked individually with a few students, others worked independently in small clusters discussing their study of the solar system or sprawled on the floor constructing 3-D models....

Climate change is everywhere in the news this week, as nations attending the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) firm their commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But did you know that the language of climate change and sustainability—from “eco-anxiety” to “climate crisis”—is constantly evolving to reflect new realities and concerns? Some terms have surged, others have taken on a revised meaning, and some are just brand new....

U.S. electric car pioneer Fisker Automotive once posted a manifesto on its Web site: “New isn’t easy.” Not for them, it wasn’t. Now their site is defunct and the company is scrambling to find a funder or face bankruptcy. An electric car company buoyed by federal dollars in 2010, Fisker has now been crippled by supply chain and other problems, and joined legions of start-ups that get dragged down by technical glitches and financial woes....

Some bats sing or call just as birds and humans do. But how they learn their calls and melodies is a mystery—one that scientists will try to solve by sequencing the genomes of more than 1,000 bat species. The project, called Bat 1K, was announced on November 14 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California. Its organizers also hope to learn more about the flying mammals’ ability to navigate in the dark through echolocation, their strong immune systems that can shrug off Ebola and their relatively long lifespans....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In the past few months a lot of people in my life have ventured abroad, either to teach, live, or just visit. Keeping in touch with friends and family in different time zones is tough - let alone when you’re trying to navigate foreign internet connections and phone plans!...

Physicians have long tinkered with ways to “improve” the human brain, but as our understanding of that organ’s inner workings quickly grows, artificial enhancement is becoming more feasible. Military research is at the forefront of this work, much of it focused on drugs. The goal is to produce a better soldier, but the emerging techniques could just as easily be applied to any individual. The military wants to juice up personnel’s brains because the human being is the weakest instrument of warfare....