What does your infant see when they look at you? Do you appear as just a round blob with some dark features? Or can your child already recognize that they are looking at a face, one belonging to the parent who will love and protect them? Scientists, philosophers—and parents—have asked similar questions about what is innate and what is learned in the infant brain, going all the way back to the ancients....
Genes involved in tasting sweet and savory flavors on the tongue also play a key role in properly working sperm, new research in animals finds. These findings could lead to novel contraceptives for men, and suggest ways to help treat male infertility, the researchers said. In this research, scientists investigated proteins known as taste receptors. These receptors help tongues detect sugars, acids, salt and other chemicals responsible for basic tastes such as sweet, sour, salty, bitter and the savory taste known as umami....
Google took Internet maps to the streets when it launched itsStreet View feature in Google Maps. Rather than relying on satellite photos, Street View, which debuted in May, enables users to view and navigate 360-degree street-level digital images of 21 U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, Miami and the Big Apple. Now a Berkeley, Calif., start-up called earthmine inc plans to offer a similar Web-based navigation service that employs technology that NASA uses on the Mars Exploration Rover missions to help guide Opportunity and Spirit on their treks across the Red Planet’s craggy surface....
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is apparently also red hot: The highest temperatures ever observed on the planet were recently detected in the region above the ginormous storm. The Great Red Spot (GRS) is a massive storm about twice the diameter of Earth that lies in lowest layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere. About 497 miles (800 kilometers) above this humongous storm, astronomers measured temperatures reaching about 700 degrees Fahrenheit (about 370 degrees Celsius) higher than normal, James O’Donoghue, lead author of the new study and a research scientist with Boston University’s (BU) Center for Space Physics, told Space....
You could think of it as the biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now being completed underneath a circle of countryside and villages a short drive from Geneva, will peer into the physics of the shortest distances (down to a nano-nanometer) and the highest energies ever probed. For a decade or more, particle physicists have been eagerly awaiting a chance to explore that domain, sometimes called the terascale because of the energy range involved: a trillion electron volts, or 1 TeV....
BORN TO OFFEND? The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime by Nicole Rafter. New York University Press, 2008 ($24) In the sci-fi movie Minority Report “Precrime” police units stop murders before they happen by relying on the visions of people who can see the future. Clairvoyants who possess precognition will likely remain fiction. But the idea of preventing individuals from committing crimes may be on the threshold of becoming reality, according to Northeastern University criminologist Nicole Rafter....
For Erik Lentz, it all started with Star Trek. Every few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard would raise his hand and order, “Warp one, engage!” Then stars became dashes, and light-years flashed by at impossible speed. And Lentz, still in elementary school, wondered whether warp drive might also work in real life. “At some point, I realized that the technology didn’t exist,” Lentz says. He studied physics at the University of Washington, wrote his Ph....
Back in February an Indian Space Research Organization rocket deployed over a hundred miniature spacecraft into Earth orbit. This constituted the largest stream of petite satellites, called CubeSats, ever dispensed into space courtesy of a single heave-ho booster—but not by much. Seventy more are slated to hitch a ride onboard a Russian rocket later this week. In launches large and small, on the order of 700 CubeSats have made their way into space since the late 1990s, and the pace is picking up....
As the dizziness began to fade and the nausea to subside, I kept thinking how two tablespoons did not sound like a lot of blood. During regular checkups, my physician draws only about half that amount. I suppose I might have guessed, especially after a 12-hour fast, I would sicken when my blood pressure and glucose levels dipped—I’m a terrible blood donor in that regard. The nurse who drew my blood helpfully looked around my office for a sweet drink....
In 2009 a regiment of Danish soldiers, the Guard Hussars, was deployed for a six-month tour in Afghanistan’s arid Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold. They were stationed along with British soldiers—270 in all—at a forward operating base called Armadillo. Although none of the Guard Hussars were killed during the tour of duty, they nonetheless experienced many horrors of battle. A commander was seriously injured by a roadside bomb, and a night patrol ended in a firefight that killed and dismembered several Taliban combatants....
Amber Sapp was browsing the Internet late one night in August when she happened to find out that her 12-year-old son’s clinical trial had failed. Every four weeks for two-and-a-half years, she had shuttled Garrett to a hospital nearly six hours away. There, he was prodded and pricked with needles in the hope that the antibody treatment being tested would reverse a devastating genetic disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. But an early data analysis, Sapp learned, had shown that the treatment wasn’t working....
It was 6:30 A.M., and I was getting ready to head down to the operating room (OR) for the first case of the day: an abdominal wall hernia repair. In preparation for the case, I logged on to the electronic health record portal and read through the patient’s medical history and the preoperative notes written by the surgical team. In many of the physician notes, the first line noted the patient’s body mass index (BMI) of 41....
SAN JOSE, Calif. – There is little doubt that the trial between Apple and Samsung taking place here is complex, and perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in the form that jurors will have to fill out on their way to reaching a verdict later this week. The document, which both sides have yet to agree on, is still in its draft stage. In Samsung’s case, it’s 33 questions long, and stretched across 17 pages....
Dear EarthTalk: The cold winter we’re having here in the Northeast has convinced me to finally beef up my home’s insulation, but I’ve heard that spray foam can off-gas noxious chemicals and pollute the indoor environment. Are there safer options? — Rose Donahue, Framingham, MA Making your home more energy efficient is certainly good for the planet and will cut your heating/cooling bills, but you’re right to worry about chemical off-gassing....
Ozone (O3) is bad for people and plants. When lingering near the top of the atmosphere, the O3 molecule provides cover from energetic radiation but closer to the ground it can choke lungs and blight leaves. In addition, O3 is a greenhouse gas, helping to trap heat and warm the earth, and new research shows that it plays an even larger role in global warming by destroying plants’ ability to use extra carbon dioxide....
WASHINGTON — The National Institutes of Health on Thursday announced a $215 million public-private partnership with 11 pharmaceutical companies in what the agency bills as a significant next step in its cancer moonshot. The Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies, or PACT, is a five-year agreement to push ahead with research that seeks to “identify, develop and validate robust biomarkers — standardized biological markers of disease and treatment response — to advance new immunotherapy treatments that harness the immune system to attack cancer,” the agency said....
U.S. corn production is booming as Midwestern farmers adopt new technologies and methods that mitigate bad weather, destructive pests and weeds. But the long-term outlook isn’t rosy. New research published yesterday in Nature Food shows maize is becoming more vulnerable to drought, a finding with major implications for annual corn yields given scientists’ predictions that climate change will intensify poor weather conditions. “What is clear,” the researchers found, “is that despite robust corn yields, the cost of drought and global demand for corn are rising simultaneously....
Doubts have surfaced about a landmark paper claiming that human embryos were cleared of a deadly mutation using genome editing. In an article posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint server on August 28, a team of prominent stem-cell scientists and geneticists questioned whether the mutation was actually fixed. The August 2 Nature paper, led by reproductive biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Oregon Health Sciences Center in Portland, described experiments correcting a mutation that causes a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in dozens of viable human embryos....
Facebook has barred Australians from finding or sharing news on its platform, in response to an Australian government proposal to require social media networks to pay journalism organizations for their content. The move is already reducing online readership of Australian news sites. Similar to what happened when Facebook suspended Donald Trump’s account in January, the fight with Australia is again raising debate around social media networks’ enormous control over people’s access to information....
The symbolic language of mathematics can be beautiful—but even more striking are some of the patterns and forms that arise from the visual representation of math. The power of mathematical images attracted Nina Samuel, an art historian, to investigate how visual information can inform scientific discoveries. “Images are not only a by-product but at the core of science,” says Samuel, a visiting assistant professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City....
