In previous episodes, I’ve talked about the nutritional differences (such as they are) between grass- and grain-fed beef. But today, I want to share some updated information regarding the impact of various feeding programs on the health of the cow and on the environment–an area where there are a lot of misconceptions. I’ve just returned from the beautiful state of Colorado, where I had an opportunity to visit some places where beef cattle are raised....
THEY HAVE BEEN part of our collective imagination almost since we began to set down words. Mechanical beings sparked to life in the myths of ancient Greece, the Middle East, China and the Nordic countries. Today we call them robots—from robota, meaning “drudgery” or “hard work” in Czech and related languages. As that name implies, so far these useful machines have been limited in their applications to the sorts of repetitive tasks best suited to automatons—tirelessly turning screw after screw in a factory assembly line, for instance....
The wings of a butterfly are a thing of beauty as they shimmer and dance in the breeze.They are also a marvel of light-directing properties. Researchers have discovered that the swallowtail butterfly of eastern and central Africa, Papilio nireus, has fluorescent wings that reflect and direct light in much the same way that the modern light-emitting diodes in high-end computer screens and televisions do. Pete Vukusic and Ian Hooper of Exeter University in England studied the colored parts of the swallowtail’s wings and found that the scales that comprised them contain photonic crystals whose atoms are spaced so precisely that only certain wavelengths of light can pass through....
Tropical Storm Madeline brought the classic impacts of heavy rains, high surf and gusty winds to Hawaii’s Big Island on Wednesday night and early Thursday. But it also brought a rather unexpected impact: carbon dioxide levels dipped below 400 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which monitors carbon dioxide at the observatory, chronicled the dip in a blog post. The drop is notable because scientists hadn’t expected carbon dioxide to drop below that threshold at the top of Mauna Loa in our lifetimes....
Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 1:55 p.m. E.T. The origins of a massive 1.8 billion-year-old crater in Canada has been revealed The Sudbury Basin, which is the world’s second-largest impact crater, was likely formed by an enormous comet that battered Earth more than 1.8 billion years ago, new research suggests. The findings settle a long-standing mystery about how the giant hole in the Earth formed. [Crash! 10 Biggest Impact Craters On Earth] Hole in the Earth The Sudbury Basin is a roughly elliptical crater that measures about 37 miles by 18 miles (60 kilometers by 30 kilometers), located on the outskirts of Sudbury, Ontario, in Canada....
Magma—the molten rock that nourishes volcanoes—can lurk in underground pockets surprisingly far from where it emerges, new research shows. This means the instruments placed on a volcano’s flanks might fail to pick up signs of moving magma that can signal an impending eruption. University of Oregon volcanologist Allan Lerner and his colleagues focused on 56 volcanoes in subduction zones (geologically active areas where one tectonic plate is diving under another) on five continents for a new paper, published in July in Geophysical Research Letters....
By Richard A. Lovett Astronomers seeking to predict solar storms are receiving the first trickles of a wealth of new data, scientists reported this week at a meeting of the Committee on Space Research in Bremen, Germany. The data come from a new satellite, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which became operational in late April. Launched on February 11 and costing $856 million (including the first five years of operation), it is the inaugural mission in NASA’s Living With a Star Program, intended to better understand the sources of solar magnetic storms....
Jeffrey (not his real name) came to treatment complaining of depression, anxiety and trouble getting along with others. Colleagues in the engineering department where he worked complained he was “not a team player,” and his wife saw him as distant and hypercritical. Beyond this, he carried with him a constant feeling of dread, no matter how well things were going. I agreed with Jeffrey that his dread seemed out of proportion to anything that was actually happening in his life and suggested it might be in proportion to something that was not immediately obvious to either of us....
A dash of graphene can transform the stretchy goo known as Silly Putty into a pressure sensor able to monitor a human pulse or even track the dainty steps of a small spider. The material, dubbed G-putty, could be developed into a device that continuously monitors blood pressure, its inventors hope. It also demonstrates a form of self-repair that may herald smarter graphene composites. Since graphene was first isolated in 2004, researchers have added these atom-thin sheets of carbon to a panoply of different materials, hoping to create composites that benefit from its superlative strength and electrical conductivity....
The warming that humans cause today may have ripple effects far into the future, scientists warned in a study yesterday that finds the vast Greenland ice sheet could continue melting for centuries after greenhouse gases are stabilized. Greenland has a delayed response to changes in the Earth’s climate, and even if the planet stopped warming tomorrow, Greenland may continue losing ice for hundreds or even thousands of years. The study, published in the journal PLOS One and led by Hu Yang of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, used model simulations to look back thousands of years into Greenland’s history....
Medicine has a race problem. Doctors consistently provide worse care to people of color, particularly African-Americans and Latinos. In studies that control for socioeconomic status and access to care, researchers have found racial disparities in the quality of care across a wide range of diseases: asthma, heart attack, diabetes and prenatal care, to name a few. Two studies performed in emergency rooms showed that doctors were far more likely to fail to order pain medication for black and Hispanic patients who came in with bone fractures....
Scientific American presents “Tech Talker” by Quick and Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick and Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. I’ve worked in technology for years, and I’ve seen a lot of people experience heartbreak when their computer crashes and they lose their most treasured photos, or that thesis they’ve been working on for the past 6 months. That’s why today’s tip is an important one—and one that you’ll thank me for later....
Did early human inventions—bows and arrows, houses, kayaks—result from innate smarts that bested the intelligence of chimps, lions and other species? Or did these artifacts arise from a gradual accretion of knowledge—tiny modifications over innumerable generations that constitute the passing along of collective cultural wisdom? Such shared information would not necessarily require individuals to gain a basic understanding of the physical workings of the slowly evolving technologies. In academia, these contrasting accounts proceed along two tracks....
AT THE END of Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart finally tells Ingrid Bergman to get on the plane back to her husband, the young mother watching the afternoon TV movie sheds a tear. Instinctively, her two-year-old tries to comfort her by offering his teddy bear to her. Both the mother and child are displaying intuitive awareness of others’ mental states and emotions. Social intuition comes naturally to most of us, but not all....
“All of the mystery of quantum mechanics” is contained within the double-slit experiment, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman famously said. In the experiment, first proposed in 1801 by British polymath Thomas Young, a beam of photons—particles of light—flies toward a wall with two slits cut in it. When the light reaches a screen behind the wall, it produces a telltale “interference pattern”: stripes of light interspersed with darkness. This pattern results only if the photons act like waves rather than like point particles, and the peaks and troughs of the waves coming through the two slits interfere with one another, sometimes adding light and sometimes canceling it out....
A fast-growing salmon has become the first genetically engineered animal to be approved for human consumption in the United States. The decision, issued by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on November 19, releases the salmon from two decades of regulatory limbo. The move was met with swift opposition from some environmental and food-safety groups. But for advocates of the technology, the decision comes as a relief after a long and vexing wait....
You could call it one of the most magnificent conundrums of our existence: consciousness. How can an experience be so routine, so common to all of us—and yet so utterly unfathomable at its deepest levels? That enigma has long intrigued neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, author of the cover story, “The Movie in Your Head.” Imaging technology reveals what areas in the brain are buzzing with neural activity when a person is tracking a speeding car, looking at a loved one or eating a chocolate bar....
In March, I talked about the potential benefits of omega-3 eggs. Ironically, shortly before that episode was released, a new study came out that was widely covered in the media, finding that people who ate more than a few eggs a week had an increased risk of heart disease and death. This headline wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows 20 years ago, when we firmly (but falsely) believed that eating foods that contained cholesterol would contribute to high blood cholesterol and heart disease risk....
The commercial spaceflight company SpaceX announced on Twitter today that it plans to send its robotic Dragon capsule to Mars as early as 2018. “Red Dragons will inform the overall Mars architecture,” SpaceX representatives tweeted today (April 27), referring to the company’s eventual plans to set up a colony on Mars — a key goal of SpaceX and its founder, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. A source familiar with the company’s plans said the first test flight of a Dragon capsule to Mars would demonstrate technologies needed to land large payloads on the Red Planet....
Escolar masquerading as white tuna. Flounder passing for Vietnamese catfish. Pricey baby cod replaced with lesser quality hake instead. Once fish is filleted and skinned, it can be difficult to distinguish, as a Boston Globe investigative report found after testing 183 pieces of fish and finding that 87 were mislabeled. This type of fraud has long vexed the seafood industry, especially for popular species such as red snapper, wild salmon and Atlantic cod, which could be mislabeled as much as 70 percent of the time....
