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Marijn Roovers’ epicurean delights have graced the tables of some of the Netherlands’ finest restaurants. But the food designer’s Chocolate Globe is his most intricate—and technologically advanced—creation. A chocolate shell just 0.8 millimetres thick is embossed in gold with the chocolate’s continent of origin, and it holds delicacies that symbolize the region. Roovers and chef Wouter van Laarhoven printed it—layer-by-layer of chocolate—on a 3D printer. Roovers is at the forefront of a small group of gourmets and technophiles who want to revolutionize how food is prepared....

There’s one problem with the silicon age: its magic depends on elements that are far scarcer than beach sand. Some aren’t merely in limited supply: many people have never even heard of them. And yet those elements have become essential to the green economy. Alien-sounding elements such as yttrium, neodymium, europium, terbium and dysprosium are key components of energy-saving lights, powerful permanent magnets and other technologies. And then there are gallium, indium and tellurium, which create the thin-film photovoltaics needed in solar panels....

When a tree falls to illegal loggers in the forest of the Kalaweit Supayang Nature Conservation Reserve for gibbons in West Sumatra, Indonesia, it most definitely makes a sound—and generates a text message to alert reserve managers. Last summer a tiny, nonprofit start-up called Rainforest Connection installed a handful of old, donated smartphones, each tricked out with a solar charger and reprogrammed to conduct audio surveillance, into the forest canopy. The system quickly brought logging to a halt, says Topher White, a 31-year-old physicist who designed the system and founded the outfit....

The world’s small islands have more to lose from runaway climate change than perhaps anywhere else on Earth. Pacific and Caribbean islands have been battered recently by historically destructive hurricanes that endangered residents and stalled economic development. Cyclone Winston last year was the strongest storm ever to touch down in the Southern Hemisphere, while this September was the most active month on record for hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. Sea-level rise is already eating away at low-lying islands and jeopardizing shoreline economic activity....

Like a burglar with a universal lock pick, many deadly pathogens use the same protein to gain access to the cells of a potential host, researchers have discovered. The new findings could have implications for blocking infections by agents ranging from wheat rust to malaria. Pathogenic fungi, such as flax rust and soybean rust, and similar pathogens known as oomycetes, such as the organism behind the Irish potato famine and sudden oak death, make similar proteins to disarm their hosts’ defenses....

NASA is applying space technology to a decidedly down-to-earth effort that links the production of algae-based fuel with an inexpensive method of sewage treatment. The space agency is growing algae for biofuel in plastic bags of sewage floating in the ocean. Jonathan Trent, the lead researcher on the project at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, said the effort has three goals: Produce biofuels with few resources in a confined area, help cleanse municipal wastewater, and sequester emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that are produced along the way....

NASA has rescheduled the launch of its Mars InSight spacecraft for May 2018 — delaying its send-off by 26 months. Insight was originally set to launch in March 2016, but NASA called off the launch in December because of leaks in the spacecraft’s primary scientific instrument, a seismometer. The space agency said then that it was considering whether to cancel the mission outright. The seismometer, built by the French space agency CNES, will be repaired in time to make the 2018 launch window, said Jim Green, the head of NASA’s planetary sciences division in Washington DC....

Astronomers have spotted a record-setting fifth planet orbiting the sunlike star 55 Cancri, 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. Researchers say the planet, a “mini-Saturn” of about 46 Earth masses, lies fourth out from the star in a large gap between the third and fifth planets, placing it squarely in the estimated habitable zone around the star where water might remain liquid, according to the group’s report, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal....

Public health emergencies are a fact of life in a world as interconnected as ours. In just the past five years we have witnessed unexpected outbreaks of devastating diseases—Ebola, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika—each of which has spread far beyond its historical geographical range. No one can say what the next large-scale emergency will be, whom it will affect or when it will strike, but we do know that it is inevitable....

If your hands and arms quiver when you write and do other tasks, you may have a common neurological condition called essential tremor (ET). As many as 7 percent of adults older than 65 suffer from ET, which may also affect the head and voice. In severe cases, it can be disabling. The cause of such shaking has long been mysterious. But researchers are beginning to uncover a biological explanation for the problem: they have found a gene that may contribute to its development as well as a pathological signature of the disorder in the brain....

The system of acupuncture can be traced back to China and has probably been practiced for thousands of years. The therapy became an international crossover hit much more recently. In 1972 President Richard M. Nixon visited the People’s Republic, and the Western journalists accompanying him described spectacular successes of acupuncture in anesthesia and pain control–including cesarean sections in which the women got only needles and no anesthetics. Even as acupuncture has grown in popularity, though, it has never been able to shake suspicions that it is merely an esoteric sham treatment....

Editor’s Note: This story will appear in the July 2009 issue of Scientific American. We are posting it in advance because of a Congressional hearing on this issue. Tomorrow (May 5), the House Committee on Science and Technology will convene its second hearing concerning the U.S. stimulus package and the risk of fraud in research. Earl Devaney, the chairman of the newly appointed federal watchdog agency, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, has warned that without precautionary measures, as much as 7 percent of the stimulus funds will end up in the hands of bad actors....

Researchers have just identified a security flaw in a software program called Log4J, widely used by a host of private, commercial and government entities to record details ranging from usernames and passwords to credit card transactions. Since the glitch was found last weekend, the cybersecurity community has been scrambling to protect applications, services, infrastructure and even Internet of Things devices from criminals—who are already taking advantage of the vulnerability. “For cybercriminals this is Christmas come early, because the sky’s the limit,” says Theresa Payton, a former White House chief information officer and the CEO of Fortalice Solutions, a cybersecurity consulting company....

Created, written & designed by John Pavlus / Screencasts produced by Smashcut Media / Music by Jeff Alvarez Check out previous episodes of The Monitor. Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes or RSS Background on this week’s stories: 1. Gaming addiction = Aspergers? http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/30296 A Discovery News story in which a researcher from the University of Bolton in England likened video game addiction to Asperger syndrome was widely repeated throughout the blogosphere, and was even picked up by at least one wire service....

Twenty-one years ago this week, mathematicians released a list of the top seven unsolved problems in the field. Answering them would offer major new insights in fundamental mathematics and might even have real-world consequences for technologies such as cryptography. But big questions in math have not often attracted the same level of outside interest that mysteries in other scientific areas have. When it comes to understanding what math research looks like or what the point of it is, many folks are still stumped, says Wei Ho, a mathematician at the University of Michigan....

When Erinn Baldeschwiler was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in March 2020, the then 48-year-old mother of two knew she wanted to seek treatment—but not just for the cancer itself. She also wanted something to address the emotional anguish that accompanies a terminal diagnosis. So she began investigating various therapies that might help her “make sense of everything and find peace,” as she put it at the time. Baldeschwiler’s palliative care doctor, Sunil Aggarwal of the Advanced Integrative Medical Science (AIMS) Institute in Seattle, suggested that she might benefit from therapy with psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms....

What do tobacco, food additives, chemical flame retardants and carbon emissions all have in common? The industries associated with them and their ill effects have been remarkably consistent and disturbingly effective at planting doubt in the mind of the public in the teeth of scientific evidence. Call it pseudoskepticism. It began with the tobacco industry when scientific evidence began to mount that cigarettes cause lung cancer. A 1969 memo included this statement from an executive at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public....

Harriet Holliday sparkled with personality. She reminded Kevin Horowitz, her third husband, of the mother in Mamma Mia!—free-spirited, flamboyant and nurturing. She dressed with a sexy, sophisticated glamour and regaled friends with witty tales at soirees. As hospitality manager at a winery in Napa Valley in California, she planned events for hundreds of guests. But around six years ago, at age 49, Holliday “started turning mean,” Horowitz recalls. “She didn’t know when to hold her tongue....

A rising number of epileptic patients are using an alternative medicine to reduce their seizures. The herb in question is Cannabis sativa. Among the users are some of the almost 100,000 American children who have “intractable epilepsy,” which does not respond to standard antiseizure medications. Some parents report that marijuana helps to control their child’s seizures when other standard drugs do not. There is no pharmaceutical preparation of cannabis as a drug....

DENVER — Researchers have spotted powerful antifreeze proteins swarming ice crystals and stunting their growth. They found that one of the strongest such proteins, from an insect called the spruce budworm, sticks to a developing ice crystal on its broadest face, where it restricts the crystal’s growth like a vice at cold temperatures. The results may aid in designing molecules that keep organs alive longer and prevent freezer burn. Antifreeze proteins, also called ice-structuring proteins (ISPs), help keep animals alive at temperatures at which their tissues would normally freeze full of jagged ice crystals....