Posts

This story is a supplement to the feature “Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Darkness Falls Electric currents in the ionosphere induce electric currents in the ground and in pipelines. These currents surge into transformers and can fry them. It would take weeks or longer for workers to fix them all. Off the Grid The entire East Coast and much of the rest of the country would lose power....

The astronomy community, amateurs and professionals alike, will turn its attention to the moon early tomorrow morning in the hopes of confirming the long-suspected presence of water ice trapped in permanently shadowed areas near the lunar poles (not to mention the drama of seeing two man-made objects crash into the moon). A research collaboration showed last month that water exists at very low levels across the lunar surface, but concentrated ice deposits would likely be a more accessible and abundant resource....

Lisa, an elementary school teacher from Ambler, Pa., came home from work one day and said to her husband, “Honey, guess what? I landed that summer teaching position I wanted!” “Wow, congratulations!” he replied. “I know how hard you worked to get that job. I am so happy for you! You must be really excited.” The way Lisa’s husband reacted to her good news was also good news for their marriage, which, 15 years later, is still going strong; such positive responses turn out to be vital to the longevity of a relationship....

Robots of all shapes and sizes increasingly populate workplaces, from factories to operating rooms. Many of the bots rely on attaining new skills by trial and error through machine learning. A new method helps such skills transfer between differently shaped robots, avoiding the need to learn tasks from scratch each time. “Practically, it’s important,” says Xingyu Liu, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of the research, presented this past summer at the International Conference on Machine Learning....

Physical similarities aside, we share a lot in common with our primate relatives. For example, as Jane Goodall famously documented, chimpanzees form lifelong bonds and show affection in much the same way as humans. Chimps can also solve novel problems, use objects as tools, and may possess “theory of mind”—an understanding that others may have different perspectives than oneself. They can even outperform humans in certain types of cognitive tasks. These commonalities may not seem all that surprising given what we now know from the field of comparative genomics: We share nearly all of our DNA with chimpanzees and other primates....

The stresses of everyday life may start taking a toll on the brain in relatively early middle age, new research shows. The study of more than 2,000 people, most of them in their 40s, found those with the highest levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol performed worse on tests of memory, organization, visual perception and attention. Higher cortisol levels, measured in subjects’ blood, were also found to be associated with physical changes in the brain that are often seen as precursors to Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, according to the study published in October in Neurology....

Hugh Rienhoff says that his nine-year-old daughter, Bea, is “a fire cracker”, “a tomboy” and “a very sassy, impudent girl”. But in a forthcoming research paper, he uses rather different terms, describing her hypertelorism (wide spacing between the eyes) and bifid uvula (a cleft in the tissue that hangs from the back of the palate). Both are probably features of a genetic syndrome that Rienhoff has obsessed over since soon after Bea’s birth in 2003....

Lisa Harris, an ob-gyn and researcher at the University of Michigan, recalls being paged to the operating room late on a Friday night to treat a pregnant woman who was hemorrhaging uncontrollably. The patient had been undergoing a procedure to treat a complication involving too much amniotic fluid in the uterus, and things went awry. In Harris’s experience, she says, “performing an abortion within minutes or hours can be lifesaving in this situation....

Editor’s Note (9/2/21): This story is being republished following a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that declined to block a Texas law banning abortions performed after six weeks of pregnancy. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a new abortion restriction into law on May 19, 2021, it marked a chilling milestone—a staggering 1,300 restrictions enacted by states since the U.S. Supreme Court protected abortion rights in 1973 in its Roe v. Wade decision....

NEW YORK—The Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and other conventional sports cars were bumped from the showroom of the Manhattan Classic Car Club today in favor of a motley array of alternative vehicles—many of which could likely out-accelerate the world-renowned sports cars. From high-schoolers modifying a Ford Focus hybrid to run on biofuel to would-be manufacturers of three-wheeled electric vehicles, the X PRIZE’s seven automotive expert judges have winnowed a field of 135 vehicles down to 53, powered by six different fuel sources and coming from 18 states and 10 countries....

For those living outside China, Beijing’s smoggy air is scary but remote. For those who have been living with the past three weeks of foul air, it’s a call to action. Last month, Beijing hit record levels of air pollution, engulfing the city with smog 20 times higher than world safety levels. Airlines have grounded flights because of low visibility, the government is urging residents to stay indoors, and, according to Twitter postings, Swiss-made IQAir home air purifiers are going for $2,300, more than twice their normal price....

Occasionally Alán Aspuru-Guzik has a movie-star moment, when fans half his age will stop him in the street. “They say, ‘Hey, we know who you are,’” he laughs. “Then they tell me that they also have a quantum start-up and would love to talk to me about it.” He doesn’t mind a bit. “I don’t usually have time to talk, but I’m always happy to give them some tips.” That affable approach is not uncommon in the quantum-computing community, says Aspuru-Guzik, who is a computer scientist at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Zapata Computing in Cambridge, Mass....

The biopsychologist John Gibbon called time the “primordial context”: a fact of life that has been felt by all organisms in every era. For the morning glory that spreads its petals at dawn, for geese flying south in autumn, for locusts swarming every 17 years and even for lowly slime molds sporing in daily cycles, timing is everything. In human bodies, biological clocks keep track of seconds, minutes, days, months and years....

As anyone who’s dealt with substance addiction can tell you, breaking the physical intimacy with the drug isn’t always the most challenging part of treatment. People trying to avoid resurrecting their addiction also must grapple with reminders of it: the sights, sounds and people who were part of their addictive behaviors. These cues can trigger a craving for the drug, creating anxiety that steers them straight back into addiction for relief....

SHANGHAI—For Jin Liang, a typical Chinese who watches his utility bills carefully, each scorching hot summer day posed a dilemma: Should he switch on his air conditioner, or keep it off to cool the impact on his wallet? But his dilemma faded away this year after Jin moved into a new apartment. It features magical materials that allow him to comfortably turn off the air conditioner and yet stop sweating. “This apartment has thermal insulation,” Jin explained....

Although the invisible substance known as dark matter dominates galaxies nowadays, it was apparently only a minor ingredient of galaxies in the early universe, a new study finds. This new finding sheds light on how galaxies and their mysterious “haloes” of dark matter have changed over time, researchers said. Dark matter is thought to make up about 84 percent of the matter in the universe. Although dark matter is invisible, its presence can be inferred by its gravitational effects on visible matter....

One of the most iconic animals in Africa has a secret. A genetic analysis suggests that the giraffe is not one species, but 4 separate ones—a finding that could alter how conservationists protect these animals. Researchers previously split giraffes into several subspecies on the basis of their coat patterns and where they lived. Closer inspection of their genes, however, reveals that giraffes should actually be divided into four distinct lineages that don’t interbreed in the wild, researchers report on 8 September in Current Biology....

Child molestation and rape top the social taboo list, according to a survey of 186 people between the ages of 18 and 47, and smoking marijuana ranks lowest among the 19 choices of forbidden behavior. In the middle—worse than robbing a bank but better than spousal murder—lies incest between brothers and sisters. Given the deleterious genetic impacts of offspring from such mating, some researchers have suggested that there may be an evolved mechanism designed to prevent that from occurring....

In 1999 agricultural researchers discovered in Uganda a new variety of stem rust—a fungus that infects wheat plants and wiped out 40 percent of U.S. wheat harvests in the 1950s. Millions of spores have spread from Uganda to neighboring Kenya and beyond to Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen, wiping out as much as 80 percent of a country’s harvest. In fact, the only thing that has stopped the rust from devastating the breadbaskets of China, India and Ukraine has been several years of drought in Iran....

When a physicist wants to determine the motion of two stars orbiting one another, it’s called a two-body problem. This same term also refers in some egghead circles to two people in a relationship who are both trying to find satisfying jobs in the same location. Referring to high-achieving partners simply as “bodies” is a little crude, we admit. Maybe it should be called the “two-star problem.” Whatever you call it, the problem is especially prevalent in academia, where a disproportionate number of couples are both scholars, with many of them even working in the same field....