What’s going on in your head right now? How about … now? Or … now? Answering this question is harder than you might think. As soon as you pay attention to your thoughts, you alter them, as surely as you alter an electron’s course by looking at it. You can’t describe your thoughts the way you describe, say, the room in which you are reading, which remains stolidly unaffected by your scrutiny....
In the opening of The Matrix, columns of strange keyboard characters stream down an old monochrome computer screen. They represent the peeled back digital curtain of experience, reminding us that every taste, smell and color that we experience is, in a way, a deception—a story computed bit by literal bit in a brain working in the quiet darkness of the skull. We don’t need special hardware to enter the Matrix. We just need to understand the special hardware we’ve been given: our brain....
Key Concepts Biology Botany Dissection Plants Reproduction Introduction Springtime is when nature appears to come back to life after winter. Trees grow leaves, grass gets green, and flowers sprout, displaying beautiful colors and sometimes spreading a delightful scent. But have you ever looked at a flower in more detail? What parts do flowers consist of? Are all flowers alike? In this activity you will find out by dissecting, or taking apart, a flower piece by piece....
Earth’s building blocks were more eclectic than once thought, according to a new study suggesting our planet formed from collisions of many different types of meteorites. Our planet is thought to have formed around 4.5 billion years ago from a disk of dust grains left over from the cloud of material that built our sun. These grains slowly clumped together, drawn by gravity into pebbles, then boulders, then planetary embryos. Eventually, enough mass coalesced to form the planet Earth....
The dust refuses to settle on a debate about whether asteroid impacts caused one of Earth’s most famous cold snaps 12,900 years ago. The latest evidence in the contentious discussion comes in the form of pieces of bedrock from Quebec, Canada, that seem to have been blasted out as far as Pennsylvania. “I’d say there’s evidence of an impact happening, for sure,” says Mukul Sharma, an isotope geochemist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and co-author of a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....
The eggshells of modern birds exhibit a spectacular array of rainbow hues—from butter yellow to blood red, palest aqua to darkest cyan. Some are spotted or speckled; others are blemish-free. How and when did the astonishing diversity of egg colors and patterns evolve? Among modern-day amniotes (the group that includes birds, reptiles and mammals), only birds produce colored eggs. The other egg layers make plain white ones. So the prevailing wisdom has been egg color is strictly a bird innovation—but new findings indicate that long before robin’s egg blue, there was Deinonychus’s egg blue....
Key concepts Physics Water Surface tension Cohesion Introduction Have you ever noticed how hair floats freely when submerged in water, but when surrounded by air when wet it clings together? You can see this in animal fur as well: When wet dogs shake themselves their hair clings together in strands. Try this activity to see why wet hair is far less fluffy than dry hair! Background Water can also be called H2O because the smallest amount of water that is still water (called a water molecule) consists of two hydrogen (H) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom....
A group of studies that looked at the best data available from more than 40 countries across the globe found that the incidence of postpartum depression in mothers ranges from 3 to 63 percent, with Malaysia and Pakistan at the bottom and top, respectively. The rate for U.S. mothers is 10 to 15 percent. Although mothers in all corners of the world agree that lack of social support or an unhelpful partner can make them feel depressed, there are also many factors they do not agree on....
By Richard LovettA newly discovered crater on Mercury may have been geologically active as recently as a billion years ago. The discovery was made by NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft on its latest fly-by of the innermost planet of the Solar System on 29 September.“It’s the youngest terrain we’ve yet seen on Mercury,” said Clark Chapman a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and part of the MESSENGER mission team....
BLACK HOLE FIREWALLS In “Burning Rings of Fire,” Joseph Polchinski explains that according to Stephen Hawking’s theory of black holes, when a matter-antimatter pair of particles comes into existence just outside a black hole, one of those particles could go into the hole and the other could be radiated out, which would eventually deplete the hole’s entire mass. Wouldn’t it be random whether the antimatter particle or the matter particle of the pair fell into the black hole?...
Amid a drug crisis that kills 91 people in the U.S. each day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked Congress to help roll back protections that have shielded medical marijuana dispensaries from federal prosecutors since 2014, according to a letter made public this week. Those legal controls—which bar Sessions’s Justice Department from funding crackdowns on the medical cannabis programs legalized by 29 states and Washington, D.C.—jeopardize the DoJ’s ability to combat the country’s “historic drug epidemic” and control dangerous drug traffickers, the attorney general wrote in the letter sent to lawmakers....
The Greek version of a familiar myth starts with Artemis, goddess of the hunt and fierce protectress of innocent young women. Artemis demands that Callisto, “the most beautiful,” and her other handmaidens take a vow of chastity. Zeus tricks Callisto into giving up her virginity, and she gives birth to a son, Arcas. Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, turns Callisto into a bear and banishes her to the mountains. Meanwhile Arcas grows up to become a hunter and one day happens on a bear that greets him with outstretched arms....
The capture and analysis of surveillance footage has been an indispensable tool for U.S. counterterrorism and law enforcement in the past decade. Video analysis software has improved since the 9/11 terrorist attacks—it can be programmed to identify certain patterns and colors, for example, and to issue security alerts when these characteristics are detected. But as terrorists and criminals change their tactics to slip through security the surveillance technologies designed to stop or catch them must likewise become more sophisticated....
Humans intuitively understand how the world works, which makes it easier for people, as opposed to machines, to envision how a scene will play out. But objects in a still image could move and interact in a multitude of different ways, making it very hard for machines to accomplish this feat, the researchers said. But a new, so-called deep-learning system was able to trick humans 20 per cent of the time when compared to real footage....
If you could enhance just one aspect of your brain, what would you choose? We recently asked online readers this question and received a bevy of creative responses. As we sifted through your 215 specific suggestions, we noticed a trend. Many of you used the language of technology—random-access memory, SD cards—to describe the brain’s features and abilities. Clearly, the prevalence of smartphones and computers has shaped the way we think about mental abilities....
For the vast majority of the history of our kind we were in some ways no more sophisticated than crows, which use sticks to poke around in promising holes. Eventually, of course, we discovered fire and invented stone tools, which then led to guns, pesticides and antibiotics. Using these tools, we encouraged the survival of favorable species such as wheat and yeast needed for beer and cows for meat and milk—a garden of delights....
We are often surrounded by bogus claims about other people—especially in the context of political elections. But why do we sometimes believe blatant misinformation? A new study from the University of Arizona suggests that our gullibility can be triggered by subtle reminders of how we are different from the person in question. During the months before and after the 2008 presidential election, psychologist Spee Kosloff and his colleagues asked predominantly white, non-Muslim students to evaluate smears about both candidates....
By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - About one in 10 pregnant women with confirmed Zika infections had a fetus or baby with birth defects, offering the clearest picture yet of the risk of Zika infection during pregnancy, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the first to analyze a group of U.S. women with clear, confirmed test results of Zika infection during pregnancy....
Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Last week, in Part 1 of this series, we covered the 5 symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. This week, we’ll talk about healing from PTSD and the stigma that can get in the way, with a special emphasis on new veterans. We’ll cover 7 misconceptions about PTSD and one big truth....
SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica—This story has no happy ending. Quite the opposite, it tells the tale of how the relative success of a country can harm initiatives intended to understand and protect its natural resources. The National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBio), founded in 1989, is imploding, thereby weakening of one of the nation’s pillars of scientific investigation. Costa Rica is not the only victim here. In a time during which more scientists are investigating plant compounds to develop drugs to improve our quality of life or treat illnesses, all inhabitants of this planet lose out, including those who have never heard of INBio....
