Posts

For decades, the big guns of American science have been the U.S. Department of Energy’s particle colliders, which investigate the nature of matter by accelerating subatomic particles and smashing them together. Colliders at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered exotic particles such as the top quark and revealed phenomena that hint at new laws of physics. But this great American enterprise, like so many others, is now moving overseas....

On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower on the Austin campus and shot 46 people. Whitman, an engineering student and a former U.S. Marine sharpshooter, was the last person anyone expected to go on a killing spree. After Brown was assigned as the state’s consulting psychiatrist to investigate the incident and later, when he interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers for a pilot study, he discovered that most of the killers, including Whitman, shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids....

SURELY THERE MUST have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional answer is that this is not the job of the brain at all but rather of the soul. Hovering above the brain like Casper the Friendly Ghost, the soul freely perturbs the networks of the brain, thereby triggering the neural activity that will ultimately lead to behavior....

Plants are often thought of as the masters of photosynthesis, the process by which sunlight, carbon dioxide and water are converted into usable energy, but when it comes to efficiency, they are beaten out by a rather surprising rival: bacteria. Plants use resources, such as minerals and water, to promote their growth, but they also are restrained by the enzymes they need to complete photosynthesis, particularly an enzyme commonly known as RuBisCo....

When you first meet dark energy, it seems so charming. An alluring stranger, outsider to the Standard Model of particle physics, it entered astronomers’ lives a decade ago and won their hearts by fixing all kinds of problems, such as discrepancies in the age of the universe and the cosmic census of matter. Cosmic expansion has got its groove back: once thought to be winding down, it is actually speeding up....

Researchers have gained control of the elusive “particle” of sound, the phonon. Although phonons—the smallest units of the vibrational energy that makes up sound waves—are not matter, they can be considered particles the way photons are particles of light. Photons commonly store information in prototype quantum computers, which aim to harness quantum effects to achieve unprecedented processing power. Using sound instead may have advantages, although it would require manipulating phonons on very fine scales....

A job that’s been held by some of the nation’s top scientists is now occupied by a 31-year-old politics major from Princeton University. And it’s unlikely to change soon, observers say, leaving President Trump without a science adviser as the administration wrestles with a severe outbreak of the flu, lead-poisoned drinking water and record-breaking disasters that many scientists say are sharpened by rising temperatures. More than a year into his term, Trump hasn’t identified a potential nominee for the key position held by prominent scientists in Republican and Democratic administrations alike....

Species from sharks and sea cucumbers to tuna and jellyfish could find new safe havens soon under a U.N. plan to protect more ocean habitat. At a meeting in New York next week, officials hope to create a “robust system” to increase the number of marine protected habitats in international waters, or high seas, from human activities like overfishing. Currently, individual countries can easily create regulations to protect marine habitats in their own waters or exclusive economic zones, said Elizabeth Wilson, director of international ocean policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts....

A week ago, the International Energy Agency (IEA) dropped a bombshell: Global greenhouse gas emissions produced by burning fossil fuels for energy last year were the same as they were in 2013. That marked the first time in 40 years that energy-related emissions were flat while the economy grew. The announcement flew in the face of established economic wisdom, which has long assumed that economic growth is inextricably linked to rising fossil fuel consumption and with it, rising climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions....

Alison Gopnik is a psychologist and philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s also the author of the newly released book The Philosophical Baby, which explores the inner world of young children. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gopnik about why babies might be more conscious than adults, the benefits of having an imaginary friend and why play, not necessity, is the mother of invention. LEHRER: What first drew you to study the baby mind?...

Becca writes: “I’d love to hear your thoughts on mycoprotein. I’ve been using it as a chicken substitute but I don’t know much about it.” “Myco” refers to things related to fungi but mycoprotein is not from mushrooms. Rather, it’s produced by a thread-like fungus that’s found in the soil. The official name is Fusarium venenatum. Mycoprotein is a relatively new thing. It was literally cooked up back in the 1980s by some British industrialists who were worried about a global food crisis–specifically, they were worried that we would be unable to produce enough protein to sustain a growing population....

An enormous iceberg, a little bigger than the state of Rhode Island, has broken off of Antarctica. The finger-shaped chunk of ice, which is roughly 105 miles (170 kilometers) long and 15 miles (25 kilometers) wide, was spotted by satellites as it calved from the western side of Antarctica’s Ronne Ice Shelf, according to the European Space Agency. The berg is now floating freely on the Weddell Sea, a large bay in the western Antarctic where explorer Ernest Shackleton once lost his ship, the Endurance, to pack ice....

Like a tomato, which could arguably be a fruit or a vegetable, burnout can arguably be a diagnosable disorder or not. While it’s not recognized as a disorder in the U.S., it is in Sweden and it makes an appearance in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) as a “state of vital exhaustion.” Regardless of whether you call it burnout or vital exhaustion, it’s a state known to many of us, and it ravages the body, contributing to everything from hypertension to substance abuse....

Pandemics seem to have a way of reminding us about things we might normally take for granted: The feel of a hug or handshake. The number of times we touch our faces or wash our hands each day. Even our intake of breath—and what it might feel like if COVID-19 blocked our ability to breathe as effortlessly as we normally do. This is a moment in history that has many of us thinking more about our lungs than we ever have before....

Engineers can only stuff so much computing power into devices like smartphones and tablets before they run up against physical barriers. Although Moore’s law famously predicts that the number of transistors people can squeeze onto memory chips will double every couple of years,technology cannot be miniaturized indefinitely. Researchers are trying to get around this by starting small—using individual atoms—to make big gains in data-storage capacity. Now, a team has developed a 1-kilobyte rewritable data-storage device using chlorine atoms arranged on a small metal surface....

Editor’s note: Legged robots have the ability to follow troops on long journeys across extremely difficult terrain. In our series on legged robotics, Scientific American Online explores the challenges such technology poses as well as two DARPA projects—BigDog and LittleDog—that have shown great promise. If BigDog is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) dopey but lovable Great Dane, LittleDog is its extremely intelligent—if high-strung—Jack Russell terrier. Shortly after DARPA commissioned Boston Dynamics to build its BigDog autonomous legged robot, the agency decided it should broaden its research to include a likewise legged device that was aware of its environment and deliberately placed its feet to avoid falling....

A tough year just got tougher for US fusion researchers. The country’s flagship experimental fusion reactor has broken down, less than a year after completing a four-year, US$94-million upgrade. Now officials at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey are investigating whether problems encountered during fabrication of a key component caused the reactor to fail. Lab officials say that the machine could be offline for up to a year....

A woolly mammoth carcass recently unearthed in Siberia could be the best hope yet for scientists aiming to clone the massive, long-extinct beast. The mammoth specimen, which was discovered in 2013 in a remote part of Siberia, oozed a deep red liquid when it was first discovered. Scientists have now analyzed the mammoth to understand how it lived and died — and whether it will yield enough undamaged DNA to make cloning the extinct creature a reality....

Most children have a decent sense of reality. They get that dinosaurs existed and that SpongeBob is fictional. But a new study found that in the young brain, the realness of cultural fabrications such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny exists somewhere in between reality and make believe. And it concluded that our rituals are responsible for a child’s acceptance of Santa’s yearly sleigh ride and the Tooth Fairy’s cash deliveries....

Dear EarthTalk: Has anyone calculated the energy wasted at night by unnecessary lighting in and around buildings? What can we do to reduce our light footprint?—Bill Rehkamp, via e-mail Americans do squander a lot of electricity keeping things lit up at night while most of us sleep. This light blocks our view of the night sky and stars, creates glare hazards on roads, messes with our circadian sleep-wake rhythms, interrupts the patterns of nocturnal wildlife, and is by and large annoying....