In the middle of his landmark book On the Origin of Species, Darwin had a crisis of faith. In a bout of honesty, he wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree....
The 61st Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany, is taking place from June 26 to July 1. At the event, about 20 past laureates in physiology or medicine will mingle with more than 550 young scientists. In honor of the meeting Scientific American has collected articles that Nobel Prize winners have published in the magazine recently as well as more than 60 years ago. You can find a number of excerpts from those articles in the June issue and enjoy others here....
About 100 times rarer than Parkinson’s, and often mistaken for it, progressive supranuclear palsy afflicts fewer than 20,000 people in the U.S.—and two thirds do not even know they have it. Yet this little-known brain disorder that killed comic actor Dudley Moore in 2002 is quietly becoming a gateway for research that could lead to powerful therapies for a range of intractable neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer’s and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disorder linked to concussions and head trauma....
A simple peptide could save countless future snakebite victims in developing countries, researchers announced at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Denver. The antivenom relies on a sequence of just 11 amino acids, copied from an opossum protein. The research team, led by Claire F. Komives of San Jose State University, also demonstrated that genetically modified bacteria could produce the protective peptide at low costs. Komives unveiled the antivenom candidate in a Division of Biochemical Technology session in Denver on Sunday....
On a Friday evening in mid-January, Jackson, a five-year-old chimp living at Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone, alarmed his keepers by ignoring his dinner. By Saturday, he was lethargic and having seizures. Jackson has improved since then—he is eating and seems stable, despite lingering diarrhea—but his survival is by no means guaranteed. “The disease is very much like that: you see ups and downs,” says veterinarian Andrea Pizarro, general manager at Tacugama....
Researchers worldwide are racing to develop potential vaccines and drugs to fight the new coronavirus, called SARS-Cov-2. Now, a group of researchers has figured out the molecular structure of a key protein that the coronavirus uses to invade human cells, potentially opening the door to the development of a vaccine, according to new findings. Previous research revealed that coronaviruses invade cells through so-called “spike” proteins, but those proteins take on different shapes in different coronaviruses....
The U.S. Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane is quietly chalking up mileage in space more than two months after its latest launch into orbit. The robotic X-37B space plane soared into orbit atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Dec. 11. The mini-shuttle’s mission is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-3 (OTV-3), since it is the third classified mission under the Air Force’s X-37B program....
The ascendance of the phrase “post-truth” in 2016 has left many science advocates stunned by this apparently growing willingness by some of the public to embrace ideologies that favor clear falsehoods over well-established facts. But take heart: Real science and the enduring truths of the natural world can still be found everywhere—and the holiday season offers some opportunities to spread them around, especially via tech gadgets that always play a role in year-end gift giving....
Oyster reefs once carpeted much of the seafloor, filtering water, stabilizing shorelines and providing habitats for a vast array of life. But in the past 200 years net-dragging fishing boats have destroyed most of these reefs around the world. Now, in the Journal of Applied Ecology, researchers at Australia’s University of Adelaide reveal a curious fact that may help rebuild such formations: baby oysters follow the sounds of shrimp. Australian flat oysters’ microscopic larvae drift in currents and swim with hairlike cilia, searching for a hard surface—ideally a thriving reef made of shells from other oysters—to cement themselves to for the rest of their lives....
No one expects to live a before-and-after kind of life, divided into the moments before and the moments after a single defining event. When the two of us met, fell in love and got married in Sonia’s backyard in Hermitage, Pa., we had no idea we were in our “before” life. We had no intention of quitting our careers in law and engineering and taking entry-level jobs in a different field....
Consider how mystifying a walk through an art museum can be. Although dramatic changes in style are simple for anyone to spot, imagine asking someone, on their very first visit: “which of these paintings are the best and which are the worst?” Yet a connoisseur, after learning to identify the finer points of various styles, would have no trouble picking out his or her favorite pieces. A much easier task would be to identify good children’s artwork....
Readers intent on enlightening me often send me books and essays written by them or, less often, others. Now and then one of these offerings grabs my attention before I hit “delete.” A recent example: Robert L. Fry, a physicist-engineer at Johns Hopkins, recently e-mailed me a 92-year-old paper that he thought, given how I tout the idea of doubt, I might enjoy. He was right. Felix S. Cohen, a legal scholar specializing in Native American rights, wrote “What Is a Question?...
Three weeks before her eighth birthday, Josie got her period at school. Magen, her mother, stopped at a drugstore for supplies before picking up her daughter. In the tampon aisle, she found a shelf of “tween” menstrual pads promising to “fit smaller bodies.” She remembers thinking, “How does this even exist as a product?” Magen was heartbroken that her seven-year-old was menstruating but not completely surprised. She had begun to notice her daughter’s body odor when Josie was six....
The standard safety goggles that surgeons and other doctors often wear have a single important purpose: to protect the eyes from spurts and splashes of blood and other bodily fluids. Now health care professionals are welcoming a new generation of medical spectacles that not only shield the eyes but also enhance them. INJURY NAME: O2Amp MAKER: 2AI Labs PURPOSE: The glasses reveal bruises, rashes and internal injuries invisible to the naked eye....
Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....
One of the most alluring and valuable of these plants is a flower found nowhere else on Earth. It has a straw-like stem and a white head the size of a peanut. Lacking the gaudiness of a greenhouse rose or the steamy sensuality of an orchid, these flowers, individually, seem unremarkable. They achieve their beauty through multiplication, when dozens of them are dried and bound into a mesmerizing bouquet in the palette of an eternal autumn....
FINALIST YEAR: 1984 HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Identifying malaria treatment targets WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Atom Sarkar was destined for scientific pursuits. His moniker is no coincidence; his biophysicist father wanted to name the boy after something related to his work. After his little sister contracted malaria at age six during a visit to India, a teenaged Sarkar, who had access to a lab at The Rockefeller University in New York City, decided to research the disease....
A manuscript that lay unnoticed by scientists for decades has revealed that Albert Einstein once dabbled with an alternative to the Big Bang theory, proposing instead that the Universe expanded steadily and eternally. The recently uncovered work, written in 1931, is reminiscent of a theory championed by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle nearly 20 years later. Einstein soon abandoned the idea, but the manuscript reveals his continued hesitance to accept that the Universe was created during a single explosive event....
Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The analysis, led by Goddard director Jim Hansen, attempts to debunk popular belief that the planet is cooling. It finds that global temperatures over the past decade have “continued to rise rapidly,” despite large year-to-year fluctuations associated with the tropical El Niño–La Niña cycles. The analysis also predicts, assuming current El Niño conditions hold, that 2010 will go down in history as the hottest year on record despite an unusually snowy winter in the Northern Hemisphere....
High atop a platform inside a clean room at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) launch site in South America, scientists painstakingly searched for microbes near the Ariane 5 rocket due to launch the Herschel space telescope in May 2009. Only very unusual organisms can survive the repeated sterilization procedures in clean rooms, not to mention the severe lack of nutrients available. But the scientists’ careful inspection was fruitful, turning up a type of bacteria that had been seen only once before....
