Posts

I have long been fascinated by the homes that animals construct. Over the years I have contemplated the nests of hundreds of different species—including ants, termites, wasps, birds, fish and mice—by poking and prodding nests in the wild, manipulating them in the laboratory and reviewing the work of other scientists. I have dug holes meters deep, trying to find the bottoms of ant nests. I have snorkeled over bluegill fish, watching them excavate and tend to their dish-shaped nests....

Before you get married, everyone tells you that marriage takes work. I never really believed it until my husband and I landed in therapy after four years, two kids and one seismically stressful cross-country move. Turns out you really can’t just flip the switch to autopilot and trust love to take care of itself; you have to devote actual time and effort to understanding and appreciating your spouse. Anyone who is married knows that’s not always a simple feat....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Are we facing insect Armageddon? A recent study found that German nature reserves have seen a 75% reduction in flying insects over the last 27 years. The researchers involved made stark warnings that this indicated a wider collapse of the general insect population that would bring about an ecological catastrophe if left unchecked. But is this an over-dramatisation of a single study in one country, or is there some real cause for concern?...

Every night, before he goes to sleep, Al Pierce, whose thunderous snoring used to drive his wife out of their bedroom, uses a small remote control to turn on an electronic sensor implanted in his chest. The sensor detects small changes in his breathing pattern—early signs that Pierce’s airway is beginning to collapse on itself. When the device senses these changes, it triggers a mild jolt of electricity that travels through a wire going up his neck....

The mysterious workings of a new catalyst could help produce fuels from water and improve fuel cells, scientists say. Splitting water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen elements is an important starting point for the development of clean renewable fuels. Producing hydrogen from water could also become a method to store excess renewable energy. It’s a process plants have already mastered via photosynthesis and humans are now working to replicate. “While photosynthesis is extremely good at oxidizing water, the truth is many man-made processes of doing these things are not that good,” said Thomas Jaramillo, a researcher at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis in Stanford University’s Department of Chemical Engineering....

Edited by Dava Sobel Elective Affinities: Ghazal of the Muon “Long-Awaited Muon Measurement Boosts Evidence for New Physics” — Scientific American, April 7, 2021 The Muon’s aberrant behavior, an extended quantum particle wobble, upends the Standard Theory, creating in Physics an existential wobble. Normally a wavelike excitation, spinning through Higgs’s gravitational field, unless caught and entangled in a moment of viable wobble, endowed with inertia and mass by its fellow particles’ embrace—a short- lived liaison, alas, for it soon dissipates in an unavoidable wobble....

The average American works 46.7 hours a week. Given how much time people spend on the job, it is little wonder that workplace stressors and dissatisfaction can drain well-being. Burnout is not the same as feeling down or having a bad day. It is a chronic state of being out of synch with your job. You may feel continually exhausted. Your passion for a project may fade. You may become cynical and lose confidence in your work....

Seven years ago representatives from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and other car manufacturers joined President Barack Obama to announce historic new vehicle mileage standards. The industry-supported targets would have doubled the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks in the U.S. to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. But in April the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to roll back part or all of the new standards, saying they were “wrong” and based on “politically charged expediency....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - People who occasionally work night shifts may be at a slightly increased risk of heart disease, according to a new study. Nurses in the study who worked at least three nights per month were more likely to develop heart problems over the next 24 years than nurses who stuck to daytime shifts. “It’s an important message because it’s a potentially modifiable risk factor,” said lead author Celine Vetter, of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston....

The scientist who announced last year that he had produced the world’s first gene-edited babies has been fired by his university. The decision, announced on 21 January by the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, in China’s Guandong province, follows a report of findings from an investigation into He’s work by provincial health authorities. A probe by the Guangdong health ministry found that He broke national regulations against using gene-editing for reproductive purposes, Chinese state media agency Xinhua reported on 21 January....

Light from some of the universe’s most energetic explosions is allowing scientists to probe the nature of space-time, according to new observations of so-called gamma-ray bursts from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Ikaros spacecraft. Photons released by these bursts help place limits on a unified model of all of the forces of nature — what scientists call a “theory of everything.” Using the Gamma-Ray Burst Polarimeter (GAP) onboard the spacecraft, a team of Japanese scientists have made the most precise measurements of energetic gamma-ray burst photons to date....

Stephen Hawking will spend eternity in the company of some other tremendously influential English scientists. The cosmologist and science communicator, who died March 14 at age 76, will have his ashes interred in Westminster Abbey later this year, officials with the famous London church announced today (March 20). “It is entirely fitting that the remains of Professor Stephen Hawking are to be buried in the Abbey, near those of distinguished fellow scientists....

Imagine if your biggest health problem could be solved with the flip of a switch. Deep-brain stimulation (DBS) offers such a dramatic recovery for a range of neurological illnesses, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and major depression. Yet the metal electrodes implanted in the brain are too bulky to tap into intricate neural circuitry with precision and corrode in contact with tissue, so their performance degrades over time. Now neurophysiologists have developed a method of DBS that avoids these problems by using microscopic magnets to stimulate neurons....

Patients undergoing significant operations, such as major cardiac or transplant surgery, typically require general anesthesia. But putting patients to “sleep” might not be the best way to describe the process, argued the authors of a new review paper, published in the December 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. What anesthesiologists are really doing is closer to putting patients—close to 60,000 each day in the U.S.—into a drug-induced coma....

The federal government announced on Tuesday that it is lifting a three-year moratorium on funding controversial research that involves genetically altering viruses in ways that could make them more contagious, more deadly, or both—and that critics say risks triggering a catastrophic pandemic. Called gain-of-function experiments, the studies aim to understand genetic changes that can make viruses such as bird flu, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) more transmissible from person to person....

To see the divide between the best artificial intelligence and the mental capabilities of a seven-year-old child, look no further than the popular video game Minecraft. A young human can learn how to find a rare diamond in the game after watching a 10-minute demonstration on YouTube. Artificial intelligence (AI) is nowhere close. But in a unique computing competition ending this month, researchers hope to shrink the gap between machine and child—and in doing so, help to reduce the computing power needed to train AIs....

Editors’ note: This story will appear in the October/November 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind. Many athletes credit drugs with improving their performance, but some of them may want to thank their brain instead. Mounting evidence suggests that the boost from human growth hormone (HGH), an increasingly popular doping drug, might be caused by the placebo effect. In a new double-blind trial funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency, in which neither researchers nor participants knew who was receiving HGH and who was taking a placebo, the researchers asked participants to guess whether or not they were on the real drug....

Here’s one advantage to armadillos’ steady northward march across the Southeast United States: They’re awfully handy to have as bait if, say, you’re a wildlife biologist looking to trap an alligator that has inexplicably settled into your local pond in north Georgia. That’s what happened last month near Atlanta: A biologist with Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, on the way to trap an alligator scaring residents, stopped en route to pick up some fresh road kill....

Connor was diagnosed with autism early — when he was just 18 months old. His condition was already obvious by then. “He was lining things up, switching lights on and off, on and off,” says his mother, Melissa. He was bright, but he didn’t speak much until age 3, and he was easily frustrated. Once he started school, he couldn’t sit still in class, called out answers without raising his hand and got visibly upset when he couldn’t master a math concept or a handwriting task quickly enough....

Dear EarthTalk: We’ve been hearing for years how producing red meat is bad for the environment while consuming it is bad for our health. How do other types of meat, fish, dairy and vegetable proteins stack up in terms of environmental and health impacts?—Julia Saperstein, via e-mail Not all forms of protein are created equal as to the environmental and health implications of raising and consuming them. A 2011 assessment by the non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that “different meats and different production systems have varying health, climate and other environmental impacts....