Steven Weinberg, who died in July at the age of 88, was not only a Nobel laureate physicist but also one of the most eloquent science writers of the last half century. His most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. Having told the story of how our universe came into being with the big bang some 13....
From Nature magazine It may just look like your average rock, but in fact it’s an extra-special delivery from the red planet. Laboratory analysis has revealed that a specimen bought from a Moroccan meteorite dealer in 2011 is the first sample of Martian origin that is similar to the water-rich rocks examined by NASA’s rovers. The meteorite, dubbed Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, contains a concentration of water by weight about ten times higher than in any of the other 100 or so known Martian meteorites — those rare rocks that get ejected from the Martian surface into space when an asteroid hits the planet, and eventually find their way to Earth....
When a single neuron fires, it is an isolated chemical blip. When many fire together, they form a thought. How the brain bridges the gap between these two tiers of neural activity remains a great mystery, but a new kind of technology is edging us closer to solving it. The glowing splash of cyan in the photo above comes from a type of biosensor that can detect the release of very small amounts of neurotransmitters, the signaling molecules that brain cells use to communicate....
Dear EarthTalk: Is nature photography good or bad for the environment?—Cal Moss, Camden, Maine Nature photography is a wonderful way to share the beauty and wonder of the natural world with others who don’t have the opportunity to see a given subject first-hand. An obvious benefit of the art is raising awareness about and generating empathy for special landscapes and species. But too much love can be a bad thing if landscapes are trampled and wildlife is frightened—all in the name of leaving only footprints....
Has the Internet dumbed down society or simply become an external storage unit that enhances the human brain’s memory capacity? With Google, Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia at our beck and call via smart phones, tablets and laptops, the once essential function of committing facts to memory has become little more than a flashback to flash cards. This shift is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it irreversible, according to a team of researchers whose study on search engines and learning appears in the July 15 issue of Science....
In the Andaman Islands, a helicopter delivering food and water to survivors of December’s tsunami briefly found itself under assault from the arrows of xenophobic Sentinelese tribesmen. Outsiders feared the flooding might finish the already endangered societies native to the islands. But the Sentinelese attack was welcome proof that at least some of them were still alive. In these first weeks after the tsunami, with the death toll still climbing past 225,000, good news has been redefined as the absence of bad....
A popular method of editing genes in research labs could trigger an immune reaction when used in people, according to a new study, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. But it is too soon to know how serious a problem this could pose for gene therapy, which aims to stop diseases caused by defective genes. “The big question will be: What impact does it actually have therapeutically?...
When we stare into the periodic table, it’s like looking into a mirror. The essential soft metals we need for life are sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium, which dissolve easily into the water that makes up much of our body. Among the hard metals we use are iron, zinc and copper. Nearly half of all our proteins contain a metal. Most of us know iron best for its role in our blood....
Today’s Internet is a playground for hackers. From insecure communication links to inadequately guarded data in the cloud, vulnerabilities are everywhere. But if quantum physicists have their way, such weaknesses will soon go the way of the dodo. They want to build quantum networks sporting full-blown quantumness, where information is created, stored and moved around in ways that mirror the bizarre behavior of the quantum world—think of the metaphorical cats that can be both dead and alive or particles that can exert “spooky action at a distance....
Imagine a simple blood test that could flag most kinds of cancers at the earliest, most curable stage. For decades that idea—the “liquid biopsy”—has been a holy grail of oncology. Liquid biopsies could, in theory, detect a tumor well before it could be found by touch, symptoms or imaging. Blood tests could obviate the need for surgeons to cut tissue samples from suspicious lumps and lesions and make it possible to reveal cancer lurking in places needles and scalpels cannot safely reach....
For the past decade or so scientists have noticed Earth is being bombarded with far more antimatter than expected. Now they are closing in on this strange bombardment’s source, tentatively linking it with the enigmatic dark matter thought to make up roughly five sixths of all matter in the universe. Every particle of normal matter has an antimatter counterpart, equal in mass but opposite in charge. For instance, the antiparticle of the negatively charged electron is the positively charged positron, a particle that makes up the bulk of antimatter striking the top of Earth’s atmosphere from outer space....
Nuclear fusion could potentially provide abundant, safe energy without the significant production of greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear waste. But it has remained frustratingly elusive as a practical technology for decades. An important milestone toward that goal has now been passed: a fusion reaction that derives most of its heat from its nuclear reactions themselves rather than the energy pumped into the fuel from outside. A team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California has reported this so-called burning plasma condition using an approach called inertial-confinement fusion, where the ferociously high temperatures and pressures needed to initiate fusion in a fuel of hydrogen isotopes are produced by intense pulses of laser light....
The beautiful thing about disposing of your old electronics is that doing the right thing gives you more than a rosy feeling; it can actually pay you. The trick is to hand off your own gear immediately, while it still has some value. For example, suppose you had a 32-gigabyte AT&T iPhone at the time the Verizon iPhone 4 came out. You could have sold it to online buy-back site Gazelle....
The depressing task of monitoring ocean acidification just got a little easier. A collection of scientists from Europe, the U.S. and India have developed a technique that could provide the first global and nearly real-time assessment of our rapidly acidifying seas. Their findings were published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology on Monday, showing how data from satellites that measure salinity and other ocean conditions could be combined to produce a whole new way of monitoring acidification....
French drugmaker Sanofi recently announced a recall of over-the-counter Zantac, the widely used acid reflux medication, in the U.S. and Canada over concerns of possible contamination from a probable carcinogen. This action followed recalls by manufacturers and retailers of generic versions of the drug, called ranitidine. The recalls have prompted questions about whether the drugs’ levels of a chemical called N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA)—which has been linked to cancer in animals—pose a more serious health risk than initially reported....
In the world of science, Richard Leakey is as close to royalty by birth as one gets. The son of Louis and Mary Leakey, whose dramatic discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania helped establish Africa as the birthplace of humankind, Richard is best known for his excavation of a nearly complete 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of “Turkana Boy”—a young Homo erectus male found near Lake Turkana in Kenya in 1984. In 1989 Leakey was appointed to head Kenya’s fledgling wildlife service, where he developed a reputation as an incorruptible if confrontational public servant....
On October 5, 2006, the BBC reported that the second most senior leader of terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, Abu Ayyab Al-Masri, was killed in a raid in Haditha, Iraq. This event would have been a crowning achievement for global anti-terrorism efforts, except that Al-Masri was not in fact dead. The international media and U.S. military forces were mistaken about Al-Masri’s whereabouts in the raid. Proving to be a slippery and elusive figure, Al-Masri was declared dead at least once more on May 6, 2007 by The Economist, and then most recently in April 2010 by numerous reputable newspapers and websites....
Health officials now believe the Zika virus is being transmitted by mosquitoes in parts of Miami Beach, a development that is expected to lead to a travel warning for one of the country’s best known travel destinations. Roughly a handful of cases have cropped up that are believed to be linked to that part of the city, a health official who spoke on condition of anonymity told STAT. Late Thursday afternoon health authorities were working to finalize the area that would be covered by a new travel advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....
1972 A Muon Phone Someday “In April a sequence of Morse-code V’s (dot dot dot dash) was transmitted by a beam of muons that passed through a five-foot wall and traveled 150 meters before reaching a ‘terminal’ consisting of two coincidence counters. The message was encoded by mechanically interposing or not interposing a three-inch block of brass in the muon beam every time a 12-billion-electron-volt synchrotron at the Argonne National Laboratory emitted a short burst of particles....
Thirty-one years ago, the federal government began rewarding communities that took action to minimize their flood risk with an innovative program that gives residents discounts on their flood insurance premiums. The Community Rating System is popular—roughly 3.5 million property owners are getting discounts on flood policies they buy through the federal National Flood Insurance Program because their government has done something noteworthy to reduce flood damage. But a Brown University researcher says the program is doing little to improve the nation’s flood resilience because it doesn’t actually encourage communities to take new steps....
