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Science news and technology updates from Scientific American
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The Physical Science behind Climate Change
07 10 2008 Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the July 2008 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long history of Nobelists publishing in Scientific American. For a scientist studying climate change, “eureka” moments are unusually rare. Instead progress is generally made by a painstaking piecing together of evidence from every new temperature measurement, satellite sounding or climate-model experiment. Data get checked and rechecked, ideas tested over and over again. Do the observations fit the predicted changes? Could there be some alternative explanation? Good climate scientists, like all good scientists, want to ensure that the highest standards of proof apply to everything they discover. [More]

Of Survival and Science
07 10 2008 Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the August 1999 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long history of Nobelists publishing in Scientific American. In 1996 Japan's Inamori Foundation asked Mario R. Capecchi to review his life and work in an acceptance speech for the prestigious Kyoto Prize. Capecchi dutifully described his pathbreaking research on a precision method for insertion or deletion of genes in mice. The most compelling part of the talk, however, had nothing to do with mouse chimeras or positive-negative selection. Rather Capecchi recounted memories of a childhood with the makings of a script Italian actor/director Roberto Benigni might use as an encore for his Academy Award-winning Life Is Beautiful. [More]

George Yancopoulos: Doing Well by Trying to Do Good
07 10 2008 His finalist year: 1976 [More]

Ranking Candidates Is More Accurate than Voting
07 10 2008 Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the March 2004 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long history of Nobelists publishing in Scientific American. Most American and French citizens--indeed, those of democracies the world over--spend little time contemplating their voting systems. That preoccupation is usually left to political and electoral analysts. But in the past few years, a large segment of both these countries’ populations have found themselves utterly perplexed. People in France wondered how a politician well outside the political mainstream made it to the final two-candidate runoff in the presidential election of 2002. In the U.S., many voters asked why the most popular candidate lost the election of 2000. [More]

Gut Microbe Strikes Again: Ulcer-causing bug may also prevent cancer
06 10 2008 The common ulcer-causing bug linked this summer to reduced rates of childhood asthma and allergies may also help protect adults against one type of cancer, according to a new analysis. Researchers report today in the journal Cancer Prevention Research that they found the stomach microbe Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) may help prevent a major form of cancer of the esophagus (the muscular tube that carries food and drink from the throat to the stomach). [More]

Celebrating The Nobel Prizes
06 10 2008 More than 130 Nobelists have written more than 200 articles for Scientific American. Here's a sampling, along with a look at the prizes themselves [More]

Montagnier, Barre-Sinoussi and zur Hausen Share Nobel
06 10 2008 A pair of French scientists who isolated the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and a German scientist who determined that human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine today. The Nobel committee's decision to give the prize to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who isolated HIV in 1983, caps a long, bitter dispute between the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where they made their discovery, and American scientist Robert Gallo, who linked HIV to AIDS separately but was snubbed by the Nobel committee. [More]

AIDS In 1988
06 10 2008 Editor's Note: We are posting this article, originally published in the October 1988 issue of Scientific American, because co-author Luc Montagnier will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. As recently as a decade ago it was widely believed that infectious disease was no longer much of a threat in the developed world. The remaining challenges to public health there, it was thought, stemmed from noninfectious conditions such as cancer, heart disease and degenerative diseases. That confidence was shattered in the early 1980's by the advent of AIDS. Here was a devastating disease caused by a class of infectious agents - retroviruses - that had first been found in human beings only a few years before. In spite of the startling nature of the epidemic, science responded quickly. In the two years from mid-1982 to mid-1984 the outlines of the epidemic were clarified, a new virus-the human immunodeficiency virus (HN)-was isolated and shown to cause the disease, a blood test was formulated and the virus's targets in the body were established. [More]

No Nobel for You: Top 10 Nobel Snubs
06 10 2008 Every year, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, announces up to three winners each in the scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. As of this morning, since 1901, 780 individuals have joined the hallowed ranks of Nobel laureates in these and other categories. And every year, there are murmurings--some louder than others--about the Nobel-worthy scientists who were overlooked. In 1974, when Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left out of the physics prize, her fellow astronomer and Nobel reject, Fred Hoyle, told reporters it was a "scientific scandal of major proportions." Physician-inventor Raymond Damadian famously took out full-page newspaper ads protesting his omission from the 2003 Nobel for MRI technology. This year, some will be asking questions about Robert Gallo, who did not share today's Nobel for medicine or physiology with Luc Montagnier and Francois Barre-Sinoussi. [More]

Musicians Think Differently from the Rest of Us
06 10 2008 [Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.] At the top of The New Yorker magazine’s entertainment listings is this warning: “Musicians live complicated lives…; it’s advisable to call ahead to confirm engagements.” [More]

One Quarter of World's Mammals Face Extinction
06 10 2008 The baiji dolphin is functionally extinct, orangutans are disappearing and even some species of bats--the most numerous of mammals--are dying out. A new survey of the world's 5,487 mammal species--from rodents to humans--reveals that one in four are facing imminent extinction. [More]

Montagnier, Barre-Sinoussi and zur Hausen Share Nobel
06 10 2008 A pair of French scientists who isolated the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and a German scientist who determined that human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine today. The Nobel committee's decision to give the Nobel to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who isolated HIV in 1983, caps a long, bitter dispute between the Pasteur Institut in Paris, where they made their discovery, and American scientist Robert Gallo, who linked HIV to AIDS separately but was snubbed by the Nobel committee. [More]

AIDS In 1988
06 10 2008 Editor's Note: We are posting this article, originally published in the October 1988 issue of Scientific American, because co-author Luc Montagnier will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. As recently as a decade ago it was widely believed that infectious disease was no longer much of a threat in the developed world. The remaining challenges to public health there, it was thought, stemmed from noninfectious conditions such as cancer, heart disease and degenerative diseases. That confidence was shattered in the early 1980's by the advent of AIDS. Here was a devastating disease caused by a class of infectious agents-retroviruses-that had first been found in human beings only a few years before. In spite of the startling nature of the epidemic, science responded quickly. In the two years from mid-1982 to mid-1984 the outlines of the epidemic were clarified, a new virus-the human immunodeficiency virus (HN)-was isolated and shown to cause the disease, a blood test was formulated and the virus's targets in the body were established. [More]

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
06 10 2008 [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Germany’s Harald zur Hausen and France’s Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi share the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, awarded October 6th. [More]

Global Warming: Beyond the Tipping Point
06 10 2008 The basic proposition behind the science of climate change is so firmly rooted in the laws of physics that no reasonable person can dispute it. All other things being equal, adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere--by, for example, burning millions of tons of oil, coal and natural gas--will make it warm up. That, as the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Svante Arrhenius first explained in 1896, is because CO2 is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun, which heats the planet during the day. But it is relatively opaque to infrared, which the earth tries to reradiate back into space at night. If the planet were a featureless, monochromatic billiard ball without mountains, oceans, vegetation and polar ice caps, a steadily rising concentration of CO2 would mean a steadily warming earth. Period. But the earth is not a billiard ball. It is an extraordinarily complex, messy geophysical system with dozens of variables, most of which change in response to one another. Oceans absorb vast amounts of heat, slowing the warm-up of the atmosphere, yet they also absorb excess CO2. Vegetation soaks up CO2 as well but eventually rereleases the gas as plants rot or burn--or, in a much longer-term scenario--drift to the bottom of the ocean to form sedimentary rock such as limestone. Warmer temperatures drive more evaporation from the oceans; the water vapor itself is a heat-trapping gas, whereas the clouds it forms block some of the sun’s warming rays. Volcanoes belch CO2, but they also spew particulates that diffuse the sun’s rays. And that’s just a partial list. [More]

Brain-Scan Cell Mystery Solved
06 10 2008 Since its discovery in the early 1990s, functional MRI has been the basis for more than 19,000 studies of the living, working brain. The technique allows scientists an unprecedented glimpse of the brain regions that are most active during particular tasks or states of mind, but it does not do so directly: the scans measure blood flow, which seems to increase around neurons that are firing. Neurons are not directly connected to blood vessels, however, so until now the mechanism underlying fMRI’s robust success has been a mystery. Now a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reveals that the support cells dubbed astrocytes (because of their star-shaped bodies) form the link between neurons and blood vessels, as reported in the July 7 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The neuroscientists used a technique called two-photon microscopy, which harnesses light particles to image very small structures, to observe cells in ferrets’ brains. As the animals were shown different animated graphics, neurons responded within milliseconds, and astrocytes became active seconds later--matching the time delay that neuroimagers have long known accompanies blood flow to active brain regions. When the M.I.T. team blocked astrocyte function, the ferrets’ neurons fired as usual, but blood flow did not increase. [More]

Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth
06 10 2008 Atoms are now such a commonplace idea that it is hard to remember how radical they used to seem. When scientists first hypothesized atoms centuries ago, they despaired of ever observing anything so small, and many questioned whether the concept of atoms could even be called scientific. Gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with Albert Einstein’s 1905 analysis of Brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid. Even then, it took another 20 years for physicists to develop a theory explaining atoms--namely, quantum mechanics--and another 30 for physicist Erwin Müller to make the first microscope images of them. Today entire industries are based on the characteristic properties of atomic matter. Physicists’ understanding of the composition of space and time is following a similar path, but several steps behind. Just as the behavior of materials indicates that they consist of atoms, the behavior of space and time suggests that they, too, have some fine-scale structure--either a mosaic of spacetime “atoms” or some other filigree work. Material atoms are the smallest indivisible units of chemical compounds; similarly, the putative space atoms are the smallest indivisible units of distance. They are generally thought to be about 10–35 meter in size, far too tiny to be seen by today’s most powerful instruments, which probe distances as short as 10–18 meter. Consequently, many scientists question whether the concept of atomic spacetime can even be called scientific. Undeterred, other researchers are coming up with possible ways to detect such atoms indirectly. [More]

What is benzene?
04 10 2008 Apple is investigating a complaint that its pre-2008 Mac Pros emit fumes from the chemical benzene. One user told Apple that he noticed a strong smell when he unpacked his Mac last year, and that 10 days later, he developed nose and throat irritation, reports the French newspaper Liberation. (A clunky English translation of the report can be found here.) [More]

Molecular Machines That Control Genes
04 10 2008 Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the February 1995 issue of Scientific American. We are reposting it this week because Robert Tijan has just been named president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Asthma, cancer, heart disease, immune disorders and viral infections are seemingly disparate conditions. Yet they turn out to share a surprising feature. All arise to a great extent from overproduction or underproduction of one or more proteins, the molecules that carry out most reactions in the body. This realization has recently lent new urgency to research aimed at understanding, and ultimately manipulating, the fascinating biochemical machinery that regulates an essential step in protein synthesis: the transcription of genes. For a protein to be generated, the gene that specifies its composition must be transcribed, or copied, from DNA into strands of messenger RNA, which later serve as the templates from which the protein is manufactured. [More]

How to Fix the U.S. Financial Crisis
04 10 2008 Editor's Note: This "Sustainable Developments" column will be printed in the December 2008 issue of Scientific American. The origin of the U.S. financial crisis is that commercial banks and investment banks lent vast sums--trillions of dollars--for housing purchases and consumer loans to borrowers ill-equipped to repay. The easy lending pushed up housing prices around the U.S., which then ratcheted still higher when speculators bought houses on the expectation of yet further price increases. When the easy lending slowed and then stopped during 2006-07, the housing prices peaked and began to fall. The housing boom began to unravel and now threatens an economy-wide bust. [More]

Using Plants Instead of Petroleum to Make Jet Fuel
03 10 2008 Chemical engineers in North Dakota have successfully turned oil from plants--canola (rapeseed), coconuts and soybeans--into jet fuel indistinguishable from the conventional kind, according to U.S. government tests. Working with the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), scientists at the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota turned these plant oils into fuel that had a similar density, energy content and even freezing point. [More]

The Environmental Dangers of Backyard Fire Pits
03 10 2008 Dear EarthTalk: Backyard fire pits have become the latest must-have gardening feature. How bad are they on the environment? -- Michael O’Laughlin, Tigard, OR [More]

Biden and Palin talk energy and environment
03 10 2008 Last night's debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin showcased their differences on energy policy and climate change, and also reminded us of some intra-ticket differences on those key scientific issues. [More]

Cocaine Addiction Stems from Desire, Not the Drug
03 10 2008 Scientists know that addictive drugs can mess with the brain’s circuitry and hijack its reward systems, but a July 31 rat study in the journal Neuron shows that psychological factors may be more instrumental in causing these changes than a drug’s chemical effects are. Cocaine use triggers long-lasting cellular memories in the brain, the study found--but only if the user consumes the drug voluntarily. A team led by Billy Chen and Antonello Bonci, both at the University of California, San Francisco, trained three groups of rats to press levers that delivered cocaine, food or sugar. The researchers injected cocaine into a fourth group. When they examined the rats’ brain tissue, they found an increase in synaptic strength within the reward center in those rats that had self-administered sugar, food or cocaine. These cellular memories were short-lived in the sugar and food groups, but in rats that had self-administered cocaine they persisted for up to three months after consumption had stopped. Most interestingly, the brains of rats that had consumed cocaine involuntarily did not show such imprints. [More]

Mothers and Children Unite Under 1Sky
03 10 2008 One way to get legislators to pay more attention to climate change is to put emotional messages in front of them. The national organization 1Sky has convened an unusual team, built on mothers and their kids, to appear at more than 500 congressional district offices and almost 500 climate change rallies across the country. In June, 1Sky turned up the heat even further when it delivered more than 130 banners and images made by mothers, children and other family members to 175 House and Senate offices. The effort came immediately after the Senate killed a leading bill on climate change, the Lieberman-Warner act. The intent was to encourage lawmakers to keep pushing for bold, innovative legislation. [More]

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