Science news and technology updates from Scientific American
Custom-designed proteins made with the aid of computers could fight chemical weapons such as nerve gas and help decontaminate toxic-waste sites, scientists say.
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Posted on 7 February 2012 | 11:00 pm
Over the weekend Erin Brockovich made the news yet again as she and her nonprofit team descended on the village of Le Roy, N.Y., determined to test for environmental toxins that might be giving the town's teenagers symptoms of Tourette's syndrome. She has reportedly been stonewalled thus far by local officials, who have already ruled out toxins as the cause of last October's sudden outbreak of tics and involuntary movements in 12 girls who attend Le Roy Junior–Senior High School. An environmental testing company surveyed the air and water and found nothing amiss, and a local neurologist concluded upon examining the girls that they had "conversion disorder," a catchall moniker for physical symptoms that originate in the mind because of stress, trauma or even mass hysteria.
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Posted on 2 February 2012 | 11:05 pm
Key concepts [More]
Posted on 2 February 2012 | 3:00 pm
KWADUKUZA, South Africa--A Zulu crowd's ululations welcomed Jacob Zuma, president of the Republic of South Africa, back to KwaZulu–Natal, his home province. He had come to tell them of his commitment to bring them, and the rest of the nation, better access to energy--as well as to announce the distribution of solar-powered hot water heaters and LED lighting systems as well as clean-burning cookstoves.
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Posted on 31 January 2012 | 9:01 pm
How many chargers do you own? One for your cell phone? Another for your laptop? Yet another for your tablet, podcast player or even electric toothbrush? It adds up.
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Posted on 29 January 2012 | 2:00 pm
Algae naturally produce oil. When it’s processed, that oil can be turned into biofuel, an alternative energy source. There’s just one snag--harvesting the oil from algae-filled water is prohibitively expensive. But researchers have come up with an effervescent solution: bubbles smaller than the width of a human hair can help reduce the costs of collecting algae oil.
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Posted on 28 January 2012 | 12:47 am
CHEMISTRY COMMENTARY [More]
Posted on 27 January 2012 | 5:00 pm
Carmakers learned years ago it's not easy to make a practical hydrogen fuel cell. Yet hydrogen fuel cells do work, and they're greener than batteries. So how about using a mini hydrogen fuel cell to recharge something small--like your mobile phone battery?
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Posted on 27 January 2012 | 12:53 am
Among the first things you notice when you step into the corner office of Harvard University professor Joanna Aizenberg are the playthings. Behind her desk sit a sand dollar, an azure butterfly mounted in a box, a plastic stand with long fibers that erupt in color when a switch is pulled, and haphazard rows of toys. Especially numerous are the Rubik’s cubes--the classic three-by-three, of course, but also ones with four, five, six and even seven mini cubes along each edge. An eight-year-old would be in heaven.
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Posted on 26 January 2012 | 1:45 pm
Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk, posted on January 25th, 2012. I’m Steve Mirsky. Last night, President Obama delivered the State of the Union Address. Here is a little more than six minutes of it, the sections dealing with research, technology and energy. Anywhere I’ve made an edit in the audio, you’ll hear a musical interlude. And I’ve lowered the volume on some of the applause for the sake of all of our ears. I think science-interested listeners across the political spectrum can find points of both strong agreement and major disagreement in these few minutes of the talk:
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Posted on 25 January 2012 | 6:00 pm
You need to get out more. Whether it's smog or tiny particles of pollution , Americans face the bulk of their health risks from bad air inside. Why? We spend most of our time indoors.
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Posted on 22 January 2012 | 2:00 pm
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Mark Lynas's book , The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans .
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Posted on 20 January 2012 | 9:31 pm
Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin--a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel .
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Posted on 19 January 2012 | 8:01 pm
Editor's Note : Paul Anastas, the father of green chemistry, is leaving his high-ranking post at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency next month and returning to Yale University . During an interview with Jane Kay of Environmental Health News, Anastas, who will remain at his post for another month or so, said there has been a "growing realization across EPA" that green chemistry "can meet environmental and economic goals simultaneously." During his two years as science advisor and assistant administrator at EPA's Office of Research and Development , Anastas played a key role in many important decisions and issues, including the use of dispersants during the Gulf oil spill and the agency's long-awaited analysis of dioxin.--Marla Cone, Editor in Chief [More]
Posted on 17 January 2012 | 7:15 pm
Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital.
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Posted on 17 January 2012 | 4:12 pm
Americans produce 32 billion gallons of sewage every day. And we need to start drinking it. After treating it, of course. So argues a report from the U.S. National Research Council . Why drink reprocessed pee? Because freshwater supplies are getting squeezed .
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Posted on 16 January 2012 | 4:32 pm
New York's emerging plan to regulate natural gas drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale needs to go further to safeguard drinking water, environmentally sensitive areas and gas industry workers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has informed state officials.
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Posted on 14 January 2012 | 2:00 pm
POLOCHIC VALLEY, GUATEMALA--Echoes from armed raids still seem to resound in this valley, eight hours north of the capital city. In early 2011 military and paramilitary forces forcibly evicted 13 communities of indigenous Mayan peasants--some 300 families were dispossessed of disputed land they had been living on for three years to secure the property rights of one powerful local family, the Widmanns, and its agribusiness company Chabil Utzaj.
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Posted on 13 January 2012 | 8:01 pm
For years researchers have been trying to figure out the best ways of making plants produce biofuels. But there is a fundamental problem: photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into stored chemical energy, is highly inefficient. Plants turn only 1 to 3 percent of sunlight into carbohydrates. That is one reason why so much land has to be devoted to growing corn for ethanol, among other bad biofuel ideas. And yet plants also have many advantages: they absorb carbon dioxide at low concentrations directly from the atmosphere, and each plant cell can repair itself when damaged.
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Posted on 13 January 2012 | 1:00 pm
In a sign of pessimism about humanity's future , scientists today set the hands of the infamous "Doomsday Clock" forward one minute from two years ago.
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Posted on 10 January 2012 | 9:15 pm