Wendy Science

Cadmium chloride is a nasty chemical. If it gets on the skin, it releases cadmium, which has been linked to cancer, lung disease and cardiovascular disease. And yet the expensive, dangerous compound has long been used as a coating for thin-film solar cells because it increases the efficiency of converting sunlight to energy. During manufacturing, chemists have to don protective gear and use fume hoods and other precautions to apply the coating, then carefully dispose of the dissolved cadmium waste. Physicist Jon Major of the University of Liverpool in England and his team set out to find a replacement. They tested numerous alternative salts, including sodium chloride (table salt) and potassium chloride, and found that magnesium chloride yielded comparable efficiency. “We got cells as good as, if not better than, anything we ever got with cadmium chloride,” Major says. Magnesium chloride is also nontoxic, abundant and costs about 300 times less than cadmium chloride. It can even be appl...

The drug — a cocktail of three purified immune proteins, or monoclonal antibodies, that target the Ebola virus — has been given to seven people. ZMapp, the drug that has been used to treat seven patients during the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, can completely protect monkeys against the virus, research has found. The study, published online today in , comes the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the Ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 1,500 people, is worsening and before it ends. A fifth West African nation, Senegal, reported its first case of the disease on Friday. Public-health experts say that , such as the deployment of greater numbers of health-care workers to stricken areas, should be the focus of the response. But ZMapp, made by Mapp Pharmaceutical in San Diego, California, is one of several unapproved products that the WHO has said in the outbreak. The drug — a cocktail of three purified immune proteins, or monoclonal antibodies, that...

Little, Brown, 2014 One marshmallow now or two later? This simple choice has agonized preschoolers since the 1960s, when psychologist Mischel began running his famous experiment to test children's ability to delay gratification. It turns out that a kid's performance on this willpower test predicts far-reaching outcomes such as SAT scores, relationship satisfaction and even body-mass index later in life. The good news is that the ability to resist instant gratification for longer-term rewards is not innate but can be learned. “It is a skill open to modification, and it can be enhanced through specific cognitive strategies that have now been identified,” Mischel writes in this account of the history of the test and the revelations it has produced. Admittedly impatient himself, he details the tactics that help our minds resist temptation and the implications of his work on child rearing, education and public policy.

The kilometer-size rubble pile appears to be held together by van der Waals forces. Karen Hopkin reports Aug 29, 2014 | | From the depths of space, an asteroid hurtles toward Earth. [Well, our general vicinity.] But this is no ordinary hunk of galactic debris. Because the body of this asteroid seems to defy gravity. It’s bound by forces never observed on this scale in space. That’s not the plot of a new summer blockbuster. It’s the result of a study in the journal . [Ben Rozitis, Eric MacLennan and Joshua P. Emery: ] The asteroid in question is actually a kilometer-sized collection of rubble. In most cases, such space-faring pebble piles are held together by a combination of gravity and friction. But not so for our rocky interloper, dubbed “1950 DA.” This asteroid is rotating so rapidly that its pieces should have flung apart long ago. Now, by analyzing the 1950 DA’s temperature and density, researchers conclude that cohesive forces called van der Waals attractions must be kee...

DIY drone enthusiasts speak out about safety Aug 29, 2014 | | Attaching a GoPro camera to a personal drone gives you an aerial perspective unlike any other. That’s one reason these vehicles are getting popular with enthusiasts. But how safe would you feel walking around with those drones buzzing overhead? What if a drone suddenly drops midair or crashes into a building? The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that by 2018, there could be as many as swarming through the sky. In fact, last year to help achieve speedy deliveries in the future. Today, personal drones are already in flight. “Flying above 200 feet is unnecessary with these kinds of aircraft,” says Steven Cohen, unmanned autonomous systems education coordinator at Bergen Community College. Cohen teaches STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students how to build and fly their own recreational unmanned aerial vehicles, which rely on several rotors. Unlike their winged counterparts, recreational dro...

My explores the push to replace live orchestras at operas and musicals with less expensive, but less satisfying, digital ones. This issue affects me deeply, you see, because I wasn't always a technology writer. My original aspiration was to compose Broadway musicals. After college I spent 10 years chasing that dream. While I waited for the world to discover my compositional genius I worked in the office of a theatrical licensing house called Music Theater International (MTI). Companies like MTI rent the rights, scripts and music for musicals such as or to your school or theater. My boss was fascinated by the possibilities of exploiting technology to foster more live theater. We had a lot of long conversations about what that meant. For example, should we offer canned recordings of the orchestra parts for our shows? Then many more schools and theaters would be able to produce musicals. But we also didn't want to be in the business of discouraging the use of live orchestras. ...

See Inside Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed By On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower on the Austin campus and shot 46 people. Whitman, an engineering student and a former U.S. Marine sharpshooter, was the last person anyone expected to go on a killing spree. After Brown was assigned as the state's consulting psychiatrist to investigate the incident and later, when he interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers for a pilot study, he discovered that most of the killers, including Whitman, shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids. Brown did not know which factor was more important. But in the 47 years since, he has interviewed some 6,000 people about th...

August 28, 2014 | DIY drone enthusiasts speak out about safety Showing 16450 Get the latest Special Collector's edition Secrets of the Universe: Past, Present, Future > X Email this Article X

In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps, bringing the Gulf of Mexico to the back door of New Orleans and posing a lethal threat to an energy and shipping corridor vital to the nation’s economy. And it’s going to get worse, even quicker. Scientists now say one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation’s history is rushing toward a catastrophic conclusion over the next 50 years, so far unabated and largely unnoticed. At the current rates that the sea is rising and land is sinking, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists say by 2100 the Gulf of Mexico could rise as much as 4.3 feet across this landscape , which has an average elevation of about 3 feet. If that happens, everything outside the protective levees — most of Southeast Louisiana — would be underwater. The effects would be felt far beyond bayou country. The region best known for its self-proclaimed motto “ lais...

The U.S. government pared back the number of reef-building coral species it was considering to label as threatened from 66 to 20 this week, prompting criticism from conservationists. Environmentalists urged the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday to extend the protection to all threatened marine species. Aug 28, 2014 | By Daniel Wallis MIAMI (Reuters) - The U.S. government pared back the number of reef-building coral species it was considering to label as threatened from 66 to 20 this week, prompting criticism from conservationists. Environmentalists urged the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday to extend the protection to all threatened marine species. "We are concerned with NOAA's unwillingness to acknowledge the widespread threats to the coral species not receiving protections," said Bethany Cotton, wildlife program director for environmental advocacy group WildEarth Guardians. NOAA was considering 66 coral species wh...

Scientific American Bright Horizons Cruise 22 arrives in Juneau, Alaska. -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

By Alister Doyle OSLO, (Reuters) - Climate change is aiding shipping, fisheries and tourism in the Arctic but the economic gains fall short of a "cold rush" for an icy region where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the world average. A first cruise ship will travel the icy Northwest Passage north of Canada in 2016, Iceland has unilaterally set itself mackerel quotas as stocks shift north and Greenland is experimenting with crops such as tomatoes. Yet businesses, including oil and gas companies or mining firms looking north, face risks including that permafrost will thaw and ruin ice roads, buildings and pipelines. A melt could also cause huge damage by unlocking frozen greenhouse gases. "There are those who think that growing strawberries in Greenland and drilling for oil in the Arctic are the new economic frontiers," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program. "I would caution against the hypothetical bonanza that some people see," he...

The recipe for wild mushroom risotto starts with the ingredients list. The risotto includes rice, garlic, minced onion and vegetable stock. The mushroom mixture contains half a pound of wild mushrooms, garlic, butter, thyme, 12 grasshoppers with the legs and wings removed, and two thirds of a cup of buffalo worms, along with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Julia Child has left the building. Entering the building are Arnold van Huis and Marcel Dicke, entomologists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, along with chef Henk van Gurp, from the nearby Rijn IJssel Vakschool, which teaches hotel and tourism management. The wild mushroom risotto recipe is one of 32 in the frying Dutchmen's new volume, . Americans may involuntarily utter “Gurp” as they contemplate dishes rich in grasshoppers and buffalo worms, the larvae of a rather handsome beetle. Therefore, the meat of the book is its essays discussing the value of incorporating insects into culinary cultures that have mostl...

See Inside How does the brain form new memories without ever filling up? Scientists turn to the youngest neurons for answers By For many years scientists believed that you were born with all the neurons you would ever get. The evidence for this dogma seemed strong: neuroanatomists in the early 20th century had identified immature neurons under the microscope but only in the brains of mammalian embryos and fetuses, never after birth. We now know that the truth is not quite so simple. By radioactively labeling DNA, researchers gradually began to find exceptions to the rule against new neurons in the adult brain. Today scientists have identified two small regions where neurogenesis, or the birth of new neurons, continues throughout life: the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. The former area is part of the brain's odor-discrimination system, so neurons there likely participate in this process. But the hippocampus has a much broader function. It gives us memory. *You must have purch...

See Inside Swings between wet and dry landscapes pushed some of our ancestors toward modern traits—and killed off others By Scrambling up the steep bank of a small wadi, or gully, near the western shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, I stop on a little knoll that offers a view across the vast, mostly barren desert landscape. The glittering, jade-blue lake contrasts in every way with the red-brown landscape around it. This long, narrow desert sea, nestled within Africa's Great Rift Valley, owes its existence to the Omo River, whose winding flow delivers runoff that comes from summer monsoon rains in the Ethiopian highlands, hundreds of miles north. The heat here has to be respected. By noon it feels like a blast furnace. The sun beats down, and the hot, stony ground fires it back upward. Scanning the dusty horizon, with the lake winking in the distance, I find it hard to imagine this place as anything but a desert. *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subsc...

An underground neutrino detector has found particles produced by the fusion of two protons in the sun’s core Aug 27, 2014 | | The Borexino neutrino detector uses a sphere filled with liquid scintillator that emits light when excited. This inner vessel is surrounded by layers of shielding and by about 2,000 photomultiplier tubes to detect the light flashes. Deep inside the sun pairs of protons fuse to form heavier atoms, releasing mysterious particles called in the process. These reactions are thought to be the first step in the chain responsible for 99 percent of the energy the sun radiates, but scientists have never found proof until now. For the first time, physicists have captured the elusive neutrinos produced by the sun’s basic proton fusion reactions.Earth should be teeming with such neutrinos—calculations suggest about 420 billion of them stream from the sun onto every square inch of our planet’s surface each second—yet they are incredibly hard to find. Neutrinos almost never...

See Inside Psychedelic drugs are poised to be the next major breakthrough in mental health care Aug 14, 2014 | | Alamy Almost immediately after Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD in the 1940s, research on psychedelic drugs took off. These consciousness-altering drugs showed promise for treating anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and addiction, but increasing government conservatism caused a research blackout that lasted decades. Lately, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in psychedelics as possible therapeutic agents. This past spring Swiss researchers published results from the first drug trial involving LSD in more than 40 years. Time for a Psychedelic Spring? The DEA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration maintain that there is insufficient research to justify recategorization. This stance creates a catch-22 by basing the decision on the need for more research while limi...

In the past decade an extraordinary claim has captivated cosmologists: that the expanding universe we see around us is not the only one; that billions of other universes are out there, too. There is not one universe—there is a multiverse. In articles and books such as Brian Greene's , leading scientists have spoken of a super-Copernican revolution. In this view, not only is our planet one among many, but even our entire universe is insignificant on the cosmic scale of things. It is just one of countless universes, each doing its own thing. The word “multiverse” has different meanings. Astronomers are able to see out to a distance of about 42 billion light-years, our cosmic visual horizon. We have no reason to suspect the universe stops there. Beyond it could be many—even infinitely many—domains much like the one we see. Each has a different initial distribution of matter, but the same laws of physics operate in all. Nearly all cosmologists today (including me) accept this type of m...

See Inside Psychedelic drugs are poised to be the next major breakthrough in mental health care Aug 14, 2014 | | Alamy Almost immediately after Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD in the 1940s, research on psychedelic drugs took off. These consciousness-altering drugs showed promise for treating anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and addiction, but increasing government conservatism caused a research blackout that lasted decades. Lately, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in psychedelics as possible therapeutic agents. This past spring Swiss researchers published results from the first drug trial involving LSD in more than 40 years. Time for a Psychedelic Spring? The DEA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration maintain that there is insufficient research to justify recategorization. This stance creates a catch-22 by basing the decision on the need for more research while limi...

A system to provide early warnings of earthquakes such as the one which shook California's wine country this week is planned and ready to go, but two years after the scientific work finished, the funding is still being lined up. California passed a law last year to start the system, but did not appropriate the money needed to build it. Aug 26, 2014 | By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - A system to provide early warnings of earthquakes such as the one which shook California's wine country this week is planned and ready to go, but two years after the scientific work finished, the funding is still being lined up. California passed a law last year to start the system, but did not appropriate the money needed to build it. A system to cover California, Washington and Oregon would cost $38 million, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Had money been available two years ago, the system would likely have been finished by Sunday, when the largest earthquake i...

A North Texas family, who discovered the skeleton of a 20,000- to 40,000-year-old mammoth while mining through sediment on their farm, is preparing to turn over the remains to a local museum. In May, Wayne McEwen and his family were gathering material from a gravel pit on their property, south of Dallas, when his son struck a 6-foot (1.8 meter) tusk while operating an excavator. Aug 26, 2014 | By Lisa Maria Garza DALLAS (Reuters) - A North Texas family, who discovered the skeleton of a 20,000- to 40,000-year-old mammoth while mining through sediment on their farm, is preparing to turn over the remains to a local museum. In May, Wayne McEwen and his family were gathering material from a gravel pit on their property, south of Dallas, when his son struck a 6-foot (1.8 meter) tusk while operating an excavator. The rest of the near-complete skeleton was unearthed by a team from a nearby community college, who determined it was a Columbian mammoth - a slightly larger, less hairy version o...

An Exxon Mobil Corp unit has agreed to pay $1.4 million to resolve U.S. government claims over a 2012 crude oil spill in Louisiana, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday. ExxonMobil Pipeline Company discharged 2,800 barrels of crude oil after a pipeline ruptured, in violation of the Clean Water Act, the agency said. Aug 26, 2014 | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Exxon Mobil Corp unit has agreed to pay $1.4 million to resolve U.S. government claims over a 2012 crude oil spill in Louisiana, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday. ExxonMobil Pipeline Company discharged 2,800 barrels of crude oil after a pipeline ruptured, in violation of the Clean Water Act, the agency said. (Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Sandra Maler)

The World Health Organization says it’s necessary to check the “booming” market and ban indoor use Aug 26, 2014 | | Even in the absence of on the potential hazards surrounding the use of electronic cigarettes, regulations are needed now to head off health concerns. One such restriction should be a ban on indoor use of the devices. That’s according to the World Health Organization in a the international body published on August 26. Electronic cigarettes, the organization states, “represent an evolving frontier, filled with promise and threat for tobacco control.” The popular devices deliver an aerosolized solution to users by a heating a nicotine solution that users inhale.In the past nine years the e-cigarette industry has exploded to include more than 400 brands in a roughly $3-billion industry. Yet flavorings that attract children, poor quality control between brands and apparent rapid experimentation among adolescent users (with e-cig use doubling in that group from 2008 to 2012) ...

Scientific American Bright Horizons Cruise 22 arrives in Ketchikan, Alaska. -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Scientific American Bright Horizons Cruise 22 arrives in Ketchikan, Alaska. -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

A genetic variant that keeps dopamine levels high could lead to personalized training and also benefit personnel in ERs and air traffic control towers Aug 26, 2014 | | For thousands of years generals such as Caesar and Napoleon have molded citizens into soldiers en masse by using the same drills and training techniques for everyone. A recent study suggests how genetic testing could enable more personalized training for today's operators who remotely control missile-armed Predators and Reapers. The , funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, looked at how different variants of the or gene affected people’s multitasking performances. The gene makes an enzyme that breaks down certain neurochemicals such as dopamine, thereby affecting behavior and mood. Humans have three variants of , labeled as Met/Met, Met/Val and Val/Val. These abbreviations refer to the amino acids methionine and valine in certain paired positions in the molecular structure of the enzyme. The Met and Va...

This August's production of Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle in Hartford, Conn., has been postponed. Rather than hiring pit musicians, producer Charles M. Goldstein had intended to accompany the singers with sampled instrument sounds, played by a computer. Not a CD, not a synthesizer; the computer triggers the playback of individual notes (“samples”) originally recorded from real instruments. The reaction of professional musicians—and, of course, the musicians' union—was swift and furious. New York City's Local 802 president called it operatic karaoke. Hate mail poured in. In the end, the opera's music director, as well as two of the stars, withdrew from the production. I know exactly what Goldstein must be feeling right about now. For my first 10 years out of college, I worked on Broadway shows as a musical director and arranger. In 1993 the group now called the Broadway League (of theater owners) contacted me. They wanted me to demonstrate how well computers and ...