Posts

October 23, 2012

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7:44 PM | Watch This: An Easter Island Statue Replica “Walks”

In the video above, 18 people “walk” a 10-foot, 8,700-pound replica of an Easter Island statue along a Hawaiian road by tipping it back and forth (and yelling “heave ho,” of course). They are testing the theory, put forth by archeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, that this is how the Easter Islanders transported their statues from the quarry where they were carved, a water-filled crater of an extinct volcano, to their final positions. (Others think the islanders […]

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4:00 PM | Nikon Announces Winners of 2012 Small World Competition

It’s a happy day for those of us who appreciate the small things! Nikon has announced the 2012 winners of its venerable Small World Photomicrography Competition. The prestigious contest, now in its 38th year, ranks images captured with various methods of microscopy. And I must say, the galleries are stunning! Go visit: Nikon Small World [...]

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3:29 PM | Blood From Youthful Mice Makes Codgers Sharper on Cognitive Tasks

Our cognitive abilities tend to decline when we get older, as we have trouble remembering old facts and skills and learning new ones. But a little young blood reverses some ill effects of old age, at least in mice, researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. Neuroscientist Saul Villeda and his team gave elderly mice infusions of blood from younger, sprightlier members of their species. The old mice fortified with young blood improved on learning and memory […]

October 22, 2012

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4:58 PM | Conscious or Not? Brain Responses Bring Scientists Closer to Making a Diagnosis in the Brain-Damaged

When a brain-damaged person seems unresponsive, the uncertainty is excruciating. Is the person in a vegetative state, awake but not conscious, or are they minimally conscious, still retaining some shreds of awareness? Scientists can now distinguish between people in vegetative and minimally conscious states by measuring brain waves, a Belgian research team announced at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week, which could lead to a more clear-cut, objective way to make the […]

October 19, 2012

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7:32 PM | Look At This: New Photos Show Uranus’ Stormy Weather in Unprecedented Detail

In 1986, in a flyby shooting, the Voyager 2 space probe took some of our first photos of Uranus. The planet looked blue-green and featureless, a planetary pokerface. In the decades since, we’ve learned that Uranus does have weather, visible as variations in color on the surface, and new photos from by the Keck II telescope in Hawaii (above) reveal the ice giant’s meteorology in more detail than ever before. The scalloped pattern near the equator is a ring of clouds; the busy, […]

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3:24 PM | Look At This: Foot-long Daddy Longlegs Found In Laotian Cave

Dr. Peter Jäger, an arachnologist from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, was just taking a break from a TV shoot in a cave in Laos—like you do—when he came across this gigantic harvestman, or daddy longlegs. A pair of its legs spans 33 cm, over a foot, from end to end, making it one of the largest-known members of its order, the opiliones. Don’t take this the wrong way, arachnophobes, but it missed the record for longest-legged daddy longlegs by a centimeter. […]

October 18, 2012

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2:57 PM | Rogue Geoengineer Illegally Dumped Tons of Iron Into the Pacific in July

The yellow and brown on this map of the western Canadian coast represent high concentrations of chlorophyll. A California businessman lobbed 110 tons of iron into the ocean off the western coast of Canada this July, The Guardian revealed on Monday, and he did it in violation of two international moratoria on such activity. Russ George wanted to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton to sell carbon credits for the carbon dioxide that the tiny photosynthesizing organisms would take out of the […]

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1:59 PM | Thrifty Thursday: an iPhone looks at the fall foliage

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [Apple iPhone 4s - $300; autumn colors - priceless] The easiest cheat in photography is to photograph only subjects that are naturally stunning. On Monday I walked about a New York woodlot with the red maples at peak color, shooting with my trusty little [...]

October 17, 2012

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7:10 PM | To Prevent Bedsores, Electric Underpants Shock the Fanny Into Motion

University of Alberta researcher Vivian Mushahwar with Smart-e-Pants We often speak of the luxury of sinking into bed, but if you really sank in, and couldn’t get back up, things would go badly for you. People immobilized by neurological injuries often develop nasty wounds called bedsores, which form when soft tissues, such as the buttocks, heels, and back of the head, get pressed against the surface of a bed or wheelchair so that the tissue’s oxygen supply is cut off and it […]

October 16, 2012

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3:03 PM | The Surface of Titan Might Feel Like a Damp Beach

An illustration of the descent While the Cassini probe has been taking the gorgeous pictures of Saturn we know and love, its little buddy and traveling companion, the Huygens lander, has been on the surface of the moon Titan. A just-published reconstruction of what happened when Huygens hit Titan’s surface eight years ago gives insight into what the ground on the methane-soaked body is like: something like damp sand, or perhaps crusty snow. According the scenario constructed from its […]

October 15, 2012

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6:17 PM | Manmade Snow From Recycled Sewer Water May Contain Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

This winter, an Arizona ski resort, Snowbowl, will be the first to use treated sewage water, and sewage water alone, to make manmade snow. Recycling’s usually a good thing, but opponents of the plan worry about chemicals left in the snow, and an August report by a civil and environmental engineer says that the recycled water, already used for irrigation in Flagstaff green spaces, may contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As Virginia Tech’s Amy Pruden describes in an unpublished […]

October 12, 2012

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4:44 PM | Look At This: A Shrimp Vomits A Glowing Cloud

Startle this Parapandulus shrimp, and it will spit a glowing cloud in your direction, illuminating you for predators to see. To produce these van Gogh-like swirls, the shrimp vomits up chemicals that react together to produce light. This particular shrimp was photographed in the Bahamas, during an expedition in the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible near the sea floor. The mission? To poke sea creatures and see if they would glow. Check out more bioluminescent animals at National Geographic […]

October 11, 2012

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8:17 PM | Stem Cells Safely Implanted in Brains of Boys with Neurological Disorder

An oligodendrocyte—the type of cell that manufactures myelin. At first, the infants seem to be progressing normally. But it soon turns out they may have vision or hearing problems, and when the time comes to lift their heads, the milestone comes and goes. It often gets worse from there. Children with the rare Pelizaeus–Merzbacher disease, like others who lack the usual insulating sheaths on their neurons, have trouble controlling their muscles, and often develop serious neurological […]

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2:34 PM | Thrifty Thursday: Preying, Praying, Whatever. It’s a Mantis.

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [Apple iPhone 4s - $300; backlit with a desk lamp] A standard iPhone 4S doesn’t normally have the oomph to photograph insects. Unless the insects are extremely big. A five-inch long Chinese mantis fills the frame at the iPhone’s minimum focus distance.

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2:09 PM | Look At This: A 100-Million-Year-Old Spider Attacking A Wasp

This lucky wasp did not get eaten by the spider attacking it. But when we say “lucky,” we mean it only in a certain sense: moments after the wasp’s capture, they were both overtaken by a flow of tree resin and were preserved in amber for the next 100 million years, while their species and their dinosaur contemporaries from the Early Cretaceous period went extinct. The amber fossil is described in a new paper by George Poinar, the entomologist whose investigations into […]

October 10, 2012

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6:45 PM | Peat Wars: Should Ancient Bogs Be Miracle Plant Food? Or Precious Carbon Sink?

An English bog It’s a battle over turf—peat, to be exact. In Great Britain, government plans to phase out the use of peat in gardening products—intended to protect bogs, from which peat is harvested—have created a division between gardeners and environmentalists, writes The New York Times. That’s because peat bogs are tremendous carbon sinks that hold one-quarter of the carbon stored in the world’s soil, or more than 200 billion tons of carbon, but also […]

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4:54 PM | How the Brains of Bookworms Compare To Those of Bibliophobes

We all knew the kid who couldn’t be pried away from her book—and the kid for whom each page was an exquisite torture. Why do people take to reading with such varying amounts of ease? A new study that looked at the differences in the brain development between children with different reading abilities may help answer the question. The researchers monitored subjects over a three-year period and found some interesting correlations between reading ability and neuronal wiring. Reading […]

October 09, 2012

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8:20 PM | Science, history, art and time – Hirst at the Tate

I write this as Damien Hirst hits the headlines again, so it’s no surprise that his recent exhibition at the Tate Modern attracted queues. In the same way that people flocked to see the oddly disturbing Equus when it starred … Continue reading →

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4:44 PM | Watch Felix Baumgartner Fall 23 Miles To Ground, Breaking the Sound Barrier

This afternoon, the Austrian parachuter Felix Baumgartner is expected to leap from a balloon nearly 23 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, and freefall Earthwards, achieving speeds faster than the speed of sound. Baumgartner has already put on his pressurized suit that’s protecting him against the low air pressures he’ll be falling through. His team is now laying out the stratospheric balloon, due to launch at 1:15 pm EDT, to take him up to the upper reaches of the stratosphere, […]

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1:23 PM | Humans are Still Killing Substantial Numbers of Whales, New Analysis Finds

Though the slogan “Save the Whales” has, these days, something of a sepia-toned sound to it, we aren’t doing a terribly good job of it, a new study suggests. In the last 40 years, the study says, humans were implicated in the majority of whale deaths with known causes. Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution looked at government reports of whale strandings, fatalities, and necropsies along the Eastern coast of the US and Canada from 1970 to 2009. Their sample […]

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11:00 AM | Whale Sculpture (Vancouver, Canada)

Filed under: photography Tagged: Canada, Lego, marine biology, sculpture, Vancouver, whales

October 08, 2012

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4:38 PM | Scientists Use Enormous Flywheel To Slam Rocks Together, Simulating a Quake

Two stone discs and a flywheel may sound like a Flinstonian vehicle, but in fact, it’s the recipe for a new, rather high-tech device that scientists are using to study earthquakes in the lab, described in a recent Science paper. In an actual earthquake, two jagged rock faces slide past each other at fault lines, and the energy of that collision propagates through the earth in waves. In this experiment, the researchers simulate a fault line using two stone disks one atop the other and a […]

October 05, 2012

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5:57 PM | Harper Reed, Obama’s Data Guru, Gets Voters to Engage—and Provide Their Info Along the Way

What do custom-designed T-shirts and presidential campaigns have in common? Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign, rose to prominence because he knew the answer: They both can benefit from websites that engage users and encourage community participation—and, in the process, gather valuable data. In a profile at Mother Jones, Tim Murphy describes how such potentially powerful and jealously guarded tech strategies—Obama’s go by codenames like […]

October 04, 2012

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9:39 PM | Study Points Finger at New Climate Miscreants: Ancient Romans and Chinese

Ancient civilizations emitted greenhouse gasses, too; the red and orange dots above mark indirect measures of methane in the atmosphere over the past two millennia. Scientists have thought that humans only started emitting significant quantities of greenhouse gasses in the 19th century, after the Industrial Revolution—and the fossil fuels that powered it—took hold. But a study in Nature today suggests that our history as heavy emitters stretches back much farther, to the […]

October 03, 2012

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7:18 PM | Watch This: Reconstructing a Spiny Dinosaur From the Skeleton Up

It’s always nice to put a face to a name—and not just in the case of humans. Paleontologist Paul Sereno just introduced the world to Pegomastax africanus, a small two-legged dinosaur that lived 200 million years ago, traipsing through what is now South Africa armed with a pointed beak, unexpectedly sharp canine teeth, and a bristling coat of quills. Calling to mind an image of such an unusual animal is difficult (I come up with a sort of parrot-wolf-porcupine-raptor mix which, […]

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7:08 PM | Got Allergies? Scientists Engineer a Cow That Makes Hypoallergenic Milk

People with milk allergies often turn to products like rice and soy milks. But now, in a twist, there is a new source of hypoallergenic milk in the offing: genetically-modified cows. New Zealand scientists have produced a calf that gives milk devoid of a protein, called beta-lactoglobulin (BLG), that causes an immune response in people with milk allergies. To get the milk this way, they had to engage in some fancy genetic footwork: They inserted a specially designed gene into cow embryos […]

October 02, 2012

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7:11 PM | Why the iPhone’s purple haze is more problematic than Apple thinks

Reports are filtering in that the new iPhone 5 has a camera problem. When pointed near a bright light, a characteristic magenta hue smears across the screen. This “Hendrix Effect” is not apparent in earlier versions of the iPhone. According to Gizmodo, Apple is responding to complaints by informing customers that the purple is normal: [...]

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6:43 PM | UN Report: Tropical Deforestation is a Booming Business for Organized Crime

This chart from the report illustrates the improbable spurt of new timber coming out of Indonesian, likely harvested rain forest trees funneled through legal plantations. Tropical rain forests—enormous carbon sinks, workers of regional weather, home to millions of species, sources of new drugs—have a lot more to offer alive than dead; lumber isn’t much good at curing cancer or keeping global temperatures down. Yet deforestation continues, and even getting legislation that […]

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3:37 PM | Kids Play the Way Scientists Work

Kids are natural scientists, it turns out. In an article published last week in Science, psychologist Alison Gopnik reviewed the literature about the way young children learn, and she finds that the way preschoolers play is very similar to the way scientists do experiments: Kids come up with general principles, akin to scientific theories, based on the data of their daily lives. Gopnik argues that the research should steer educators and policy makers away from more-regimented, dogmatic […]