Índice para September 2016 em Discover

I remember peering up at the glow of the screen from the flattened back seats of our Datsun station wagon, in PJs, lying on sleeping bags, and not too committed to wanting to see all of that movie. I could hear it, dialogue squawking through the heavy metal speaker that dangled from the car window. But I wasn’t sure I really wanted to witness creatures from above swooping down to snatch some unsuspecting soul from Earth. Granted, I was just 8 years old when Close Encounters of the Third Kind landed at the drive-in on a gravely sagebrush field outside Helena, Mont. And sure, I knew it wasn’t real, but the feeling of something “out there” delivering mayhem down here was unnerving. That sense of otherworldly doom lives, to some…

Possible Side Effects A response to “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Gets Some Respect” from our January/February 2016 issue. I have been a reader of this magazine for over 15 years. This year, I got back something very valuable from it. There was a comment in the article about sufferers having an inability to regulate blood pressure. I had been struggling with fatigue and low blood pressure for over seven years. I had been to the doctor over and over but never came away with a diagnosis. With magazine in hand, I went to my doctor’s office. After labs ruled out a few other things, I finally was given a diagnosis: chronic fatigue syndrome. It may sound odd, but I was so relieved. After years of struggling with symptoms, I finally had…

Landslides play a key role in shaping landscapes over time, but they can be deadly. A landslide in Oso, Wash., in March 2014 killed 43 people, making it the deadliest in U.S. history. While they tend to cause less damage than other natural hazards because of their relatively smaller reach, landslides occur in an instant, with little opportunity for people to get out of harm’s way. WHAT CAUSES THEM: Landslides strike when the rock or soil on a slope weakens to the point where it can no longer resist gravity’s pull. They can be triggered by rainfall, erosion or other natural disturbances, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. ADVANCES: Landslides are among the least understood of all natural hazards. Researchers are studying the site of the Oso landslide to determine how…

Cancer and fertility are intensely personal subjects that require people to make ethical decisions. Oncofertility is no different. Laurie Zoloth, a professor of religious studies and a member of the faculty of bioethics and humanities at Northwestern University, has advised the Oncofertility Consortium since its inception. “Teresa [Woodruff] was interested from the very beginning about ethics questions,” Zoloth says. “For her, the questions of ethics were just as important, fascinating and complex as the scientific questions.” Part of Zoloth’s work concerns the complexities of deciding who should be permitted to preserve ovarian tissue — solely cancer patients, individuals with less life-threatening diseases or anyone who wishes to do so. She considers issues of justice and accessibility, because, as she wrote in the American Journal of Bioethics, while “cancer and infertility…

The Latest Science News & Notes CATCHING THE WIND Seen from a jetliner, these wind turbines appear to float on air — they’re actually fixed firmly to the bed of the Thames Estuary near London. The 175-turbine London Array, the world’s largest operating offshore wind farm, set a record in December for electricity generated in one month by an offshore facility: 369,000 megawatt-hours. The turbines generated enough juice in 2015 to meet the annual needs of about 600,000 U.K. households. — ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY THOMAS TRUTSCHEL/PHOTOTHEK/GETTY IMAGES Space is a deadly environment. Its airless vacuum forces the water out of most cells, and temperatures fluctuate rapidly from below freezing to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Not to mention the radiation: In low Earth orbit, the sun’s ultraviolet rays hit DNA…

THE TYRANNOSAUR CHRONICLES The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs By David Hone T. rex may be among the most famous dinosaurs, but on the tree of life, the 5-ton predator of the late Cretaceous is just a single blossom, one of the last species in a long and diverse branch of animals. In his first book, popular British paleontologist Hone traces the T. rex lineage from smaller, far less impressive ancestors through a successful range of carnivores that spread from deserts to beyond the Arctic Circle. While there’s plenty to please dino-philes, Hone also provides a handy primer for anyone somehow not already enraptured with the topic. — ALL REVIEWS BY GEMMA TARLACH WHAT THE F What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves By Benjamin K. Bergen…

People have lived in the shadow of volcanoes for thousands of years, drawn by their rich soils and picturesque slopes. Today, 800 million people live within 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles, of a volcano. At any given time, a dozen or more volcanoes are in an active state, ranging from minor gas-and-ash plumes to lava flows. WHAT CAUSES THEM: When magma — molten rock — rises through a vent in Earth’s surface, it is exposed to air. As a result, gas bubbles form, causing pressure to build until the gases and magma are discharged, slowly building a mountain. ADVANCES: Since volcano monitoring began a century ago, scientists have made significant strides in understanding volcanic behavior, especially in recent years. That’s largely because of advances in seismic sensing and new…

It’s one of the most common and costly natural hazards: The majority of disasters between 1994 and 2013 were floods, and they affected nearly 2.5 billion people. In one recent incident last winter, flooding in the Mississippi River watershed killed roughly two dozen people and caused widespread power outages. WHAT CAUSES THEM: Rivers swollen by heavy rains, rising sea levels or storm surges that push seawater into coastal areas. ADVANCES: Meteorologists can now detect precipitation changes at a smaller scale, making it much easier to forecast flash floods, says Jonathan Gourley, a research hydrologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Rainfall estimates generated by the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system are plugged into a system called FLASH, which pairs the MRMS estimates with information about soil type and…

For more than 50 years, psychologists have worried about the robustness of research in their field. Many studies have never been replicated, meaning nobody knows what the results would be if they were repeated in another lab. Last year, psychologist Brian Nosek led a consortium of nearly 300 scientists who published the first attempt to estimate the reproducibility rate in psychology by redoing 98 recent studies. The scientists couldn’t reproduce the initial results about 60 percent of the time, according to a paper published in Science, resulting in “reproducibility crisis” headlines across the globe. Colleagues have since questioned the validity of the group’s conclusions, however. In Science Smackdown, we let experts argue both sides. Crisis of Confidence University of Virginia social psychologist Brian Nosek and his collaborators replicated studies ranging…

Recycling a plastic bottle may provide a fleeting sense of green philanthropy, but the process of making that bottle is still pretty ecounfriendly. Now, chemists at Stanford University have developed a new plastic-making method that could leave no carbon footprint. Most of the 270 billion plastic bottles used in the U.S. each year are derived from petroleum. And that manufacturing contributes to a global greenhouse gas hit of more than 200 million tons of carbon dioxide each year — the same amount about 150 coal power plants generate annually. Some plastics companies are attempting to cut that footprint by substituting corn-based sugar for petroleum. But planting, fertilizing and harvesting corn generates significant carbon emissions, too, says researcher Matt Kanan. Instead of sugar, Kanan’s team developed a process that uses carbon…

T unç I˙lada stoops to pick up a pottery shard, one of many littering the ground at the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. “This is from a Roman ceramic workshop that was here nearly 2,000 years ago,” I˙lada, a tour guide, says of the shard. “But for the archaeologists working here, this is practically brand new.” Ancient Rome indeed feels like modern history compared with the finds for which this arid, dusty site in rural central Turkey is most renowned. Beginning some 9,500 years ago, in roughly 7500 B.C., and continuing for nearly two millennia, people came together at Çatalhöyük to build hundreds of tightly clustered mud-brick houses, burying their dead beneath the floors and adorning the walls with paintings, livestock skulls and plaster reliefs. Greeks, Romans and other later cultures…

Earthquakes are the deadliest of natural disasters. Between 1994 and 2013, temblors killed almost 750,000 people — more than all other disasters put together. (That includes fatalities from tsunamis caused by undersea earthquakes.) Seismologists have made great strides in understanding earthquake dynamics and monitoring Earth’s trembles, but they still have much to learn. WHAT CAUSES THEM: Where tectonic plates meet deep in the earth, they scrape against one another, causing friction and triggering upheaval at the surface. ADVANCES: Recent updates to the Global Seismographic Network give seismologists a clearer read on activity below Earth’s surface. Instruments placed directly on a fault provide real-time monitoring; in some places, such as Los Angeles, they’re just a few meters apart. “There have been incredible advances in the development of instruments and the deployment…

On May 20, 2013, a massive twister ripped through Moore, Okla., killing 24 people and shredding 13,000 homes, schools, farms and businesses. It was one of more than 80 tornadoes in the state that year, and its swift blow was a cruel reminder of the difficulty of forecasting tornadoes, which form very quickly. WHAT CAUSES THEM: Tornadoes occur when huge thunderstorms known as supercells are turbocharged with churning columns of air. When winds high and low in the column blow at different speeds, they create wind shear, causing the mass of air to spin. If the column is snagged in a supercell updraft, funnel-shaped clouds form. ADVANCES: Tornado prediction requires complex computer modeling that can take into account the small shifts in storms that can send one whirling into a…

Tucked away in a brick warehouse complex in St. Paul, Minn., frozen in liquid nitrogen, sits Abby Bott’s left ovary. Bott was only a college senior when doctors diagnosed her with Stage III colorectal cancer in 2009. They told her she needed aggressive chemotherapy and radiation to kill the cancer cells in her softball-sized tumor. However, the lifesaving regimen would also strike Bott’s ovaries. She had always wanted children, yet if she survived her cancer, she would likely be infertile. A cancer diagnosis is “one of the most existential crises you can imagine,” says Teresa Woodruff, a reproductive scientist at Northwestern University. Given advances in treatments, cancer isn’t necessarily a death sentence: 80 percent of children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer survive five years or more. But while chemotherapy and…

1953 First baby born using frozen sperm. 1978 Baby born via in vitro fertilization. 1980 Birth from a legal surrogate mother in America. 1984 Birth using a donated oocyte. 1984 Baby born as a result of a frozen embryo. 1990 Tests of “assisted hatching,” a technique to help embryos attach to the uterine wall. 1992 Case of intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in which a single selected sperm is injected directly into an oocyte. 2003 Monkey birth from fresh, non-cryopreserved ovarian tissue. 2004 Human birth from cryopreserved ovarian tissue. 2015 “Stem-cell baby” born from an oocyte with mitochondria boosted using ovarian stem cells. 2016 Researchers find that when sperm enzymes fertilize the egg, there is a burst of naturally occurring zinc. These zinc “sparks” are brighter for healthier eggs, which could lead…

1 You may associate ancient wine with the togawearing set, but by the time Romans were quaffing it, the beverage was itself ancient: 7,000-year-old pottery from sites in Iran’s Zagros Mountains tested positive for residues specific to grapes. 2 A couple of hundred miles north, archaeologists have found numerous artifacts near the Armenian village of Areni that point to organized wine production as early as 4000 B.C. 3 Winemaking may go back so far because it’s so easy: Smash some grapes and let the juice mix with yeasts naturally present on the skins for a few days. Voila! Paleowine. 4 A big difference between domesticated wine grapes and their wild ancestors is pollination. Wild grapes are dioecious; plants are male or female. Domesticated grapes are usually selfpollinating hermaphrodites, which improves…