Table of contents for June 2014 in Discover

Hands-On Science I have three school-age kids, so I’m occasionally involved in some science project or other: overseeing an experiment with acids and bases in the kitchen; measuring rainfall in the backyard; launching a Diet Coke-and Mentos-fueled rocket over the neighbor’s house. Actually, I’m still not convinced that last one was a school-sanctioned experiment. They’re great fun, but working on these projects reminds me that I was not always an “A” student in science class. I learned better by doing, not by reading, and for most of my early school years, my teachers taught straight from the book. It wasn’t until high school, when I had access to an actual school science lab — and a teacher who made full use of it — that my interest and my grades…

An archaeologically fertile area of the Middle East finally opens up. All of Iraq is not created equal — at least not for archaeologists. Its war-torn northern region, known as Kurdistan, has been closed to digs for more than half a century. But the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is now allowing a team led by Boston University archaeologist Michael Danti to search the mountainous area for artifacts. Their continuing efforts in the western Zagros Mountains, along the Turkish and Iranian borders, likely represent the best chance yet to dig at the root of Kurdish origins. Case in point: While widening a road leading into Iran, Danti says Kurdish workers dug into a 25-kilometer section of hillside, exposing the buried and burned remains of several stone, adobe and timber buildings from…

When a young man thumbs his nose at death by bull riding or BASE jumping, is an immature prefrontal cortex to blame? Perhaps. Or maybe there’s a survival benefit inherent in the very act of taking big risks. UCLA anthropologist Daniel Fessler and his colleagues argue that in early human clans, being ridiculously gutsy may have protected young men from potential adversaries. And even today, the team found that when test subjects in America and Fiji heard about people performing high-stakes physical feats, they assumed the daredevils to be large, unpredictable and possibly violent — not guys to mess with. Playing with fire, therefore, may give young men an evolutionary advantage, according to Fessler’s so-called Crazy Bastard hypothesis. Enemies keep their distance to avoid getting burned.—REBECCA COFFEY…

Since 2003, Discover has been reporting on a biofuel company that turned turkey guts, garbage and old tires into oil, which it sold to refineries for vehicle fuel or to electrical utilities to help power generators (“Anything Into Oil,” May 2003). Changing World Technologies’ method of thermal depolymerization used intense heat and pressure to break waste materials into desirable, short-chain hydrocarbons (much like the Earth’s super-slow, fossil fuel-producing process). As it turns out, the company’s production costs were too high to compete commercially. After only four years in operation, it filed for bankruptcy and shuttered its Carthage, Mo., plant in 2009. “There can be disadvantages to being first,” says Robert Brown, a mechanical engineer at Iowa State University who works on biofuel development. Changing World Technologies’ radical approach was ultimately…

Teenage Heartache “I’m having chest pain.” It’s a declaration guaranteed to grab a physician’s attention. And it certainly got mine one day as my healthy-looking new patient pointed to the middle of his sternum and added, “It’s an ache right here.” Walk into any emergency room, your fist clutched to your chest, and say, “I’m having chest pain,” and most of the following will happen: You will be fast-tracked to an exam room and connected to a cardiac monitor. Oxygen tubing will be slipped under your nose. An intravenous line delivering saline will be inserted into your forearm. It will be assumed that you are having cardiac pain until proven otherwise. Blood will be drawn and sent stat to the lab. And you will probably be asked to chew an…

After a successful — if sometimes harrowing — flight across the U.S. in a prototype, two intrepid pilots strive to create a solar-powered plane capable of circling the globe. ON JULY 5, 2012, the buzz of André Borschberg’s cell phone pulled him out of a meeting at a military airfield northeast of Lausanne, Switzerland. The news wasn’t good. The former Swiss Air Force pilot rushed to his helicopter and raced the familiar 45-minute route to Dübendorf, near Zurich. After touching down at the helipad, he sprinted to the cavernous hangar and swung open its blue door to find the splintered remains of a critical piece of his latest engineering endeavor: part of the 236-foot-long carbon fiber wing of a solar plane designed to circumnavigate the globe. A team of 40…

Cracking the Climate Color Code A silver station wagon loaded with climbing gear, computers, electrical wiring and a few scientists from Harvard University stops near a stand of pine and oak trees in the Harvard Forest, about 70 miles west of campus. Physiological ecologist Andrew Richardson, leader of this expedition, slips from the driver’s seat and grabs gear to ascend a metal tower among the trees. Its peak affords Richardson a clear view of his living laboratory: the forest canopy. Above the treetops, he checks a cluster of instruments that analyze the lush canopy as a collection of numbers: the amount of carbon being inhaled from the atmosphere, the concentration of water vapor in the air and the precise mix of hues the leaves exhibit. Different pigments serve different functions:…

Children can now give the energy crisis a swift kick, enjoying the world’s most popular sport while generating electricity that can power a light to read or do homework. Meet Soccket, a soccer ball and rolling power plant in one. The New York-based company Uncharted Play began selling the ball last November with a focus on getting it into the hands (and onto the feet) of kids in underdeveloped countries. So far, Soccket has rolled into 62 countries and all 50 states. The Windup The ball uses electromagnetic induction to transform kinetic energy, produced from rolling or striking the ball, into electricity. It’s a process akin to that of a selfwinding watch. Just as the watch is wound with movement, Soccket converts every corner kick or header into battery-stored power…

June2014 6/7-6/8 All About Birds Weekend Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences hosts a meet-and-greet with live birds, including owls, hawks and cockatoos. Stay and check out the museum’s exhibit on the courtship dances of birds-of-paradise. 6/19 Defiant Return Syfy’s experiment in “transmedia experience” — the futuristic TV drama Defiance and its massively multiplayer online video game — is back for season 2. defiance.com 6/6 Edge of Tomorrow Premiere Tom Cruise must relive a lousy day over and over, until he and Emily Blunt defeat an alien menace. edgeoftomorrow-movie.com 6/7 Take to the Trails Lace up your boots! Local, state and national parks across the nation host trail cleanups and (of course!) hikes to celebrate National Trails Day. americanhiking.org/national-trails-day 6/10–6/12 Game On The hottest new games and gaming gadgets premiere in…

Homeschooling, Hangouts and a Hoax Homeschool Help Our January/February issue annually sums up the previous year in science. Thank you for the “100 Top Stories of 2013.” I am the grandmother of a 9-year-old boy for whom science is his love. I homeschool him, and we used the January/February 2014 issue for our science component this past month. We picked four of the 100 stories each day to read out loud, discuss and ponder about. I realized yesterday while driving him for a haircut that he was sitting there talking out loud about the difference between dark matter and antimatter, and neutrinos to boot. His mind is on a different plane from mine. Keep up the 100 top stories issues, please! Homeschooling parents can really use them — and not…

Q Why aren’t we using thorium in nuclear reactors, given the possibility of a meltdown is nearly zero and the waste cannot be used to make bombs? — Dennis Dorando Concord, Calif. AIn a word: precedent. It’s certainly possible to base nuclear reactors around thorium, as opposed to the most commonly used element, uranium. And thorium reactors likely would be somewhat safer because of thorium-based fuel’s greater stability versus uranium-based fuel, with the added benefit of not producing as much nuclear bomb fuel. Of course, they’re still not perfect. Even though a conventional meltdown would be unlikely, thorium still produces harmful radiation that needs to be contained, and something could always go wrong. But the real reason we use uranium over thorium is a result of wartime politics. Cold War-era…

A patient lies unconscious on the operating table. Fluid in her brain cavities has built up to dangerous levels. For the patient to survive, a neurosurgeon must drill a hole in her skull to insert a drainage tube. And fast. But a slight slip of the surgeon’s hand could result in hemorrhaging, memory loss, partial paralysis or even death. This kind of high-pressure situation demands perfection, but that perfection takes practice. “Imagine trying to learn in an environment where you are not allowed to make a mistake,” says Frank Bova, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Florida medical school. Bova has come up with a novel application of 3-D printing that lets neurosurgery residents slice into realistic skulls and brain tissue with zero risk. He feeds a patient’s X-rays,…

Are We All Martians? Legend has it that in 1938, a radio broadcast about a Martian invasion of New Jersey incited panic; not everyone realized it was a fictional drama — Orson Welles’ adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Nowadays, people might regard the notion of Martians taking over our planet as pure fantasy. But Steven Benner, a levelheaded scientist of some repute, suggests that perhaps the invasion already occurred billions of years ago. Maybe Martians are not merely among us — maybe they are us. Benner — a Harvard-trained chemist who started the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, an associated research institute and two bioscience companies — wasn’t trying to be provocative when he presented the idea at a geochemistry conference last August. As a longtime investigator into…

Silent Treatment BONNIE BASSLER Bacteria may be primitive, but they’re far from simple. They lead complex lives and communicate through a chemical language that allows them to coordinate their actions, a process known as quorum sensing. Using this chemical communication system, bacteria can sense when they have reached a critical number, or quorum. Then they act en masse. Some might begin producing light, others a deadly toxin. This capability is part of what makes bacteria so terrifying: A single cell can’t manufacture enough toxins to make us sick, but when millions simultaneously churn out noxious molecules, the results can be lethal. No one has done more to decipher this bacterial lingo than Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University. In the 1990s, Bassler discovered that bacteria can converse not…

Extraordinarily accurate maps of the medieval Mediterranean present historians with a puzzle: How were they made? A mathematical analysis offers some clues. One of the most remarkable and mysterious technical advances in the history of the world is written on the hide of a 13th-century calf. Inked into the vellum is a chart of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could navigate with it. Most earlier maps that included the region were not intended for navigation and were so imprecise that they are virtually unrecognizable to the modern eye. With this map, it’s as if some medieval mapmaker flew to the heavens and sketched what he saw — though in reality, he could never have traveled higher than a church tower. The person who made this document — the…

Weirdlands of Mars When you get a letter from a legendary science fiction author, you stop and take notice. When the letter claims that NASA space probes have spotted enormous forests on Mars and requests an investigation, you really take notice, though maybe not the way the writer had in mind. That happened to me a few years ago when I opened my email to find an earnest exposé from Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He included links to images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (the most advanced Mars orbiter at the time), showing vistas that really did resemble thick stands of giant trees. Clarke died in 2008, but ever since, I’ve been keeping tabs on the visual oddities of the Red Planet — and there…

Quench your thirst for boozy knowledge or travel back to a real-life thriller pitting scientists against villainous nits and Nazis — just two of our favorite picks for smart and entertaining books worth reading this summer. PROOF By Adam Rogers Rogers, a science journalist and Wired editor, serves up a comprehensive, funny look at booze. He’s traveled the world and searched the historical annals to present the story of alcohol, from the life cycle of yeast to the neurochemistry of a hangover. Rogers bounces from personal moments enjoying a drink (or not) to some surprising biological evidence that possibly no one likes alcohol’s taste, just its effects. He even pops in to bar labs, which re-create your corner tavern in the interest of bona fide scientific research. Like the best…

The most impressive regions of the Milky Way return to prominence during the warm nights of early summer. The section surrounding our galaxy’s center in Sagittarius teems with glowing clouds of gas and dust — stellar nurseries like the one that gave birth to our sun some 4.6 billion years ago. But this area also harbors an often-overlooked component of the Milky Way. Globular star clusters — vast collections that hold anywhere from tens of thousands to a few million suns — roam the periphery of our galaxy’s central bulge. One of the best reaches its peak in the southern sky late on June evenings. Globular cluster M5 lies nearly 25,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens Caput (the Serpent’s Head). Look for it approximately 15 degrees (about two…

What’s up? A lot more than you might think. Floating and flying above us are not only the usual suspects — birds, bats, insects — but countless microscopic creatures as well. The disciplines of aerobiology and aeroecology explore how animals, plants and other organisms live in, move through and interact with the aerosphere — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that supports life. (It’s also known as the boundary layer, which typically stretches upward about 650 to 1,650 feet.) Ever since Boston University biologist Thomas Kunz founded aeroecology in 2008, it has seen huge gains because of the growing ability to track air movement with radar and telemetry, and because of humans’ growing use of airspace. Instruments are now so precise that radar observations can spot a single bee at about…

Inside the electrifying relationship between plants and insects. In a never-ending quest to ensure that bugs distribute their pollen, flowers strut their stuff, displaying their brightest colors and lushest scents to attract bees and other pollinators. Scientists recently discovered another shocking method flowers use to lure bumblebees: electric fields. Biologist Daniel Robert and colleagues at the University of Bristol in England already knew that flowers usually carry a negative electrical charge, while bees tend to be positively charged. To test whether bees could make use of that difference, the researchers electrified artificial flowers. Each group of the fakes had a different kind of charge, like the unique charges around real flowers. But some of the fakes held tasty sugar and others offered a bitter quinine solution. With the electricity on,…

Stefan Kappe sticks his left hand into a mosquito-filled Plexiglas box and watches the bugs feed furiously on his blood. Fortunately, they aren’t injecting Kappe with the human malaria parasite, which infected roughly 207 million people worldwide in 2012 and killed some 627,000. Instead, the insects are part of an unconventional project to develop a malaria vaccine via lab-grown mosquitoes. In humid, dorm-size “swamp rooms” at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, shallow plastic tubs of wriggling mosquito larvae feast on bits of tropical fish food delivered by spice grinder. As they grow, the insects graduate into Chinese takeout containers; some of them eventually make it into breeding cages. Mosquitoes “are bloodsucking machines, and the malaria parasite has very effectively hijacked that mechanism,” says Kappe, who heads the laboratory for the…

Panspermia — the notion that life can be transferred between different bodies in the solar system, and maybe even between different planetary systems — has intrigued us for millennia. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras discussed it some 2,500 years ago, and the idea again gained credence in the late 19th century. But the question has never been satisfactorily answered: Could a viable life-form, such as a microbial organism, actually withstand a journey — from Mars to Earth, for instance — that would inevitably end in a violent impact? Based on recent laboratory experiments, University of Kent physicist Dina Pasini offers a qualified yes. So far, Pasini and her colleagues have looked at three simple life-forms: bacteria, yeast and phytoplankton (single-celled, photosynthetic algae). The last one interests Pasini the most because all…

Laurence Garvie can’t stop thinking about the rock that’s still out there, the one he doesn’t have, the specimen that might explain how the solar system formed or even the origin of life on Earth. That’s why, on a windy February morning in Phoenix, he escorts two men into Arizona State University’s meteorite room, a solid concrete vault lined with metal cabinets containing the collection Garvie manages: thousands of stones from the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt. The men bear little resemblance to Garvie, a meteoriticist with a balding pate and too many pens in his pocket. In contrast, Ruben Garcia and Bob Cucchiara are fast-talking meteorite dealers dressed in blue jeans and sweatshirts. They’ve just driven 100 miles from Tucson, where they’ve been scouring the annual Gem, Mineral…

When David Haig finished college in Australia with a degree in biology, he found a job in a New South Wales government office rubber-stamping documents to record mortgage tax payments and property transfers. His tour in the bureaucracy lasted two years. “I decided there was more to life than rubber stamps,” he says, reminiscing in his office at Harvard University’s Botanical Museum. Haig returned to his biology studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, earning his doctorate in 1989. While he was there, he became absorbed in the study of an unsolved problem in evolutionary biology. Researchers were learning that the process of conceiving a child is not nearly the tender, rhapsodic intertwining of the mother’s and father’s genes that one might imagine. Instead, it’s the start of a survival-of-the-fittest struggle…

HOTTECH Reinventing Our Wheels Take a summer road trip into the future of driving: You can hop on an electric scooter designed for the modern urban jungle or get behind the wheel of a car that’s more connected than your LinkedIn profile. Want more? How about a super-posh hybrid and zero-emission fuel that’s a real waste. Mahindra GenZe Young urbanites are clamoring for a greener transportation option. India-based company Mahindra has heard their cries. The GenZe utility cycle’s zero-emissions electric motor doesn’t need tune-ups or oil changes, and its larger, 16-inch front tire offers extra stability on pothole-riddled streets. Dual position seating gives the driver the option of traveling in an almost standing position when greater visibility is needed (with, we hope, less dorkiness than a Segway). HITS THE ROAD:…

Duke Lemur Center Durham, N.C. 35°59’40"N, 78°57’41"W lemur.duke.edu Located on 80 wooded acres just two miles down the road from Duke University, the Duke Lemur Center is home to the largest collection of lemurs outside of Madagascar. The facility houses nearly 250 lemurs representing 18 species, as well as four other prosimian species. AU NATUREL: Since research comes first and foremost at the facility, the center aims to preserve or encourage the lemurs’ innate behaviors. You won’t find a more natural experience with lemurs anywhere else besides Madagascar. TAKE A TOUR: On the Lemurs Live! tour, learn about the animals and the center’s research and conservation efforts. This 60-to 90-minute tour is available seven days a week, year-round. Appointments are required; calling a week in advance is recommended: 919-401-7240. Tours…

Noise 1 The Big Bang was noiseless. Everything in the universe expanded uniformly, so nothing came into contact with anything else. No contact, no sound waves. 2 Astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang in the ’50s, not because he thought it was noisy, but because he thought the theory was ridiculous. 3 For a really big bang, you should have heard Krakatoa in 1883. On Aug. 27, the volcanic island in Indonesia erupted with the explosive power of 200 megatons of TNT. The eruption could be heard nearly 3,000 miles away, making it the loudest noise in recorded history. 4 There are people who would outdo it if they could. They pack their cars with stereo amps to pump out 180-plus decibels (dB) of noise at so-called dB…