Table of contents for July-August 2013 in Discover

Maverick of Art and Science Steve Nadis profiled scientist-artist Joe Davis and his portfolio of work in the April issue (page 52). “A Scientific Method to His Madness” is weirdly wonderful. I want to join the Joe Davis Fan Club, not because of his unusual style, but because the treatment of it is refreshing in these times of herd-following, “don’t rock the boat” ofcial science. Patricia Folley Noble, OK Family Inheritance In “Trait vs. Fate” (May issue, page 48), Dan Hurley explains how our ancestors’ lives — be they rough or privileged — might be reflected in our genetics. Very good article and explanation of the mechanics of epigenetics chemistry. I did wish there was not so much emphasis on mothering, which seems like a throwback to a bad time…

A burrowing owl looks skyward near the Salton Sea in Southern California. Photographer Floris van Breugel noticed that it seemed to watch a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Burrowing owls nest in the ground instead of trees, using holes dug by prairie dogs, but they also find or dig suitable burrows on golf courses and open flatland. The owls place mammal droppings around their habitat to attract dung beetles, which the owls capture and eat. The bird’s numbers are declining due to habitat loss to development, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers the owl a Bird of Conservation Concern. They can be found in western North America, large parts of South America outside the Amazon Basin, and Florida. ERNIE MASTROIANNI…

More than 2,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific, scientists off the coast of Japan photographed a giant squid (Architeuthis) in its native habitat for the first time last summer. These high-definition images were taken from within a submersible vehicle exploring near the Ogasawara Islands in an effort led by Japan’s National Science Museum, the Ocean Research and Conservation Association (ORCA), the Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) and the Discovery Channel. The squid is more than 40 feet long with eyes the size of dinner plates. The team made 55 dives, reaching depths of 3,000 feet in its search for the elusive marine animal, and used a novel globe-like device called an electronic jellyfish to capture the creature’s attention. To frighten predators, some jellyfish will emit bioluminescence when attacked, and…

John Templeton, once called “arguably the greatest global stock-picker” of the 20th century, may now best be known for the foundation that bears his name. The Templeton Foundation often funds research into questions that seem a far cry from the grounded, data-driven realms of high finance: immortality, the nature of evil, the power of prayer and the possibility of alien life, to name just a few. Templeton, a devout Presbyterian, established the foundation in 1987 to serve as a “philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” according to its mission statement. Although financing such research may raise scientific eyebrows and hackles, there’s no question that much of Templeton’s money — $71 million in 2011 — has funded legitimate and important science. With…

Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minn. The Maya of Mesoamerica thought big: Consider the monumental architecture left behind at Tikal, Palenque and other sites. So it’s fitting that Minnesota’s Science Museum built its world premiere exhibit, Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed, on a grand scale. At 15,000 square feet, it’s billed as the largest traveling exhibit on the Maya ever mounted in the U.S. Hundreds of artifacts reveal both the art and everyday experience of the culture, while multimedia and hands-on displays give visitors a glimpse into ongoing field research that will further our understanding of this fascinating civilization. Opens June 21. smm.org GEMMA TARLACH…

While Kyocera’s rugged Torque is marketed as the sort of thing you could drop, dunk or summit a mountain with, it’s the phone’s tissue-conduction technology that caught our eye, er, ear. The Torque is the first smartphone sold in the U.S. that conducts sound through tissue in your head, a technology originally developed for use in hearing aids. You can hold a conversation on the Torque while wearing earplugs, even with someone aiming a hair dryer into your other ear. (Yes, we went there.) As long as the phone’s screen is in contact with your head, it doesn’t need to be near your ear: We tried the base of the skull, forehead and even nose. It’s weird, but it works. –GT FISH TALES: Start your trip just a few hundred…

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU had huge parasitic cysts? That could burst at any moment? And spill thousands of babies? My new patient, an elderly Armenian who recently moved to the United States, didn’t speak much English. He didn’t need to. His penetrating gaze — anxious, wary and pleading all at the same time — revealed his inner thoughts. He had one overriding goal: to make his problem go away ASAP. I also wanted to vanquish his parasitic invader and restore his peace of mind. But major abdominal surgery in a man nearing 80? About that, I wasn’t so sure. After trading emails with a local radiologist, I was finally meeting Mr. Kazaryan face to face. From his CT scan, I already knew the bulging landscape of his liver.…

In 1903, explorer Robert F. Scott and his team stumbled on an anomaly in the frozen, white expanse that is Antarctica: the Dry Valleys, fields of exposed rock with virtually no visible ice. Since 1986, geologist David Marchant of Boston University has spent nearly every Antarctic summer here, decoding a unique landscape. Journalist Jennifer Berglund, assisting Marchant in the field, kept a diary of her adventure. Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012 | McMurdo Station to Upper Friedmann Valley This morning, four of us hopped on a helicopter at McMurdo Station, the United States Antarctic Program’s base, near the spot where Scott’s men built a hut in 1902 to wait out the long winter. Along with my fellow field assistant Keith Heyward, I was joining Marchant and his graduate student, Sean Mackay,…

In the 2011 thriller novel Spiral, a scientist is forced to swallow a swarm of razor-clawed, fungus-tending micro-robots, a scene that hardly presents small machines in a positive light. So it may seem odd that the book’s first-time author, 49-year-old physicist Paul McEuen, is a leader in the field of nanoscience, the study of structures smaller than a micron, or a millionth of a meter. One might think his fellow scientists would be disturbed that he mined his field for gory ways to kill people. “Actually,” McEuen says, “they were very supportive. I even got a good review in the Journal of Mycology.” Relaxed, thoughtful and highly literate — in a recent academic article he cited Hume, Joyce and Beckett along with Nobel Prize-winning physicists Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr…

STEPH ZECH GRADUATED FROM high school this spring with an admirable academic record. She especially loved chemistry, writing and literature — though she has some reservations about Dante. A bright and diligent student, she took two Advanced Placement classes her senior year, sailing through both. But when it comes to math, Steph has struggled mightily. At age 17, she still counts on her fingers to add 3 and 5. She doesn’t know her multiplication tables. She can’t understand fractions, process concepts of time such as “quarter after” or read dice without counting the dots. She did recently figure out that if something costs 75 cents, the change from a dollar should be 25 cents. But when asked what the change would be if the price were 70 cents, she considers…

1. Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi said the Force “surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” He could have been talking about gravity. Its attractive properties literally bind the galaxy together, but it also “penetrates” us, extending physically through us, keeping us bound to Earth. 2. Unlike the Force, with its dark and light sides, gravity has no duality; it only attracts, never repels. 3. NASA is trying to develop tractor beams that could move physical objects, creating an attractive force that would trump gravity. 4. Passengers on amusement park rides and the International Space Station experience microgravity — incorrectly known as zero gravity — because they fall at the same speed as the vehicles. 5. Someone who weighs 150 pounds on Earth would — if it were…

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO REGULARLY DROP IN ON DiscoverMagazine.com, parts of our Antarctica coverage (page 48) might jingle a faint bell. See, back in January, DISCOVER had a writer posting online dispatches from the scene when scientists peered for the first time into the interior of a lake that has sat undisturbed beneath the Antarctic ice sheet for perhaps a million years. It was news, but it wasn’t the whole story — nor the only story we wanted to run on Antarctica. But reviewing the online coverage of that event made me realize that now, as we bring you our annual Invisible Planet issue, it would be fitting to have you meet a few of the folks who work tirelessly, if somewhat invisibly, to bring you the stories that…

GROWING UP IN THE FAROE ISLANDS in the North Atlantic, Edmund Jensen battled an overpowering sense of fatigue. At age 10, he developed seizures in which his limbs would stiffen and his eyes would roll back in his head, but local doctors could never diagnose his condition. In August 2008, Danish doctors identified the genetic defect that prevented his body from maintaining adequate levels of carnitine, which plays a critical role in metabolism. By then, Jensen was 21, had close-cropped brown hair and a silver hoop through his upper ear. The day before he went to get his first prescription, he died of cardiac arrest. “Again and again, I look at his picture and cannot believe that it is true,” his father, John, wrote afterward. Jensen’s death was followed by…

Anyone who has ever hit a baseball off the wrong part of the bat knows the shot of pain that courses through your hands. Now, thanks to acoustics engineer Daniel Russell of Pennsylvania State University, that unpleasant jolt could become a relic of the game’s past. Russell, who has been devising baseball-centric experiments for years, recently helped solve the physics mystery at the heart of the infamous sting. Nearly a decade ago, baseball equipment manufacturer Marucci Sports put a vibration damper inside its aluminum bats to eliminate the pain, but the technology was not working as well as hoped, so the company recruited Russell. After interviewing several college players, Russell learned they all felt pain in the same spot: the fleshy tissue between the thumb and forefinger in the upper…

We really are a mutant race. Our genomes are strewn with millions of rare gene variations, the result of the very fast, very recent population growth of the human species. From an estimated 5 million individuals just 10,000 years ago, we ballooned to more than 7 billion. On average, every duplication of the human genome includes 100 new errors, so all that reproducing gave our DNA many opportunities to accumulate mutations. But evolution hasn’t had enough time to weed out the dangerous ones: gene variants that might make us prone to illness, or simply less likely to survive. Joshua Akey of the University of Washington recently explored the average age of our species’s gene variants, finding that most are very young. About three-quarters of single nucleotide variants — a mutation…

ROCKET GIRL by George D. Morgan After Sputnik’s successful 1957 launch, the U.S. was desperate to get ahead of Russia in the space race. Subpar rocket fuels held the Americans back until the Army put Mary Sherman Morgan on the problem. Without a college degree, Morgan concocted the right ratio of propellants and then pressurized the mix. Not long after Morgan pioneered the top-secret fuel, she gave up research and became a recluse, isolated even from her children. While writing her 2004 obituary, her playwright son George stumbled upon his mother’s classified contributions as the first female rocket scientist and reveals them here, taking dramatic license with dialog and details. BREANNA DRAXLER HOW TO MAKE A ZOMBIE by Frank Swain Science Punk blogger Swain connects the undead dots from Haitian…

19-21 Da Vinci Days Contestants in the kinetic sculpture race in Corvallis, Ore., pedal feats of art and engineering through street, sand dune, mud and river.www.davincidays.org 17 Turbo Release According to DreamWorks’ latest flick, the trick to turning a snail into an Indy 500 champ is a quick bath in nitrous oxide. Don’t try this at home. turbomovie.com 10 International Nikola Tesla Day Join fellow geeks around the globe as they salute the supergenius whose inventions basically made our modern world. Take that, Tommy Edison. teslasociety.com Jul 4 Independence Day Get your picnic blanket and a good spot to watch strontium nitrate, aluminum and copper(II) oxide in action — these metal salts produce fireworks’ red, white and blue colors. tinyurl.com/FireworksChem 24-25 Suits That Compute New York City’s Wearable Tech Expo…

For Paul Stamets, the phrase “mushroom hunt” does not denote a leisurely stroll with a napkin-lined basket. This morning, a half-dozen of us are struggling to keep up with the mycologist as he charges through a fir-and-alder forest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. It’s raining steadily, and the moss beneath our feet is slick, but Stamets, 57, barrels across it like a grizzly bear heading for a stump full of honey. He vaults over fallen trees, scrambles up muddy ravines, plows through shin-deep puddles in his rubber boots. He never slows down, but he halts abruptly whenever a specimen demands his attention. This outing is part of a workshop on the fungi commonly known as mushrooms — a class of organisms whose cell walls are stiffened by a molecule called…

Hundreds of lakes and rivers lurk beneath Antarctica’s expansive ice sheet. Writer Douglas Fox joined a cadre of researchers seeking signs of life in the frozen deep. Sunlight glared off of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Slawek Tulaczyk, a 46-year-old glaciologist, squinted in the slanted summer rays as he watched a drama unfold 600 feet away. A Hercules military cargo plane sat stranded, unable to take off. Its skis had frozen to the snow. The plane had just dropped off Tulaczyk along with 12 workers and 10,000 pounds of gear. They were here to probe one of the last unexplored places on Earth. Beneath the snow’s deceptively flat surface, under 2,600 feet of ice, lay a mysterious lake that human eyes had never seen. Tulaczyk, from the University of California in…

A Seattle start-up replaces death statistics with a nuanced accounting of health. by JEREMY N. SMITH It’s Monday morning in Seattle, and Christopher Murray and I are glued to his computer screen, watching how the world dies. A drop-down menu offers choices from measles and cirrhosis to eating disorders and self-harm. I choose road traffic injuries and see a map divided into 187 countries, each color-coded by incidence: blue for safest, fire engine red for most deadly. Commuting in Sweden or Singapore? Go ahead, gas up. Traversing Gabon or Angola? Buckle up and pray. The maps represent the ascendance of a new accounting of life and death led by Murray, a still-boyish-looking salt-and-pepper-haired 50-year-old who is the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Rather than focus only…

I AM A LIGHT-MATTER CHAUVINIST. Don’t snicker; you’re probably one, too. Almost all of us are. We think of ourselves, and the world immediately around us, as something special. And by extension we regard our kind of matter — atoms, molecules, rocks, water, air, stars and all of the other things that interact with visible light — as the most important kind of matter in the universe. Te only matter that matters, as it were. Science tells a starkly different story. Last spring, the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft completed an ultraprecise 15-month census of the composition of the universe. Te kind of matter that we can see makes up 4.9 percent of the total. Another fundamentally invisible type of matter vastly outweighs it, accounting for 26.8 percent. (Te remaining…

A stroll through the clouds turns out to be a walk on water only inches deep at Salar de Uyuni, a vast salt flat in the high plains area of southwestern Bolivia. During the rainy season, this 4,000-square-mile, virtually flat expanse of salt is often covered in shallow water that creates a mirror-like vista stretching to the horizon. Photographer Kazuyoshi Nomachi said conditions have to be exactly right for such a vista. Too much water, and the surface gets choppy. A clear sky has far less drama. Although the salt has been mined since antiquity, the slushy brine beneath it may contain more than 50 percent of the world’s lithium, an essential element for efficient batteries used in aircraft, hybrid vehicles, computers and cell phones. ERNIE MASTROIANNI WATCH THE BIRDIE…

A few smiles, yawns and grimaces into the camera were all it took for Tanya Smith to shatter one of the longest-held truisms in primate studies — that a young chimpanzee’s molar development can be used as a proxy for developmental milestones such as age of nursing and weaning. For decades, researchers assumed that chimps, like other nonhuman primates, weaned their young once the back teeth started coming in. The belief was so ingrained that paleoanthropologists and others investigating human evolution figured that if they saw molar eruption in the fossilized skull of a young human ancestor, they’d assume they knew the age and feeding behavior. But Smith, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, wanted to test the theory by looking at wild chimpanzees. First, she wanted to see if…

C all it the “X-ray vision” app: In several years, smartphones could come equipped with a microchip that lets users peer through boxes, walls and other objects. Rather than dangerous X-rays, however, the chip beams out waves in the harmless terahertz frequency, a little-used portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and far-infrared. Terahertz generators historically have been bulky, expensive affairs. But now Caltech researchers have succeeded in crafting terahertz-emitting silicon chips that are smaller than a dime using a standard, inexpensive electronics manufacturing technique. The researchers harnessed an array of tiny transistors operating in unison and designed the whole chip to act essentially as a terahertz antenna. “We took a holistic approach and combined generation and radiation in one place,” says Ali Hajimiri, co-developer of the chip and an…

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM Because rhinoceroses are endangered, buying and selling their horns should be banned. CONTRARY VIEW Legalizing the trade in rhino horns is our best chance to save the species. Purported to treat a variety of ailments, from fevers to measles to epilepsy, rhinoceros horns have been prized ingredients in Chinese medicines for thousands of years. Sought after for their horns, white rhinos saw their population fall to 100 animals in South Africa by 1910, and only 2,410 black rhinos remained there in 1995. In South Africa and Namibia, a strong conservation ethic — coupled with financial incentives for ownership, management and protection of rhinos for tourism and legal trophy hunting — gradually helped to reduce poaching and restore rhino numbers. But today, Africa’s rhinos once again are facing extinction,…

A Computing Pioneer Looks to the Next Frontier Among the big guns of computer science, Ivan Sutherland is a bazooka. Fifty years ago, Sutherland’s Sketchpad program arguably launched the field of computer graphics. In the ’90s, the Nebraska native’s “logical effort” method optimized circuitry speed. Sutherland is currently focused on asynchronous computing, which he believes will revolutionize his field. Now at Portland State University, he spoke with DISCOVER Associate Editor Gemma Tarlach about his place in history and biggest source of pride. Computing today runs, well, like clockwork: A circuit’s signal is forced onto a pathway made of regular intervals. But you’ve been developing asynchronous computing, which allows signals to progress at different speeds. Why is this method the next big thing? All computing systems today march to the beat…

ON THIS GRAY, DRIZZLY WINTER morning, the California coastal mountains in the distance look like a mirage hovering over a flat swath of fields at Russell Ranch, a 300-acre experimental farm in the Sacramento Valley. One of the researchers in charge is Martin Burger, an angular, intense-looking Swiss ecologist. He steps out of his Ford F-150 pickup and leads me down a gravely path to a field covered in neat rows of lime-green triticale — a cereal grain — and bean shoots. Above ground, the scene looks orderly and static. But Burger and his colleagues at the University of California at Davis are interested in what lies hidden below the surface. Down there, it’s a highly dynamic and far-from-predictable scene. To get a glimpse, they have buried an array of…

Above: Central Beacon Valley lies at the heart of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys; buried under the valley’s rubble is 8-million-year-old ice, believed to be the world’s oldest. Photographer Keith Heyward of Prehensile Productions created this 180-degree panorama of the area from 35 separate exposures. From left: In these photos taken by JT Thomas, Dan Sampson from the University of California in Santa Cruz jumps to test seismic sensors that are buried in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, nearly 650 miles and a world away from the Dry Valleys; a 2,626-foot borehole leads to Subglacial Lake Whillans; Reed Scherer, a geology professor from Northern Illinois University, stands by as drilling work continues; researchers extract mud from the lake; geomicrobiologist Andrew Mitchell, now with Aberystwyth University in England, prepares lake-water samples.…

by GEORGE JOHNSON When Louis Leakey sat down to recount the discovery of what may be the earliest sign of cancer in the genus Homo, the first thing he remembered was the mud. It was March 29, 1932, midway through the Third East African Archaeological Expedition, and it had rained so long and so hard that it took an hour to drive the four miles from the campsite in Kanjera, near the shore of Lake Victoria, to the Kanam West fossil beds. By the time he and his crew had slogged their way through, they were covered with mud, and before long, Leakey, who was just beginning an illustrious career as an anthropologist, was on hands and knees scouring the ground for newly exposed bones. He was coaxing the remains…

by LINDA MARSA Martha Cota awakened one morning to find her infant son, Jose Miguel, gasping for air, his lips and the skin under his fingernails blue from lack of oxygen. Terrified, she rushed him to her local hospital in Long Beach, Calif., where doctors stabilized the toddler and sent him home with medications to control his fever and an inhaler to help him catch his breath. The cycle went on for more than five years — Jose turning blue and barely able to breathe, Cota frantically strapping him into his car seat and racing through traffic, spending countless days and nights sitting in hospital emergency rooms. Like so many other kids in their working-class neighborhood not far from Long Beach’s massive port, Jose had severe asthma, and it took…

JULY/AUGUST SKY MYSTIC MILKY WAY “The Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters,” wrote Galileo Galilei in 1610, recognizing for the first time that the sun, Earth and other planets are part of a far grander structure. Most of us never get to share Galileo’s epiphany because ubiquitous light pollution easily overwhelms the glow of the Milky Way. But not always: Once or twice a year, suburban skies turn beautifully transparent, often after a storm has cleaned up the air. Or perhaps your summer vacation may take you to true dark-sky country. Either way — seize the moment! Even a quick glance reveals a lot. The Milky Way appears as a confined band of light because our galaxy is flattened like a pancake,…