Discover January-February 2014

In my inbox this morning, I found a letter from a reader waiting for me, requesting more information about research that appeared in “Doorway to a Cure,” our September feature on cystic fibrosis. We get these sorts of requests all the time. Frankly, I’d be worried if we didn’t. One of the things I admire about all of you is your insatiable curiosity. We strive in every issue to tell complete and satisfying stories, but in some ways I feel we’d be doing you a disservice if you didn’t come away from any given story or issue and ask, “What’s next?” Based on the letters we get, a good number of you even find yourselves thinking about a story you read months or years ago and wondering whatever happened to…

(and what they hope misses us!) Don’t be shy about sharing your opinions, whether via letters, email or our social media communities. Here’s what you’ve been telling us lately. Holes in Hot Science The Hot Science section is “Your guide to cool culture, new tech and what’s next” in each issue. I think Hot Science is a great section; however, I’m surprised that there is no subsection on sciencefiction literature! In my opinion, reading books does the mind more good than watching movies, and you certainly dedicate a good portion of the section to films. Science-based nonfiction is awesome, too, but let’s get some sciencefiction novels in there! Even mentioning/recommending some older science fiction, like Isaac Asimov’s 1972 The Gods Themselves, would be excellent. Derek Saballos Dunedin, FL Under Surveillance…

In 1976, the Viking spacecraft gave us the first clear picture of the Martian surface — and sparked hopes that the barren, toxic planet once hosted life. In 2013, the rover Curiosity found the most convincing evidence yet that the planet was once habitable, as well as clues about why life there might have died out. The $2.5 billion rover, roughly the size of a Mini Cooper automobile, discovered an ancient streambed soon after landing — evidence that water once flowed there. Next, Curiosity used its considerable payload of geologic tools to dig up further proof. Its robotic arm drilled a 2.5-inch borehole in mudstone bedrock. The robot fed the resulting rock powder into its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which heated the sample, vaporizing it into gases that…

The patent Myriad Genetics filed in 1994, laying claim to the DNA sequence of the gene BRCA1, wasn’t remarkable. It was one in a long line of some 40,000 patents on DNA molecules awarded in the past three decades, covering more than 20 percent of human genes. But that patent took on a new importance last summer, when the Supreme Court ruled that it and untold numbers of other DNA patents are invalid because naturally occurring DNA sequences cannot be patented. The decision has had immediate benefits for researchers and doctors, but creates new worries for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Before the ruling, Utah-based Myriad had a legal monopoly in the U.S. on tests for mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 that contribute to aggressive forms of breast…

On May 9, instruments atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano pegged the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) — the gas that contributes most to global warming — at slightly above 400 parts per million (ppm). Pieter Tans, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and his colleague Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, had been watching the concentration climb ever closer to 400 ppm — a level not seen in millennia. They realized that reaching such a big, round number was “an opportunity to remind the world that CO2 is rising fast, and that the rate of rise in the last decade has been the fastest recorded,” Tans says. They also knew that “the press was looking over our shoulders,…

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, writing in the Harvard Law Review, expressed concern over privacy infringements threatened by new technology: “Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual . . . the right ‘to be let alone,’” they wrote. The year was 1890, and the inventions Warren and Brandeis cited were “instantaneous photographs” and devices for “reproducing scenes or sounds.” Those innovations now sound quaint, but the concerns they raised are fresher than ever. In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden created an international firestorm when he leaked top-secret documents detailing the U.S. government’s surveillance activities. In addition to providing details on foreign eavesdropping of private citizens and leaders,…