Indice dei contenuti per January-February 2013 in Discover

Bill Andrews, previously at Astronomy, is a new editor at discover. He has also written for MayoClinic.com Nate Berg is a Los Angeles–based writer who covers cities, science, and design. Kevin Berger is the features editor of Nautilus, a new digital science magazine. He is a former senior editor at DISCOVER. Jennifer Berglund, a Boston-based writer interested in biology and ecology, is a film producer at prehensileproductions.com David Brin (davidbrin.com) is a physicist and writer whose novels include The Postman, Earth, and Existence. Emma Bryce, a former intern at DISCOVER, is a freelance writer and a contributor to The New York Times. Gillian Conahan lives in New York and focuses on physics and technology. She is a discover researcher. Andrew Curry is a journalist based in Berlin. More of his…

EARLY IN MY CAREER, I WAS the resident on call one night in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit when an emergency room doctor called and asked me to come down and see a patient. “Young guy,” he said. “He has some sort of an airway problem.” Those were worrisome words, because airway problems can be immediately life-threatening. I rushed to the patient’s examining room, where two men were supporting a third, younger man. One of the two supporting him was grasping his upper arm so tightly that his own arms were visibly shaking. He looked very scared. “I’m Steve’s dad, doc.” He looked at the man on the other side of the patient. “And this is Coach Alexander.” “Hey, doc,” grunted the coach. “Somethin’ ain’t right here. This is one…

A DECADES-LONG, MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR SEARCH PAID OFF LAST July when physicists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva announced that they had discovered the Higgs boson, a particle so fundamental that without it there would be no atoms in the universe—and therefore no stars, no planets, and no one to wonder about it all. “It’s kind of profound,” says Joe Incandela, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, spokesman for one of the two teams that made the discovery and a master of scientific understatement. “We’re still absorbing it ourselves. We’ve touched on something now that really is way beyond anything we’ve done before.” The Higgs holds a special place in physicists’ hearts (and equations) because it helps explain a baffling dichotomy in nature: Why do some particles have…

1 Canada, United States/Oyster Die-Off More than 80 percent of oyster larvae are not surviving in Pacific Northwest commercial hatcheries. The high mortality rate is due to ocean acidification, partly driven by carbon dioxide emissions, according to an April 2012 study. 2 United States/Heat Waves The continental United States experienced the hottest temperatures ever recorded, with 4,420 daily records broken or tied in July. That helped trigger droughts affecting 80 percent of the country, wild-fires that incinerated 9 million acres, and severe thunderstorms that cut power to 4.2 million Americans. 3 Arctic Ocean/Ice Melt The ice coverage on the Arctic Ocean shriveled last September to 1.32 million square miles, the smallest expanse ever recorded and less than half the area covered by sea ice three decades ago (for more detail…

John Donoghue, the director of the Institute for Brain Science at Brown University, could not contain his excitement. For years he had been working on a revolutionary method to pick up brain signals from paralyzed patients and translate them into commands to move mechanical limbs. If all went well in this experiment, Cathy Hutchinson, a 58-year-old woman who lost the use of her limbs in a stroke, would control a robotic arm and hand and use them to lift a bottle of coffee to her mouth—just by thinking. “Guys,” Donoghue told his collaborators, “buy the most expensive camera we can afford and shoot this in high-definition. This is a historic moment.” And so it was. Hutchinson sipped coffee from a bottle, the first time she had served herself in 14…

THE UNITED STATES’ ENERGY BALANCE shifted dramatically in 2012 as natural gas production in North America surged, driven by the controversial extraction method known as fracking. Last April natural gas tied coal as the top electricity-producing fuel in the United States (each generated 32 percent of the total). This was the first time any generating source had challenged coal for dominance since the dawn of electric power generation in the 1880s. The glut of cheap gas and tightening regulations on air pollutants (see next page) have prompted the planned closure of 175 coal-fired power plants by 2016, representing 8.5 percent of all coal-fueled electricity capacity in the country. One-third of those plants, among the oldest and dirtiest in the United States, were to be shuttered by the end of 2012,…

IN 2003 THE HUMAN GENOME Project gave us all the A’s, G’s, C’s, and T’s in our DNA, but that readout told little about how those molecular components are used, controlled, and organized. Last September researchers narrowed that gap between reading our genome and understanding it by cataloging the activity of most of its 3 billion letters. The ambitious venture, called Encode (the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements), required a team of 442 scientists studying genetic activity in 147 different types of human cells. Just 1.5 percent of the genome directs the building of proteins, the molecular workhorses of our cells. The Encode team provided the first comprehensive look at the roles played by the rest. Some of the letters serve as landing spots for proteins that switch genes on and…

Refined sugar is notorious for promoting tooth decay and obesity. But last February a group of scientists issued a much more damning charge against the white stuff. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, argued in the journal Nature that sugar is addictive and toxic—that it can poison the liver, cause metabolic syndrome (increasing the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes), suppress the brain’s dopamine system, and cause us to crave more. Lustig concluded, controversially, that sugar should be regulated like a drug. Alcohol is regulated because of its ubiquity, toxicity, abuse, and negative impact on society, he wrote, and “sugar meets the same criteria.” Some researchers, along with (no surprise) the American Beverage Association and the Sugar Association, claim that Lustig has gone too…

ITS USE LONG CONFINED to tech-savvy engineering students and Silicon Valley tinkerers, the 3-D printer has suddenly morphed into an off-the-shelf technology, with big implications for R&D and society at large. The printers, which create physical objects directly from digital renderings, could revolutionize the manufacture of everything from pharmaceuticals to automobiles. In one notable application, chemists at the University of Glasgow last year developed a method for assembling chemical compounds using open-source software and a pair of $2,000 3-D printers. One printer’s robotically controlled syringe deposited gels that hardened into half of a reaction vessel. A second printer painted chemical compounds into the shell, which was sealed by the first printer. The compounds then combined in the completed reaction vessel, creating new, previously unsynthesized chemicals. As a test, the Scottish…

Hurricane Sandy upended millions of lives and caused up to $50 billion in damage when it struck the Eastern Seaboard last October, but its most enduring legacy may be vaulting climate change back onto the public agenda. “We have a 100-year flood every 2 years now,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the day after the storm. “We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns.” He called for the building of levees or other barriers to counter the threat of storm flooding as sea level rises; in New York Harbor the water is about a foot higher than it was a century ago. Similar adaptation projects will most likely be needed in other major coastal cities. They won’t be cheap, but Sandy starkly framed the alternatives.…

Environmentalists who are skeptical about genetically modified crops should think again, judging from a study published last June. Researchers reported in the journal Nature that transgenic cotton bred to resist pests increases biodiversity by reducing the amount of insecticide sprayed on fields. The scientists tracked cotton plots in China from 1990 to 2010 as farmers switched from conventional seeds, which require insecticide spraying as many as 15 times a year, to a transgenic variety that produces a protein toxic to crop-ravaging insects like the cotton bollworm. Today so-called Bt cotton is planted on nearly 60 million acres in China, making up more than 95 percent of the country’s total crop. The result: “With the Bt cotton, chemical use decreased 60 percent,” says Kongming Wu, an entomologist with the Chinese Academy…

Microscopic oxygen bubbles, injected directly into the bloodstream, could soon begin saving the lives of patients who have stopped breathing. Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital encased microscopic pockets of oxygen in a layer of lipids, the fatty molecules that make up cell membranes. Then they administered a shot of the bubbly mix into test animals. The fatty bubbles diffused instantly and saturated the blood within seconds. When given to rabbits with obstructed airways, the solution kept the animals alive and stable for 15 minutes without their taking a single breath. If this type of therapy proves safe in humans, a syringe full of oxygen microbubbles could help avert brain damage and death for the victims of cardiac arrest, asthma attacks, strokes, and injuries to the lungs, airway, or face. Says…

ARCTIC SEA ICE, IN RETREAT FOR YEARS, SHRANK TO ITS LOWEST extent in recorded history this past summer. At its minimum on September 16, the ice covered an area about the size of India; that is 18 percent smaller than the previous record low, set in 2007. The past year’s Arctic melting may have excited shipping companies with the prospect of new ice-free maritime routes, but it is having climate repercussions far from the North Pole. “The intervals between the records are shorter and shorter. The changes are accelerating,” says Ronald Kwok, a polar scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Satellite data show that the annual minimum for Arctic sea ice area fell 7 percent per decade between 1980 and 2000—but since 2000 it has fallen 14…

Check out these numbers: Researchers at MIT have figured out an improved mathematical technique that can process signals up to 1,000 times faster than is possible with today’s technology. Their approach promises to turbocharge GPS, MRI scans, and many other data-intensive processes. The advance improves on a staple of modern computation known as the fast Fourier transform, or FFT, which breaks down a complex signal into its component parts—almost like describing a piano chord by identifying the individual notes that need to be played. In January computer scientists Dina Katabi and Piotr Indyk, along with their students Eric Price and Haitham Hassanieh, announced a way to get the job done much faster. Signals that have the fewest component frequencies, like those used for medical imaging, will see the biggest speed…

Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, is a remarkable place. Bigger than the planet Mercury, it has a thick, opaque atmosphere; complex weather; and lakes of liquid natural gas. Last June astronomers added another wild detail to the profile: a global ocean buried beneath the icy surface. The discovery came from six flybys of Titan that NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, orbiting Saturn since 2004, made between 2006 and 2011. During those passes, astronomers measured how the intense pull of Saturn’s gravity deforms Titan during its 16-day revolution around the ringed planet. If Titan were a solid body, it would barely be affected, bulging only about 3 feet during its closest approach to Saturn. Cassini’s measurements revealed that Titan actually bulges a substantial 30 feet, indicating that the moon’s surface rides on…

GLIOBLASTOMA, THE MOST COMMON AND aggressive type of brain cancer, has long resisted treatment. But now, with the finding that glioblastoma can be triggered when two genes fuse, a targeted therapy to reverse the disease may be a step closer. The insight was reported last September, when oncologists described a merger between two specific genes in 3 percent of the roughly 10,000 glioblastoma cases diagnosed each year. Similar mergers between other gene pairs, they hypothesized, could account for a significant portion of those with the disease. The discovery sheds new light on the origin of this deadly cancer, suggesting that therapies have largely failed because they are aimed at the wrong target. The mergers occur during DNA replication, when matching segments of otherwise disparate genes mistakenly pair up. The fused…

THREE YEARS AGO, A VIRUS called XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus) made headlines when a researcher flagged it as a potential cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, attaching a concrete cause to a mysterious disease. Earlier work hinted that XMRV causes prostate cancer as well. But last year the case fell apart, as the virus was cleared on both counts by two separate studies, both published on September 18. Soon after Judy Mikovits, then a researcher at the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nevada, published her original 2009 results in Science, other researchers failed to replicate her findings and started raising concerns. So Columbia University virus hunter W. Ian Lipkin coordinated with three separate labs to determine conclusively whether XMRV is linked to chronic fatigue. The investigation…

THE SUCCESSFUL REINTRODUCTION of gray wolves to parts of the northern Rocky Mountains has boosted the ecological health of Yellowstone National Park, William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, reported last January. The wolves’ rebound has also led to expanded opportunities to hunt them, though, raising concerns about how the recovery is being managed. In the fall of 2012, Wyoming issued hunting licenses to kill about 16 percent of its wolf population. The federal government wiped out Yellowstone’s wolves in the 1920s, and elk soon browsed trees and shrubs down to short, stubby forms. Now that wolves are culling elk, many aspens and willows are taller and fuller, and birds are repopulating them. Beavers expanded from one colony in 1996 to 12 in 2009. In the recovered regions, Ripple…

Archaeologists have found that people began tending fires long before they were even people, exactly. Until recently, the oldest documented man-made fire dated to 790,000 years ago; it was found in 2004 at a dig in Israel. But last February researchers from Boston University, the University of Toronto, and the Heidelberg University of Science and Humanities in Germany dramatically pushed back the date of man’s mastery of fire with the reported discovery of a hearth in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave. Tucked 100 feet inside the 460-foot-long cavern, behind a large stalagmite, the team found bits of burned grasses and sedges, along with ash and charred bone fragments. Further study revealed that the remains were produced by a tended fire that burned over a million years ago. The researchers hope that…

Scientists have reconstructed much of the genome of an extinct human species, called the Denisovans, that lived in what is now Siberia. To do the work—the most complete reconstruction of archaic human DNA to date—Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany amplified wisps of DNA from an 80,000-year-old fingertip bone, yielding sequences as detailed as those swabbed from someone’s cheek today. The method splits strands of highly degraded genetic material in half, doubling the amount available for decoding. “We will be able to use the genome to build a catalog of the genetic changes that set us apart from our archaic relative,” Meyer says.…

Professional digital cameras snap shots with a resolution of 20 or 30 megapixels. Electrical engineer David Brady at Duke University has created a camera that takes one-gigapixel pictures. He and his team arranged 98 microcameras in a dome. A unique computing system knits the 98 snapshots into a billion-pixel image, so detailed that viewers can read a license plate shot from a third of a mile away. The tech could eventually find its way into personal cameras. Meanwhile, Brady and his colleagues started building a five-gigapixel commercial version this past fall.…

Rice is considered so benign that for many babies it is their first taste of solid food. That wholesome reputation came under fire last September when separate studies by Consumer Reports and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration showed that much of the rice in this country harbors a significant load of inorganic arsenic, a carcinogen associated with a wide variety of cancers. Both studies looked at about 200 samples of consumer products, from rice milk to rice varieties like basmati. Since there is no federal standard for arsenic in most food, Consumer Reports compared the samples with the standard set for drinking water in New Jersey: 5 micrograms per liter, the strictest regulation in the nation. Nearly a quarter of the tested rice samples carried more than 5 micrograms…

Lasers pop up everywhere in modern life, from supermarket scanners to the cables that bring the Internet into your house. But few of us have encountered the laser’s cold war–era relative, the maser, which produces concentrated beams of microwaves. Maser technology has been held back by weak performance and chunky dimensions. That changed this year when researchers in England created a downsized prototype that is 100 million times as powerful as typical existing masers. Most masers are the size of a vending machine, bulked up by the strong magnets and refrigeration systems required to make them work. “I wanted to liberate the maser,” says physicist Mark Oxborrow of the National Physical Laboratory, “to free it from the prison of the refrigerator.” The key was finding a material that creates microwaves…

WHILE SURVEYING LIGHT FROM THE EARLY UNIVERSE IN 2010, ASTROPHYSICIST Felipe Menanteau noticed a suspicious shadow cast by something filled with hot gas. Last year he announced he had tracked down the source: a giant, hot cluster of hundreds of galaxies about 7 billion light-years away, the most distant such cluster known. Menanteau named the cluster El Gordo, Spanish for “the fat one”—fat because it is so enormous, and in Spanish since it was spotted with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. Because it is so far away, El Gordo appears to us the way it looked just 6.7 billion years after the Big Bang. At that age, a cluster would not yet have had much time to accumulate mass by the pull of its gravity; El Gordo’s extreme size…

Cell biologists have finally proved a 60-year-old theory about how certain animals get their stripes and blotches. The famously prolific mathematician Alan Turing had hypothesized that such biological patterns arise when a pair of chemicals react in a regular, alternating manner as they move through tissue during development. In February Jeremy Green and his team at King’s College London identified a pair of proteins called morphogens that shape the ridges on a mouse’s palate. These morphogens, named fibroblast growth factor and sonic hedgehog, form an “activator” and “inhibitor” pair that together differentiate cells into ridges and troughs. The researchers believe that the same alternating chemical process stimulates skin cells to generate patches of differently colored fur. “Turing was one of the first people to have the boldness to deal with…

WHEN COMPUTER SCIENTISTS START MESSING with music, their electronic sounds rarely elicit much interest beyond the research lab or the experimental basement club. So it was a milestone last April when the London Symphony Orchestra recorded “Tránsitos,” a 13-minute work by Iamus, a computer developed by Francisco J. Vico at the University of Málaga in Spain. Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, a composer and pianist, and Vico designed Iamus (named after a mythical Greek prophet who understood the language of birds) to employ basic rules of musical notation and the ranges of notes available to various instruments. Beginning with some randomly generated musical fragments the researchers called genomes, Iamus mutated the elements until they evolved into complete scores. Algorithms automatically pared away any unplayable passages. Díaz-Jerez claims that Iamus’s debut album, released last…

Nearly 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Democritus theorized the existence of atoms by imagining what happens if you break a material into its smallest possible units. Last year physicist Dave Kielpinski of Australia’s Griffith University had a similar thought about shadows. “We’re used to objects casting shadows, but they’re made up of atoms,” he says. “I wondered what the shadow would look like if you kept peeling back atoms until you had just one.” So he isolated a single ytterbium atom in a vacuum chamber, shined a laser at it, and focused in on the resulting 450-nanometer gap of darkness that landed on his digital image sensor. In July he released the image above: the first-ever view of an atomic shadow, magnified here 6,500 times.…

Great paleontology finds like Pegomastax (see story at left) can be overlooked because fossils are so cumbersome and time-consuming to study. Last year, a Drexel University team led by Ken Lacovara started working on a solution. Taking advantage of the plummeting price of scanners and 3-D printers, they are digitizing dinosaur remains and making copies of key elements. They have already logged most bones from a newly discovered, 60-ton sauropod, a relative of Diplodocus. “They’re the biggest creatures to ever walk the land, so they’re very difficult to work with,” Lacovara says. “A femur can weigh 1,200 pounds.” Now that the bones exist in digital form, Lacovara plans to link them up virtually to test how the sauropod once moved. He also printed its forelimbs at one-tenth scale so he…

India has overtaken the United States as the world’s supreme spewer of spam. Indian computers distribute a sixth of the roughly 100 billion junk emails sent daily, according to an October report by the online security firm Sophos. It attributes India’s rise to a fast-growing population of novice users who unwittingly download viruses that turn computers into zombie spam distributors. Security-awareness campaigns and tighter oversight by Internet service providers helped the U.S. fall to third. SHARE OF WORLD’S SPAM…

One hundred million years ago, a young spider bore down on a wasp ensnared in its web. Just seconds before the captor made a meal of its captive, a drop of tree resin engulfed and smothered them both. The resin eventually became a hunk of amber that was unearthed in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar. Inside, perfectly preserved, is not just this haunting tableau, but also the leg and part of the body of an adult male spider that had the bad luck to step in the same resin globule. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime piece,” says George Poinar Jr., professor emeritus of zoology at Oregon State University, who described the find last year in the journal Historical Biology. “The fact that there’s also a male in this web shows that these…

IN THE EARLY MORNING OF MARCH 27, 2012, glowing streamers spread across the sky above the Eastern Seaboard. Visible from North Carolina to upstate New York, the eerie trails were created by five suborbital NASA rockets that soared to altitudes of 50 to 80 miles, where they released chemical tracers that reacted with oxygen in the thin upper atmosphere. A team led by Miguel Larsen, a physicist at Clemson University, then monitored the tracers to follow the movements of the hard-to-study upper jet stream. Those high-altitude winds zip along at more than 300 miles per hour and generate electrical currents that surround the Earth. “This is an important region of the atmosphere because it affects so many things that occur in space,” Larsen says. His mission—called the Anomalous Transport Rocket…

WHEN WORD GOT OUT THAT TWO VIROLOGISTS HAD ENGINEERED AVIAN FLU SO it could spread among ferrets, the reaction was swift and savage. The New York Times called the germs “doomsday” weapons and predicted that “tens or hundreds of millions of people could get killed.” Many scientists voiced fears that the mutant virus could cause a deadly pandemic if it escaped—or, even if it remained controlled, that this work could show terrorists how to breed bioweapons. The researchers who created the viruses, Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical College in Rotterdam, both mutated an existing influenza strain so it could attach to cells in mammalian upper airways. Kawaoka modified the H1N1 flu virus with a gene from the H5N1 bird flu virus, which…

When the Curiosity rover reached Mars on August 6, our science team at NASA debated what to name its touchdown site. On August 22—what would have been the 92nd birthday of science fiction luminary Ray Bradbury—we dubbed the site Bradbury Landing. The simple reason we chose that name is that it garnered the most votes. The deeper reason is that Ray Bradbury’s writings had a powerful effect on many of us in the room. I heard the news of the first landing on Mars, achieved by Viking 1, as an oceanography student out at sea in 1976. Bradbury’s book The Martian Chronicles had captured my imagination when I was a young boy and had, in some ways, led to my being on that research vessel, exploring new worlds beneath the…

In August Oscar Pistorius, a South African double amputee, sprinted into the 400-meter semifinals—and into Olympic history—on carbon-fiber feet. In November Zac Vawter climbed to the top of Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) on a bionic leg controlled by his thoughts. The events were triumphs for both the athletes and the army of prosthetics engineers working behind the scenes. Pistorius’s feet were so effective that some questioned whether they provided an unfair advantage on the track. The prosthetic worn by Vawter, a software engineer, has even bigger implications for commonplace amputee challenges like walking up hills and stairs. After losing his right leg in a motorcycle accident, Vawter underwent an experimental technique called targeted muscle reinnervation. Stray ends of nerves at the amputation site were redirected into muscle…

YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS (OR VIEW ON YOUR SCREEN) AN object steeped in history. It is a record of science advances from 2012, yes, but also much more. Our #1 story, the discovery of the Higgs boson, is the result of one of the largest and most complex collaborations in history. The two teams that did the research include more than 5,000 physicists. Collectively the 100 stories in this issue represent tens of thousands of people-years of work—a monumental, global effort to expand the reach of the human mind. This issue also represents a more personal historic moment. After 32 years in New York City (ignoring a short, ill-fated vacation in California), discover is closing its editorial offices here. And after 15 years at the magazine, I will soon…

MY WIFE HAS TRIED TO convince me from time to time that I suffer from depression. I point out that I feel fine, I’m productive, I engage in all the basic elements of a reasonably full life. She counters that this is all evidence of how deeply I’m burying my depressive feelings. She has gone on to suggest that my fascination with technology is a way of distancing myself from other people. I’m not buying it. But her comments did get me wondering: If I really did become depressed, could I count on gadgetry to help me find a way out? For once I’m not alone in my distorted thinking. Or so I am assured by Edrick Dorian, a clinical and police psychologist in Encino, California. “Unfortunately, some people don’t…

1. ARRIVAL The spacecraft transporting the Curiosity rover entered the Martian atmosphere at 1:10 a.m. EDT on August 6 After an eight-month journey. Because it takes 14 minutes to send or receive a signal from Mars, NASA operators could not communicate with the craft during its descent; they had to hope that their meticulously plotted engineering and software would, within “seven minutes of terror,” slow the probe down from 13,000 miles per hour and gently and precisely deposit Curiosity at the selected landing site. 2. DESCENT Friction with Mars’s tenuous atmosphere slowed the spacecraft as it descended but created temperatures up to 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit. A heat shield protected the rover inside from incineration. Meanwhile, a network of eight thrusters adjusted the trajectory toward the landing site. At an altitude…

AS MEN AGE, THEY ARE MORE LIKELY TO PASS GENETIC MUTATIONS ON to their children. By introducing change, older men’s genes appear to be a major driving force in human evolution, says Kári Stefánsson, founder of the company decode Genetics and author of a study published in August. But the mutations from a growing number of older fathers may also account for a portion of the recent increase in autism. Because the cells that give rise to sperm divide frequently—about 23 times a year—they are much more likely to accumulate genetic copying errors than the female precursor cells, oocytes, which divide only twice before becoming eggs. The mistakes add up over a lifetime, so that the older the father, the more mutations he has in his sperm. Stefánsson and his…

MORE THAN 80 PERCENT OF THE matter in the universe consists of an unknown substance that cannot be seen through any telescope nor detected in any lab. This invisible stuff interacts with normal matter only through gravity, which is how astronomers first inferred its existence. More recently, computer models have demonstrated that dark matter is actually crucial to the visible realm. Without it, galaxies never would have pulled together. There would be no stars. There would be no people. Although astronomers still do not know exactly what dark matter is, in 2012 they learned a lot more about how it works. One team traced the way it spreads its tentacles throughout the cosmos. And another found hints that dark matter may not always be invisible after all. Last January, Ludovic…

2012, AFTER TWO DECADES OF resistance from the coal industry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally upheld a rule to control mercury emissions from power plants. Called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or mats, the stringent new regulations limit not only mercury but also acid gases like hydrochloric acid, heavy metals like arsenic, and other toxic pollutants—and require companies to comply by 2017. When fully implemented, the standards will eliminate 90 percent of the 53 tons of mercury emitted annually by coal-fired power plants in the United States. Power generation will then finally catch up with medical waste incineration and municipal garbage burning. Twenty years ago those activities contributed similar amounts of heavy-metal pollution but have since drastically cleaned up their acts, leaving power plants as the leading…

Astronomers identified more than 100 more worlds around other stars in 2012, but one especially hit home—because it is right next door. Scientists have spent more than a decade probing for planets around Alpha Centauri, a trio of stars just 4.4 light-years away. In October, Xavier Dumusque at the Observatory of Geneva and colleagues described a slight wobble in Alpha Centauri B, caused by the tug of an Earth-mass planet orbiting every three days around that yellowish, sunlike star. Although the planet is probably rocky like Earth, it lies so close to Alpha Centauri B that its surface is surely molten. But where there is one planet there are usually more, Dumusque says. The worlds of the Alpha Centauri system will be among the few close enough to study for…

Last year two paralyzed people briefly stood again, aided by a device that electrically stimulates the lower spinal cord. They were among the first beneficiaries of a hugely promising technique that researchers hope could one day enable many paralyzed people to walk again. The spinal cord carries the brain signals that control movement of the limbs. If the cord gets clipped by disease or injury, the communication lines go dead; because nerve fibers have limited ability to regrow, the resulting paralysis can be permanent. But starting in the 1990s, UCLA neuroscientist Reggie Edgerton showed that when stimulated with small electrical pulses, the spinal cord can wake up those nerve fibers and coordinate standing and walking—without any input from the brain. Edgerton implanted electrodes in paralyzed rats, then stimulated their spinal…

Gastric bypass surgery can put early diabetes into remission in obese patients, sometimes within a few days. Last year, two papers demonstrated that gastric bypass can push the disease into remission in advanced diabetics as well, and that it outperforms drugs in treating the disease. During Roux-en-Y, the most successful type of bypass, surgeons section off a ping-pong-ball-size pouch of stomach and connect it to a lower part of the small intestine, skipping large portions of the stomach and intestine. This seems to lower appetite and reboot metabolism, resetting the response to hormones (like insulin) that control sugar uptake. But to what extent these changes curb diabetes was unclear. So teams at Catholic University of Rome and Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic followed nearly 200 advanced diabetics receiving medicine or weight-loss surgery.…

The main options for parents who want to test their unborn child for genetic diseases are invasive procedures that pose up to a 1 percent risk of miscarriage. But in landmark studies published last year, two research teams pieced together nearly an entire fetal genome using just easy-to-obtain parental blood and saliva samples. One technique, developed by University of Washington geneticist Jay Shendure, involves comparing fetal DNA from the mother’s blood plasma with DNA from the mother’s blood and from the father’s saliva. A statistical algorithm then analyzes which gene variants the fetus has inherited from each parent and detects new mutations in the child’s DNA. A similar technique, created by researchers at Stanford, requires only blood from the mother, but provides less hereditary information. Both methods have downsides: They…

As our electronic devices get ever smaller and more powerful, they are generating mountains of data—documents, pictures, videos, and so on. Where are we going to put it all? Andreas Heinrich at IBM Research–Almaden in California, has a solution. This past year his team announced that they had created the world’s smallest magnetic memory, storing one bit of data (recorded as a 0 or 1) on just 12 iron atoms. Today’s hard drives need about 1 million atoms to do the same. Heinrich used a scanning tunneling microscope to align the iron atoms so each one takes on a magnetic polarity opposite that of its neighbor. Such an alignment cancels the overall field. As a result, the data-storing groups of atoms—which record information magnetically—do not interfere with each other. The…

In the ever-shrinking world of electronics, vacuum tubes long ago gave way to solid-state component transistors, then to transistors in integrated circuits. Last year an international team achieved the next astonishing milestone in downsizing: They devised a way to make a single-atom transistor, the smallest possible electronic switch. By controlling electrons, that atom can modulate the flow of information and so be the foundation of a new kind of ultrafast, ultracompact computer. The team was led by physicist Michelle Simmons of the University of New South Wales and electrical engineer Gerhard Klimeck of Purdue University. The single-atom transistor is made by carving a slot in a hydrogen-coated silicon wafer with a tunneling electron microscope and depositing a single phosphorus atom in the hole. The phosphorus atom acts as an electrical…

SCIENTISTS ARE BEGINNING TO identity cancer by its mutations rather than just its tissue of origin, allowing them to find drugs more precisely targeted to a particular disease type. Already researchers at the Cancer Genome Atlas project (a collaboration of the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute) are sequencing mutations involved in more than 20 types of cancer. In September oncologists reported they sequenced deadly squamous cell lung cancer in 178 patients. Half the tumors had mutations that can be targeted by newly developed drugs, some of which are already in human trials. Similar cancer types often had very different mutations. “Lung cancer will turn out to be not one disease but dozens,” says Ramaswamy Govindan, a lead scientist on the project. The flip side is…

On February 5, a drill bit broke through 12,366 feet of ice to hit the waters of Antarctica’s vast and pristine Lake Vostok, after 20 years of on-and-off drilling. Human instruments had never before touched Vostok nor any of the other 250 buried lakes hidden beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets. Under immense pressure from the weight of the overlying ice, lake water instantly gushed up the borehole, forcing out 100,000 pounds of kerosene drill fluid that had filled the hole—and sparking celebration among the team of Russian scientists on the surface. Vostok has been sealed off from the surface for 15 million years, fueling eager speculation that archaic organisms might be secluded there. The Russian team plans to retrieve samples of frozen water from the borehole in early 2013 and look…

In a remarkable act of biological mimicry, researchers in Europe and the United States announced in April that they had created six types of artificial DNA—synthetic genetic material that can encode information just like the real thing. The invention suggests that the earliest life on Earth did not necessarily rely on DNA or its cousin, RNA, since other molecules can also perform the same tricks. The artificial DNA, or XNAs, are “simple chemical alternatives to store and propagate genetic information,” says team leader Philipp Holliger of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Natural DNA consists of a ladder frame of ring-shaped deoxyribose molecules (which form the backbone of the double helix) and rungs of bases (which spell out the genetic alphabet). To create XNAs, Holliger…

Two years ago, at a press conference that drew wide attention, scientists described a newfound microbe in California’s Mono Lake that flouted life’s basic instruction manual. They claimed that the bacterium, GFAJ-1, survived not on phosphate (essential to all known organisms) but on arsenate, a toxic arsenic compound. NASA hailed the work as a step forward in the search for alien life. But now other researchers have discredited the discovery. Swiss investigators Tobias Erb, Julia Vorholt, and Detlef Günther of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology exposed GFAJ-1 to varying concentrations of phosphate and noted that the more phosphate there was, the better the bacterium grew. When phosphate levels were too low it did not grow at all, contradicting the original claim. Before publishing his findings in July, Erb shared…

In September 2011 physicist Antonio Ereditato announced that wispy particles called neutrinos seemed to be traveling faster than light, in violation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The neutrinos, generated by an accelerator on the Swiss-French border, were showing up at a detector in Italy 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. The news exploded, and DISCOVER picked it as the top science story of the year. But last February physicists located a faulty cable that produced mistimed measurements. A month later Ereditato resigned as spokesman for Opera, the experiment that issued the result. DISCOVER’s Andrew Grant spoke with him about the fallout. What was your reaction when the Opera measurements first suggested that neutrinos were moving faster than light? Our reaction was a mixture of surprise and skepticism, but also the conviction…

Recently physicists have created prototype invisibility cloaks that conceal objects from light, sound, and water. Last January, Cornell physicist Alexander Gaeta one-upped them all by building a cloak that hides entire events. Gaeta exploited the fact that we perceive objects only because they scatter light. He started by splitting a light beam as it passed through a 400-foot-long glass fiber, which created a 40-picosecond gap of darkness as one part of the beam lagged behind the other. During that brief time, he shot a laser through the unlit gap. Finally Gaeta rejoined the light fragments to preserve the original beam. An observer at the end of the fiber would never know the laser had been fired, because it never interacted with the light beam. Gaeta suggests this approach may have…

On May 25, just 10 months after NASA’s final space shuttle flight, a cargo capsule called Dragon docked with the International Space Station, a first for a commercial space vehicle. In late October it made another visit to deliver routine supplies, even overcoming a failed engine on its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Both Dragon and Falcon 9 were built by SpaceX, a California-based company that is leading private industry’s advance into the last frontier. Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, is a former engineer who is already thinking far beyond supply runs to Earth orbit. She spoke with DISCOVER associate editor Andrew Grant about SpaceX’s big year and her lofty goals. What was it like watching the Dragon connect with the space station in May? I was in Backup Mission Control,…

Three taikonauts successfully linked a spacecraft to the Tiangong-1 orbiting lab in June, the first time a Chinese crew performed such a docking. The mission marked another major milestone in China’s rapidly advancing human space program: One member of the three-person crew, Liu Yang, became the first Chinese woman in orbit. So far, China has launched four manned missions. None have been technological breakthroughs (the United States and Russia accomplished similar feats decades ago), but the Chinese “have made demonstrable progress in the last decade,” says space historian Roger Launius of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. China’s long-range space plans, broadly outlined in a government white paper released in late 2011, call for a manned orbiting station by 2020—the same year the International Space Station is scheduled to close—and…

TWO SPACE MISSIONS LAUNCHED IN THE 1970S CONTINUED TO astound scientists this year: After touring the outer planets, Voyager 1 neared the boundary of interstellar space, while Pioneer 10 and 11 put our understanding of gravity to the test. For years scientists scratched their heads over the “Pioneer anomaly”: Radio signals from the twin spacecraft, which are no longer in contact with Earth, showed they were decelerating more rapidly than could be explained solely by the pull of the sun or other known physical effects. Some theorists suggested that the slowdown might indicate a problem with the laws of gravity set down by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Jet Propulsion Laboratory astrophysicist Slava Turyshev began an investigation and in June reported his findings. He concluded that the probes’ generators were…

Automatic translators have become powerful tools for communication across dozens of the world’s major languages. But accessing one of the other 6,800 tongues spoken on Earth has continued to require costly and time-consuming human translators. Now Microsoft has created a way for communities to develop a computer translator by themselves. A pilot project organized by Microsoft focused on the Asian Hmong Daw language. About 30 Hmong-speaking volunteers in Fresno, California, uploaded definitions from a Hmong-English dictionary, alongside copies of documents written in both Hmong and English. Then they wrote sample sentences demonstrating how individual words in their language are used. Statistical techniques automatically assigned probable translations, and over a four-month period the volunteers corrected mistranslations, steadily improving the computer system’s pattern recognition. In February Microsoft officially added Hmong Daw to…

Jeffrey Carr was working for Microsoft as a business analyst and blogging after-hours about the shadowy realm of intelligence analysis when war between Russia and Georgia broke out in 2008. At the behest of his readers in the intelligence community, Carr made a foray into their world, leading a successful crowdsourced project that determined the Russian government had been behind a series of hacks of Georgian websites. Since then Carr has started a digital security firm, Taia Global; written an authoritative overview of hack attacks, “Inside Cyber Warfare”; and become an adjunct professor at George Washington University, where he will teach a course on cyberconflict this year. With a rash of cyberattacks in the Middle East and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warning of a possible “cyber Pearl Harbor,” Carr…

HOOK-LEGGED SPIDER A group of cave explorers in southern Oregon discovered a new family of spider that grows up to three inches long and wields hooklike claws at the end of each leg. The claws are most likely used to snatch insects like midges midflight. The spider, Trogloraptor marchingtoni, has poisonous glands but is not considered dangerous to humans. It is the first native spider family identified in North America since 1890. WORLD’S TINIEST FROG This housefly-size frog, Paedophryne amauensis, has snatched the record as the world’s smallest vertebrate. One-third of an inch long and weighing 0.02 gram, it is a millimeter shorter than the Southeast Asian fish, the runner-up. Louisiana State University herpetologist Christopher Austin announced last January that he discovered the species after following chirping noises in a…

In June NASA announced that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a secretive U.S. spy organization, had made the space agency a surprise gift: two satellite telescopes originally intended for orbital surveillance. The telescopes have mirrors the same size as the one on the Hubble Space Telescope but offer a field of view 100 times as wide. “You can look at thousands of different targets at the same time instead of one at a time,” notes NASA astrophysics director Paul Hertz. The quality of the telescopes’ optics also far exceeds that of Hubble, indicating that the spy agency employs telescope technology beyond what NASA has developed. And the satellites were built roughly a decade ago, spurring questions about what the NRO is capable of now—questions that are unlikely to be answered…

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria, is responsible for more than 250,000 hospitalizations a year in the United States alone. And new, even more deadly versions of staph may be on the way, due to intensive use of antibiotics on factory farms. In February scientists reported that a methicillin-susceptible staph had jumped from people to industrially farmed pigs, acquired resistance to the antibiotics the pigs were fed, and jumped back again, having turned methicillin-resistant. The newly minted MRSA strain is an important reminder that overuse of livestock antibiotics could seriously harm human health, says microbial expert Lance Price of George Washington University, who was part of the research team. After a Dutch baby girl tested positive in 2004 for an unrecognized strain of MRSA, researchers…

A new sensory organ found inside the jaws of certain baleen whales may explain how they became the largest animals on Earth. The organ seems to help blue and humpback whales coordinate the movements of their giant mouths. The gel-filled organ, as yet unnamed, fits in a squishy cavity inside the tip of the lower jaw, where the jawbones converge and link to cartilage that branches into the whale’s accordion-like throat. About the size of a basketball in a blue whale, the organ senses pressure, movement, and vibration, and sends this information to the brain to coordinate so-called lunge feeding. That eating method, unique to a group of baleen whales known as rorquals, involves gulping a volume of water roughly equal to the whale’s whole body into its expandable throat.…

WHEN NASA’S VOYAGER 2 PROBE FLEW PAST URANUS IN 1986, THE SEVENTH PLANET looked like a featureless blue-green ball. But new images from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii reveal Uranus as a stormy, dynamic world. The false-color infrared shots below capture Uranus’s–360-degree Fahrenheit cloud tops over consecutive nights in July, with brighter colors representing higher-altitude methane clouds. These are the most detailed views of Uranus ever taken from Earth. Astronomers are puzzled by the scalloped band of low-lying clouds (left of the planet’s center) and the small storms (bright blotches at right) dotting the northern polar region. Further observations at Keck should help explain why the weather on Uranus is so active even though the sunlight there is just 1/900th as strong as on Earth.…

Ten thousand years ago, there were just 5 million people on Earth, fewer than live in Singapore today. The population has since soared to 7 billion. This rapid growth has left a mark on the human genome, researchers are finding, drastically increasing the number of very rare mutations in our DNA. That realization casts doubt on the long-standing view that just a few genetic mutations underlie many hereditary diseases. In reality, those diseases are probably caused by a wide variety of extremely rare mutations that vary from one person to the next, complicating efforts to understand and treat them at the genetic level. Scientists have known for years that each of our roughly 20,000 protein-coding genes comes in multiple forms, some with dramatic health effects. More recently, improved gene-sequencing technology…

U.S. DOCTORS DIAGNOSED MORE than 34,000 cases of pertussis—better known as whooping cough—in the first 10 months of 2012. That is 34 times as many Americans as caught the infection in all of 1976, the year the disease bottomed out. One of the least controlled vaccine-preventable diseases in the developed world, pertussis is not just an inconvenience; it can kill young infants, who are not yet protected by immunizations. Before the pertussis vaccine entered routine use in the 1940s, the bacterial infection killed about 4,000 people a year in the United States. In 2011 it caused 13 deaths. Unlike the revival of measles (see page 59), the resurgence of pertussis has little to do with parental resistance to vaccinations. “We don’t think those exemptors are driving this current wave,” said…

In a classic test of willpower, psychologists found that preschoolers who could resist eating one marshmallow now to get two marshmallows later fared better as adolescents, with higher SAT scores and better concentration. For decades the “marshmallow test” has been cited as evidence that self-control leads to success. But this past year, University of Rochester psychologist Celeste Kidd and colleagues proved that things are not so simple. In Kidd’s study, an experimenter promised 3-to 5-year-olds new crayons or stickers but returned empty-handed, saying that the supply had run out. When those disappointed kids took the marshmallow test, they gobbled the treat in short order. If you can’t count on that second marshmallow, why wait? Children who got the promised goodies waited four times longer, on average. Kidd’s conclusion: What might…

Virologist Ijad Madisch launched ResearchGate, a social network for scientists, three years ago in the hopes of bringing collaboration into the digital age. It took off rapidly and now boasts more than 2 million members, around 100 employees, and venture capital funding from PayPal cofounders Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek. Members can create profiles featuring their research, seek scientific collaborators, and share news. In August 2012, ResearchGate debuted its most disruptive feature: an alternative to the traditional process of peer review. The network now features a reputation score that allows members to review the contributions and input of other scientists. Madisch’s ultimate goal is to overturn the journal system that has served science for centuries and replace it with something more open and responsive. What’s wrong with the way research…

Last year astronomers made great progress toward understanding our place in space, gaining a new sense of the three-dimensional structure of the universe around us. In October a team led by Mathilde Jauzac at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France created a 3-D representation of an enormous filament of dark matter, the invisible substance that fills our universe and binds galaxies together (see page 29). Some 60 million light-years in length, this thread funnels all kinds of matter—visible and not—from intergalactic space into a giant cluster of galaxies called MACS J0717.5+3745. Jauzac plotted the structure of the filament by studying how its gravity distorts passing light; that information will help trace the unseen dark component of the universe and explain how it interacts with the bright parts we see.…

Life by Any Other Name “Frozen. Irradiated. Desolate. Alive?” (page 30) profiled astronomer Britney Schmidt, whose work makes a compelling case that Jupiter’s moon Europa could support life. Schmidt says that extraterrestrial worlds such as Europa must satisfy three basic requirements to support life: energy, a substantial collection of molecules, and water. I would submit that those factors are necessary only for life as we know it. Isn’t it reasonable to suspect that with billions of planets in the galaxy, life may exist in a form completely unknown to our Earth-bound scientists? Jeff Rodgers Lewes, DE Lying Eyes In exploring the fallibility of eyewitness testimony (“False Eyewitness,” page 38), writer Douglas Starr shared the case of Barion Perry, a man convicted of burglary on the basis of one witness who…

1 The Tinkerers Journalist Alec Foege explores how amateur inventions, like Steve Jobs’s “blue box” phone, can jump-start technological growth. perseusbooks.com 3 Quadrantids Tonight is the peak of this prolific meteor shower, visible in the northern sky. astronomy.com/quadrantids2013 8 The Universe Within Biologist Neil Shubin tracks the universe’s 14-billion-year history through the molecular structures of our own bodies. randomhouse.com 19 Great Balls of Fire An exhibit at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego considers the odds of a catastrophic impact from an asteroid or comet. rhfleet.org 19 Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival Seattle’s EMP Museum screens over a dozen sci-fi flicks (including one that chronicles a feline space mission). empmuseum.org/filmfestival 10 Birth of the Subway On this day in 1863, London opened the first underground…

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES—literally—and so do you. A hundred trillion bacteria, viruses, and other microbes, collectively known as the human microbiome, live on and inside our bodies. Last year, scientists working on two major collaborative projects produced the most comprehensive census so far of this inner world. Many common diseases may be influenced by the microbiome, because microbes control many of the body’s essential chemical processes: They predigest our food, chemically modify the pills we take, shape our immune system responses, and repel infectious invaders. Everyone’s microbiome is unique, which may help explain why a certain drug helps one person but hurts another, why chronic conditions like inflammatory bowel disease suddenly flare up and then die down, and even why some individuals suffer from asthma or cancer. In the last four…

ON OCTOBER 12, A 160-WHEEL TRANSPORT CARRIED THE space shuttle Endeavour through Los Angeles at a stately two miles per hour. As the shuttle—the centerpiece of American space exploration for the last 40 years—paraded to its final resting place at the city’s California Science Center, the future of spaceflight was orbiting overhead: Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX) Corporation’s Dragon, an unmanned capsule, was circling 240 miles up, delivering nearly 900 pounds of food, water, and equipment to the International Space Station. Industry stakeholders have been heralding the dawn of private spaceflight for nearly a decade, but the 2012 success of SpaceX and several other companies, along with the announcement of innovative new ventures, suggests the era has finally arrived. “This year was pivotal,” says Phil McAlister, NASA’s director for commercial spaceflight…

IF YOU EVER HAVE THE IMPULSE TO SMASH YOUR alarm clock, Ludwig-Maximilians University biologist Till Roenneberg understands. This year he described the increasingly common phenomenon of “social jet lag,” experienced by those who sleep short on workdays, then stay up later but sleep longer on weekends. If that is your pattern, you are more likely to be depressed and obese. “Sleep is one of the most underrated phenomena in modern society,” Roenneberg says. A growing body of research is showing that if you don’t get enough or get it at the wrong times, you expose yourself to a wide range of health consequences. Eve Van Cauter, an endocrinologist at the University of Chicago, began untangling the connection between sleep deprivation, diabetes, and obesity more than a decade ago. This year…

BUSINESS WAS USUAL IN GERMANY on Friday, May 25, 2012. Subway trains rushed people to work, skyscrapers bustled with activity, automobile factories hummed, and breweries pumped out rivers of beer. Everything seemed normal except for one remarkable fact: Nearly one-third of the entire nation’s midday electricity was delivered by the sun. It was the highest solar power output that any nation had ever achieved in one day and could mark a milestone in the transition of solar energy from alternative to mainstream power source. As the sun crested on May 25, tens of millions of solar panels across Germany generated 22 gigawatts of power, according to data provided by the nation’s four largest electrical transmission operators. From downtown Munich to the fields of Bavaria, those panels exploited the photoelectric effect…

Last May a convoy of three cars and one truck glided, without any drivers, onto a Spanish highway. Following a conventionally driven vehicle, the group safely traveled 120 miles, a major move forward in the effort to make self-driving cars commonplace. The Spanish trip was the latest feat of the European Commission’s Sartre Project, which aims to develop semiautonomous “road trains” that could increase gas mileage, improve traffic flow, and reduce accidents. It was also just one of several dramatic advances in 2012 toward the creation of a viable auto-chauffeur. In the most prominent achievement, Google’s self-driving cars completed 300,000 miles without a major accident. They are now licensed for road use in Nevada and soon should be in other states as well. Stanford University’s autonomous car flawlessly ran at…

Last summer, after a year in orbit around Vesta, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took one last image of the Arizona-size asteroid and pushed off. While the probe spends two years traveling to its next destination, the dwarf planet Ceres, scientists are knitting together remarkable results from its first mission. “Vesta turned out to be a really fascinating object,” says Mark Sykes, an investigator at the Planetary Science Institute. Dawn’s measurements show Vesta has a core, mantle, and crust. That structure proves it is not a simple hunk of rock but a relic protoplanet that survived the chaos of the early solar system. Hundreds of such bodies circled the sun before the larger ones cannibalized the rest to form Earth and the other modern planets. Vesta also has pitting on its surface…

Blood, sweat, and tears: Every researcher experiences them from time to time, but for Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder, they are at the heart of his work. Three years ago, he set out to create a microscopic profile of personal health, cataloging not just an individual’s genes but also proteins, snippets of RNA, and other crucial molecules. Snyder needed a reliable test subject who would not balk at any distressing information the project might uncover, so he volunteered himself. Over the next 14 months, he donated 20 blood samples. He sequenced his own genome and then analyzed 40,000 molecules, tracking how their levels changed over time. It was the first time such a detailed, integrated profile had been created. In the end, Snyder got more than he bargained for as he…

LOCKED INSIDE THE LITTLEST objects of the solar system—asteroids, comets, and meteorites—is a secret history. These small fry retain many characteristics they had when they formed 4.5 billion years ago. A series of studies in 2012 pried from them telling new clues about how Earth and the other major planets came to be. One insight came from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which circled the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and 2012. Over the past year, using Dawn’s measurements, astronomers determined that Vesta has an iron core. That bolstered the theory that Earth and the other inner planets swallowed an earlier set of small, iron-cored planets (see page 36). Vesta is a survivor of this original solar system. Astrophysicist Alan Boss at the Carnegie Institution and his colleagues pushed further into the past…

Computer engineers are forever trying to make microchips smaller and more efficient. So far, essentially all resulting improvements (smarter smartphones, more powerful laptops, and the like) have come from better use of traditional silicon. But last January scientists at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center showed that a different material—cylinder-shaped molecules known as carbon nanotubes—may be the chip of the future. Computer chips are made of transistors, which work by letting current flow through a channel only when voltage is applied to a gate, IBM researcher Aaron Franklin explains. “The thinner the channel or semiconductor material, the easier it is to control the current.” As silicon transistors are scaled down, Franklin says, the gate becomes less effective at controlling the current. Carbon nanotubes, one-tenth to one-hundredth the thickness of the…

LAST SPRING AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF researchers demonstrated that quantum computing is finally living up to its much-heralded potential. For decades scientists have been convinced that the laws of quantum physics—which describe how atomic particles can exist in two states at once, such as spinning backward and forward—could be harnessed to create a supercomputer capable of solving certain computational problems with unprecedented speed. But such particles are sensitive to environmental disturbances like heat and vibration, which cause them to “decohere,” or be robbed of their extraordinary computing powers. For the first time, the scientists, representing the University of Southern California, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, fashioned a quantum processor that curtailed decoherence and allowed the…

It’s not often that a single discovery can illuminate both the history of science and ancient office culture—but that is what happened in the ancient Mayan megacity of Xultun, in present-day Guatemala. There, researchers from Boston University and the University of Texas unearthed a small room, two walls of which were marked with astronomical tables predicting movements of the moon, Venus, and Mars. The calculations seem to have been plastered over several times, indicating that the room was used for several years and that the calculations were refined over time. The earliest of the numerical murals, created in the ninth century, are the oldest Mayan astronomical tables ever found, and the place where they were created is the first documented Mayan office space. Most Mayan calendars have been found on…

A group of scientists planning to map all the major connections in the human brain began studying their first test subjects in August. The $30 million Human Connectome Project will trace the main neural pathways that link the roughly 500 major regions in the brain, illuminating how biological circuitry underlies our mental functions. MRI scans of 1,200 people, including 300 pairs of twins, will be used to compile an atlas of communication routes throughout the brain. The resulting blueprint will also reveal how brain connectivity varies from person to person. The Human Connectome Project’s scans will achieve only a fairly rough resolution of about 1 millimeter (0.04 inch), analogous to mapping the world’s highways and boulevards while skipping local streets. But that will still represent a huge advance, since scientists…

The so-called psychiatrists’ bible—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM—specifies when people should be given diagnoses of mental disorders, influencing everything from insurance reimbursement to legal definitions of mental illness in court. Last year, planned revisions to the fourth edition of the DSM, now 19 years old, triggered bitter public controversy and worries that psychiatric disorders will be misdiagnosed. Revising the DSM is always contentious because there are few objective tests and often no physical signs of mental disorders. But the debates surrounding the upcoming DSM-5, published by the American Psychiatric Association, were particularly intense. The changes “will dramatically raise the rates of mental disorders and mislabel normal people as psychiatrically sick,” wrote psychiatrist Allen Frances, who was chairman of the committee for the previous edition. Frances and other critics…

It is one of the most familiar concepts from evolutionary biology: Natural selection makes males promiscuous and females choosy. But in June, Patricia Gowaty of UCLA exposed a major flaw in the evidence supporting that idea. The Bateman principle, as it is known, assumes that males sire more offspring if they mate with more females, while females stick with a single mate because they are limited in how many young they can produce regardless of their hanky-panky. Geneticist A. J. Bateman seemingly proved it in a 1948 study of fruit fly mating, which has been regularly cited ever since. “It has become more and more obvious that females in mice, birds, and all sorts of insects are mating with more than one male,” Gowaty says, meaning that promiscuity cuts both…

Last October more than 8 million people watched on YouTube as Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon 24 miles above the ground. During a 4 minute 20 second free fall, he became the first person to break the sound barrier without a plane. He also broke the record for highest skydive, set by his mentor, former test pilot Joseph Kittinger. In 1959 and 1960, when the Air Force was testing ejection seat technology in jet fighters, Kittinger made three jumps from the stratosphere to try a parachute optimized for high-altitude bail-outs. There are no ejection seats in the space planes being built by private companies like Virgin Galactic, but that may change now due to innovations developed for the extreme jump. Skydiver Luke Aikins, the designer of Baumgartner’s…

In September a healthy Nashville man died of a highly unusual fungal infection that invaded his brain—the first case in a meningitis outbreak that has claimed at least 30 lives and sickened more than 400 people in 19 states. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspected the infections were caused by contaminated steroid injections for back and joint pain produced by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts. “When the Food and Drug Administration visited the facility and came back with steroid vials with fungus, we knew we were right,” says Benjamin Park, a CDC epidemiologist who took part in the investigation. Unsanitary manufacturing conditions evidently were to blame. In total, more than 14,000 patients may have received tainted shots. The outbreak brings to light a…

REMAINS UNEARTHED IN 1979 in a cave in China’s Guangxi Province may belong to a previously unknown, anatomically unique modern human species. Neglected until a team of Australian and Chinese scientists decided to take a closer look, the remains are between 11,500 and 14,500 years old, says Darren Curnoe, a paleoanthropologist at the University of New South Wales who interpreted the find. Curnoe nicknamed the bones the Red Deer Cave people; he and his colleagues compared them with modern and contemporary human remains from Asia, Australia, Europe, and Africa, as well as with Pleistocene East Asian hunter-gatherer skulls. The Pleistocene age lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago. “The Red Deer specimens have an unusual short, flat face, prominent browridges, and no human chin,” Curnoe says. They could be…

A VACCINE THAT TARGETS CANCER stem cells dramatically limits tumor growth in mice, researchers reported in April. If the technique works in humans, it could be used to train a person’s own immune system to attack and destroy the cells at the root of most cancers. Cancer stem cells are believed to lurk in nearly every type of tumor. Like other kinds of stem cells (which can develop into many other cell types), they can divide repeatedly. Unlike other stem cells, they multiply without limit and are thought to be major drivers of cancer relapse and progression. “All you need is one leftover cancer stem cell for a tumor to come back,” says Qiao Li, an immunologist at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center in Ann Arbor. “These cells…

Measles and mumps—diseases that most Americans regard as a worry of the past—are experiencing a small but worrisome resurgence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially declared measles eliminated in 2000. Yet nearly four times as many people caught measles in 2011 than did, on average, each year from 2001 to 2010. In 2012 measles infections sickened 17 in Indiana and 5 in Kansas. Most of the 220 Americans who caught measles in 2011 fell ill because they had not received the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and had either traveled to a region that has endemic measles, such as parts of Europe, or come into contact with someone who had been traveling. But the infection could start spreading here again if enough people refuse vaccinations. “It’s one…

A novel dating technique suggests that some ancient cave art is considerably older than previously realized—so old that it may have been created not by modern humans but by their predecessors, the Neanderthals. Measuring the age of the cave paintings found across Europe is confounding because most images are made from inorganic pigments that leave few clues. In June archaeologist Alistair Pike, now at the University of Southampton, described a clever way to get answers: Analyze the breakdown of radioactive uranium-234 embedded in the natural mineral crust that forms on top of the artworks. Pike and his team applied the technique to drawings from 11 caves in the Cantabria and Asturias regions of northern Spain. They pegged the age of one illustration—a red disk in El Castillo cave—at 40,800 years…

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE HAS repeatedly defeated predictions that effective treatments were right around the corner. By the time symptoms of dementia appear, it seems, damage to the brain is already substantial. But several 2012 advances improve the prospects for intervening before the point of no return. EARLY DETECTION In April the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Amyvid, a radioactive dye that helps spot amyloid plaques—abnormal clumps of protein in the brain that are a key indicator of Alzheimer’s. Until now, those plaques could be identified only by examining brain samples postmortem. Amyvid attaches to the amyloid protein so it can be spotted easily on a PET scan. “This compound has great potential to be an effective diagnostic tool,” says Ralph Nixon, a psychiatrist and cell biologist at the New York…

New research challenges the much-touted idea that eating a low-calorie diet can extend your life span. In September a 25-year study conducted by the National Institute on Aging, in Baltimore, found that rhesus monkeys fed a moderate diet lived just as long as those receiving 25 to 30 percent fewer calories. That result diverges from prior research suggesting that slashing the caloric intake of test rats, mice, and monkeys substantially increases their longevity. Before you storm the all-you-can-eat buffet, however, physiologist Julie Mattison warns that even the control group of monkeys ate portioned, healthy meals and that the calorie-restricted group showed lower rates of cancer and diabetes—they just did not end up living longer as a result. “I think the basic age-old truths of moderation and exercise are still the…

PATIENTS WITH CYSTIC FIBROSIS GOT A glimmer of hope last year. The fatal genetic disease, which affects 30,000 Americans, can be caused by hundreds of different protein mutations. In January the FDA approved Kalydeco, the first drug that repairs one of the most important of those flawed proteins, correcting a root cause of the disease. In patients with this mutation, called G551D, the distorted protein obstructs the flow of salt and fluids through the surface of cells, causing mucus in the lungs to thicken like oatmeal. The mucus then blocks airways and cultivates bacteria that destroy the lungs. A new drug, developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, repairs the protein, thinning mucus so patients can breathe more easily. It is too soon to know whether Kalydeco completely cures the disease, but clinical…

In July researchers investigating Huntington’s disease announced a treatment that can eliminate the distorted proteins that cause the illness, offering hope to the 30,000 people afflicted in the United States. Huntington’s disease causes neurons to waste away in certain parts of the brain, resulting in cognitive decline, involuntary movement, and eventually death. When mice with the disease were given increased amounts of the protein PGC-1-alpha, which is naturally present in both mice and humans, the neural decay was dramatically reduced. According to the study’s lead researcher, geneticist Albert La Spada of the University of California, San Diego, “the prospect of an oral drug is conceivable.” The PGC-1-alpha protein has also been shown to play a role in other neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and possibly Alzheimer’s. Next, La Spada wants to…

Big, scary, and—fluffy? That is the profile of Yutyrannus, a newfound relative of Tyrannosaurus rex and the first large dinosaur known to have sported feathers. In April researchers unveiled an adult and two juvenile fossils of the dinosaur, unearthed in northeast China. An adult Yutyrannus, whose name means “beautiful feathered tyrant,” reached nearly 30 feet long and weighed 1.5 tons. Preserved fossil fibers suggest Yutyrannus had bristle-like hairs over most of its body. Corwin Sullivan, a paleontologist at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology who helped interpret the remains, thinks Yutyrannus “would have been rather shaggy-looking, a killer fuzz ball with deadly teeth and claws.” Although its feathers were too spindly for flight, they might have provided insulation during the relatively cool Early Cretaceous, 125 million years ago. The…

For giant dinosaurs like the 25-ton Diplodocus— an iconic long-necked herbivore—feeding all that flesh was a full-time job. And now we know how the beast did it. An international paleontology team used finite element analysis, a technique commercially used to measure stress on objects such as cars and orthopedic implants. In this case, it was to deduce whether Diplodocus fed by nipping at leaves, stripping them in large quantities from branches, or scraping bark from trees. The team analyzed a 150-million-year-old skull and found that it would have fractured from bark-scraping, suggesting Diplodocus instead stripped leaves and swallowed them whole, quickly ingesting maximum amounts of food. “By borrowing engineering techniques,” team member Paul Barrett says, “we can make testable models of how extinct animals behaved.”…

While the United States celebrated a banner year of Mars exploration (see page 18), Russian scientists were mourning the loss of a $160 million spacecraft designed to retrieve soil from Mars’s moon Phobos. The Phobos-Grunt probe plummeted into the Pacific Ocean on January 17, two months after launch. Its upper-stage rockets had failed to fire after its initial ascent, and the craft never left Earth’s orbit. Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, initially suggested the mission was sabotaged. Another official claimed a U.S. radar station had disabled the probe. But in February a Roscosmos investigation concluded the failure resulted from a software glitch. The crash of Phobos-Grunt continued Russia’s befuddling Mars jinx. In 1988 it lost contact with two probes also bound for Mars and Phobos,…

MOST OF US TODAY HAVE MORE COMPUTING power on tap in our laptops than typical scientists had in their laboratories 15 years ago. With powerful tools for tracking and analyzing scientific data available to anyone, anytime, amateurs are increasingly helping scientists tackle big research projects—and making noteworthy discoveries. The list looked more impressive than ever in 2012. Volunteers sifting through open-source genetic data on their home computers identified more than 200 new gene variants within the most common Y-chromosome type in Europe. The data will help researchers study the prehistoric migrations of European cultural groups, such as the Celts. After combing through telescope images, citizen scientists helped identify the highly unusual asteroid 2011 HM102 near Neptune. It now may get a close look from the New Horizons spacecraft in 2013.…

They say island life is leisurely—but beneath the ocean floor, life relaxes much further, nearly grinding to a halt. Last May researchers reported that bacteria survive harsh conditions there by going into a kind of suspended animation, expending perhaps the minimum amount of energy required for survival. The extreme bacteria were found in red clay collected 100 feet beneath the seafloor under the North Pacific Gyre, a vast, nutrient-starved region of circular ocean currents running roughly between Japan and Mexico. The sediment containing the microbes is 86 million years old, and the organisms themselves are very likely just as ancient. Their only apparent food source all that time? Organic matter deposited along with them when they were buried, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. To compensate for the chronic lack…

FORTY-THREE YEARS AFTER the first human set foot on the moon and 29 after an American woman first flew in space, Neil Armstrong (born 1930) and Sally Ride (born 1951) resonated in our thoughts again last year. Both will be remembered for milestones that blended scientific and engineering brilliance with powerful, transforming symbolism. Armstrong’s role on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon was to serve, alongside crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, as the tip of an immense wedge to penetrate the unknown, backed up by thousands of scientists and engineers and propelled by a brash nation bent on achieving the impossible. Ride will be best remembered not for her role as the first American woman astronaut but rather for her sterling competence, through which she made that…

One day paleontologist Michael S. Engel of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum received an image from Chinese colleagues that looked like nothing he had seen before: a fossil flea of truly staggering proportions. Working together, Engel and his collaborators eventually confirmed this initial impression and later found eight other specimens dating from 165 million to 125 million years ago—the earliest fleas in the fossil record. Until these jumbo insects were identified, the oldest known fleas were 45 million years old and looked similar to their modern counterparts. Engel’s paleo-pests were both more primitive and more formidable. “They aren’t the tiny things you flick off your dog or cat,” he says. “These are giant critters; some are almost an inch long.” The ancient fleas were equipped with serrated mouthparts…