Tabla de contenidos para May-Jun-10 en Science Illustrated

A There's recent proof that they are. This refutes the long-standing theory that bacteria in the lizards' saliva kill prey. Komodo dragons, native to a few Indonesian islands, are the world's largest living lizards. Although they do eat carrion, they are also notoriously aggressive predators that will take down and consume prey much larger than themselves, such as deer and cattle. The lizards also display cannibalistic behavior, which includes eating hatchlings that hide in trees for several months after their birth. In 2008, biologist Brian Fry of the University of Melbourne in Australia used an MRI scanner to image the head of a preserved Komodo dragon. The scans revealed six venom glands on each side of the lizard's lower jaw. Fry and his colleagues then removed the glands from a…

The ancient Romans believed that vapors rising from swamps caused the disease and thus dubbed it mal aria for “bad air.” Today we know malaria is caused by the parasite plasmodium and transmitted by anopheles mosquitoes. American photographer Eadweard Muybridge shot the first motion picture, of a galloping horse, in 1877. Muybridge used 12 cameras whose shutters were triggered by wires stretched across a racetrack. The film showed for the first time that a horse lifted all four hooves off the ground at once while galloping. Gravity. In shallow water, the crests of waves gradually become steeper, and waves usually break when the water depth is 1.3 times their height. Wind increases the height of waves, and gravity brings them back to the water surface, where the energy of their…

Between late spring and midsummer at new and full moons, a tide of horseshoe crabs emerges from the waves to mate and lay eggs on land. The females carry the greater burden in this yearly ritual. Not only are they somewhat heavier than their mates, but after emerging from the surf, a male will fasten himself solidly to his bride's back, where he will fertilize the eggs that she deposits in the sand. As many as six suitors also hoping to have access to her eggs surround each female. It's an exhausting process, and it happens in incredible numbers. Once, over the course of a single night in 2008, volunteers and staff from the Nature Conservancy estimated that about 350,000 horseshoe crabs came ashore on the beaches of Delaware Bay,…

We put around 600 million tons of CO2 from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere every week, causing overall global temperatures to increase. But we may be able to slow global warming or counteract it by taking some carbon out of the atmosphere. Here are several ideas IDEA: When plants decompose, carbon dioxide is released into the air. To trap that CO2 in the ground, the biomass can be partially combusted with little or no oxygen, in a process called pyrolysis. This transforms the plants into biochar, which can be plowed into the ground in a field where crops are grown. Proponents claim biochar makes soil more fertile. REALITY: The plan may require large swaths of land to effectively reduce atmospheric carbon. And if biomass production becomes more profitable than…

Scholars at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago knew that the female mummy's name was Meresamun and that she had been a singer at the Temple of Amun in Thebes (thought to be the present-day city of Luxor), ancient Egypt's religious center. The hieroglyphics painted on the coffin told them this much. The coffin's style indicated that she lived around 800 B.C. Yet to avoid damaging the elaborately painted coffin, no one has dared open it. To see what was inside, in 1991 scientists sent it through a then state-of-the-art, single-channel CT scanner, which took about five hours. The resulting, somewhat blurred image revealed that Meresamun had a broken jaw and fingers and a lump in her throat that scientists thought might have been a goiter. There were…

Irish novelist Jonathan Swift coined the word in his 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels. Yahoos were a race of vicious and repulsive creatures on an island Gulliver visited. English astronomer John Herschel, more famous for having discovered the planet Uranus, first published the idea of placing a refractive lens on the cornea to correct vision in 1845. But it wasn't until 1888 that Adolf E. Fick, Eugene Kalt and August Mueller each independently created the first contact lenses, which were made of glass. Today's soft plastic lenses, developed by Czech chemist Otto Wichterle, were introduced in the 1970s. English scientist Robert Hooke first used the word “cell” in his 1665 publication Micrographia to refer to structures in a drawing of cork as seen through a microscope.…

A Water is considered essential, but one can imagine that under different conditions other liquids might also be able to support the chemical reactions necessary for life. NASA has a mantra for its search for extraterrestrial life: Follow the water. According to Carl Pilcher, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, there are two reasons that current strategies in the search for life elsewhere focus on water. First, it is the only liquid that we are sure can support life. Second, water is composed of the most abundant element in the universe—hydrogen—combined with the third most plentiful element, oxygen. As such, it is likely to be extremely abundant throughout the universe. “Because we expect to find water in many places, it's a reasonable starting point in our search for habitable…

LATEST COUNT: 12 million Researchers count Atlantic puffins during breeding season, when they can observe mated pairs and their nests. For small colonies, each occupied nest might be counted; in larger sites, population numbers are extrapolated from a manageable sample area of about 300 square feet. LATEST COUNT: Unknown Found throughout the world's oceans, these tiny crustaceans are a vital food source for many animals. To determine the biomass in a specific location, biologists multiply an estimate of the number of krill per cubic yard of water in the area by their average weight. LATEST COUNT: 6,000 In one method, researchers count the number of blue whales observed along a stretch of ocean; larger population numbers are extrapolated from this. In the mark-release-recapture method, scientists identify or “mark” whales by…

The sun warms our planet's surface. Reflect some of its light back into space, and the planet cools slightly. Today the planet's albedo—its reflectivity—is 30 percent, but this varies greatly by locale. The albedo of fresh snow is 80 percent, grass 25 percent, and fresh asphalt pavement 4 percent. Here are some ideas scientists have proposed to increase the planet's albedo IDEA: A large part of the Earth's land is cultivated, so crops play a significant role in how much sunlight is reflected back into space. By choosing crops with high albedos, we could affect global temperatures. REALITY: We have data about the albedos of many crop plants, which differ due to variables like the color, shape and glossiness of the leaves. In 2008, research from the University of Bristol…

When the radio was invented in the 1890s, no one dreamed that 120 years later there would be a version small enough to fit inside a living cell. The first “nanoradio” was built at the University of California at Berkeley in 2007, when physicists at the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS) realized that the mechanical properties of a single carbon nanotube meant that it could function as a radio [see “What Is a Nanotube?” at left]. Although nanoradios don't have tremendous potential for consumer gadgets—who needs a music player smaller than the width of a human hair?—the technology might have profound medical and environmental applications. It could restore vision, for example. For some types of blindness, doctors can bring back sight by electrically stimulating specific areas of the brain.…

A Although the planet's landmasses are concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, Earth's mass is kept in balance by a phenomenon called isostasy. According to isostasy, a mass on the outermost layer of the Earth's crust, the lithosphere, is balanced by the movement of molten rocks 60 to 450 miles below the surface in the asthenosphere. The total weight of the lithosphere and asthenosphere over any cross-section of the Earth's crust is assumed to be equal. Thus the Northern Hemisphere, which has a greater landmass in the lithosphere, must have less mass in the asthenosphere, and the reverse must be true for the Southern Hemisphere. Because of constant tectonic changes, the Earth's mass never achieves a perfect balance, and some deep ocean trenches and high plateaus cannot be compensated for isostatically.…

Microwave ovens use high-frequency electromagnetic waves to vibrate water molecules in food, increasing its temperature. When a gun is fired, hot gases produced by exploding gun-powder come out under high pressure, resulting in a loud noise. To muffle the gunshot, a sound suppressor, as silencers are more accurately called, attaches to the gun barrel and traps the gases, allowing them to expand and slow down before they're released. Some studies have shown that dogs are able to sniff out cancers of the lungs and breasts, among other types. Cancer cells produce distinct organic compounds, which may appear in breath, sweat and urine. Dogs seem to be able to detect and identify trace amounts of these compounds.…

According to the National Climatic Data Center, the world is getting warmer. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the average global temperature has risen by 1.4°F, and the past decade is the warmest on record. Meanwhile sea levels are rising along with the temperature, and at an ever-increasing pace: from an average of 0.06 inch per year over the past 100 years to an average of 0.14 per year for the last 17 years. But don't take it as a signal to bust out the beachwear and celebrate a perpetual summer. Unfettered, global climate change will cause widespread disruption to billions of people, in part by destroying crucial agricultural centers, fishing grounds and sources of freshwater. The fight against climate change has mostly focused on curbing emissions of carbon…

Bacterial infections that are resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics now make up 16 percent of all infections contracted in a health-care setting, and new resistant strains emerge every year. The usual tactic to combat this resistance has been to develop new drugs or to combine two or three classes of existing ones. This strategy might work in the short term, but resistant strains will keep popping up as antibiotics become ineffective. A new class of compounds, created in 2008 by a team of biochemists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, could circumvent this problem. Rather than killing the bacteria outright, this type of molecule blocks communication among bacteria, rendering them incapable of coordinated attacks and more susceptible to eradication by our own immune systems. This new approach, developed…