Table of contents for April 2013 in Discover

Scientific Advancements The Year in Science number 55, “The All-Seeing Eye” (January/February 2013, page 57), relates the development of a camera that takes one-gigapixel photos. This “achievement” of being able to identify a license plate at a third of a mile with that camera failed to excite me. As the owner of a 3½-inch Questar telescope weighing only about three pounds, I can see individual hairs on a squirrel’s back at a half mile away and license plate numbers at three-plus miles quite readily, as long as the air is tranquil. I’m willing to bet that my scope cost less than any one-gigapixel or five-gigapixel camera, too. Rodger W. Gordon Nazareth, PA The Year in Science number 3, “A Census of Your Insides” (January/February 2013, page 21), explains changes in…

A human iris and pupil are magnified by photographer Suren Manvelyan’s macro lens. The iris regulates the amount of light entering the pupil and the eye’s interior, acting much like the aperture of a camera lens. “I love macro shooting,” Manvelyan says, adding that it was a natural step for him to turn his camera to the human eye. He developed a special technique to capture the fine detail of the iris, and he was surprised when his pictures showed more complexity than he expected to see.…

ANIMAL SCIENTIST TEMPLE GRANDIN has an extraordinary mind. Probably the world’s most famous person with autism, she designed widely used livestock handling systems to reduce animal suffering. She is not just autistic but an autistic savant, meaning that she has unusual cognitive abilities, such as a photographic memory and excellent spatial skills. She “thinks in pictures,” she says, helping her understand what animals perceive. Her brain is equally remarkable, according to a team of neuroimaging experts who study brain changes in autism at the University of Utah. Neuroscientist Jason Cooperrider and colleagues scanned Grandin’s brain using three different methods: high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which captures the structure of the brain; diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a method to trace the connections between brain regions; and functional MRI, which indicates brain…

Escherichia coli, or E. coli, is being used by University of Washington chemical engineer James Carothers to produce a chemical precursor of pristinamycin, an antibiotic used to treat staph infections. The microbial method could reduce the chemical-processing steps usually necessary to make the drug, potentially lowering the cost. Real-world deployment is at least five years out. Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Biologist Jay Keasling of the University of California in Berkeley has shown how this species of yeast can be engineered to produce artemisinic acid, a key chemical compound in anti-malaria drugs, normally extracted from the wormwood tree. Limited supply has driven up the cost of the drug, but now pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis has licensed the technology to use S. cerevisiae for mass production. Methanobacterium palustre. Apply electric current to this microbe, and…

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: Annual checkups are an important part of a healthy lifestyle. CONTRARY VIEW: Purely routine checkups might do more harm than good. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, they say. Getting annual physical exams to check under the hood and make sure everything is working properly seems like a sensible approach that can help us live longer, healthier lives. After all, detecting serious illnesses at their earliest and most treatable stages can save lives. But it turns out this widely held notion doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny: New Danish research has found no evidence that routine checkups increased longevity or reduced the risks of dying from diseases like cancer or heart disease. While the findings are counterintuitive, “the study adds to growing evidence that…

Theory Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Portland, Oregon Have your science and eat it, too, at the newest addition to Portland’s science education hub. Theory is equal parts exhibit and eatery, with a menu that showcases seasonal, regionally sourced ingredients. Rotating demos at the venue cover the chemistry behind foodie fun, including how different senses experience the act of eating and why that grilled burger tastes so good. Also, there is pizza. Wood-fired, hand-tossed, artisan pizza. Open daily. omsi.edu/visit/restaurants…

SEEDS OF HOPE By Jane Goodall More than 50 years after she first ventured into the bush to study chimpanzees, renowned researcher and environmental advocate Goodall shifts her focus from fauna to flora. Extolling the many benefits of plants, Goodall juxtaposes horticultural history with more recent biomedical innovations, such as the role of rosy periwinkle as a potent weapon against childhood leukemia. Humans, Goodall argues, have generally reciprocated with destructive agricultural practices, including genetic modification. While sentimental and light on supporting data, Goodall makes a passionate case for more aggressive conservation of what’s left of our global garden. BREANNA DRAXLER MY BELOVED BRONTOSAURUS By Brian Switek Science writer Switek earned fame as the unabashed dinosaur advocate behind the fossil-focused blog Laelaps. He applies that same blend of boyish exuberance and…

AT SUNRISE ON A SEPTEMBER day in 1991, as Scott Dowd’s riverboat floated up the Rio Negro in Brazil, flocks of shrieking macaws streaked the sky red and gold. Otherwise, “my full field of vision was filled with jungle,” he remembers. Best of all for the self-described “fish nerd” from Weymouth, Massachusetts, the dark waters beneath his boat teemed with beautiful fish—species he’d kept in aquarium tanks since he was 10. Now he was headed to the place they’d come from: Barcelos, a town of 20,000 in the heart of the Amazon. But when he got there, he was horrified. The riverfront was jammed with men in dugout canoes. They had come from the surrounding municipality, a rainforested area the size of Pennsylvania, bringing hand-woven baskets lined with plastic, now…

Bioengineer David Mooney has packed a cancer-fighting factory into what looks like a tablet of aspirin. With this new technology, he aims to improve treatment of melanoma, a deadly skin cancer that can claim up to 85 percent of patients diagnosed after metastasis. To start, Mooney’s team members biopsied a mouse tumor, isolated some of its proteins, and loaded them into the tablet, a biodegradable plastic device so porous that it is 90 percent air. They also filled the tablet with GMC-SF (granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor), an inflammatory protein known to attract immune cells. Then they implanted the tablet under the mouse’s skin. As expected, GMC-SF triggered a red alert, attracting immune cells that flooded the tiny device. Once inside, these immune cells came in contact with the tumor proteins…

Not long after midnight on July 9, 2011, six men descended on a fenced-in field at biovativ, a research facility in the northern German town of Gross Lusewitz. It was a clear, warm Saturday night, and the 115-acre farm was lit by a half moon. Moving quickly, the men surrounded the night watchman. Shining their flashlights in his face and threatening him with pepper spray and clubs, they frisked him, took his flashlight and keys, and smashed his cell phone. Then they headed directly for their target, a potato patch the size of a tennis court. Within minutes, the potatoes—part of a research project run by the nearby University of Rostock to see if rabbit vaccines and plastic polymers could be grown in plants—had been ripped out of the ground…

JOE DAVIS DEPRESSES THE CLUTCH AND PUTS HIS TRUCK IN gear. The first stops on today’s tour are MIT and Harvard Medical School—the two institutions at which Davis has held research positions (mostly unpaid), serving as an unofficial artist-in-residence, free spirit, and mad scientist all rolled into one. Although his ’79 GMC pickup is a bit sluggish, Davis’s brain runs at one speed only and that’s overdrive. Ideas pour out of him at a breathtaking pace, and if you ask him what he’s been up to these days (as I did), you’re likely to get an earful. He tells me about experiments he’s doing at MIT with highly tempered glass that can withstand bullets and sledgehammers, yet, with subtler prodding, “explodes catastrophically.” He launches into a discourse about “polytractors”—plastic disks…

When Davis arrived at Harvard Medical School in 2010, he became intrigued by a then-current investigation into the material properties of natural silk. That effort was abandoned when the researchers found their attentions diverted elsewhere. Davis took over the project, spinning it in a new direction. In particular, he wanted to induce the silkworms to make gold. “It’s about the romance of making dreams come true,” he explains. “It’s magical; it’s alchemy; it’s the Rumpelstiltskin story without taking the firstborn.” His collaborators at the Transgenic Silkworm Research Unit in Tsukuba, Japan, have taken a gene used by sea sponges to form glass skeletons from silica, and introduced it into a silkworm strain. Davis believes that if you feed the genetically modified silkworms metals such as gold, they will incorporate it…

In December 1988, Arlan Rosenbloom arrived in Quito, Ecuador, to treat a handful of patients. For the past decade, the endocrinologist had treated several Ecuadorian children with growth hormone deficiency, a common type of dwarfism, at his clinic at the University of Florida. Now, for the first time, he had flown down to South America to treat them at home. The plan was to give six patients their biannual dose of growth hormone, saving them the expense of visiting Rosenbloom in the States. Once he arrived, the director of the local children’s hospital, who had previously trained under Rosenbloom, referred patients en masse, and by the end of his stay, Rosenbloom had seen 100 patients, many with growth problems. Out of the stream of patients, the ones that struck him…

1. Forget 5-Hour Energy. The original pick-me-up may have come from the nomadic Galla tribe of Ethiopia, which made energy bars from ground coffee beans and animal fat sometime in the first millennium. 2. Around A.D. 1000, Arab traders brought coffee beans home from Africa and started boiling them into a drink they called qahwa. Translation: “that which prevents sleep.” 3. Fast-forward to the 1930s, when German physician Max Gerson began promoting daily coffee enemas to detoxify the liver, stimulate metabolism, and cure cancers. 4. More recently, Britain’s Prince Charles has raved about coffee enemas, and Amazon.com sells DIY kits. 5. But be warned: The National Cancer Institute says Gerson’s claims are unsupported, and the American Cancer Society cautions that illness and death can result from contaminated coffee enema equipment,…

MY HIGH-SCHOOL CHEMISTRY TEACHER, MR. M, HAD A peculiar habit: Every few weeks, without warning, he’d change the lab table seating assignments. You might start class partnered with a brainy kid and end up with some burly jock who thought a catalyst was the name of a luxury sedan. If you complained, Mr. M would simply say, “Change is the only constant in life. Get used to it!” DISCOVER has seen its share of change, including, now, a new editorial staff. And since readers don’t often get to meet the editors who assemble the magazine they love, I thought I’d introduce you to a few of them here: Senior editors Tasha Eichenseher and Siri Carpenter work on our features. Tasha served as environment editor at National Geographic Digital Media. She’ll…

THE WORLD’S FIRST CHIMERIC monkeys were created in a laboratory last year, and they offer surprising new insights into embryonic stem cell therapy: One reason for often-poor treatment outcomes may be that we’re using embryos that are, strangely, just too old. Researchers have long been able to create chimeras—offspring with more than two parents—in rodents like mice by combining embryos so tiny they consist of only eight cells in all. At this early stage of their development, embryos are made of pluripotent stem cells, each of which can give rise to many, though not all, tissue types. Previous attempts to do the same in monkeys, however, have failed—a disappointment because monkeys are more similar than mice to humans, and thus likely a better harbinger of how stem cell treatments will…

YUEN K. IP KNEW SOMETHING FUNKY WAS going on inside the mouths of Chinese soft-shelled turtles. When they were on dry land, they dunked their heads in puddles and gargled. “Why would they do that?” asks Ip, a physiologist at the National University of Singapore. It turns out they were simply peeing. From their mouths. Mouth-peeing is more than just a neat trick—it’s essential for maintaining these turtles’ deviant lifestyles. Unlike other freshwater turtles, these guys venture into brackish water for days at a time. In this challenging environment, their bodies break down protein and produce toxic ammonia, packaging it as urea. The load is so great that they cannot just drink water and flush it out because their kidneys would be overwhelmed by the salts. Instead, these turtles have…

The next step in touch-screens may be to ditch the actual screen, according to researchers at Purdue University. Engineers Karthik Ramani and Niklas Elmqvist and their colleagues recently unveiled a projector-based computer input system that can transform desks, office walls, or even kitchen islands into interactive surfaces. The system, called extended multitouch, consists of a computer, a projector, and a Microsoft Kinect depth-sensing camera. (Also used for the Xbox 360, Kinect enables users to interact with games and devices optically, without touching anything.) The projector displays the contents of a typical computer screen onto a surface like your refrigerator or stone countertop, while the Kinect’s infrared laser and receiver estimate the distance to the surface. As a user moves his hand into view, the Kinect snaps 30 frames per second,…

IN YOUR INNER EAR, A BONY, SNAIL-shaped structure called the cochlea acts essentially like a battery. An electrochemical interaction between two of the cochlea’s chambers helps translate sound vibrations into neural signals sent to the brain. Now, for the first time, scientists have tapped into this natural battery to charge a small wireless transmitter. “No one’s ever extracted this power to do actual electronic functions,” says MIT electrical engineer Anantha Chandrakasan, who led the research along with Konstantina Stankovic of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. The scientists implanted tiny glass electrodes in a guinea pig’s cochlea, which is similar to a human’s. The electrodes caused only a slight degradation in hearing, a problem that might be avoidable in the future with thinner materials. The experiment successfully reaped about a…

Short of hiring Spider-Man to do the job, having a robot clean your windows is about the coolest way to get glass sparkling. Although earlier versions required a pair of magnetized units on either side of the window, the latest WinBot, which had its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, is a single unit that attaches to smooth glass using vacuum pump suction. The WinBot first travels around the window in a zigzag pattern to determine an optimal cleaning route, then goes to town with two microfiber pads and a squeegee. Coming soon. ecovacs.com…

Where others see only numbers, physicist and musician Domenico Vicinanza hears dance tunes and epic scores. Vicinanza sonifies raw data by mapping it to musical scales. In 2012, he collaborated with other musicians and researchers to turn data from the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle into a toe-tapping motif. Vicinanza’s latest project is heaven-sent: He turned raw feeds from Voyager 1’s magnetometer into a space odyssey symphony. He’s currently working on a “duet” between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. DISCOVER Associate Editor Gemma Tarlach asked Vicinanza, based in Cambridge, England, why data is his muse. Why sonify? Data sonification is a really huge chapter in the global book of representation techniques. We are probably more used to listening to the waveforms of the things that are around us, like…

BILL, A MANAGING PARTNER OF a prominent local law firm, frequently used me as a psychiatric consultant for the firm’s personnel issues. So I wasn’t surprised to get a call from him about his partner, Steve. We had spoken about Steve several times in just the past year. This time, Bill sounded desperate. “He’s finally done it,” Bill said. “I just have two questions for you. First, what the hell is wrong with him? And second, can it be fixed? If not, he’ll have to leave the firm. We’ve had enough.” Brilliant, demanding, and aggressive, Steve had been terrifying associates and support staff for as long as anyone could remember. He was kept on because he brought in lots of work and because he was a valuable mentor. This time,…

Bioengineer Kit Parker, a major in the U.S. Army, was on duty in Afghanistan in 2009 when an explosive struck the lead vehicle in his convoy. The driver and vehicle commander suffered major concussions in the crash. Their behavior suggested the soldiers had suffered traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, which can have devastating long-term effects, including cognitive and psychiatric disorders, seizures, and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. “I thought to myself, ‘There’s no first aid for this,’” Parker says. If the men had suffered a broken limb, he could have tied a splint, but he knew there was no way to immediately stop the cascade of damaging chemical events happening in those soldiers’ brains. So he went back to his lab to find one himself. The solution Parker hit upon is a…

Anti-GMO food activists in the U.S. don’t stage late-night guerrilla raids, vandalizing farms swathed in hazmat gear. Instead, they’re more likely to patrol the corridors of power in sport jackets, lobbying lawmakers for oversight or suing biotechs in court. But even without these tactics, American activists, including a handful of scientists, have been raising skepticism about GMO foods. “The science just hasn’t been done,” says Charles Benbrook, an agricultural policy expert at Washington State University and a leading voice of dissent. Today, about 90 percent of the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the U.S. are genetically modified to be either resistant to pests or tolerant of herbicides, including the popular weed killer Roundup, so that farmers can spray throughout the growing season without harming crops. While the harvest from…

Davis created this piece in response to the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, dispatched to explore the solar system in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Each probe carried a plaque containing information about our civilization, including nude images of male and female humans in which the female genitalia were absent. That’s what ticked Davis off. “It’s almost as if they sent a picture of man and Barbie Doll into deep space,” he says. In Microvenus, the first artwork made using recombinant DNA technology, Davis tried to set the record straight. In 1986, he and Harvard biologist Dana Boyd synthesized a DNA molecule that contained instructions—in the form of a code composed of the four bases that make up DNA—for creating a figure that looks like a capital Y superimposed over…

At the heart of Davis’s mission is a big dream: He wants to develop mobile biological archives that can reveal virtually everything there is to know about humans, safeguarding the information in durable containers that could outlive humankind. He realized that self-reproducing bacterial spores—which can withstand vacuum conditions and extremes of temperature and radiation—might provide the perfect vessels. Propelled by attached solar sails or just floating free, these information-laden spores could conceivably travel beyond the solar system, offering a new form of interstellar communication. “Hundreds of billions of copies of a message can be cheaply and conveniently produced for hundreds of billions of target stars,” Davis says. That’s a long-term proposition, and maybe just a pipe dream, since he has no plans for releasing recombinant organisms into the terrestrial environment…

TRY THIS FOR A CHALLENGE. YOUR task is to thread a needle—but not your average sewing-kit variety. The needle in question is five miles away. No matter how fast you push the thread, it will take 9.5 years to get it there. When your thread finally dangles in front of the needle’s eye, perfectly aligned, don’t get cocky, because a dust speck blowing by could fray your thread, ruining all that you’ve done. And did I mention that if you fail, you will have blown $700 million? Now you have a sense of the slow-motion cliffhanger that is New Horizons, a NASA space probe currently racing toward Pluto and its large moon Charon at 35,000 miles per hour. “We have to hit our arrival time window within 450 seconds,” says…

A scuba diver is dwarfed by Atlantic bluefin tuna off the island resort town of Carloforte in Sardinia. The fish are swimming in a maze of nets called a tonnara, a traditional fishing method used only in a few locations around the Mediterranean. The tuna — which can weigh, on rare occasions, up to 1,500 pounds — are caught in the final days of a long migration from the Atlantic Ocean. Photographer Francesco Zizola, an experienced scuba diver, spent about an hour swimming among the tuna. He took this photo with a compact digital camera enclosed in an underwater case. “I documented this event because bluefin tuna is an endangered species, and tonnara fishing is dying out,” he says.…

It’s worth considering what a human chimera might look like, but any such experiment would, of course, run up against ethical barriers. In 1998, Dutch embryologist Jacques Cohen, director at Reprogenetics LLC in New Jersey, inadvertently created human chimeras. He and his team removed cytoplasm from the eggs of healthy mothers and injected it into the eggs of women having trouble getting pregnant. That cytoplasm contained DNA from the cells’ mitochondria—self-contained structures inside our cells that carry their own genome. Cohen and his team then fertilized the eggs in the laboratory with sperm and implanted them in the womb. The resulting embryos—and live births—contained mitochondrial DNA from both egg donors along with regular, nuclear DNA from the mother and father. Just how normal these children, and their children, will turn…

When Michigan State University artist Adam Brown learned of a type of bacteria, Cupriavidus metallidurans, that can extract pure gold from the toxic solution gold chloride (a totally artificial salt), he hurried to an expert colleague, microbiologist Kazem Kashefi, with a question: “Is it possible to make enough gold to put in the palm of my hand?” Brown merely wanted to satisfy his intellectual and artistic curiosity, inspired by the gold-tinted roots of alchemy, the precursor of modern chemistry. Soon thereafter, Kashefi and Brown set to work designing a half-experiment, half-art-exhibit that exposes C. metallidurans to gold chloride in a hydrogen-gas-rich atmosphere that serves as a source of food. Over the course of a week, the bacteria gradually strip-mined the toxic liquid, leaving flecks of pure 24-karat gold behind. The…

TO EXPLORE HOW THE BRAIN encodes memories, neurobiologists at the Scripps Research Institute created a new memory in a mouse, by mixing two separate experiences of its past. The experiment reveals just how malleable memory can be. The team, led by Mark Mayford, created a mouse with a specific gene that produces the protein hM3Dq when nerve cells with this gene become active, leaving the protein attached to the cell. Mayford could then selectively reactivate those cells whenever he wanted, simply by giving the mouse a drug known as clozapine-N-oxide (CNO), which interacts with hM3Dq. He used this setup to interfere with a mouse’s memory of two distinct places and create an artificial blended memory that combined both places. In his experiment, he put the mouse into a box with…

In 2011, Robert Sampson, a professor of social sciences at Harvard, received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the field’s equivalent of a Nobel. Last year he published his magnum opus, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (University of Chicago Press, 2012), based on his research as scientific director of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Sampson helped pioneer the concept of collective efficacy, a measure of neighbors’ willingness to act for each other’s benefit. He sees it as having as strong an effect on children’s well-being as do families, poverty, and schools. I GREW UP IN THE 1960S IN UTICA, A DECLINING industrial city in upstate New York. Cops patrolled the halls of my high school. A lot of my friends ended up in serious…

NASA gives iPad owners a ticket to the stars with two free e-books. Hubble Space Telescope: Discoveries includes interactive galleries, videos, and a comprehensive guide to the scope’s capabilities. Its companion, James Webb Space Telescope: Science Guide, whets astrophiles’ appetites with an in-depth look at the scope’s technological advances. When the Webb launches in 2018, its gear will include a folding mirror and instruments that will work in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum to reveal the universe’s oldest galaxies. Earthlings without iPads can download non-interactive PDFs of both books. hubblesite.org/ibooks/…

1 Major League Baseball Opening Day On opening day, consider the science at work in America’s pastime, including the physics of the spin on a curveball: It can curve up to 17 1.2 inches in the distance between pitcher and batter. 100.nist.gov/baseball.htm 11-14 National Science Teachers Association Conference Building reusable outdoor learning spaces and creating an environmentally friendly chemistry curriculum are hot topics at the San Antonio event. nsta.org/conferences/2013san 6-14 National Robotics Week Check out dozens of affiliated events across the country, including block parties, demonstrations, and competitions, as RoboWeek shifts into gear. nationalroboticsweek.org 5 Jurassic Park in 3-D Just in time for the film’s 20th anniversary, Steven Spielberg remasters his blockbuster about a paleontological DisneyWorld gone terribly wrong. jurassicpark.com 12 Yuri’s Night Celebrate the anniversaries of both Yuri Gagarin’s…

Inside the Boston headquarters of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, an exuberant Don Ingber weaves through a maze of chlorine-scented laboratories, glass-walled offices, and darkened rooms. In less than five minutes, Ingber, the institute’s 56-year-old director, has pointed out a mattress that could prevent life-threatening sleep apnea in newborns; simulated lungs, intestines, and hearts made of silicone rubber using microchip manufacturing technology; and a machine that forces mutations in bacteria, directing their evolution so they can produce low-cost biofuels and drugs. More than once, he stops to revel in the scope of the research. “There’s so much,” he says. “It’s just ridiculous.” The 4-year-old institute consists of six core research areas focused on a wide range of technologies, from cancer vaccines to robotic bees that will pollinate…

Chemist Joanna Aizenberg found the inspiration for her latest innovation in the ultra-slippery leaves of the carnivorous pitcher plant. Then she improved on nature to create permanent nonstick surfaces that could keep artificial walls free of insect infestations, prevent ice from adhering to airplane wings, and deter bacterial growth on medical devices continually in contact with body fluids. When wet, the leaves of the pitcher plant are essentially friction-free: Insects slide down the surface into the interior, where the plant slowly digests them. The technique works in nature because rain regularly replenishes the moisture needed to keep the surface slick. Aizenberg knew there was no use replicating that trick: An artificial material that needs to be refreshed with new liquid to remain friction-free would have limited value. Instead, Aizenberg needed…

The Paleo diet is just the beginning. It’s the gateway to an entire suite of lifestyle prescriptions devoted to mimicking the way our ancestors ate, moved, slept, and bred nearly 10,000 years ago in the Paleolithic era of hunting and gathering, an era Paleo followers associate with strong bodies and minds. Members of this modern-day caveman community believe the path to optimal health is through eating only what our ancestors ate before modern agriculture and a shift to more sedentary ways. Devoted proponents of a Paleo lifestyle not only subsist primarily on meat and eschew carbs; they also exercise in short bursts of activity intended to mimic escaping prey. Even blood donation has become a Paleo fad among the most dogmatic of 21st-century cavemen, based on the notion that our…

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, wiping out homes and livelihoods in the part of Mississippi where Davis grew up, he vowed to build a 106-foot-tall sculpture to commemorate hurricane victims and inspire survivors. The monument he conceived represented an act of defiance—a way of standing up to the wrath of nature, and lightning in particular, flinging it back toward its source. Dominating Davis’s design are three vertical aluminum masts, which act not only as lightning rods but also as electrodes that discharge energy into the long, narrow cavity bounded by them. Inside this cavity, nitrogen molecules from the air will be electrically excited and induced to beam light toward the heavens primarily at a single ultraviolet wavelength (337.1 nanometers). “The hurricane is like Moby Dick, and…

In the late 1990s, a medical student who’d just done fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon met with Davis at MIT. She’d heard from a shaman that a plant sang differently, depending on whether it took root in a valley or on a mountain. She asked Davis if he knew how to distinguish between those sounds. That’s not the sort of question you hear every day, and it inspired him to invent the “audio microscope,” a device for eavesdropping on protozoa and other minute creatures. Davis modeled his concept after Alexander Graham Bell’s photophone. The basic approach is to shine lasers onto a mirror-like slide containing microorganisms that vibrate in a liquid solution. The light is reflected off the slide to a microscope, which magnifies the image and sends it to…

FOR PROFESSIONAL ASTRONOMERS, CLOUDY WEATHER TYPICALLY MEANS LOST WORK. For urban skygazers, it can mean nights of exceptional beauty. Some of the loveliest sights result from the high, wispy cirrus clouds that often precede storms. These clouds can contain two types of six-sided ice crystals: platelike, planar ones and elongated, pencil-shaped ones. The crystals reflect and refract light, though at night only the near-full or full moon is bright enough for these effects to be visible. Planar crystals, which lie roughly horizontal as they fall, occasionally form delicate “moon pillars,” columns of reflected light extending above or below the moon when it is low in the sky. The pencil crystals refract the light to produce a ring 22 degrees away from the moon in all directions. (The full halo stretches…