Índice para October 2013 em Discover

Don’t be shy about sharing your opinions, whether via letters, email or our social media communities. Here’s what you’ve been telling us lately. JOIN THE CONVERSATION Send email to editorial@DiscoverMagazine.com. Address letters to: DISCOVER 21027 Crossroads Circle P.O. Box 1612 Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Include your full name, address, daytime phone number and email address. Not to Bee? “Insect Insight,” in our May issue (page 56), outlined the ways insects are inspiring robotics. While Robert Wood and his colleagues of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab are to be commended for their research into and creation of RoboBees, it is sad that these small robots may one day have to replace the real honeybee. While new and emerging technologies such as this benefit society greatly, if we continue to destroy our natural world…

California has borne the brunt of several deadly earthquakes, in part because of its famous San Andreas Fault (SAF), where two of the planet’s constantly moving tectonic plates move against each other. These plates don’t always slide easily: Stress builds up, and earthquakes occur when they suddenly shift, just as a stubborn weed may suddenly give way when steadily pulled by an angry gardener. But a different kind of tremor also puts people at risk. Unlike traditional interplate examples, intraplate quakes occur in the interior of a tectonic plate, far from where many people would expect. Smaller faults also exist within plates, and when pressure builds up, they, too, can suddenly give way, causing an intraplate earthquake like the 2011 one centered in Mineral, Va., or the famous New Madrid…

Ever since the early 1700s, when scientists such as Irish physician and collector Hans Sloan began studying the fossilized teeth and tusks of Siberian woolly mammoths, researchers have debated what caused the demise of these Ice Age behemoths. Furry cousins of modern elephants, mammoths stomped their way across northern Eurasia and North America beginning 300,000 years ago. But between roughly 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, all except a few isolated island populations disappeared. Scientists believe the last of them may have died on Russia’s Wrangel Island in the Arctic around 1700 B.C. In the early 20th century, 11,000-year-old cave paintings of woolly mammoths were found in France, suggesting, along with other discoveries of that time, that the creatures once lived side by side with humans. “Then came the chilling question:…

And you thought using your smartphone as a flashlight was a big deal. Consider NASA’s PhoneSat 1.0. mission: In a demo last spring, HTC Nexus One cell phones acted as onboard computers, powering a trio of 4-inch, 3-pound cube-shaped satellites with off-the-shelf components. The $3,500 units, which successfully transmitted digital images over six days while orbiting Earth, are part of the agency’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program. PhoneSat 2.0 launches this fall with a two-way S-band radio, which should give Earth-based engineers command abilities over the satellite. - ARNIE COOPER…

With his rooster-like crest of red hair, trendy piercings and penchant for T-shirts and hoodies, Harper Reed hardly looks like the kind of guy who could topple empires. But as chief technology officer for President Barack Obama’s reelection effort, Reed supervised a handpicked team of digital wizards who revolutionized election campaigns. Throughout history, political parties have collected information on voters to gauge their views and target political messages. But in 2008, the Obama campaign took data mining to a new level by collecting morsels culled from online sources like email, Facebook and Twitter. Then they made history by using these platforms to mobilize supporters. In 2012, Reed’s elite geek squad upped the ante by several orders of magnitude in scale and scope. The team built a high-tech platform — code…

Detecting the Dangers Importing Risk Like our cars and our kids’ toys and of course those designer bags, the food we eat often comes from overseas. Almost 15 percent of foods consumed in the U.S. come from outside the country. That includes about half our fruit, 20 percent of our vegetables and 80 percent of our seafood. Fully 90 percent of the shrimp that hits American tables hails from abroad, primarily from Southeast Asia, Ecuador and Mexico. Thousands of ingredients used in countless food products are imported from foreign lands; penetration from overseas is so vast and complex that a single product might contain ingredients from multiple countries, a fact you would never discern from labeling on the food itself. The situation might sound exotic, but it puts us at…

Putting Things Into Perspective Big Data for Outbreak Sleuths When a Salmonella Montevideo outbreak swept across 44 states several years ago, sickening hundreds, investigators hit a wall. They ran patients through some 300 questions about their eating habits, asking them to recall all the food consumed over the course of weeks. Sleuths suspected salami but had no idea what brand to begin testing, much less recall. The big break came only after investigators realized that many of the afflicted had shopped at a national warehouse grocery store chain. With the victims’ permission and the store’s cooperation, they quickly identified a particular brand of salami —more specifically, the red and black pepper coating it —as the common source. A recall was quickly instated. Shopper cards proved their mettle in that crisis,…

→ To defeat the enemy, you have to think like the enemy, according to the old military cliché. If so, then Rusty Schweickart is exactly the guy you want on your side when the enemy is a giant space rock. As the co-founder of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, he is a leader in the effort to find and ward off threatening space rocks. And as the lunar module pilot on Apollo 9, he once sailed through space at 5 miles per second. “I’ve been out there. I’ve been a human asteroid,” he says with a chuckle. Despite the obstacles I discussed in this column last month, astronomers are rapidly developing better tools to find and track near-Earth asteroids. Inevitably, the day will come when they find one on a collision…

“MEGASTORM AFTERMATH” PBS, 9 p.m. EDT Oct. 9 One year ago, Superstorm Sandy pummeled the Atlantic Seaboard, killing hundreds and wreaking about $65 billion in havoc. NOVA’s "Megastorm Aftermath" revisits the 2012 monster’s path of destruction. But it also looks ahead to ways New York and other cities might adapt to rising sea levels ¡X and the increasing likelihood of future Sandys. The hourlong documentary examines how Arctic warming may be increasing storms’ intensity and altering their paths, and how countries such as the Netherlands are creating climate-adaptive cities to respond to changing conditions. Ƭ GT WATER FALLS SCIENCE ON A SPHERE Locations worldwide Water, water everywhere - but never before quite like this. Using a mix of live-action sequences, animation and satellite data, the NASA-produced film Water Falls melds…

10/4 It’s Alive! Learn about early filmmaking tech when Thomas Edison National Historic Park in West Orange, N.J., screens the 1910 film Frankenstein. nps.gov/edis 10/10 – 10/18 Science on the Big Screen Get the popcorn ready as New York’s sixth annual Imagine Science Film Festival takes over screens in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. imaginesciencefilms.org Calendar compiled by Elisa Neckar. Submit your events to thismonth@DiscoverMagazine.com 10/3 Uranus Peaks Ready your binoculars for the year’s brightest appearance of ice giant Uranus. Astronomy.com/uranus2013 10/8 Tornado of Flame Extreme drought and cyclonic winds spawned a firestorm in 1871, annihilating Peshtigo, Wis., and inspiring World War II firebombs. ci.peshtigo.wi.us/history 10/17–10/20 Catch an Global Flick New York’s Margaret Mead Film Festival spotlights international films, such as Gringo Trails (pictured). amnh.org 10/19 Picture Show A 1515 woodcut…

Going In-Depth We’re having a busy and exciting time here at Discover. Last month, of course, we launched the magazine’s redesign, and now we’re rolling out a few more changes. This issue, for example, the ever-popular Vital Signs column (page 22) returns with a new look, as does the Discover Interview (page 26), our signature Q&A profile. We’ve also created a new section, Discover Events (page 46), where we’ll spotlight panel discussions, Capitol Hill science briefings and other events that Discover co-hosts with a variety of schools, professional associations and partners such as the National Science Foundation. Speaking of special events, I want to draw your attention to a new initiative Discover is launching. Over the years, we’ve prided ourselves on our commitment to deliver readers deeply informed, deeply reported…

The tooth fairy may be good at doling out cash for lost teeth when we’re kids, but it disappears when we lose a bicuspid as adults. Not so with American alligators, whose teeth can regenerate up to 50 times. USC researchers have uncovered the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in alligators. The scientists found that when an alligator loses a tooth, latent stem cells are activated, triggering tooth development. The researchers hope this discovery could lead to tooth regeneration in adult humans, whose pearly whites are naturally replaced only once. - ARNIE COOPER…

Move over, 15-year cheddar. Researchers believe they may have found a sample of cheese residue dating back some 7,000 years —the earliest known appearance of the preserved dairy product. Archaeologists began uncovering ancient pieces of hole-riddled pottery in Poland in the 1920s and ’30s. The reassembled ceramics immediately brought to mind modern cheese strainers for Princeton anthropologist Peter Bogucki, who published a paper on them in 1984. It was something that always interested organic geochemist and prehistoric dairy sleuth Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol, so he decided to find out for sure. He performed forensic tests on the fatty residues inside the pottery and confirmed they were milk-derived. It’s not certain the contents were cheese, Evershed says, but “they clearly were straining some sort of dairy products.” Cheese…

To woo females, male mice whistle complex songs at ultrasonic frequencies. Scientists have assumed these tunes are hardwired in their tiny mouse brains and doubted that rodents modify their songs after hearing others — a cognitive feat similar to vocalizations by birds and some mammals, including dolphins, bats and humans. To test whether feedback had a role in mouse songs, neurobiologist Gustavo Arriaga and colleagues at Duke University deafened adult mice and found that, surprisingly, their songs degraded over time; they were no longer able to maintain a precise pitch. Young hearing-impaired mice fared even worse, producing squawks rather than the usual whistles. In their next experiment, Arriaga placed a male strain of mouse that had what’s considered a “tenor” voice inside a soundproof cage with a “baritone” so the…

SOMEWHERE ON THE CAMPUS of Stanford University, among the stately oaks and tile-roofed temples of scientific inquiry, live Carla Shatz’s super-mice. They learn complex physical tasks more quickly than their ordinary cousins. If one eye is deprived of sight, they rapidly rewire their brains to compensate, then beat normal one-eyed mice on tests of visual acuity. They recover more readily from some brain injuries, too. What sets these rodents apart is their superior ability to form new neural connections, or strengthen existing ones, in response to experience. Shatz is proud of her prodigies. But when I ask for permission to visit them, the pioneering neurobiologist turns me down. “They’re in a germ-free facility,” she says apologetically, glancing away from a video in which a tiny champion powers through a water…

Concentrations of algae in our oceans and lakes have long bloomed naturally, but climate change and fertilizer runoff from farms have exacerbated the situation in recent years. The outcome: algal blooms so massive that ecosystems turn into dead zones, resource-poor realms inhospitable to other life. The most dangerous of the blooms, called harmful algal blooms, or HABs, are often reddish in color, leading observers to call them red tides. The dangers are as ominous as the name. Some of the algae, or phytoplankton, manufacture saxitoxin, a poison so devastating it is the underlying cause of paralytic shellfish poisoning, an often-lethal reaction to shellfish that are storing toxic algal cells. This January, two people in Malaysia died after eating cockles tainted with the stuff. Other phytoplankton produce domoic acid, a neurotoxin…

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY OUR EXPERT PANEL This article draws from the Programming Life conference co-hosted by Discover and Synberc on March 25 at the University of California, Berkeley, along with follow-up interviews with panelists. GEORGE CHURCH Professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School; director of PersonalGenomes.org DOUGLAS DENSMORE Assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University DREW ENDY Assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University STEVE EVANS Fellow at Dow AgroSciences JAY KEASLING Director of Synberc; CEO of Joint BioEnergy Institute; professor of biochemical engineering at UC Berkeley CHRISTINA SMOLKE Associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University VIRGINIA URSIN Technology prospecting lead and science fellow at Monsanto CHRISTOPHER VOIGT Associate professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology LAURIE ZOLOTH Professor of medical humanities, bioethics and religious…

Your Guide to Cool Culture, New Tech and What’s Next Science Adviser to the Stars When alfonso cuarón’s astronauts-adrift epic Gravity arrives in theaters Oct. 4, it will be grounded in science, thanks to Kevin Grazier. The planetary physicist is well-known to fans of Syfy’s Defiance and Battlestar Galactica, and TNT’s Falling Skies, as the science adviser who helps give authenticity to sci-fi adventure. Grazier spent 15 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as investigation scientist and science planning engineer for the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan. He’s currently penning Hollyweird Science with co-author Stephen Cass. The book, due out in 2014, will cover studios that got the science in their sci-fi right. Still an active researcher focused on computer simulations of solar system dynamics, Grazier told Discover Associate…

Marin County Headlands Sausalito, Calif. 37d 50’ 05" N 122d 31’ 51" W marinemammalcenter.org Just five miles west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, there’s a hospital where no patient has insurance and fish is always on the menu. Tucked into the scenic Marin County Headlands, the Marine Mammal Center treats Pacific harbor seals, northern elephant seals and other pinnipeds, giving visitors an intimate view of wildlife rescue. SEA LION 911: Staff and volunteers cover a range of more than 600 square miles, locating and transporting stranded, sick or injured animals to the center for care. Conditions treated range from malnutrition and net entanglement to gunshot wounds and disease; patient stays average three to four months. SCORE A TOUR: Check out the center for free; self-guided audio tours and docentled…

Traditionally, looking up at night was an act of escape, ascending from the human world into the cosmic one. But the growing number of artificial objects zipping around Earth has inspired a more synthetic form of skygazing: the new sport of satellite watching. You could think of it as the nighttime version of train spotting. (It even has its own insiders’ checklist for earning an award pin; see www.astroleague.org/content/eosoc-introduction.) Satellite watching is easy to do even under severely light-polluted city skies. The most prominent satellite —the 358-footwide International Space Station —routinely outshines the brightest stars. The far less famous Iridium satellites, a fleet of 66 telecommunication relays in low-Earth orbit, can shine brighter still. Because of their unusual six-sided shape, these satellites create brief flashes of reflected sunlight, called Iridium…

The Stories Behind the Latest Science News THERE’S A NEW BIRD IN TOWN A Cambodian tailorbird, Orthotomus chaktomuk, perches in lowland scrub in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in October 2012. Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Birdlife International and other groups documented their discovery of this new bird species in a study published in Forktail, the journal of the Oriental Bird Club. The tiny wren-size bird with a loud call was discovered in the humid scrubland around Phnom Penh where the Tonle Sap, Mekong and Bassac rivers come together. Simon Mahood, one of the authors, suggested the discovery bodes well for future new finds in familiar locations. - ERNIE MASTROIANNI 10 Charting the Curiosities at JPL 12 A New Take on Quakes Ask Discover: Cell Communication Alligators and the End of…

Q How do cells communicate with each other to form organisms? For example, how does the side of a plant stem facing sunlight tell the one on the shady side to grow more so the whole plant can bend toward the light? —Paul Cummins Alexandria, Va. A Cells communicate through their own language of chemical signals. Different compounds, such as hormones and neurotransmitters, act like words and phrases, telling a cell about the environment around it or communicating messages. When the pancreas detects a person has just eaten, for example, it releases the hormone insulin to tell other cells in the body to remove glucose from the blood. Just as a person needs ears as much as a mouth to have a conversation, cells use receptor proteins either on the…

Pity the nail-biter: After vowing to stop her self-mutilation, she’ll look down a few hours later to see she’s ravaged that expensive manicure. On its face (or hand), it’s a prime example of how little control our conscious brains seem to have over unwanted habits. MIT neuroscientist Ann Graybiel has spent her career trying to understand the mechanics of how habits form and why bad ones are so hard to break. How closely does the brain monitor habitual activity? And can it turn deeply ingrained behaviors on and off ? In a recent test of those questions, Graybiel and colleagues trained a group of rats to turn either left or right in a Tshaped maze, based on different sound cues. One end was baited with a reward of sugar water,…

She looked too healthy. In her early 40s, showing zero signs of distress, my newest patient, Lucy, seemed out of place in a bustling emergency room. Shaking her hand as she sat on the gurney, I asked her what brought her in. “Well,” she began, “I couldn’t move my right arm.” She glanced at her husband as if to confirm: You saw it too, right? “Today?” I blurted, having just shaken her right hand. “For about 45 minutes.” Maybe she had simply slept wrong and her arm had fallen asleep. But although Lucy couldn’t remember whether her arm had been all right when she woke up, she was sure she hadn’t felt any “pins and needles” upon awakening. She had gone to bed with a sinus infection, which had begun…

While millions of Americans spend their days fretting over excessive fats and carbs, more subtle concerns lurk within our food supply. Some 15 percent of our food comes from abroad, where safety standards can be scant. And recent evidence suggests that trace toxins could be making us sick. There’s no cause for panic, but staying informed can help you safeguard your health. The cans of baby formula invaded Brian Jackson’s Dartmouth College lab late in 2010. His team picked up an armful of popular brands at the food co-op in Hanover, N.H. Then another armload. Eventually Jackson had a cabinet full of the brightly labeled canisters. Today, he still keeps a few in his office. Not as clutter —that’s not his style. He just likes to keep his toxicology evidence…

Bee-assisted pollination helps produce about 30 percent of our food, but bees have fallen on hard times, posing a serious threat to food security. According to the USDA, we’ve lost 3.5 million colonies to parasites, disease, genetics, poor nutrition and pesticide exposure since the late 1940s, when bee colonies were 5 million to 6 million strong. A widespread and poorly understood cause of die-off is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), marked by unusually high bee losses (up to 90 percent per hive) in which worker bees vanish. A single explanation for CCD has yet to emerge. Recent research indicates a link between CCD and the use of pesticides derived from nicotine that target insects’ nervous systems and could impair their homing instincts. In May, the European Union approved a two-year…

→ On a table in Harvard University’s herbarium, six slimy-looking brownish lobes, each roughly the size of your palm, float in a tub of ethanol solution. They’ve been sliced in half and their flat sides face the ceiling, revealing strange patterns of grooves, bumps and tentacle-like projections. If you had to guess, you might say they were sections of something that grew in the deep ocean. In fact, they’re pickled flower buds. And though their drab hues and soggy miens suggest otherwise, they’d have bloomed, if left in their rainforest homes, into some of nature’s largest, weirdest and worst-smelling flowers. The plants, which graduate student Lachezar Nikolov collected in the jungles of Malaysia and Thailand, belong to the genus Rafflesia. Their bright red and yellow flowers can grow up to…

Crawling into the mind of one of the world’s preeminent scientists is even more interesting when he’s a gifted writer. Evolutionary biologist Dawkins delves into his earliest adventures as a young boy in Africa, efforts to fit in at English boarding schools and later animal-behavior studies. Each played a role leading to his revolutionary idea that it’s gene survival that really matters in natural selection. Dawkins presented his theory to the world via The Selfish Gene in the mid-1970s; reaction to the book changed his life dramatically - territory he promises to cover in an Appetite sequel. - BECKY LANG DON’T LOOK, DON’T TOUCH, DON’T EAT By Valerie Curtis Our species may be the result of successful "Eeew!"-volution. Curtis, a self-described ¡§seasoned disgust researcher," pinpoints the roots of revulsion in…

A NEW KIND OF BOWLING: The Omni is an eight-sided, concave platform with an adjustable, waisthigh stability ring. The bowl-like base is made of a proprietary grooved, low-friction material. THESE SHOES WERE MADE FOR SKYRIM: Omni users wear shoes designed to work with the treadmill’s dynamics. The sole of the shoe is made of the same low-friction material as the base, with a stainless-steel pin in the toe that fits into the base grooves to stabilize the foot and make natural movement easier. The front tip of the toe area is made of a higher-friction material that acts as a kind of brake so you spend more time strafing and slaying virtual bad guys and less time slipping and sliding. DON’T CONSOLE YOURSELF: Although the Omni is compatible with gear…

1. Modern Halloween celebrations focus on fun frights, but superstitions associated with the holiday’s ancestor, the Celtic festival of the dead, were no laughing matter. Families left “treats” for departed loved ones to discourage nasty “tricks” from beyond the grave. Burial sites, such as Hallan Cemetery in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides (pictured above), often evoke superstitious ideas about death. 2. On Halloween, 18th-century Scottish villagers drove sheep through hoops of rowan branches to protect them from ghostly mischief, including sickness. 3. The ritual may have arisen from observing that sheep nibbling rowanberries were healthier; the berries contain sorbic acid, which has anti-fungal properties. 4. Dowsers believe the forked rod or pendulum they hold vibrates as they pass over underground water, but there’s no science to support the notion. In fact, as…