Discover March 2013

Teamwork Pays Off “The Cooperation Instinct” (page 34) focused on the work of Martin Nowak, a Harvard biologist whose computer models show that cooperation is a natural offshoot of Darwinian evolution. Cooperation is not altruism. Altruism is the apparently unique human instinct to sacrifice ourselves for strangers, with no anticipation of a payback. Not only will we run into a burning building to save a trapped child to whom we have no connection, we will also crawl out on the ice of a frozen pond to save a deer that has fallen through—the same deer that we would happily shoot if out hunting the next day. I suggest that the next challenge for Nowak is to reconfigure his model to solve the fundamental question of whether altruism can appear and…

WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD I DISCOVERED A SIMPLE KIND of time travel. I had just recently learned the constellations and started to recognize that each time of year has its own distinctive landscape in the evening sky. But if I woke up at 4 a.m. and went outside, I realized, I could jump ahead a full season, or even two. On a crisp November night I could set my alarm clock (the old wind-up kind, with an actual bell) and catch a glimpse of orange Arcturus rising in the east, a harbinger of spring. The tangy smell of frosty predawn air only added to the magical sense of peering into the future. Last month I wrote about the history of discover’s New York editorial offices, which will have…

IN A WELL-KNOWN SCENE FROM The Matrix, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) lies down in a high-tech dentist’s chair and straps on a wild array of electrodes, downloading a series of martial arts training programs into his brain. Apparently—if the mechanics can be parsed—the information is transferred via the visual cortex. Afterward, he blinks his eyes open and speaks the words geeks have been quoting ever since: “I know kung fu.” Automatic learning, the technical term for this idea, has been a longtime dream of the cyberpunk set. Most people thought it would remain in this aspirational realm for a while longer, but thanks to recent research by Brown University neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, what has long been science fiction may soon become science fact. To understand Watanabe’s breakthrough, it helps…

IN 2009, THE CENTERS FOR Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received a plea from officials in Uganda: Could the agency investigate a mysterious head-nodding disease spreading among more than 3,000 young people there? Healthy children would suddenly begin to nod their heads uncontrollably, sometimes falling into a trancelike state. The incidents seemed to be triggered by food, so eating was a struggle for the victims; some were dying of malnutrition as a result. “We saw families lock their children in their homes or tie them to trees to prevent them from injuring themselves while the family was working,” says the CDC’s Scott Dowell, an infectious disease specialist charged with finding the cause. Examining the children with brain scans, Dowell determined the spells were seizures like those seen in epilepsy. But…

When the Curiosity rover discovered evidence of an ancient stream bed on Mars in late September, it was an important and reassuring discovery. In fact, scientists have found increasing evidence of water on numerous moons, planets, and asteroids in recent years—an encouraging trend for those who see the familiar substance as the backbone of a future space-based economy. By harvesting water and converting it into a hydrogen-based rocket fuel, a space mining company like Shackleton Energy of Austin, Texas, could become the Exxon Mobil of the interplanetary highway. “If they can figure out the engineering and the economics, the raw materials are out there,” says planetary scientist Andrew Rivkin of Johns Hopkins University. Here are six of the more interesting water worlds and the prospects for each. GREG MONE 1.…

The loon has long been a sentinel creature for detecting mercury in our waters. “Loons, because they are exclusively fish eaters, are a great indicator of how bad mercury can get in the wild,” says ecologist David Evers, chief scientist at the Biodiversity Research Institute, a nonprofit organization in Gorham, Maine. But now ordinary sparrows and backyard birds may join the club, providing researchers with a broader picture of mercury’s effects on the environment. In a new study, Evers’s colleagues found high levels of mercury in the feathers of saltmarsh sparrows living in the wetlands of North Cinder in New York’s Long Island. Whereas loons accumulate mercury by eating large fish, songbirds are poisoned by eating spiders and other bugs. “You might ask what difference it makes if a little…