Table of contents for July - August 2014 in Discover

Who’s the Boss? A friend of mine who is a novelist has a sheet of paper taped to his wall, just above his computer. It says, simply: The Book is the Boss. I assume it’s a mantra he repeats to himself whenever he’s in danger of missing his deadline (which for him is often). In my work, I’m motivated by a similar maxim, although I don’t have it written on my wall. It’s ingrained in my mind, and it’s this: The Reader is the Boss. I work for you. But I do my best work in a team environment, which is why I tend to think of our working relationship as a partnership, one that depends on actively soliciting your input. That’s why I throw a question out to readers…

Fresh from prenatal yoga, a woman walks into her 35-week OB appointment glowing. But the doc frowns as she watches the woman’s normally low blood pressure soar past 140. Then a routine test shows protein in her urine. Diagnosis: preeclampsia. These few symptoms are often the only indication of the condition; the mom-to-be feels fine, but until she has her baby, she’ll likely be put on bed rest and monitored closely, as preeclampsia can quickly escalate to severe swelling, seizures, and even coma or death. As many as 8 percent of pregnant women worldwide are diagnosed with preeclampsia, and while the condition is on the rise in the U.S., no one knows exactly what causes it. Some researchers have suspected fetal DNA or pieces of the placenta — long known…

Cuba, like most Caribbean island nations, depends almost entirely on inefficient and highly polluting diesel generators for electricity. But a new project using small waveenergy buoys aims to harvest clean energy from the ocean instead. Diesel generators crank out greenhouse gases and black carbon that contribute to climate change — the very thing that threatens to swamp more than 100 communities along Cuba’s coasts as seas are expected to rise an estimated 3 feet by 2100. Marine scientist David Guggenheim is working with Cuba’s National Center for Protected Areas to reduce the country’s diesel use and the pollution that comes with it. “These are environmentally sensitive areas, and we want to make sure we start in these places,” says Guggenheim. The team’s plan is to gradually replace diesel generators with…

Depression can be a devastating illness, plaguing millions of people worldwide with feelings of sadness, hopelessness, apathy and fatigue. Despite numerous antidepressant drugs, as many as a third of patients don’t respond to medication. This has forced doctors to be more creative in finding different treatments for the condition. In the past two decades, researchers have tied depression to a seemingly unrelated condition: inflammation, the body’s natural response to stress. It could stem from injury or infection, or even emotional issues like an unhappy marriage or problems at work. Some amount of inflammation is generally beneficial, as it ramps up production of cytokines, proteins that help us heal and protect us from the effects of overexertion. But excessive cytokine levels, and the inflammation they bring on, could come at a…

Early in her restless, inventive career, Elizabeth Phelps was trying to understand the deep structure of memory by showing word lists to people with amnesia — patients who’d survived a brain injury or stroke but lost the ability to remember. When she’d talk about her work with friends, somebody would eventually ask: What do word lists really have to do with memories — the vivid images and intense emotions that flood the mind? It’s a good question. Why do you remember best the things that really matter to you? That question, among others, led her to explore emotion and the fascinating terrain where memories, fears and stress come together. Ever since, Phelps — a past president of the Association for Psychological Science and a psychologist at New York University —…

BIG DATA and MACHINE DREAMS One winter evening in the early 1860s, German chemist August Kekulé dozed off while sitting before a fire, falling into a remarkably vivid dream. Atoms formed themselves into undulating strings that morphed into a snake eating its own tail. Kekulé contended that this intense imagery helped him solve the mystery of benzene’s ringlike structure, a discovery that is considered a foundation of modern chemistry. Nearly 100 years later, research teams on both sides of the Atlantic were vying to be the first to decipher the structure of DNA, the genetic material that is the basic molecule of life. In the United States, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling found himself up against obscure English physicist Francis Crick and his 20-something American postdoc, James Watson, in Cambridge. The…

Even when we’re resting and daydreaming, internal activity is nonstop. The brain, of course, is the crown jewel of our nervous system. It has 85 billion neural cells and 150 trillion synapses. These are its electrical connections, its possibilities. This figure is nearly a thousand times as great as the number of stars in the Milky Way. The number of brain neurons is impressive. To count them at the rate of one a second would require 3,200 years. But the brain’s synapses, or electrical connections, are beyond belief. Those 150 trillion could be counted in 3 million years. And that’s still not the end of the matter. What’s relevant is how many ways each cell can connect with the others. For this we must use factorials. Let’s say we want…

It’s 2026, and humans aren’t doing so well. Over the past decade, simian flu has nearly wiped us out, and intelligent apes — the product of misguided lab experiments — are quickly climbing to the top of the food chain. The challenge for our species is to survive. The challenge for Matt Reeves, director of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (in theaters July 11), is to live up to all the Apes that have gone before — and to go even further, creating a new level of realism. We caught up with Reeves as he was putting the finishing touches on Dawn, the sequel to 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, to talk about his chapter of a franchise that began more than 50 years ago…

DISCOVERY ZONE Denver Museum of Nature and Science The Mile-High City gets a brandspanking-new spot for budding brainiacs. Sorry, maybe we shouldn’t have mentioned “spanking” because there’s nothing but fun at the new Discovery Zone for children. Tomorrow’s researchers and innovators can excavate fossils in a simulated dig, learn about water’s acrobatic properties and cook up some chemistry experiments in the Science Kitchen. There’s even an area for tots younger than 3 to begin a lifelong love of learning. Opens June 7. dmns.org — GEMMA TARLACH…

July 2014 7/4 Rube Goldberg’s 131st Birthday Cutting the cake in honor of the late cartoonist and inventor should require at least 12 steps, including a mousetrap, a cuckoo clock, a robotic leg in a boot and a hamster running on a wheel. rubegoldberg.com 7/12 Re-Broadcast Commercial use of Morse code ended in the U.S. in 1999; the Maritime Radio Historical Society welcomes the public to help commemorate the event at a historic, Marconi-era station along California’s Point Reyes National Seashore. nps.gov/pore/historyculture/people_communications.htm 7/18–7/20 Let the Sun Shine In Blending arts and renewable energy education, the 20th annual Solar Fest in Tinmouth, Vt., offers hands-on workshops, a sustainable marketplace and musical acts. solarfest.org 7/20 Man on the Moon Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong took that one giant leap for mankind 45…

Printing Parts Christian Millman wrote “20 Things You Didn’t Know About 3-D Printing” in our March issue. I always get something out of your magazine. Loved the 3-D printing article. My brother had a massive brain aneurysm about two years ago. After surgery, they left out about a fourth of the top of his skull. When it came time to replace it, the missing piece had become contaminated in storage. No problem! They ran him through a CT scanner that made the piece. I assume this is some of the same technology. Where would he have been without it? Elaine J. McElhaney Columbia, SC Hotheaded Lessons in Skepticism April’s “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Hoaxes” mentioned Discover’s 1995 April Fools’ story about the fictional hotheaded naked ice borer, a…

Unlike the relaxation associated with Roman baths, ancient Roman bathrooms triggered trepidation. They consisted of dark, dank holes leading to sewer channels from which emerged biting creatures or even, because of methane buildup, naked flames. Independent archaeologist Gemma Jansen has studied these unsavory sites for the past 20 years, becoming one of the go-to latrine gurus among classical researchers. In January 2013, beneath layers of architectural ruins in Rome’s Palatine Hill, Jansen examined something of a treasure among toilets: a chamber likely to be the loo that slaves in Nero’s palace would have frequented 2,000 years ago. The stone bench that wraps around the room would have housed some 50 soccer ball-size holes, but no dividers. “Like public toilets today, they are convenient if you need them, but mostly they…

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are far more energy efficient than incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs. Unfortunately, much of the light LEDs produce remains trapped within the inner surfaces of the diode. Engineers tried to build a brighter LED, but when modifications hit a plateau, they sought inspiration from the bugs that light up many a summer night. An international team of researchers led by Annick Bay at the University of Namur in Belgium examined the light-emitting organ of Photuris fireflies under a scanning electron microscope and identified seven structures that showed promise for boosting LED output. Using computer simulations, the scientists determined that the most influential aspect was misfit scales on the organ’s surface that give it a rough, shinglelike quality. The multiple abrupt edges scatter light rays to increase the…

I was getting ready for rounds when the page came in. “We have a stat consult in the ER,” I told my entourage when I hung up the phone. “A woman presented with syncope and significant bradycardia.” “What’s that?” asked Ellie. I almost forgot my teenage daughter was shadowing me today. “A fainting spell,” I explained, as Brian and Adam, the medical residents assigned to my service, and Ellie and I proceeded at a brisk pace to the emergency department. “The paramedics found her heart rate to be in the 30s.” “What should it be?” asked the everinquisitive Ellie. “The heart should beat around 60 times a minute at rest,” I answered. “Faster with activity.” We arrived in the emergency department. “She’s stable now. She got atropine,” a nurse reported.…

On the remote Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia, amid the rusting ruins of an abandoned scientific research station, is the deepest hole in the world. Now covered and sealed with a welded metal plate, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, as it’s called, is a remnant of a largely forgotten Cold War race that aimed not at the stars, but at Earth’s interior. A team of Soviet scientists began drilling at Kola in the spring of 1970, with the goal of penetrating as far into Earth’s crust as their technology would allow. Four years before the Russians started punching their way into the Kola crust, the United States had given up on its own deep-drilling program: Project Mohole, an attempt to bore several miles through the Pacific seafloor and retrieve a sample…

About 20 miles south of Cancun, Mexico, on a stifling summer day, Tom Iliffe squints over a limestone ledge and into a giant pool of scuzzy, brown water. Despite the heat, he’s wearing a wet suit that covers everything but his blue eyes and white goatee. A spool of bright-orange nylon line and an assortment of mesh bags carrying glass test tubes, plastic caps and measuring devices dangle at his side. Below, the water temperature is roughly the same as the air. He jumps. “This water is about as refreshing as piss,” he exclaims with a playful smile after coming up for air. For almost 30 years, Iliffe has made a pilgrimage more or less annually to the Yucatan Peninsula, sharing the plane ride with throngs of Jimmy Buffet-loving “Parrotheads”…

Balinese farmer I Made Perasi understands the challenges of modernization well. He straddles two worlds as the owner of a car wash and the leader of a thriving but threatened rice cultivation system in the Pakerisan River’s Valley of Kings. His title is pekaseh, the elected head of a green and fruitful pocket of the watershed, which includes 110 families and their separate-but-cooperating rice paddy operations. At the edge of one such paddy, Perasi dismounts his Honda motorbike and walks along a narrow canal. He’s wearing a traditional head wrap and sarong topped by an apricot-colored polo shirt. Perasi waves at a family splashing in water that will later flow out to irrigate their rice, as well as the coconut trees and bird-filled shrubs that divide the paddies. This may…

THE SKELETON CREW By Deborah Halber Fascinated by the tens of thousands of unidentified human remains in America, civilian sleuths comb through missing persons databases, police reports and news stories, searching for matches to John and Jane Does. Science journalist Halber focuses less on hard forensics and more on the passionate, competitive amateur investigators and their online communities, where remains are referred to as “Tent Girl” or “The Head in the Bucket.” Halber’s fragmented organization makes for a choppy but compelling read, particularly when the crowd-sourced investigations pay off and a body is positively identified. — ELISA NECKAR DEEP By James Nestor After years of living next to the Pacific, journalist Nestor decides to zip up his wet suit and embark on a pilgrimage to understand our connection to the…

The smart and tech-savvy kid characters of Earth to Echo, opening in theaters July 2, establish contact with an alien robot via texts. Smartphones and other consumer gadgets play a major role throughout the movie. Is the premise any more plausible than, say, Will Smith outwitting otherworldly hordes in Independence Day? We asked a man who’d know: Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, an alien hunter by trade and an informal consultant to Hollywood. Q If there’s intelligent life out there, do you think they’d establish contact with us using a droid, as in Earth to Echo? A Well, one never knows what aliens have in mind. But the amount of energy required to go from one star system to another is daunting. If the aliens were that…

The Milky Way’s Dark Heart Summer is traditionally vacation season, when city dwellers escape the hustle of daily life for some rest in the country. For anyone experiencing a truly dark summer sky for the first time, one of the most impressive sights is the light of the Milky Way, the edge-on view of our galaxy from our planet’s position near its fringe. The luminous belt stretches from the southern to northern horizon and appears thickest around the galaxy’s center, in western Sagittarius. The Milky Way is composed of billions of stars, most of them too far away to appear as individual suns. Although impressive under a dark sky, the Milky Way would look even brighter if dust didn’t block most of its light — the galaxy’s core alone would…

Three years ago, Dana DeBeauvoir, a county clerk in Austin, Texas, had a problem. Soon she’d have to replace the aging voting machines her county had bought eight years earlier. Congress had ponied up the money for those machines, driven by the hanging chad debacle in Florida’s 2000 election. But this time, the feds weren’t coughing up any cash. Even if she had the money, though, she didn’t like her choices. Computer scientists had been sounding alarms about the rampant security flaws in voting machines for years, and the manufacturers hadn’t responded. So DeBeauvoir took a very unusual step: She gave the keynote speech at a computer voting security conference, challenging the assembled computer scientists to build her the voting system of her dreams. She outlined four requirements. First, the…

They may not be white whales named Moby, but Antarctic minke whales can be just as elusive. Generally shy and abundant only around the inhospitable southern continent, the dark bronze beasts — among the smallest baleen whales at roughly 5 to 10 tons each — have been difficult to study in their environment, so biologists know little about their behavior. In fact, their elusive nature has been used by some as an excuse to hunt and kill the whales, saying it’s the only way to study them. But last year, Ari Friedlaender, a marine mammal ecologist then at Duke University, discovered a new method. He was aboard a research vessel off the Antarctic Peninsula studying humpback whales when an unusual group of minkes let his team into their midst. Data…

A mathematician discovers a surprising similarity between the cosmic object and an ocean mainstay. At first glance, a swirling vortex of water seems similar to a black hole: Both take hold of the matter around them, sucking in and trapping whatever drifts too close. Well, it turns out the analogy is more than just skin deep. The oval boundary of water around a vortex in the ocean can be described with the same mathematical equations as the light that whips around the edges of a black hole. Oceanic vortices are stealth forces of nature. They trap water and pollutants, and shuttle warm water northward — influencing the rate of melting sea ice. Even though they’re about 90 miles across, they are still relatively small features in the huge ocean, hard…

It took many years of musical training for me to realize just how bad my singing voice is. I’m a respectable musician when I play a guitar, mandolin or other stringed instrument. But when I open my mouth, a cacophony comes out. I have tried to get better — pity the vocal teachers who worked to help me. But my voice remains defiantly bad, and I wonder: What is to blame for this selective musical sabotage? Is it my brain, my ear or my vocal cords? In search of answers, I approach the experts at BRAMS (International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research), the Montreal-based research institute devoted to musical cognition and the complex neurobiology involved in musical aptitude. I present my problem to Sean Hutchins, who spent four…

Once dismissed as a psychological curiosity, the PLACEBO effect is now recognized as the key to the brain’s “inner pharmacy.” If only doctors knew how to open the medicine cabinet. Sarah Lidstone has a long history with the medical world. A ballet dancer from the age of 3, she developed acute scoliosis and wore a back brace throughout much of her teens. “I spent a lot of my childhood in doctors’ offices,” she says with a wide Cheshire grin. “I loved carrying my X-rays around when I was 10.” The brace gradually coaxed Lidstone’s body to straighten itself out, but her experience left her with an enduring fascination for medicine and a desire to ease the suffering of others. In college she gravitated to brain science, and particularly to Parkinson’s…

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans can’t stand things not having names. As soon as naturalists spy a never-before-seen creature or explorers stumble upon a new land, they set about christening their discoveries. This undeniable urge has led to some, shall we say, issues over the naming of exoplanets, the worlds beyond our solar system. For the past 22 years, ever since finding the first exoplanets, researchers have generally preferred alphanumeric scientific designations blessed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) — we’re talking exoplanetary handles like UScoCTIO 108b and TrES-3b. But now that scientists are finding thousands of new worlds, the populace is rising up to demand more prosaic names. The ruckus over popular exoplanetary names finally reached a boiling point last year. The startup company Uwingu (meaning “sky”…

Lately it seems like the research world has launched into a full-throttle game of “what superpower would you choose?” For those who desire invisibility, engineers are developing exotic materials that can bend an object’s light completely out of view. For would-be telepaths, neurobiologists are working on ways to read one person’s brain wave patterns and transmit them into another person’s head. My personal favorite, though, is perhaps the most outrageous fantasy power of all: teleportation, the ability to arrive without traveling. Imagine being able to dematerialize from your living room and show up the next moment in Venice or the Amazon rainforest or the rings of Saturn (wearing an appropriate space suit, of course). The idea is so seductive that it has been a mainstay of science fiction since the…

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. 40°51’30’’ N, 73°27’59’’ W cshl.edu Located just outside the historic seaside town of Cold Spring Harbor, the eponymous laboratory sits on the former grounds of a 19th-century whaling company. The institution was founded in 1890 as a biology teacher training laboratory, but is now an international leader in molecular biology and cancer research. NOBEL-ITY: Eight Nobel laureates have worked at the laboratory, including James Watson, who discovered DNA’s double-helix structure with Francis Crick in 1953. TOUR IT: Learn about the lab’s Nobel legacy, historic architecture and current research in cancer and neuroscience on a 90-minute tour led by graduate students and postdoctoral candidates. Tours ($5) are offered from March through October. Reservations must be made seven days in advance; call 516-367-8455. HISTORY LESSON: On the opposite…

It’s not enough to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel — you’ve got to stay awake and alert when driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsy driving accounts for more than 100,000 crashes and 1,550 fatalities each year. Manufacturer-installed anti-driver-fatigue systems have been around a while: In 2007, Volvo introduced a forward-facing camera that gauged steering accuracy, and Mercedes-Benz began offering Attention Assist in 2009. But now, a trio of aftermarket products makes staying awake — and alive — even easier. Denmark is My Co-Pilot A DIY solution comes from Danish firm ASP (Anti-Sleep Pilot). Inspired by his experience of falling asleep behind the wheel one night, company founder Troels Palshof developed this dash-mounted device that might be mistaken for a…

1 Children will play whether they live in a suburb or a war zone. The urge is so strong that children even played in concentration camps during the Holocaust. 2 Play reflects a child’s surroundings. In the Confederate South, black children held mock slave auctions, a psychological means of coping with extreme anxiety. 3 Essential to the growing brain, play stimulates development of the cerebellum, which coordinates movement, and the frontal lobe, which regulates decision-making and impulse control. 4 Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp believes diminishing classroom playtime could be responsible for the recent rise of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 5 And then there are communication skills. A 1981 study showed that preschoolers use more complex language while playing make-believe than during ordinary conversation. 6 University of Pittsburgh ecologist…