Scientific American - News

City Dwellers Drive Deforestation in 21st Century

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:01:00 EST

Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest fall to the blade or fire each year. Such deforestation has long been driven by farmers eking out a slash-and-burn living or loggers using new roads to cut inroads into pristine forest. But now new data appears to show that, at least for the first five years of the 21st century, big block clearings that reflect industrial deforestation have come to dominate, rather than smaller-scale efforts that leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land. [More]
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Researchers Identify Genetic Variant Linked to Faster Biological Aging

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:45:00 EST

There's no right answer when someone asks you: " How old do you think I am ?"

Faced with such a dilemma, most of us aim low--erring on the side of flattery rather than honesty. But the truth is, accurately guessing someone's age is a difficult task, perhaps best left to amusement park workers and street performers.

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CERN Gears Up Its Computers for More Atom Smashing

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

A deluge of high-energy physics data is headed toward servers in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month. That's because the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now says it plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) soon for a run that could last as long as two years at a collision energy of seven TeV (tera–electron volts, 3.5 TeV per beam). As CERN ramps up the world's most powerful particle accelerator to operate well beyond its previous best performance , the lab's computer systems must likewise be tuned so they can properly capture and analyze all of this new output. [More]
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Street Smarts: The BioBus Brings a Rolling Science Lab to Resource-Strapped Schools

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

It's halfway through first period, and 10th-grade students at Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn are in science class--not in school, but on a specially outfitted bus parked outside. [More]
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Endeavour Set for Sunday Liftoff as Space Shuttle Program Winds Down

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:05:00 EST

NASA launch managers this morning cleared space shuttle Endeavour to lift off before dawn Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the five remaining flights before the shuttle program concludes this year or early next. The planned launch comes less than a week after the future of human spaceflight in the U.S. was shaken by President Obama, whose budget request for fiscal year 2011, released Monday, would cancel Constellation , the planned successor to the shuttle. [More]
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How Toads Conquered the World [Slide Show]

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:01:00 EST

Cane toads are seemingly innocuous enough. First imported to Australia to control a beetle pest of sugarcane fields, they are now frog-marching their way across the island continent , wreaking havoc on in situ flora and fauna. The key to their domination has been protection from would-be predators and an ability to breed fast. But how were cane toads gifted with those traits in the first place? [More]
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Are Coyotes or Humans the Perpetrators of Suburban Animal Attacks?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST

A coyote howls, its characteristically pointed muzzle aimed high toward the night sky. But the moon is not visible over this brightly lit Target store parking lot in Matamoras, Penn.--only a glowing globe atop a metal pole casting its electric illumination on the pavement. [More]
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Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

Methane trapped in Arctic ice (and elsewhere) could be rapidly released into the atmosphere as a result of global warming in a possible doomsday scenario for climate change, some scientists worry. After all, methane is 72 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timescale. But research announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union this December suggests that marine microbes could at least partially defeat the methane "time bomb" sitting at the bottom of the world's oceans.

The conventional wisdom for decades has been that methane emanating from the seafloor could be consumed by a special class of bacteria called methanotrophs. It has long been known, for instance, that these organisms at the bottom of the Black Sea consume methane produced in its deep oxygen-free waters.

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NSF Teams with Microsoft to Move Scientific Research into the Cloud

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:15:00 EST

Microsoft and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Thursday announced plans to offer researchers and research groups selected through the agency's merit review process free access to computer servers . Microsoft will host the computing infrastructure at its data centers, giving the researchers access to storage, computational and networking resources via the Internet for a period of three years. [More]
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Ghostbusters: Authors of a new study propose a strict ban on medical ghostwriting

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:45:00 EST

When students pawn someone else's work off as their own, they get expelled. But when some professors do the same thing, they get a "pat on the back," and maybe even a few extra bucks. Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve. [More]
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De-Worming Software More Effective at Detecting Infected Network Computers Before Contagion Can Spread

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:35:00 EST

More than a year after being launched by hackers on a campaign to infect computers running Microsoft Windows, the Conficker worm 's effects are still being felt. England's Greater Manchester Police department, for example, has had to cut its computers off from a national criminal database since detecting Conficker on its network last week. [More]
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Down to Earth: Technique Lets Ground-Based Telescopes Parse Exoplanet Atmospheres

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:20:00 EST

In the 15 years since the first planet orbiting a sunlike star outside our solar system was conclusively discovered, astronomers have compiled a vast and diverse menagerie of such so-called exoplanets. Of the more than 400 now known, many are large--10 times the mass of Jupiter or more--and a precious few are small, just a few times Earth's mass. Little is known about these faraway worlds beyond bulk properties such as their orbital periods, estimated masses and, on relatively rare occasions, their diameters. [More]
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Shining a Light on Plants' Quantum Secret to Boost Photosynthesis

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:31:00 EST

In less than one billionth of a second, plants from algae to redwoods transform 95 percent of the sunlight that falls on them--10 17 joules per second bathe the planet--into energy stored chemically as carbohydrates. The quantum key to doing that lies in a phenomenon known to physicists as quantum coherence, according to new research published in Nature on February 4. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) [More]
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Cold Comfort: Young Women with Cancer Can Freeze an Ovary to Keep Kids in the Picture

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:15:00 EST

As chemotherapy and radiation treatments improve, children with cancer are living longer. The average five-year survival rate for a range of childhood cancers increased from 58 percent to 81 percent between 1975 and 2005, according to statistics from the National Cancer Institute . But although many of these children now survive cancer-free into their reproductive years, their fertility might not. In young women and girls, direct radiation and chemotherapy drugs can stop egg production by the ovaries--meaning that along with the tumor, hopes for pregnancy are often eradicated. [More]
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The Bigger Kahuna: Are More Frequent and Higher Extreme Ocean Waves a By-Product of Global Warming?

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST

Armand Thibault looked out over the Pacific's rumbling winter waves from his balcony in Neskowin, Ore. "The predicted high tide today is a 10.1 [feet]," he relayed via YouTube on Friday, January 29. "I'm very glad we don't have a storm surge behind this one. Tomorrow is supposed to be a 10.2, so it should be interesting." [More]
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Over the Top: Data Show "Green" Roofs Could Cool Urban Heat Islands and Boost Water Conservation

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:45:00 EST

NEW YORK--Through the rain-pocked window of his Prius heading east on the Queensboro Bridge, Stuart Gaffin sees a black, watery sea of missed opportunities. [More]
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Phased Out: Obama's NASA Budget Would Cancel Constellation Moon Program, Privatize Manned Launches

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:40:00 EST

President Obama delivered his budget request for fiscal year 2011 to Congress on Monday, proposing sweeping changes to NASA's spaceflight program while increasing the agency's overall budget. As had been rumored for days , Obama's blueprint for NASA would cancel the Constellation program , the family of rockets and hardware now in development to replace the aging space shuttle, and would call instead on commercial vendors to fly astronauts to orbit. [More]
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Thinking Outside the Boxes: Robotic Pallet-Stacking Challenge Aims to Create an Automation Benchmark for Industry

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:55:00 EST

Anyone who has ever loaded a moving van knows how difficult it is to safely stack boxes of different sizes, weights and levels of fragility, all while minimizing the amount of space those cartons take up. Imagine an endless stream of such boxes and a business that lives and dies by the efficiency of their stacking, and you have an idea of the challenge facing warehouses that process large volumes of cargo onto pallets for shipping. [More]
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Rotting Fish Spoil Ideas about Early Life-Forms' Simplicity

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:01:00 EST

Five hundred million years ago, spineless chordates slunk through Earth's Cambrian oceans. These unassuming creatures would eventually give rise to more complex vertebrates such as fish, dinosaurs and even us, so they are crucial evidence for scientists trying to trace animal evolution's early steps . But because these organisms lacked bones or shells, the soft-tissue features that managed to survive the fossilization process have made the specimens look very primitive, possibly excessively so. [More]
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U.S. Commits to Greenhouse Gas Cuts under Copenhagen Climate Accord

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:01:00 EST

The U.S. officially committed in writing yesterday to the greenhouse gas emission cuts proposed by President Obama in Copenhagen --4 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The letter to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) commits the nation to combat climate change, but with a caveat: any such commitment must be backed by legislation, which has not passed the U.S. Senate. [More]
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