His Finalist Year: 2006 [More]
His Finalist Year: 2006 [More]
Africa is splitting apart at the seams--literally. From the southern tip of the Red Sea southward through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, the continent is coming unstitched along a zone called the East African Rift.
Like a shirtsleeve tearing under a bulging bicep, the earth’s crust rips apart as molten rock from deep down pushes up on the solid surface and stretches it thin--sometimes to its breaking point. Each new slit widens as lava fills the gap from below.
[More]Africa is splitting apart at the seams--literally. From the southern tip of the Red Sea southward through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, the continent is coming unstitched along a zone called the East African Rift.
Like a shirtsleeve tearing under a bulging bicep, the earth’s crust rips apart as molten rock from deep down pushes up on the solid surface and stretches it thin--sometimes to its breaking point. Each new slit widens as lava fills the gap from below.
[More]Some politicians and pundits fear that addressing global warming will drain the U.S. economy and hurt the nation’s competitive edge. But going green and clean is the best way to remain an economic powerhouse, argues Thomas L. Friedman in his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). We asked Friedman, a New York Times op-ed columnist, to explain his thinking.
Click here for an extended version of this inteview
[More]Some politicians and pundits fear that addressing global warming will drain the U.S. economy and hurt the nation’s competitive edge. But going green and clean is the best way to remain an economic powerhouse, argues Thomas L. Friedman in his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). We asked Friedman, a New York Times op-ed columnist, to explain his thinking.
Click here for an extended version of this inteview
[More]The “earth” part of the title of this special issue from Scientific American is no doubt self-explanatory, but why “3.0”? Because this planet is no longer simply the home of our species: it is also our creation. And as with any product, sometimes it is prudent to upgrade its quality.
If you will indulge the analogy further, Earth 1.0 was the world that persisted and evolved for billions of years, up until very recently. The environment was dominated by closed ecological loops and a few geological and astronomical processes, such as the movements of continents and the brightness of the sun. As such, life was highly sustainable. Even after we humans developed agriculture, which considerably enlarged our footprint on the environment, our overall influence was fairly small and localized.
[More]The “earth” part of the title of this special issue from Scientific American is no doubt self-explanatory, but why “3.0”? Because this planet is no longer simply the home of our species: it is also our creation. And as with any product, sometimes it is prudent to upgrade its quality.
If you will indulge the analogy further, Earth 1.0 was the world that persisted and evolved for billions of years, up until very recently. The environment was dominated by closed ecological loops and a few geological and astronomical processes, such as the movements of continents and the brightness of the sun. As such, life was highly sustainable. Even after we humans developed agriculture, which considerably enlarged our footprint on the environment, our overall influence was fairly small and localized.
[More][The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
[More][The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
[More]
OCTOBER 1958 [More]
OCTOBER 1958 [More]
HIS FINALIST YEAR: 1992
HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Studying the genetics of the Arizona cypress tree
[More]HIS FINALIST YEAR: 1992
HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Studying the genetics of the Arizona cypress tree
[More]Not So Rapid Eye MovementThe bizarre metamorphosis that occurs in halibut and other flatfish had even Charles Darwin floundering for an explanation. At birth, these fish have one eye on each side of the skull, but as adults, both eyes reside on the same side. Certainly, for fish that spend their lives along the sea bottom, having both eyes topside confers a survival advantage. But there seemed to be no evolutionary reason to start down the gradual path toward such lopsidedness--any intermediate steps would not seem to be especially helpful. So some biologists theorized that the fish evolved from a single, sudden mutation.
[More]Not So Rapid Eye MovementThe bizarre metamorphosis that occurs in halibut and other flatfish had even Charles Darwin floundering for an explanation. At birth, these fish have one eye on each side of the skull, but as adults, both eyes reside on the same side. Certainly, for fish that spend their lives along the sea bottom, having both eyes topside confers a survival advantage. But there seemed to be no evolutionary reason to start down the gradual path toward such lopsidedness--any intermediate steps would not seem to be especially helpful. So some biologists theorized that the fish evolved from a single, sudden mutation.
[More]Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek and Scientific American editor George Musser talk about the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, which went online this week. Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned in this episode include www.frankwilczek.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
[More]Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek and Scientific American editor George Musser talk about the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, which went online this week. Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned in this episode include www.frankwilczek.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
[More]Dinosaurs' long reign on Earth may have had more to do with lady luck than with superiority, according to a study published today in Science. The study challenges the old notion that dinosaurs out-competed their reptilian contemporaries. [More]
Dinosaurs' long reign on Earth may have had more to do with lady luck than with superiority, according to a study published today in Science. The study challenges the old notion that dinosaurs out-competed their reptilian contemporaries. [More]
If it's September, it's time for creationism in schools. That's how some would like it, anyway. [More]
If it's September, it's time for creationism in schools. That's how some would like it, anyway. [More]
The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousands of years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain?
A recent study in Nature Neuroscience yields critical new information, uncovering what could constitute the “missing link” between the brain of vocalizing nonhuman species and the human brain: evidence that a cerebral region specialized for processing voice, known to exist in the human brain, has a counterpart in the brain of rhesus macaques.
[More]The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousands of years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain?
A recent study in Nature Neuroscience yields critical new information, uncovering what could constitute the “missing link” between the brain of vocalizing nonhuman species and the human brain: evidence that a cerebral region specialized for processing voice, known to exist in the human brain, has a counterpart in the brain of rhesus macaques.
[More]Americans paradoxically combine an unquenchable curiosity with an insistance on being left alone
Click the image below to read the timeline
[More]Americans paradoxically combine an unquenchable curiosity with an insistance on being left alone
Click the image below to read the timeline
[More]Editor's Note: This story was originally published in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American.
The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."
[More]Editor's Note: This story was originally published in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American.
The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."
[More]SEPTEMBER 1958THE CREATIVE PROCESS-- “The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. --Jacob Bronowski”
[More]SEPTEMBER 1958THE CREATIVE PROCESS-- “The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. --Jacob Bronowski”
[More]When physicists petitioned the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) in the early 1980s to build a particle accelerator that would recreate the fiery conditions of the big bang, they picked a name worthy of its magnitude. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) located south of Dallas, Tex., would have outshined even the Large Hadron Collider, which after 14 years and $8 billion is about to start shooting particles around its 17-mile (27-kilometer) beam pipe on the Franco-Swiss border.
Slamming protons and antiprotons together at 40 tera-electron volts (40 trillion eV), the SSC would have put out more than enough energy to create the elusive Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle," which gives other particles their mass. (The less powerful LHC now has the honor of hunting the Higgs.) But escalating costs prompted Congress to cut the SSC's funding in 1993 before its components were even assembled.
[More]When physicists petitioned the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) in the early 1980s to build a particle accelerator that would recreate the fiery conditions of the big bang, they picked a name worthy of its magnitude. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) located south of Dallas, Tex., would have outshined even the Large Hadron Collider, which after 14 years and $8 billion is about to start shooting particles around its 17-mile (27-kilometer) beam pipe on the Franco-Swiss border.
Slamming protons and antiprotons together at 40 tera-electron volts (40 trillion eV), the SSC would have put out more than enough energy to create the elusive Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle," which gives other particles their mass. (The less powerful LHC now has the honor of hunting the Higgs.) But escalating costs prompted Congress to cut the SSC's funding in 1993 before its components were even assembled.
[More]Dawson City, Yukon--After revving up with a roar, a core drill designed to punch holes in concrete begins digging into ice more than 100,000 years old. Here in the Klondike, the drill serves as a kind of gas-powered, handheld time machine, bringing up frozen earth from the Pleistocene, when mammoths and other megafauna once ruled. In a land where miners still hunt for gold, paleomammalogist Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and his colleagues seek a different kind of treasure--DNA from extinct titans.
Millennia ago, as the earth in the Klondike cracked during the springtime thaw, water leaked in, only to freeze again during winter to form wedges of ice, explains geologist Duane Froese of the University of Alberta. Dripping in with this water was sediment from the surface, which might hold DNA from mammoths, as well as that of the plants, bacteria and other life once found in the region, MacPhee says. Nothing is known about the genetics of mammoths from the middle Pleistocene, and such DNA could elucidate their evolution. The researchers hope to find clear evidence that two species of mammoth, not just one, roamed the Americas at the end of the last ice age.
[More]Dawson City, Yukon--After revving up with a roar, a core drill designed to punch holes in concrete begins digging into ice more than 100,000 years old. Here in the Klondike, the drill serves as a kind of gas-powered, handheld time machine, bringing up frozen earth from the Pleistocene, when mammoths and other megafauna once ruled. In a land where miners still hunt for gold, paleomammalogist Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and his colleagues seek a different kind of treasure--DNA from extinct titans.
Millennia ago, as the earth in the Klondike cracked during the springtime thaw, water leaked in, only to freeze again during winter to form wedges of ice, explains geologist Duane Froese of the University of Alberta. Dripping in with this water was sediment from the surface, which might hold DNA from mammoths, as well as that of the plants, bacteria and other life once found in the region, MacPhee says. Nothing is known about the genetics of mammoths from the middle Pleistocene, and such DNA could elucidate their evolution. The researchers hope to find clear evidence that two species of mammoth, not just one, roamed the Americas at the end of the last ice age.
[More]In 1925 British adventurer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared into the wilds of the Amazon, never to be heard from again after going there in search of a lost city he called Z. But decades later, a city of sorts--actually a series of settlements connected by roads--has been found at the headwaters of the Xingu River where Fawcett went missing in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park.
View slideshow here. [More]
In 1925 British adventurer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared into the wilds of the Amazon, never to be heard from again after going there in search of a lost city he called Z. But decades later, a city of sorts--actually a series of settlements connected by roads--has been found at the headwaters of the Xingu River where Fawcett went missing in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park.
View slideshow here. [More]
As far as we know, no dog can compose music, no dolphin can speak in rhymes, and no parrot can solve equations with two unknowns. Only humans can perform such intellectual feats, presumably because we are smarter than all other animal species--at least by our own definition of intelligence.
Of course, intelligence must emerge from the workings of the three-pound mass of wetware packed inside our skulls. Thus, researchers have tried to identify unique features of the human brain that could account for our superior intellectual abilities. But, anatomically, the human brain is very similar to that of other primates because humans and chimpanzees share an ancestor that walked the earth less than seven million years ago.
[More]As far as we know, no dog can compose music, no dolphin can speak in rhymes, and no parrot can solve equations with two unknowns. Only humans can perform such intellectual feats, presumably because we are smarter than all other animal species--at least by our own definition of intelligence.
Of course, intelligence must emerge from the workings of the three-pound mass of wetware packed inside our skulls. Thus, researchers have tried to identify unique features of the human brain that could account for our superior intellectual abilities. But, anatomically, the human brain is very similar to that of other primates because humans and chimpanzees share an ancestor that walked the earth less than seven million years ago.
[More]