Scientific American - Basic Science

Science news and technology updates from Scientific American

Chile's quake was fifth largest on modern record

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:45:00 EST

When a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile on February 27, residents and seismologists knew it was a big one. But a new analysis reaffirms just how massive it was. [More]



Chile - Earthquake - Seismology - South America - Earth Sciences

MIND Reviews: Changing Brains

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST

Changing Brains www.changingbrains.org [More]



Reviews - Arts - Brain - Social Sciences - Psychology

Speaking in Tones: Music and Language Partner in the Brain (preview)

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST

One afternoon in the summer of 1995, a curious incident occurred. I was fine-tuning my spoken commentary on a CD I was preparing about music and the brain. To detect glitches in the recording, I was looping phrases so that I could hear them over and over. At one point, when I was alone in the room, I put one of the phrases, “sometimes behave so strangely,” on a loop, began working on something else and forgot about it. Suddenly it seemed to me that a strange woman was singing! After glancing around and finding nobody there, I realized that I was hearing my own voice repetitively producing this phrase--but now, instead of hearing speech, I perceived a melody spilling out of the loudspeaker. My speech had morphed into song by the simple process of repetition.

This striking perceptual transformation, which I later found occurs for most people, shows that the boundary between speech and song can be very fragile. Composers have taken account of the strong connections between music and speech, for example, incorporating spoken words and phrases into their compositions. In addition, numerous vocalizations seem to fall near the boundary between speech and song, including religious chants and incantations, oratory, opera recitative (a style of delivery in opera resembling sung ordinary speech), the cries of street vendors and some rap music.

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Speech - Singing - Language - Speech Technology - Opera

Talking trash during the dog days: A brief history of sanitation in New York City

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST

Without modern sanitation , life would be nightmarish--human and animal waste would fester on the streets along with garbage and food scraps, producing a stench so foul that you'd want to keep your windows closed even in the sweltering heat of summer (for the moment, envision lacking the luxury of air conditioning). The offensive odors and accumulating muck would be the least of your worries, however--preventable diseases such as cholera and yellow fever would be rampant, your life expectancy would be extremely short, and infant mortality rates would be staggeringly high.

This is what life was like for many of the previous inhabitants of what is now New York City, from the arrival of the Dutch in the 1600s until the establishment of an official Department of Street Cleaning in the late 19th century. Robin Nagle , professor of anthropology at New York University, chronicled this fascinating history of sanitation and public health in an illustrated lecture July 26 at N.Y.U.'s School of Medicine. Nagle's talk, "How Street Cleaners Saved the City: Garbage, Government, and Public Health in New York," was dotted with vivid descriptions of how the burgeoning sanitation system was influenced by underhanded dealings, two wars, repeated outbreaks of communicable disease, devastating fires and water crises.

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New York City - Life expectancy - New York University - Infant mortality - United States

Take Me Out of the Ball Game: When Physics and Physiology Collide

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST

Baseball is a game of trajectories. And as Yogi Berra supposedly said, you can observe a lot just by watching. For example, at Yankee Stadium on May 29, I observed New York slugger Alex Rod­riguez hit a pitch by Cleveland Indians David Huff back up the middle and off the pitcher’s head. In fact, the ball hit Huff’s head so hard that it rolled nearly all the way to the right-field wall. The ball, that is, not Huff’s head. He collapsed in a heap and remained face down on the mound for several minutes. Huff eventually left on a stretcher. Home team fans who then watched the Yankees blow a six-run lead left in a huff.

Anyway, many in the crowd feared that Huff was seriously injured. Having observed physics teachers years earlier, however, I was guardedly optimistic--precisely because the ball had ricocheted so far and so fast. Had the ball rebounded from Huff’s dome only a few feet straight back toward home plate, I would have been concerned that the poor pitcher had become the second player in major league baseball history to be killed on the job. In that scenario, much of the ball’s energy of motion would have been imparted to the pitcher. But said energy appeared to have been expended on sending the ball skittering into the right-field corner, with only a small amount having been transferred to Huff’s head.

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Yankee Stadium - Yogi Berra - New York Yankee - Baseball field - Sports

Evolution of the Neck Gave Brain a Leg up

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:05:08 EST

What’s in a neck? Well, it’s a good place to hang a pendant or a tie. Or to rest your head. Now scientists say that by separating our heads from our bodies, the neck gave our brains a leg up in evolution. Their findings appear in the online journal Nature Communications . [Leung-Hang Ma et al., http://bit.ly/97gY9B ]

Not all animals have necks. A fish's head is pretty much continuous with its body. And a fish gets around just fine. Nerves based in the fish’s brain instruct its fins to move, and off it goes.

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Evolution - Fish - Biology - Nature - Brain

Social Ties Boost Survival by 50 Percent

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:45:00 EST

A long lunch out with co-workers or a late-night conversation with a family member might seem like a distraction from other healthy habits, such as going to the gym or getting a good night's sleep. But more than 100 years' worth of research shows that having a healthy social life is incredibly important to staying physically healthy. Overall, social support increases survival by some 50 percent, concluded the authors behind a new meta-analysis. [More]



Social support - Health - Meta-analysis - Conditions and Diseases - Sleep Disorders

Genetics Predisposes for Heavy Drinking After Watching Heavy Drinking

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:45:08 EST

Spend any time in a bar, and sooner or later you’ll hear, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It sounds like a bad pickup line, but there may be an actual biological basis for this kind of alcohol copycat behavior. Because scientists have found that having the gene for a certain dopamine receptor could predispose you to being influenced by the sight of other people drinking. [More]



Genetics - Gene - Alcohol - Games - Biology

Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:20:00 EST

The microscopic plants that form the foundation of the ocean's food web are declining, reports a study published July 29 in Nature . [More]



Food chain - Phytoplankton - Nature - Environment - Ocean

Weather or Not?: Last Winter's Record Snow Driven by Short-Term Meteorologic Patterns, Not Long-Term Climate Change

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:20:00 EST

Just six months ago residents of the eastern U.S. were shoveling themselves out of the snowiest winter ever--weather that prompted mockery of global warming among some people . Now, scientists have a new explanation for why such anomalous snowstorms can coexist with global warming: The storms were kicked up by the convergence of two natural, large-scale weather patterns.

In order to better understand possible triggers of last year's media-dubbed " snowmaggedon ," a team of scientists from Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory analyzed more than 50 years of snow data as well as measurements of atmospheric pressure and sea-surface temperatures. They found that a combination of El Niño (periodic sea-surface warming in the tropical Pacific Ocean) with an unusual period of decreased variability in atmospheric pressure across the North Atlantic (known as the North Atlantic oscillation , or NAO) frequently results in a pile-up of snow in the mid-Atlantic region.

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Climate change - Pacific Ocean - Global warming - Columbia University - North Atlantic oscillation

Thaw deal: Climate change could leave penguins in the dark

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:40:00 EST

Few animals can live totally in the dark, and penguins are no exception. But new research shows that climate change could soon rob Adélie penguins ( Pygoscelis adeliae ) of the sunlight they need to survive, and that could drive them into extinction.

The problem comes from melting sea ice, according to the report in the July 2010 issue of Ecology . As the climate changes and more of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf melts, Adélie penguins will be forced farther inland. This will take the birds away from the small amount of sunlight they have during certain parts of the year at current latitudes, leaving them unable to see, hunt or endure.

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Climate change - Sea ice - Antarctica - Environment - Ross Ice Shelf

EPA Relies on Industry-Backed Studies to Assess Health Risks of Widely Used Herbicide

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:00:00 EST

Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide's health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine's safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review. [More]



United States - Drinking water - Herbicide - United States Environmental Protection Agency - Atrazine

How Can You Control Your Dreams?

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:30:00 EST

Some dreams feel so revelatory--if only returning to sleep would take us back there. It turns out, however, that our ability to shape our dreams is better than mere chance. In the blockbuster movie Inception , Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his compatriots use drugs and psychological profiles to trigger specific dreams in people. Although the heavy sedation and level of detail incited are far-fetched, dream control isn't entirely a Hollywood fantasy. [More]



Leonardo DiCaprio - Inception - Dream - Psychology - Social Sciences

ICESCAPE scientists reach 'Station 100' and re-don mustang suits, hard hats and steel-toed boots

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:30:00 EST

Editor's Note: Haley Smith Kingsland is an Earth systems master's student at Stanford University specializing in science communication. For five weeks she's in the land of no sunsets participating in ICESCAPE, a NASA-sponsored research cruise to investigate the effects of climate change on the Chukchi and Bering seas. This is her fourth blog post for Scientific American . [More]



Climate change - Stanford University - Earth - Environment - NASA

Arguing with Non-Skeptics, Part 2 of 2

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:05:08 EST

A panel discussion on arguing with non-skeptics at the recent Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York City featured James Randi, George Hrab, D. [More]



James Randi - New York City - Steve Mirsky - D. J. Grothe - Philosophical skepticism

Genes from Ebola Virus Family Found in Human Genome

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 EST

Viruses do not make good fossils. But advances in genomic technology have allowed scientists to peer into the genetic material of viruses and their hosts to search for clues about their shared evolutionary history. [More]



Ebola - Genome - Gene - Virus - Biology

Costs and values: The legacy of the Exxon Valdez disaster

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:00:00 EST

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from The Fate of Nature by Charles Wohlforth, published on June 8 by St. Martins Press. The Fate of Nature considers the burgeoning science of human nature and behavior, using Alaska as a starting point to explore our capacity to save the planet from environmental decline. As we meet a cast of characters from hippie activists to blind evolutionary scientists, from environmentalists to oil companies, we come to better understand the history of mankind's relationship with nature and the challenges for our future life on the planet. [More]



Exxon Valdez - Alaska - Oil spill - Energy - Environment

Dopamine Determines Impulsive Behavior

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:00:00 EST

Binge-shoppers and serial daters might perpetually be living at the whim of their latest impulse, and now research is getting to the biological basis of their seemingly random behavior. [More]



Health - Psychology - Social Sciences - Addiction - Mental health

Recommended: The Changing Arctic Landscape

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST

The Changing Arctic Landscape by Ken D. Tape. University of Alaska Press, 2010 [More]



University of Alaska Press - Alaska - United States - Education - Colleges and Universities

Closing the Gap: How Desire Affects Perceptions of Distance

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST

We often assume we see our physical surroundings as they actually are. But new research suggests that how we see the world depends on what we want from it.

People see desirable objects as physically closer than less desirable ones, according to a study in the January issue of Psychological Science . When psychologists Emily Balcetis of New [More]



Psychological Science - Research - Psychology - Social Sciences - Educational Resources