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Researchers trying to herd tiny particles into useful ordered formations have found an unlikely ally: entropy, a tendency generally described as “disorder.” Computer simulations by University of Michigan scientists and engineers show that the property can nudge particles to form organized structures. By analyzing the shapes of the particles beforehand, they can even predict what…
To learn about the Internet, we tend to turn to … the Internet. Blogs comment on blogs commenting on blogs. Tweets build on Tweets. It can be one hell of a beautiful snow globe. Yet perhaps the most vital investigation in years of our complex, befuddling, empowering, discouraging relationship with technology comes courtesy of Cara…
A U.S. federal court has found that a stem cell therapy offered by a Colorado clinic meets the definition of a regulated drug. The ruling could spur a U.S. Food and Drug Administration crackdown on other clinics offering untested adult stem cell treatments in the United States. The company, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado,…
A quest to get more discussion about science and scientific issues in the run-up to this year’s presidential election in the U.S, is starting to get noticed. Scientific American has joined this endeavor to get the U.S. presidential candidates to talk about substantive issues related to science and will be grading the candidates on their…
Dating features on the Moon and Mars is guesswork. Scott Anderson is building a tool to change that.
After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists looking for fossilized human bones have established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe. Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown…
The huge NASA rover speeding toward an August landing on Mars may be the most capable and complex Red Planet explorer ever launched, but it’s far from the first. The 1-ton Curiosity rover — which will search for evidence that Mars is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life — represents humanity’s 40th effort…
Your brain may be more likely to recognize new things as new when the unknown is already on your mind, according to new research. The findings suggest that memories are not made or recalled in a vacuum, said study researcher Lila Davachi, a psychologist at New York University. Instead, memories are built with the influence…
From David Barash’s post, The Hare, the Tortoise, and the Aurora Madman, in reaction to the tragedy in Colorado, from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog: Far more than any other critter, we Homo saps are stuck between two worlds, biological evolution and cultural evolution. The former is a Darwinian, genetic process, necessarily slow…
Ever since Darwin first published The Origin of the Species, scientists have been striving to identify a last universal common ancestor of all living species. Paleontological, biochemical, and genomic studies have produced conflicting versions of the evolutionary tree. Now a team of researchers has developed a novel method to search the vast archives of known…