Blog Profile / 60-Second Science
| URL : | http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / General Science | |
| Posts on Regator: | 3068 | |
| Posts / Week: | 13 | |
| Archived Since: | November 13, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Deciphering the Strange Mathematics of Cicadas [Video]
“Periodical cicadas have the longest life cycles known for insects. They are called ‘periodical’ because in any one population all but a trivially small fraction are exactly the same age. The nymphs suck juices from the roots of forest trees and finally emerge from the ground, become adults, mate, lay their eggs, and die, all [...]
How to Use the Bathroom on a 20-Hour Plus Solar Airplane Flight [Video]
In a bid to set the record for longest distance solar flight, Andre Borschberg will pilot the Solar Impulse airplane from Phoenix to Dallas. Total flying distance, barring route deviations due to weather or other factors, would be nearly 1,400 kilometers, or more than 200 kilometers farther than the previous longest flight set in 2012. [...]
U.S. Hurricane Forecasts Could Be Better
It is difficult to focus on hurricane warnings right now, when Oklahoma is reeling from some of the worst tornadoes ever recorded. But the storms do raise questions about the abilities of U.S. scientists to predict severe weather, and the answers are not clear. Just last week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released an [...]
See Mercury, Venus and Jupiter in Tightest Night Sky Cluster until 2026
Cicadas aren’t the only scientific rarity expected this month. At the end of May three planets will be visible to the naked eye in one small area of the sky. The planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will form “the tightest gathering of three naked-eye planets that the world will see until 2026,” according to the [...]
With Drones Circling, How Should Lawmakers Respond?
Drones come in a variety of shapes, sizes and capabilities that could greatly improve surveillance for law enforcement and public-safety purposes, whether it’s monitoring forest fires or providing reconnaissance for search-and-rescue operations. Show More Summary
Citizen Scientists Track Light Pollution as Humanity Loses Touch with the Night Sky
Step out into the darkness a few hours after sunset. What do you see overhead? If you live in a relatively unpopulated part of the world, you might see the broad stripe of the Milky Way splashed against a backdrop of black sky punctuated by countless stars. If, on the other hand, you live in [...]
NASA’s Kepler Mission Endangered by Hardware Failure
The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that has already discovered some of the most intriguing exoplanets known has abruptly lost the capacity to carry out its mission, NASA officials announced May 15. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009, relies on an array of flywheels, or reaction-wheel assemblies, to stabilize the pointing of its telescope toward a [...]
Bell Labs Lead Researcher Discusses the Edge of the Internet [Video]
Apple introduces the latest “i”-gadget; Samsung takes the reins as the world’s leading smartphone provider; Blackberry mounts an all-or-nothing comeback. Just a typical day of tech headlines, right? Dig deeper, however, and you have to wonder what impact all of these new multimedia devices will have on the networks that give them life. Short answer: [...]
Video Game to Help Kids Fight Cancer
Doctors can’t inject cancer patients with intelligent nanobots programmed to launch surgical counterstrikes against the disease. That didn’t stop a team of medical researchers and software programmers from developing a video game several years ago that helped young patients imagine such an empowering scenario. Based on the success of that project, the team recently launched [...]
Astronaut Chris Hadfield Covers David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in Space [Video]
Chris Hadfield is an astronaut for the 21st century. The Canadian former fighter pilot and current commander of the International Space Station has shown a supreme mastery of social media. He has hosted an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit from space and has filmed several hugely popular YouTube videos demonstrating what it looks like [...]
Move Over, Space Shuttle: There’s a New Science Giant Cruising the U.S. This Summer
When NASA flew the shuttle prototype Enterprise through New York City last year, all we had to do was look out our windows at Scientific American one morning to watch it cruise past. Countless Americans got a look at one of the decommissioned shuttles as NASA paraded them around the country en route to their [...]
EPA Nominee Gina McCarthy Stymied By Republican Boycott
When a U.S. president nominates a candidate to take over the top spot at a major government agency such as the Defense Department, at least a few senators—usually from the opposing party—raise some objections, if for no other reason than to show that they will not rubber-stamp anyone the president proposes. But yesterday Republicans boycotted [...]
Science Advisor Gives Hopeful Progress Report on Obama’s Achievements
President Obama has restored science to its rightful place in the White House, says John Holdren, Obama’s senior science advisor. “Science is again where it should be,” he told an audience of 200 as part of a lecture series at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. on Wednesday, although he warned that the [...]
400 PPM: Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Reaches Prehistoric Levels
On May 2, after nightfall shut down photosynthesis for the day in Hawaii, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere touched 400 parts-per-million there for the first time in at least 800,000 years. Near the summit of volcanic Mauna Loa—where a member of the Keeling family has kept watch since 1958—sensors measured this record through sunrise [...]
Will Business Step In to End a Sequester-Driven Research Funding Gap?
By now we’re all painfully aware of the federal government’s across-the-board cutbacks on discretionary spending—better known as the sequester—and how it has imperiled publicly funded scientific research in the U.S. The only thing less clear than the sequester’s long-term impact on academia, industry and the economy is how to end its austerity measures, which could [...]
Polio Vaccinations Need A Boost
Scientific American‘s editorial board strongly believes that the US was wrong to mount a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign in the effort to kill Osama bin Laden. Apart from moral issues, the blowback from the clandestine effort threatens the global campaign to eradicate polio from the face of the planet. This year’s polio season–the [...]
Your Smartphone Just Diagnosed You with Postpartum Depression
Depending on your perspective, Twitter can either be a valuable source of breaking news, or a fire hose of miscellaneous, often dubious information. Microsoft researchers are investigating whether the microblogging service could serve another, more scientific function—to spot signs of postpartum depression in new mothers based on changes in how and what they tweet. The [...]
Robot Bees Learn to Fly [video]
In March, the Harvard University researchers behind the RoboBee project wrote an article in Scientific American that detailed the challenges of building a swarm of bee-sized robots. The effort breaks into three loose categories: first, you have to figure out how to build a insect-sized robot that can fly (and build a lot of them—no [...]
IBM Movie Does Claymation, at the Atomic Scale [Video]
What is the “final frontier”? Star Trek fans will tell you it’s space. Filmmaker/aquanaut James Cameron will tell you it’s the ocean’s depths. IBM, however, is thinking much smaller. The company’s research division on Wednesday released a stop-motion movie whose main character is a stick figure only a few atoms in size. “A Boy and [...]
Space Ape Parody Shows Why Aquatic Ape Theory Is All Wet
This past weekend the misguided aquatic ape theory surfaced for air, only to get sunk in the most entertaining way. The theory holds that many traits of humans—including our naked skin, upright posture and large brains–evolved as adaptations to living in an aquatic environment. But fossil and archaeological evidence simply does not support this scenario, [...]