Scientific American News Feed

'Tis the season when bacterial sinus infections run rampant. But some people are better able to ward off that malady. And they can be identified by their taste buds. Because those of us who can better detect bitter flavors may also be better equipped to fight off upper respiratory tract infections. The finding is in the Journal of Clinical Investigation . [Robert J. Lee et al, T2R38 taste receptor polymorphisms underlie susceptibility to upper respiratory infection ]

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Seventy beagle puppies originally intended for pharmacology research were released to adoptive families in India on Saturday, several weeks after activists alerted the Indian government that the animals had been falsely described as “pets” by the contract research organization seeking to import them.

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Scientists and conservationists this week said they will petition the Australian government to change the status of the Leadbeater's possum from "endangered" to "critically endangered," a designation shared by only four other Australian mammals. The tiny marsupial ( Gymnobelideus leadbeateri ) is one of two faunal emblems of Australia's State of Victoria, but it has suffered badly since 2009. The species lost more than 40 percent of its habitat that year during the infamous Black Sunday bushfires , which swept through the state and killed or injured more than 600 people.The bushfires were another blow for the possums, which were thought to be extinct for 50 years before they were rediscovered in 1961. Even before the fires the animals could only be found in about 150 nonconsecutive square kilometers of habitat. Today fewer than 1,500 of the possums remain, and scientists are warning that numbers could soon drop further if immediate action is not taken. [More]

[caption id="attachment_10313" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Image courtesy of iStockphoto/Pejo29"] [/caption]Type 2 diabetes has long been thought of as a chronic, irreversible disease. Some 25 million Americans are afflicted with the illness , which is associated with obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, as well as high blood pressure. Recent research demonstrated that gastric bypass surgery--a form of bariatric surgery that reduces the size of the stomach--can lead to at least temporary remission of type 2 diabetes in up to 62 percent of extremely obese adults. But can less drastic measures also help some people fight back the progressive disease? [More]

If you believe The Daily Mail , we're all convinced that the world is going to end on 21 st December 2012. Apparently people are stockpiling food and weapons , flocking to remote villages and heading for mystical peaks from whence 'an extra-terrestrial mothership' housed for centuries in an alien temple inside the mountain 'will pluck believers to safety'. 'With ten days to go before the Mayan apocalypse supposedly casts Earth into oblivion, time is running out for believers to find alien salvation' the Mail proclaims.So why all the recent hysteria? According to Maya myth, the world was created on 11 August 3114 BC in the Gregorian Calendar; or 13.0.0.0.0 by the Maya count. This creation was the fourth incarnation of the world, the previous age having ended after the thirteenth b'ak'tun (a c.400-year cycle). On 21 st December, it will once again be 13.0.0.0.0 and the 'Great Cycle' will be completed, bringing the thirteenth b'ak'tun of the current age to an end. Some translations of the glyphs from a partially illegible Maya stela suggest that the end of the present b'ak'tun will see the 'descent' of the god Bolon Yookte' K'Uh (sometimes translated as the 'Nine-Footed God'). This convergence of dates and prophecies has been seen as marking the transition to the next world, and hence the end of this one. [More]

Cheap shale gas is significantly reducing coal demand in the United States, but global coal consumption is still expected to rise 2.6 percent annually by 2017, the International Energy Agency said today in a report.

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NEW YORK -- While jazz musician Vijay Iyer played a piece on the piano, he wore an expression of intense concentration. Afterward, everyone wanted to know: What was going on in his head?

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Citizen scientists can learn more about their genetic makeup and history, helping National Geographic researchers in the process [More]

The whole point of an explanation is to reduce something you don't know to something you do. By that standard, you don't gain much by explaining anything in terms of black holes. Appealing to the most mysterious objects known to science as an explanation sounds like using one mystery to explain another .Yet this is precisely what physicists have been doing to make sense of high-temperature superconductors and plasmas of nuclear particles. Both of these states of matter are about as un-black-hole-like as you can imagine. They don't suck you to your death--indeed, the force of gravity plays no role in them at all--and they don't split open the very foundations of physics. They are hard to understand in much the same way Earth's climate is: the laws governing their constituents are perfectly well-known, but there are just so damned many constituents. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: What are Clean Energy Victory Bonds? --Max Blanchard, Wilmington, Del.

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The spot on the lunar surface where NASA intentionally crashed its twin gravity-mapping moon probes Dec. 17 has been named after the late Sally Ride, America's first woman in space.

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Magnets naturally levitate above superconductors. The magnet's magnetic field can't penetrate the superconductor, causing it to float almost magically above. See this phenomenon at work in an exclusive Scientific American video.

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[caption id="attachment_4174" align="alignleft" width="204" caption="Dan Markingson and mom, Mary Weiss"] [/caption]We've touched on some of the many disturbing things that happened during the clinical trial on which Dan Markingson committed suicide. In my first post , I asked how a psychotic, homicidal patient who was involuntarily hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital could give an informed consent for participation in a clinical trial. There appeared to have been abuse of a vulnerable patient and extraordinary coercion--participate in this trial or be committed to a psych hospital seems to have been the bottom line. [More]

By Emily Badger

The artist Elena Radice combs the mapping service to find places where the weather in one satellite photo and the next don't match to create a series of photographs about space, time, and--oh, yes--climate change.

Sometimes when she needs to relax, the Italian artist Elena Radice travels on Google Earth to places where she knows she'll probably never go in real life. [More]

Planetary scientists have come together to prioritize the most compelling, cutting-edge questions across our entire field. Some of these questions are best addressed by ambitious, sophisticated, large-scale missions. Others are best addressed by smaller, more focused missions. Some require continued operations of existing plantary orbiters or rovers. All require a commitment to maintaining the existing planetary science community. While the future of large-scale missions has been receiving the most headlines, the other priorities have uncertain, worrying futures, and American planetary exploration may suffer greatly as a result.The relationship between planetary science and NASA is deeply intertwined and fraught with complications. Almost every US planetary scientist depends on the space agency in some way: either directly as civil servants employed by NASA, recipients of peer-reviewed science grants funded by NASA, participants in the operations or science planning of ongoing or anticipated planetary missions, or simply as users of the vast quantity of data returned by those missions since the first one 50 years ago. [More]

By Dawn Santoianni "Energy independence" is a concept that has become part of the political lexicon and touted as a panacea for a downturn economy. Recently, the concept has morphed into "energy security" which encompasses not only a domestic abundance of energy resources, but freedom from energy market manipulation. Still, there are numerous and conflicting definitions for energy security. Does energy security mean using only renewable or carbon-neutral energy resources to prevent further anthropogenic global warming? How do fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, fit into a secure energy future? One thing is certain - we know an energy security failure we when we see it...or worse, experience it. The aftermath of Superstorm Sandy was the most recent example of how vulnerable society is to disruptions in energy supply. According to the Department of Energy, more than 8.6 million customers were without power following Sandy, more than any other storm in history. However, amidst the extensive Northeast blackouts were "islands" of power that may point the way to true energy security. Microgrids kept the lights on when the electric transmission system failed. [More]

Even for the wilderness of human thinking, creative ideas seem to be deliberately designed to defy empirical enquiry. There is something elusive and mystical, perhaps even sacred, about them. So what is a neuroscientist to do if she wants to study inspiration in the lab, under tightly controlled conditions? Clearly, she cannot simply take volunteers, shove them into the nearest brain scanner and tell them: now, please be creative! That’s why most paying members of the Society for Neuroscience find the prospect of studying creativity akin to trying to nail jelly to the wall. But don’t forget: big, intractable problems in science have always been more of a calling.

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[caption id="attachment_10255" align="alignright" width="237" caption="A scene from H. G. Wells's "War of the Worlds." (Illustration by Alvim Corr?a/Bblackmoor/Wikimedia Commons)"] [/caption]December 21, according to much-hyped misreadings of the Mayan calendar, will mark the end of the world. It's not the first "end is nigh" proclamation--and it's unlikely to be the last. That's because, deep down for various reasons, there's something appealing--at least to some of us--about the end of the world. [More]