Scientific American News Feed

By Leigh Coleman

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

Solar homeowners' favorite topic of conversation is the performance of their arrays. As part of the sales pitch, the installer estimates how much power you'll generate, and most systems come with a meter (separate from the utility meter) to monitor the power output continuously. But how can you tell whether your array is really living up to expectations? That simple question set me off onto a mathematical hunt that other solar homeowners might enjoy -- and which would make a good term-paper project for a high-school science class.

By Anna Petherick

Occasionally, researchers stumble across something extraordinary in a system that has been studied for decades.

Ryan Kerney of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, did just that while looking closely at a clutch of emerald-green balls -- embryos of the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum). [More]

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.

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]

U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson rebuffed recent efforts to prevent her agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, stating that the evidence proving climate change is a problem remains "robust, voluminous and compelling."

Jackson rejected 10 petitions filed by the attorneys general of Texas and Virginia, the Ohio Coal Association and other groups that urged her to nullify the "endangerment" finding -- the EPA ruling that stated greenhouse gases pose a direct threat to human health and welfare . That ruling triggered the legal requirement for their regulation.

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]

Changing Brains www.changingbrains.org [More]

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

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The risk of earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest may be more widespread than geologists have believed, but a "big one" may be less likely at Missouri's New Madrid fault, researchers said on Wednesday.

They found that rivers that swept away sediments at the end of the last ice age could have triggered a series of large earthquakes that began in 1811 in the New Madrid seismic zone.

The common wombat ( Vombatus ursinus ) is, as its name suggests, fairly common in Australia. In fact, the indigenous badgerlike mammal is often considered to be a pest. But widespread species are usually ignored because they are pervasive, and in the case of V. ursinus new research warns that the meter-long marsupials could soon be in trouble if Australians don't start paying attention. [More]

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]

Some people pay big bucks for a designer handbag or a luxury car--and the distinctive logo that goes along with them. Now scientists have learned that other people pay even more to leave the logo behind. The findings appear in the Journal of Marketing . [Young Jee Han, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze, http://bit.ly/cxapoC ]

High-end goods are often ostentatiously labeled. After all, if you spend all that money on a status symbol, you want to make sure that other folks recognize your good taste, even at a distance. But researchers surveying California consumers found that people who are seriously well-off are willing to pay a premium for items whose branding is more discreet.

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]

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]

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday rejected 10 petitions challenging EPA's 2009 finding that climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and the environment.

A new era for nuclear power is taking shape as third-generation reactors, designed to be simpler and safer, inch through the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) design certification process. Much of nuclear's revival hinges on the ability of new reactors to outshine those of yore in terms of safety, economics, construction time and life span. [More]

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

As if the news coming out of Washington about a climate bill weren't bad enough, state budget crises are also sucking the blood out of many local renewable-energy programs, which are the only concerted action the country is taking on climate right now. In my own state of New Jersey, the rebate for buying a solar array was temporarily suspended in May as the state went scrounging for loose change to plug a general budget gap. It has since been reinstated -- partly. Now it provides homeowners only half the money it used to. [break]

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

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.