Scientific American News Feed

Why do some chords sound sweet but others make you wince? Well it appears our ears--or at least the ears of 250 Minnesota undergrads--prefer chords containing harmonically related frequencies, according to a study in the journal Current Biology . [McDermott et al, www.current-biology.com ]

Even a simple note on my guitar has an array of harmonic frequencies. But the frequencies have a special harmonic relationship, which is why you hear it as a single sound with a single pitch.

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Using a laptop in our New York headquarters, Scientific American remotely navigated the latest "telerobot" from Anybots, Inc., around the company's Mountain View, CA facilities. Is this the future of telecommuting or just another robot novelty?

The Large Hadron Collider may be up and running outside Geneva, but the particle accelerator it supplanted as top dog in the particle physics community appears to have a few surprises left to deliver. Data from the workhorse Tevatron collider at Fermilab in Illinois show what appears to be a preference for matter over antimatter in the way an unusual kind of particle decays, according to a new analysis in a Tevatron research collaboration. [More]

In his 1776 work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith identified the cause in a single variable: “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Today we call this free trade or market capitalism, and since the recession it has become de rigueur to dis the system as corrupt, rotten or deeply flawed.

If we pull back and take a long-horizon perspective, however, the free exchange between people of goods, services and especially ideas leads to trust between strangers and prosperity for more people. Think of it as ideas having sex. That is what zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley calls it in his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010). Ridley is optimistic that “the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all.”

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Dear EarthTalk: I pruned back an overgrown bush in my back yard last fall and now the soil around it is covered in dandelions and other weeds. Is there any way to get rid of these weeds without resorting to RoundUp and other chemical herbicides? --Max S., Seattle, Wash.

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In Isaac Asimov's science fiction series Foundation, the mathematician Hari Seldon invents a method, called psychohistory , that predicts social behavior as accurately as statistical mechanics predicts the behavior of gases. The catch is that the predictions may be thwarted if influential people learn about them and consequently change their behavior. Seldon's model predicts that civil war will destroy his galactic civilization. He never publicizes his prophecy, so it comes true. [More]

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Thirty years ago, on May 18, Mount St. Helens lost its top--3.7 billion cubic yards of mountain, to be exact. The peak of the Pacific Northwest icon dropped by about 1,300 feet in a matter of seconds, taking down with it enough trees to build 300,000 two-bedroom houses. Gone, too, were 200 homes, 57 human lives and most of the visible wildlife across 230 square miles. [More]

An obscure family of chemicals – important to the metalworking industry but virtually unknown to the public – is suddenly the subject of scrutiny from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, and the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is behind a majority of those deaths. Although newer drug combinations (of artemisinins ) proved effective after resistance to widely used treatments appeared, hints of resistance to this newer therapy are also beginning to emerge, creating a darkening cloud over a field already beset with challenges. [More]

Editor's Note: William Gilly , a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group's eighth blog post. [More]

The Japanese space agency is preparing to launch what could become the first spacecraft to sail across the solar system on sunlight. IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun), piggybacking on the launch of a Venus climate orbiter, is scheduled for a May 20 liftoff at 5:58 P.M., Eastern Daylight Time, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The two missions will blast off from JAXA's Tanegashima Space Center , a launch complex on a small island in southern Japan. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve often cooked canned foods in their own can, things like condensed milk and mushroom soup. I put the can without opening it in the pressure cooker, cover it with water and let it cook for 30 minutes. The results are amazing. Is it safe to do that? Can metals leach into my food? --Mercedes Kupres, via e-mail

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As a tendril of oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster creeps south in the Gulf of Mexico--potentially already caught up in the swirl of a massive conveyor of ocean water known as the Loop Current--the larger question is, where will the at least 5 million gallons of oil already spilled end up? [More]

It seems that no matter what governments and organizations do lately, tiger poaching continues to climb, driving the big cats closer and closer to extinction. But now two countries are resorting to extreme measures to help combat the dramatic decline in tiger populations, while a third is trying a new idea to boost its own tiger numbers.

Tigers vs. tourists? [More]

Want to feed a hungry world? According to David Gracer, add bugs to the menu. Gracer is, he says, a normal guy who’s also an entomophagist, an advocate for insects as food. He gave a talk about ingesting insects at a May 16th TEDxCambridge conference called “How We Eat.” The event was a spin-off of the popular TED talks.

Here’s one of the reasons Gracer’s a fan: "They can’t give us pandemics. So the mass production of insects--farm insects--really easy. There’s no cricket flu on par with avian flu or swine flu or E. coli ."

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The best science transforms our conception of the universe and our place in it and helps us to understand and cope with changes beyond our control. Relativity, natural selection, germ theory, heliocentrism and other explanations of natural phenomena have remade our intellectual and cultural landscapes. The same holds true for inventions as diverse as the Internet, formal logic, agriculture and the wheel.

What dramatic new events are in store for humanity? Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050. Some will no doubt bring to mind long-standing dystopian visions: extinction-causing asteroid collisions, war-waging intelligent machines, Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the best thinking today suggests that many events will not unfold as expected. In fact, a scenario could be seen as sobering and disappointing to one person and curious and uplifting to another. One thing is certain: they all have the power to forever reshape how we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.

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The board of editors at Scientific American is not simply made up of wordsmiths who assist contributors with grammar and spelling--as vital as those tasks are to a polished publication. Rather, one of our critical roles for readers is that we keep up with what’s happening in science, enabling Scientific American to be the authoritative source for the information that matters to our audience. We go to conferences and meetings, pore over other publications, and routinely confer with our researcher sources and authors. As editors, we think short-term--what’s the news that readers need to know right now, in a given issue?--and we also consider the longer view about what will come about in the months ahead.

In addition to reacting to news as it breaks, in other words, we work to anticipate what will happen. Case in point: the cover story for this issue, “ 12 Events That Will Change Everything .”

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