Scientific American News Feed

NEW YORK -- Most Manhattan office buildings are designed for paper pushers, but there is a new factory running at the end of a long dim corridor on the fifth floor of the Empire State Building. Here machines are whirring, a furnace is roaring, and dozens of blue-collar workers are bustling about.

They are setting up to dismantle the building's 6,514 double-hung window frames, to reuse the glass and make them anew. It is part of one of the nation's most ambitious and symbolic energy-efficiency programs: a $20 million effort to cut the skyscraper's overall energy use by 38 percent.

Every teacher knows there are students who always seem to be a step ahead of everyone else. And then there are the slackers, who are just as intelligent but who don’t seem to mind being mediocre. The difference seems obvious: some people are inherently motivated to succeed, whereas others simply don’t care. But a study conducted by psychologists William Hart, now at the University of Alabama, and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois suggests otherwise. Simply reframing a task as “fun” caused the underachievers to outperform those who usually excelled--indicating that the way an educator describes an activity might have a powerful influence on how well students do on it.

The researchers first screened participants of comparable academic ability, categorizing them as interested in achievement or interested in fun. They then had the students look at a computer screen that flashed words related to high achievement (for instance, “win,” “excel” and “master”). In subsequent tests of ability such as a word-search puzzle, the participants who were interested in achievement performed significantly better than did those who were not.

With all due respect to T. S. Eliot, maybe the world really does end with a bang, not a whimper. Whether of our own creation (nuclear holocaust) or of nature’s (asteroid impact), plenty of cataclysms could doom civilization--perhaps even putting the survival of the species in jeopardy. We assessed the likelihood of several doomsday scenarios, from oft-discussed threats such as climate change to more fanciful ideas such as quantum fluctuations that would destroy our universe. The probabilities listed here are not scientific fact--an impossible goal when estimating the possibility of unprecedented events--but informed conjecture based on researchers’ expert opinions. We also relied on those opinions to approximate how catastrophic each event would be, ranging from 1 (localized chaos) to 10 (good-bye, universe).

KILLER PANDEMIC [More]

If the 20th century was an expansive era seemingly without boundaries--a time of jet planes, space travel and the Internet--the early years of the 21st have showed us the limits of our small world. Regional blackouts remind us that the flow of energy we used to take for granted may be in tight supply. The once mighty Colorado River, tapped by thirsty metropolises of the desert West, no longer reaches the ocean. Oil is so hard to find that new wells extend many kilometers underneath the seafloor. The boundless atmosphere is now reeling from two centuries’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions. Even life itself seems to be running out, as biologists warn that we are in the midst of a global extinction event comparable to the last throes of the dinosaurs.

The constraints on our resources and environment--compounded by the rise of the middle class in nations such as China and India--will shape the rest of this century and beyond. Here is a visual accounting of what we have left to work with, a map of our resources plotted against time.

Coral, the reef-building organisms responsible for some of the oceans' most vital ecosystems, are in trouble around the world because of climate change, ocean acidification and human interference. But lots of people are also trying to save coral reefs before it's too late. Here's a roundup of some of the latest research into this important class of organism.

Some of the worst news comes out of Indonesia, where the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found that rising surface water temperatures have created a large-scale bleaching event in the local coral. Bleaching occurs when environmental factors stress the living organisms residing within coral reefs, causing them to either leave their reef structures or die. As a result, reefs turn white. WCS marine biologists found that at least 60 percent of the area's coral reefs, and 80 percent of some coral species in the region, have bleached and died following a 4-degree Celsius rise in water temperatures. Bleached coral reefs cannot support the variety of marine life that depend on coral for their survival. That, in turn, affects the ability of people to fish for their livelihoods around those reefs.

Americans, and American physicians, are concerned about ballooning waistlines and the accompanying health problems. Now, researchers have presented the first randomized trial of what they hail as a side-effect-free, prescription-free and simply free appetite control agent. That is, of course, water. Brenda Davy, lead researcher from Virginia Tech, presented the findings at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Previous studies showed that middle-aged and older Americans who drank two cups of water before a meal ate about 75 to 90 fewer calories over the course of the meal. For this study, the scientists took 48 adults between 55 and 75. All ate a low-calorie diet for 12 weeks. Half of the group drank 16 ounces of water before meals. The other half didn’t.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Danielle in the central Atlantic Ocean strengthened into the season's second hurricane Monday afternoon as it continued to move west-northwest toward Bermuda and not toward key oil and gas producing areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

In its latest advisory on Monday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Danielle, the fourth named storm of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, was located about 1,320 miles east of the Lesser Antilles with wind speeds climbing to minimal hurricane strength of about 75 miles per hour (120 km per hour) from 65 mph earlier.

By Eugenie Samuel Reich

The Newtonian constant of gravitation -- known in the finely tuned business of metrology as 'big G' -- has come a long way since British physicist Henry Cavendish first measured the gravitational attraction of Earth in 1798. [More]

A new analysis of a meteorite shows that an inclusion within the carbonaceous stone is older than any known material in the solar system. The finding pushes back the estimated age of the solar system to 4.568 billion years, older than previous estimates by up to 1.9 million years. [More]

The perplexing condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) might be linked to infection with a retrovirus, report the authors of a new paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ). The association is not new, but the researchers reportedly asked the journal to delay publication of their study, which had been accepted in May, after the online publication of conflicting conclusions July 1 in Retrovirology . [More]

Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space . Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it --or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions . Even replanting trees . All have been mooted as potential methods of " geoengineering "--"deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," as the U.K.'s Royal Society puts it. [More]

Our sleep patterns, eating habits, body temperature and hormone levels are driven by the rhythmic activity of body's circadian clock. Travel across time zones or shift work can knock those rhythms out of whack,  possibly leading to sleep problems,  bipolar disorder, metabolic syndrome and even cancer.  The lack of convenient and reliable methods to monitor the internal clock's activity has severely limited the study of circadian-related disease, but now, scientists report that they can easily track the circadian rhythms by analyzing a person's plucked hairs. The finding could one day help doctors diagnose and treat patients suffering from circadian dysfunction.

The body's master clock, located in the brain region called the hypothalamus, is set by light, which activates clock genes that are responsible for keeping this timekeeper ticking correctly. Within the past decade, scientists have discovered that organs outside the brain (such as the skin, liver and pancreas) also keep track of time with 24-hour fluctuations in clock gene expression. Previous studies have attempted to monitor molecular timekeeping in blood cells or in cells lining the mouth, but these approaches are technically challenging. 

Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.

Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?

Last week's post served up facts from Power to Save the World (Vintage, 2008) by Gwyneth Cravens, whose book forced me to see nuclear energy in a more positive light. At the risk of destroying what little credibility I still possess, I'd like to urge readers to check out two even more provocative analysts of the risks of nuclear energy. [More]

Within just a few blocks from my office, street vendors will sell me a Versace T-shirt or a silk tie from Prada, cheap. Or I could get a deal on a Rolex watch or a chic pair of Ray-Ban shades. These are not authentic brand-name products, of course. They are inexpensive replicas. But they make me look and feel good, and I doubt any of my friends can tell the difference.

That’s why we buy knockoffs, isn’t it? To polish our self-image and broadcast that polished version of our personality to the world--at a fraction of the price. But does it work? After all, we first have to convince ourselves of our idealized image if we are going to sway anyone else. Can we really become Ray-Ban-wearing, Versace-bedecked sophisticates in our own mind, just by dressing up?

A New York City postal processing facility that was contaminated during the 2001 anthrax attacks is now the site of the largest " green roof " in Manhattan. [More]

Editor's note: This story is part of a series of online exclusives about natural phenomena and human endeavors we'd like to see come to an end. They are connected with the September 2010 special issue of Scientific American called " The End ."

The meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES (pronounced "sight-eez") this past March was a decided defeat for the Atlantic bluefin tuna . Delegates voted 72 to 43 not to restrict fishing and international trade of the tuna so prized for its sushi that stocks are estimated to be at 15 percent of their historic levels . Although dismayed, conservationists remain upbeat, because they have at their disposal other management tools that could save the species. [More]

Over the past decade geneticists have proved that all people alive today are descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and carried the human spirit and imagination to every corner of the habitable world. Our shared heritage implies that all cultures share essentially the same potential, drawing on similar reserves of raw genius. Whether they exercise this intellectual capacity to produce stunning works of technological innovation (as has been the great achievement of the West) or to maintain an incredibly elaborate network of kin relationships (a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia) is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive benefits and cultural priorities. Each of the planet’s cultures is a unique answer to the question of what it means to be human. And together they make up our repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us as a species in the millennia to come.

But these global voices are being silenced at a frightening rate. The key indicator of this decline in cultural diversity is language loss. A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Each one is an old-growth forest of the mind. Linguists agree, however, that 50 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered. Every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. Within a generation or two, then, we may be witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity’s social, cultural and intellectual legacy. This is the hidden backdrop of our age.