Science: What Geeks are talking about from Discover Magazine

South Asia’s Vultures Back From the Brink
Unlovely, unloved and utterly necessary for controlling disease and stabilizing ecological health, vultures are under attack around the world. In Africa, populations of a half-dozen species are nearing collapse due to a combination of human-caused killings ranging from poaching for bushmeat and religious objects to the deliberate poisoning of poached elephant carcasses to destroy the circling scavengers. In southern Asia, and particularly in India, the chief villain has been a nonstero

Statistics: When Confounding Variables Are Out of Control
Does ice cream cause drownings? Let’s think about this statistically. Consider that, in any given city, daily sales of ice cream are, most likely, positively correlated with daily rates of drownings. Now, no matter how strong this correlation is, it doesn’t really mean that ice cream is dangerous. Rather, the association exists because of a ‘confound’ variable. In this case it’s temperature: on sunny days, people tend to eat more ice cream and they also tend to go swimming more often, thu

Nefertiti’s Final Resting Place Continues to Polarize, Captivate
Back in June of 2015, the archaeological world was electrified by a paper that suggested hidden rooms lay behind a wall in King Tutankhamen’s’s tomb. Nick Reeves, the author of the paper, and a respected Egyptologist at Arizona State University, suggested that, based on detailed photographic scans of the tomb, a doorway to an unopened room was hiding in plain sight, covered up by paintings on the wall. In his paper, he cites both visual evidence — the presence of telltale lines in the art

Do You Even Science? Edition 3: Vengeful Birds and Alien Protection Plans
It’s Friday, and April Fools’ Day, so have you been paying attention to the latest science news or just fooling around this week? It wasn’t a very good week for scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. When they attempted to contact their 5-week-old astronomy satellite, they got nothing but silence. On March 28, a video filmed from the ground suggested it was tumbling through space, which is actually a good sign. The satellite could be alive, but unable to point its antenna b

The Solar System is a-Changing
When I was a kid and got hooked on astronomy (sometime around age 7), one of the things I deeply enjoyed about the night sky was its constancy. The human world is full of unwanted variables: Families move, friends get into fights with you, bicycles crash, birthday parties don’t turn out the way you wanted…but all you have to do is look up and you can make contact with another realm that never produces such disappointments. The stars are always in the same places. The planets slide around i

Can Science and Religion Co-Exist?
Science and religion have a notoriously fractious relationship, each spouting fundamental “truths” from either side of an ideologically inscribed line. But to Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, this dichotomy is an unhelpful construct perpetuated by fundamentalists on both sides of the aisle. To him, faith and objectively vetted knowledge are the complementary pursuits of a curious mind. “If you have great faith, you are very interested i

What’s In a Snout?
It may sound superficial, but you can judge a lot about an animal from its schnoz. Plant-eaters have evolved the perfect snout shapes to nibble, chomp, or tear up the foods they love. And by decoding those shapes, scientists hope they can learn more about plant-eaters that are more mysterious—namely, dinosaurs. “When you see cows in a field, their faces almost look like they’re glued to the ground as they nibble away,” says Jon Tennant, a PhD student at Imperial College London. Cows are i

Physics Beyond the Higgs Boson
The “God Particle” was just the beginning. The Large Hadron Collider and other accelerators are poised to answer questions about the very fabric of the cosmos.

Using Technology to Find Hidden Graves
Forensic anthropologist Amy Mundorff has been identifying human remains for years. Now her goal is to make the search for the missing safer and more successful.

The Woman With Knives in Her Neck
When traditional painkillers fail, is medical marijuana the answer?

Rewriting Tel Megiddo’s Violent History
At the ancient site of Megiddo, archaeologists unearth new scientific insights that may turn centuries of gospel on its head.

The People’s Scientist
Wilma Subra helps vulnerable communities document the health toll of industrial pollution.

Slivers of Science in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’
Modern science could explain mythic tales of transformation.

‘Big Brother’ Is Already Watching
From catching crooks to tagging friends, facial recognition software is watching you.

The Archaeology of Stars
Some astronomers seek to understand the origins of our universe by reconstructing the lives of its oldest sources of light.

Being Honest About the Pygmalion Effect
In the 1960s, a researcher lied to prove students would rise to meet their teachers’ expectations. But no one could replicate those results without also lying — until now.

Animal Tracking Enters the 21st Century
Developed by the earliest hunters, wildlife tracking skills remain essential tools for conservation.

The Dangerous, Deceitful Stunt That Won a Nobel Prize
One German doctor’s daring deception helped build the basis of life-saving cardiac imaging.

Another Reason To Act Now On Climate Change: Snakes
Though scientists have been warning about the disastrous impacts that climate change will have on our planet for decades, we are now starting to feel those predictions manifest. As Eric Holthaus pointed out, the “worst nightmare” scenarios are already happening. Droughts, storms, fires, you name it—the world as we knew it is under siege. Heck, we just had the most abnormally hot month on record; February 2016 was 1.35 degrees Celsius warmer than the average, making it two-tenths of a degree

Syphilis, The Chameleon of Medicine
There’s nothing quite like syphilis. The sexually transmitted bug that sullied Christopher Columbus’ journey either to the New World or his return back to the Old – we’re still debating this grand chicken-or-egg epidemiological mystery – has deranged the minds of dictators and kings, was once a leading cause of committed hospitalizations to the psych ward, and even sparked fashion trends among members of the European royal courts who sought to cloak its debilitating, tell-tale symptoms (1).

A Plan to Hide Humanity from Hostile Aliens
Earth is a bountiful planet rich in resources. And, if you believe Stephen Hawking, that might cause our demise. Such alien alarmists compare first contact to the devastation Europeans brought to North America. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” Hawking said back in 2010. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships … having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would per

Cute and Cuddly Herbivores Can Be Bloodthirsty Savages
Prairie dog lovers got a shock last week when researchers discovered that the cuddly burrowers had a mean streak. Multiple white-tailed prairie dogs in western Colorado were observed chasing down and killing ground squirrels in the vicinity of their dens, ripping into them with their jaws and shaking them from side to side with enough force to snap their necks. This behavior was initially surprising, because prairie dogs are herbivores — peaceful plant eaters, right? Far from it. After ki

A World of Her Own
One of the most iconic works in American art – the painting “Christina’s World” – currently hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as a prized piece of Americana and one of the museum’s most popular exhibits. In his artwork, Andrew Wyeth, a master of American realism, honors a dear friend, a woman who is today both an icon and a true medical mystery. Since the first public viewing of this famed painting in 1948, the nature of the disabling disease afflicting the eponymous Chri

Japanese Hunter-Gatherers Defy Notions About Prehistoric Violence
A new study of human remains from prehistoric Japan challenges the idea that engaging in warfare is deeply embedded in human nature. Prehistoric Japan was a pretty peaceful place, according to a recent study of prehistoric remains from around the country. That could mean that, despite evidence of early warfare from other sites around the world, early Holocene hunter-gatherers weren’t innately warlike. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Biological Letters, is new ammunition for

As Seen on Television: The Dawn of Modern Medicine
They scrub in according to a strict protocol. All instruments are sterile, the patient is put to sleep, and an incision is cut and held open with retractors. Moving into the abdominal cavity, surgeons clamp bleeding arteries and cauterize tissues meticulously to prevent blood loss while also making the surgical field easier to see. Thus far, it seems just like surgery today, but for the numerous people overlooking from elevated theater seats, dressed in formal Victorian outfits. That’s th

‘Siberian Unicorn’ May Have Walked Alongside Humans
With a new discovery, paleontologists have found evidence that a Siberian “unicorn” likely walked the earth at the same time as humans. Lest visions of graceful white horses with golden, spiraled horns prance through your mind, let’s first establish that this beast is anything but. Much closer to today’s rhinoceroses than horses, Elasmotherium sibiricum was a gray, hulking creature with a single defining feature: a massive horn rising from its head. It was thought that these creatures die

Salt Lovers, This Fork Is for You
Good news for sodium aficionados everywhere: The next time you feel like reaching for the salt shaker, you could just pick up your fork instead. A prototype from the Rekimoto Lab at the University of Tokyo simulates the flavor of salt with an electric current, imbuing food with all of the flavorful goodness without increasing your blood pressure. No Salt? No Problem? The fork’s electrical jolt is activated with the touch of a button, completing a circuit between your fingers, the metal

Ocean warming threatens stability of Antarctic ice shelves by carving ‘upside-down rivers’ into their undersides
Note: Thanks to a spring-break getaway, I’m just now catching up to this new research showing that warming ocean waters are threatening the stability of giant, floating shelves of ice fringing Antarctica. The post that follows offers a summary of the new findings, followed by a Q&A with the study’s main author.  By carving giant channels into the undersides of Antarctica’s ice shelves, warming sea water is leaving some of them more vulnerable to disintegration — and raising new concer

These Birds Learn to Recognize Humans They Hate
Antarctic seabirds called skuas are so clever that they can recognize individual humans after seeing them only a few times. Some Korean researchers discovered this by messing with the birds’ nests and then waiting to get attacked. They’re either very brave or have never watched The Birds. The study took place on Antarctica’s King George Island. The animals here didn’t evolve around humans. People have only been making appearances on the island since the 1950s or so. Today 10 countrie

Rogue Editors at a Psychiatry Journal?
A group of Indian psychiatrists have raised concern over suspicious similarities between three papers published in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine (IJPM). Their allegations have just been published, also in the same journal. The authors, Girish Banwari and colleagues, focus on a 2015 paper about the use of the drug modafinil in treating schizophrenia. Banwari et al. say that this article Contains no data at all and that only one reference was cited in the bibliography. A l

Science in America’s National Parks
A century ago, Congress created the national park system — and ended up preserving some of the best research sites in the world.

A “warm, crazy winter” leaves the Arctic with a record-breaking low extent of sea ice
Thanks to dramatically warm conditions, more of the Arctic’s sea surface seems to have remained unfrozen this winter than ever before in the era of satellite monitoring, the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced today. This year’s low extent of wintertime Arctic sea ice breaks the previous record set just last year. (Satellite monitoring began in 1979.) Arctic sea ice, which expands during the 24-hour darkness and frigid temperatures of winter, reached its maximum annual exte

The ‘Not Face’ Is Universally Understood
When your boss strolls up to your desk at 5 p.m. on a Friday and asks you to work on Saturday, your facial expression tells the whole story. And, according to a new study from researchers at Ohio State University, no matter if your boss comes from Nigeria, Nepal or Nebraska, the look on your face will still come across loud and universally clear. How Many Ways to Say No? The study, led by Aleix Martinez, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at OSU, looked at the facial expres

Astronomers Crowdfund Effort to Recreate ‘Alien’ Signal
For 72 seconds in 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope recorded a powerful signal streaming from the area of globular cluster M55 in Sagittarius. To Ohio State astronomer Jerry Ehman, a SETI volunteer at the time, it seemed like the exact kind of alien message he’d been searching for. Its frequency near the hydrogen line matched a strong range that extraterrestrials might use to communicate over the vast reaches of space. Ehman circled the signal on a printout and scrawled “Wow!” Where’s

Robotic Race to the Moon Heats Up
Three engineers walk into a bar. The punchline won’t do any favors for your next stand-up set, but what followed may one day find its place in start-up folk history alongside the Silicon Valley garage. It was 2010, and Israeli engineer Yariv Bash had just posted a bold invitation on his Facebook wall. “I’m going to the Moon – who wants to join me?” Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub took the bait, meeting Bash for a beer. Soon, the three were sketching spacecraft designs on napkins,

Deadly Venoms Help Rather Than Hurt
Venomous critters may inspire the next generation of painkillers.

Responses to Typos and Personality: “Grammar Nazis” Confirmed?
Do you haet typos? If you spot a grammo (a grammatical error), does your blood boil? Some people are more offended by these kinds of linguistic errors than others, but why? Ann Arbor psychologists Julie E. Boland and Robin Queen examine this in a new PLOS ONE paper called If You’re House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email: Personality Influences Reactions to Written Errors in Email Messages The authors recruited 83 volunteers (on MTurk) and asked them to imagine that they’d placed an

Your Brain on Maths: Educational Neurononsense Revisited
Earlier this week, I was asked on Twitter why I had never blogged about the “neuro-myths” of Jo Boaler. I confessed I’d never heard of her. So I looked her up and learned that Boaler is a professor at Stanford, and an expert on the teaching of mathematics. Her work in that field has been both influential and controversial. Boaler argues that any child can become proficient at maths, given time, if they believe in themselves and in their ability to improve. Children should not be told that the

Actually, Bats See Just Fine, Neil.
Many know Neil deGrasse Tyson for his pithy, humorous science tweets, which are a part of his greater science communication strategy. As of late, though, scientists have become quite vexed with NDT’s 140-character stylings, as he’s been foraying outside his planetary expertise and into biological phenomena, getting the facts wrong every time. First, there was his mistaken evaluation of evolutionary drivers and how sex works, excellently torn apart by Emily Willingham (a Ph.D. scientist whom

Do You Even Science? Edition 2: Killer Prairie Dogs and Ancient Scrolls
Welcome to the second edition of “Do You Even Science,” the weekly quiz that tests whether you’ve been paying attention to the breakthroughs that are happening every day. This week, we learned that prairie dogs are terrifying. Traffic lights, it seems, could someday go the way of pay phones. Noted geneticist Craig Venter announced that his team had stripped a microbe’s genome to the barest essentials necessary to sustain life. Far from answering questions, Venter’s humbling discovery rais

Minimal Cell Reveals How Little We Know About Fundamental Genetics
A team of biologists has synthesized the smallest genome that can encode for a living, replicating cell, but the discovery reveals how much we still don’t know about the fundamental building blocks of life. Geneticist J. Craig Venter and his colleagues at the Venter Institute started with the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, which is a species of bacteria with the smallest genome of any self-replicating cell scientists know of so far. They inserted a foreign genetic sequence called a transp

Bacteria Give Feet 4 Distinct Odors
Foot odor comes in four main varieties: sweaty, cheesy, vinegary, and cabbage-y. That’s because of chemicals produced by the bacteria down there. Methanethiol is a key component in the flavor of cheddar cheese. Acetic acid is a result of sugar fermentation—and is better known as vinegar. Byproducts associated with rot, such as propionic acid and butyric acid, can leave feet smelling like rancid cabbage. The most common foot-related chemical, isovaleric acid, is responsible for the smell w