Science News

By Janelle Weaver

Mammals may possess the biochemical machinery to produce morphine--a painkiller found in the opium poppy, according to a new study.

Meinhart Zenk of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Mo., and colleagues detected traces of morphine in the urine of mice after injecting chemical precursors of the drug. [More]

By Janet Fang

For the first time in a quarter of a century, commercial whaling on the open seas could be condoned--and scientists are working to figure out exactly how much should be allowed.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) released a controversial proposal on 22 April which would allow limited hunting in the hope of achieving an enforceable, consensus agreement that would include Japan, Iceland and Norway, which have caught more than 33,000 whales since the 1986 IWC moratorium on commercial whaling. [More]

Editor's note: Joshua Hartshorne is a graduate student at Harvard University's Psychology Department interested in human behavior and language. He wrote the open letter below because HBO is currently creating a new fantasy language, called "Dothraki," for an upcoming television adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones . At least some fans are guaranteed to try to learn Dothraki, just as thousands have studied Klingon, Sindarin and Na'vi. The letter to Martin, the show's executive producer David Benioff and Dothraki creator David Peterson suggests a few different elements or structures for the language that could do science a favor by inventing a language that includes exactly those features that researchers would like to test to see if subjects--in this case, the show's highly motivated fans--can learn. [More]

Editor's Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident is traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to explore undersea volcanism in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the fourth blog post detailing this voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com [More]

Shhh, keep this podcast a secret. Because new research points to a possible blind spot in airport security screening: it may be easier to sneak something dangerous past security–a box cutter, for example–by also including an obvious and innocuous banned object, like a water bottle, into the mix as a distraction.

Scientists recruited college students to find targets on a computer display. Their task: search for lines that formed a T amidst other non-T lines in 10 different experiments. Sometimes the Ts were easy to find, sometimes they were more hidden. When the easy and tough ones appeared with equal frequency, the students found both on the same screen.

When President Richard Nixon launched the war on cancer in his January 1971 State of the Union, he called for "the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon." Yet nearly 40 years and $100 billion in federally funded cancer research later, it seems the lunar landing was a much less daunting task.

Jealousy can be devastating to a relationship--and it is well known that the genders experience the green-eyed monster in different ways. [More]

Toward the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy began mapping an area of northern Alaska extending south from the Arctic Sea across the North Slope and down to the forested valleys south of the Brooks Range . In an effort lasting a number of years, surveyors flew low in a small plane, snapping thousands of photographs with a large-format K-18 camera pointed out the craft’s open door.

The year was 1944. World War II was show­ing signs of winding down, but predictions that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end had the Allies gravely concerned that they would run out of gasoline for the war effort. The 23-million-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve in northern Alaska was a prime location for finding new sources of oil, and the U.S. Navy decided to explore. But the navy had a problem: no maps. So it decided to take an exceptionally detailed set of aerial photographs.

Basing out of Ladd Field, near Fairbanks, surveyors mounted a massive K-18 camera in the open door of a twin-engine Beech­craft. Over several years, flying low and slow, they took thousands of photographs of Alaska’s North Slope, extending from the Arctic Ocean south to the Brooks Range, and of the forested valleys on the south side of the range--itself a part of the boreal forest of evergreens and deciduous trees that stretches across a large swath of the Arctic.