Science News

Air travel in Europe inched back to normal Wednesday, as officials estimated that newly opened flight routes would permit air traffic to approach 75 percent of its normal capacity. Ash plumes from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano had all but extinguished flight operations across the U.K. and mainland Europe for the better part of a week . [More]

Spring is coming earlier, and nature is scrambling to keep up, according to scientists who say climate change is to blame.

The season starts an average of 10 days earlier in the United States than it did just 20 years ago. And that is scrambling the delicate balance of many ecosystems, as some species adapt to the change and others don't.

Volcanoes, with their vast outpourings of greenhouse gases and sun-screening ash clouds, can affect climate. But what about the other way around? [More]

The Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) recently released National Broadband Plan has met with mixed reactions from the industries with a stake in the availability of broadcast spectrum. Whereas technology companies producing and serving data to these wireless gadgets want the government to remove a potential bottleneck to the Internet, broadcasters are feeling pinched, having already surrendered the unused "white spaces" in between their channels last year during the digital TV transition. [More]

A New York Times reporter recently wrote this sentence: “Like most--heck, all--of the women I know, my relationship to food, to my weight, to my body is…complicated.” That relationship is now visible in our brains.

When anorexic and bulimic women see images of overweight women, an area of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, lights up in a functional MRI. This region is associated with identity and self-reflection.

I remember my excitement one morning in the winter of 2006 when I peered through a microscope in my laboratory and saw a colony of cells that looked just like embryonic stem cells. They were clustered in a little heap, after dividing in a petri dish for almost three weeks. And they were glowing with the same colorful fluorescent markers scientists take as one sign of an embryonic cell’s “pluripotency”--its ability to give rise to any type of tissue in an organism’s body. But the cells I was looking at did not come from any embryo: they were regular adult mouse cells that had seemingly been rejuvenated by the addition of a simple cocktail of genes.

Could it really be so easy to roll back the internal clock of any mammalian cell and return it to an embryonic state? I was not the only one wondering at the time. Shinya Yamanaka of the University of Kyoto and his colleagues had just published a groundbreaking study in August 2006 that revealed their formula for creating what they called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from the skin cells of mice. Researchers had been struggling for years to understand and control the enormous potential of embryonic stem cells to produce customized tissues for use in medicine and research--as well as contending with political and ethical controversies over the use of embryos, scientific setbacks and false hopes generated by previous “breakthroughs” that did not pan out. So stem cell scientists were surprised and a little bit skeptical of the Japanese group’s results at first. But that morning in the lab, I could see firsthand the results of following Yamanaka’s recipe.

When you read hundreds of letters from readers every month, as I do, common patterns of argument emerge. I can’t answer every note individually, so in this column I’d like to at least respond to one type of assertion. That is the idea, whenever the letter writer doesn’t agree with an expert-informed point of view expressed in Scientific American , that science should not mention or touch on politically sensitive areas--that science is somehow apart from social concerns. I say: Wrong.

Science findings are not random opinions but the result of a rational, critical process. Science itself advances gradually through a preponderance of evidence toward a fuller understanding about how things work. And what we learn from that process is not just equivalent to statements made by any another political-interest group. It is evidence-based information that is subject to constant questioning and testing from within the scientific community. Thus, the science-informed point of view is a more authoritative and reliable source of guidance than uninformed opinions. We should not discount its value in informing public discourse.

A metal pin adorning a military uniform signifies rank; a ring on the left hand’s fourth finger announces matrimony. [More]

LONDON/OSLO (Reuters) - Iceland's erupting volcano has spewed plenty of ash but far less greenhouse gas than Europe's grounded aircraft would have generated.

Carbon dioxide emissions totaled 150,000 tonnes a day in the early days of the eruption, according to Durham University. That compares with 510,000 tonnes per day emitted when planes are flying as normal over the continent.