Science News

Around the world carnivorous plants are on the decline, the victims of habitat loss, illegal poaching and pollution. But now a new factor has come to light: The very insects the plants rely on for food may be poisoning them.

According to new research by Christopher Moody and Iain Green of Bournemouth University in England, prey insects could be contaminated with toxic metals such as cadmium that, when ingested by meat-eating flora, affect the plants' growth.

Why don’t men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation , garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. It appeared on cocktail napkins (“Real men don’t ask directions”) and became a staple of stand-up comics as well as jokes that made the rounds: “Why did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years?” and “Why does it take so many sperm to find just one egg?”

The attention surprised me. I had not known how widespread this experience was, but I included the asking-directions scenario because it crystallized key aspects of a phenomenon that, I had discovered, accounts for many of the frustrations that women and men experience in conversation. I have spent more than three decades collecting and analyzing thousands of examples of how women and men interact and have found that men’s talk tends to focus on hierarchy--competition for relative power--whereas women’s tends to focus on connection--relative closeness or distance. In other words, a man and woman might walk away from the same conversation asking different questions: he might wonder, “Did that conversation put me in a one-up or one-down position?” whereas she might wonder, “Did it bring us closer or push us farther apart?”

With more than 400 genetically distinct breeds worldwide, the domestic dog is the most diverse land mammal. After 14,000 years of artificial selection for traits such as size, shape and color, the 40-chromosome canine genome holds the secrets to man's best friend's most defining features. And as scientists begin to understand what gives dogs their spots, they're learning a little something about humans, too. [More]

In 2007, outside Bangalore, India, an explosion decapitated an industrial worker, hurling his body through a brick wall. In 2005 a routine procedure at a manufacturing plant in Taiwan caused a spontaneous explosion that killed a worker and ignited a blaze that ripped through the factory, shutting down production for three months. Both incidents shared a common cause--silane, a gas made up of silicon and hydrogen that explodes on contact with air. And both incidents occurred in the same industry--solar power. [More]

Carbon prices will be applied to car exhaust for the first time under the Obama administration's new tailpipe rule, launched yesterday. But while environmentalists were celebrating, some economists were quietly concerned that U.S. EPA 's carbon calculation is too low.

The agency incorporated a preliminary price of $21 for every ton of carbon dioxide expelled from vehicles to help reach its new standard of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016. That amounts to about 20 cents per gallon or, as two economists claim, a level that's "far too small a price incentive to prompt substantive mitigation measures."

One of the most complex and expensive construction projects in history could inch ever closer to completion April 5, when space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to lift off on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiter and its seven-member crew will deliver additional sleeping quarters, exercise equipment and racks for science experiments to the station. [More]

A direct effect on human health related to climate change is the likely increase in infectious diseases transmitted by insects or through contaminated water.

In the March 25th issue of The New England Journal of Medicine , infectious disease researcher Emily Shuman points out that insects are more active at higher temperatures and broaden their range. Altered weather patterns bring drought to some areas, flooding to others and a higher likelihood of water contamination to both.

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

Earlier this week I posed the question of whether old houses will ever be able to reduce their energy needs by the factor of five or so needed to combat climate change. My discussion was inspired, in part, by a provocative essay written last year by preservationist Sally Zimmerman of Historic New England . Yesterday she wrote to say that my post and the comments that people left have been widely circulated among preservationists. She offered some more thoughts that I think frame the issue beautifully:

Lost Nucleotides Although Alexander S. Bradley’s article “ Expanding the Limits of Life ” provides a fascinating account of the discovery of microbes in a previously unknown kind of hydrothermal vent ecosystem on the seafloor, it does not substantiate his claim that the findings hint that life may have originated in an environment like the Lost City hydrothermal vent.