Science News

It may not be long before we witness the extinction of one of the world's six species of tigers, the Amur (or Siberian) tiger ( Panthera tigris altaica ). As we have previously reported, Amur tiger populations have dropped precipitously in recent years to around 250 animals, and the species faces a genetic bottleneck that puts it at risk of inbreeding. Now, a mysterious illness has started spreading through the Amur population, causing the death of four adult tigers and several newborns in the past 10 months.

"We may be witnessing an epidemic in the Amur tiger population," Dale Miquelle, director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Russia Program, told the Guardian .

Award-winning writer and physicist Graham Farmelo talks with podcast host Steve Mirsky [ pictured ] about The Strangest Man, Farmelo's biography of Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. [More]

Editor's Note: We are republishing this article by Paul Dirac from the May 1963 issue of Scientific American , as it might be of interest to listeners to the June 24, 2010, and June 25, 2010 Science Talk podcasts, featuring award-winning writer and physicist Graham Farmelo discussing The Strangest Man , his biography of the Nobel Prize-winning British theoretical physicist.

In this article I should like to discuss the development of general physical theory: how it developed in the past and how one may expect it to develop in the future. One can look on this continual development as a process of evolution, a process that has been going on for several centuries. [More]

Editor's Note: Marine biologist William Gilly is on an expedition to study Humboldt squid on the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research vessel New Horizon in the Gulf of California. He and other scientists are learning about the giant squid, their biology and ecology on this National Science Foundation-funded expedition. This is his fourth blog post about the trip. [More]

Offshore wind turbines will line the Atlantic coast; vast solar arrays will cover swaths of the southwestern desert; transmission towers will cradle high-voltage direct current lines and take electricity from the windy Great Plains to the populated coasts. That is the renewable future for the U.S. that the Obama administration seems to envision and, certainly, what Jon Wellinghoff forecasts. And as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Wellinghoff has a better than even chance of making his vision a reality.

Already, FERC is rewriting the rules for new transmission lines, potentially making it easier to permit new electricity-carrying capacity--and, as a result, unleashing the development of more renewable resources. The commission released a new rule on June 17 that would require that mandates for renewable energy--enacted in 36 states nationwide--be taken into account when determining where and when new transmission lines get installed.

For those of you who like stories with simple plots and tidy endings, I must confess the tale of the Human Genome Project isn't one of those. The story didn't reach its conclusion when we unveiled the first draft of the human genetic blueprint at the White House on June 26, 2000. Nor did it end on April 14, 2003, with the completion of a finished, reference sequence. [More]