Scientific American Online

By Elie Dolgin

Researchers have transformed human skin cells into stem cells similar to those in an embryo without using any reprogramming genes, just the viral vector normally used to deliver them.

The findings, reported last week at the International Society for Stem Cell Research annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif., challenge the conventional wisdom about what it takes to produce stem cells that are compatible with a specific patient.

"There needs to be a note of caution and respect for the way the virus works," says Andrew Baker, a gene therapy researcher at the University of Glasgow, UK. [More]

The acid rain scourge of the '70s and '80s that killed trees and fish and even dissolved parts of statues on Washington, D.C.'s National Mall is back. But unlike the first round, in which sulfur emissions from power plants mixed with rain to create sulfuric acid, the current problem stems primarily from nitrogen emissions mixed with rain to create nitric acid.

"Both are strong acids, and both create serious problems for the environment," says William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Acid rain degrades cement and limestone as well as leaches critical soil nutrients, which injures plants. It also liberates toxic minerals from the ground that flow into stream runoff where they can kill fish.

The body louse, a plague to humans and our ancestors for millions of years, subsists exclusively on our unwitting hospitality. Scientists have now parsed the modern human body louse's ( Pediculus humanus humanus ) genome, revealing a deep evolutionary dependence on humans and "remarkable completeness," despite being the shortest yet decoded in the insect group, the researchers wrote in a study published online June 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [More]

A geologic scar left by a catastrophic Texas flood in 2002 is providing an unexpected scientific benefit. A new study demonstrates how researchers can use a channel carved by floodwaters pouring over the dam of a flooded reservoir as a laboratory to test scientific theories of how such canyons are formed. The research could help to inform the hydrological histories of Earth and Mars by indicating the kind of imprints large, sudden floods leave on a planet's surface. [More]

The professor takes great care in how he speaks. He knows when to talk and when to smile, when a laugh can disarm his listeners and draw them into his point. When answering questions, he'll pause mid-sentence to repeat the questioner's name, then continue.

Lately he has been pondering this question: For decades, advocates have tried the emotional and rational sells for saving energy . Turn off the lights, program the air-conditioner, unplug idle appliances, and it'll either benefit the planet or save piles of cash. While these tactics have picked up some steam, millions of Americans remain unmoved.

Editor's Note: Vienna, Austria-based science writer Chelsea Wald is taking part in a two-week Marine Biological Laboratory journalism fellowship at Toolik Field Station , an environmental research post inside the Arctic circle. To see the current conditions in Toolik, check out the Webcam .

I packed my flashlight. That's really stupid. I'm above the Arctic Circle near summer solstice. The sun never sets. Never. It's like when my friend packed her umbrella to go to the Sahara. [More]

Have you been having some trouble getting some digits lately when you ask a girl out? Maybe you should check what music is playing. That’s what French psychologists found. They published their research in the journal Psychology of Music . [Nicolas Guéguen, Céline Jacob and Lubomir Lamy, http://bit.ly/9nXu6f ]

First the researchers found a guy who was rated average looking by a group of women. Then that average Antoine talked about a couple of food products with 87 different women, aged 18 to 20. But before the conversation, half the women heard this romantic French tune: Je L’aime a Mourir.

High levels of brominated flame retardants can alter pregnant women’s thyroid hormones , which are critical to a baby’s growth and brain development, according to a California study published Monday.

The study is considered important because it is the first human research showing a link between the ubiquitous chemicals and altered levels of the hormones in pregnant women. The effects on babies are unknown, but some researchers say it may lead to smaller fetuses, and reduce childen's intelligence and motor skills.

Editor's Note: A team of researchers led by John Kessler , Texas A&M College of Geosciences chief scientist and assistant oceanography professor, traveled to the Deepwater Horizon disaster area to study the methane leaking into the Gulf of Mexico (along with tens thousands of barrels of crude oil) daily at the site of the damaged Macondo 252 well. Kessler, along with David Valentine (a professor of marine sediment geochemistry, biogeochemistry and geomicrobiology at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and the rest of his colleagues were hoping to come away with a rough estimate of the spill's size by the time his team returned home on June 20, followed by more accurate estimates as they complete their analysis of the information collected. Other objectives of the expedition onboard the RV Cape Hatteras included trying to determine how the methane might be removed from the water (whether eaten by waterborne microorganisms or released into the atmosphere) and how methane concentrations will change over time. The following dispatch was written by Valentine and Texas A&M Ph.D. graduate student Eric Chan. This is the team's fifth blog post overall for Scientific American . [More]

The quiet, suburban neighborhoods and strip malls that line Route 128 , the main highway that circumscribes the Greater Boston area, hardly betray the area's high-tech firepower. Since the 1950s, this corridor has played host to seminal technology companies such as Digital Equipment Corp., Raytheon and Sun Microsystems.

Amidst this high-tech stew, the corridor has also become a hotbed for military robotics, particularly those that roll or even walk on terra firma. Companies such as Boston Dynamics , iRobot and QinetiQ , all live within about 10 miles of each other and manufacture the Big Dog, Packbot and TALON robots respectively.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This principle, called conservation of energy, is one of our most cherished laws of physics. It governs every part of our lives: the heat it takes to warm up a cup of coffee; the chemical reactions that produce oxygen in the leaves of trees; the orbit of Earth around the sun; the food we need to keep our hearts beating. We cannot live without eating, cars do not run without fuel, and perpetual-motion machines are just a mirage. So when an experiment seems to violate the law of energy conservation, we are rightfully suspicious. What happens when our observations seem to contradict one of science’s most deeply held notions: that energy is always conserved?

Skip for a moment outside our Earthly sphere and consider the wider universe. Almost all of our information about outer space comes in the form of light, and one of light’s key features is that it gets redshifted--its electromagnetic waves get stretched--as it travels from distant galaxies through our ever expanding universe, in accordance with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But the longer the wavelength, the lower the energy. Thus, inquisitive minds ask: When light is redshifted by the expansion of the universe, where does its energy go? Is it lost, in violation of the conservation principle?

A newfound subspecies that hasn't even been properly named yet could be wiped out by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, its discoverer has now warned.

The Louisiana pancake batfish, a previously unknown subspecies of pancake batfish ( Halieutichthys aculeatus ), was discovered six months ago by Prosanta Chakrabarty , assistant professor and curator of ichthyology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Sciences in Baton Rouge.

As I type this letter, I am sitting in a hotel room in Barcelona, Spain, having just completed an important but little-known meeting: the twice-a-year gathering of editors and other members of Scientific American’s international editions. Reflecting the scientific enterprise itself, the producers of the 14 local-language editions are spread around the world. Although we are in frequent e-mail and phone contact through­out the year, we also meet in person in various cities, the better to learn from one another.

Around the long table were representatives from Brazil, China, Japan, Kuwait, Russia and essentially every European nation. Our collective readership is a diverse audience that numbers more than one million, but they all share a passion for science and technology. And we, as editors, share a common mission to comb the globe for the science that matters, the better to serve those readers. Members of the editions traded intelligence on best practices and also shared new ideas. One initiative, which I expect to be under way on www.ScientificAmerican.com by the time you read this, is to conduct global surveys about science topics , working together and also in partnership with the journal Nature (which is in the same Macmillan corporate family). I will report further in the coming months.

By Erika Solomon

DUBAI (Reuters) - Driving along brand new highways with medians of lush trees and manicured grass, one could easily forget the United Arab Emirates sits on a sweltering desert coast with rapidly diminishing freshwater resources.

Mini robot vacuums are one thing, but larger robots may soon become a part of everyday life for the elderly, performing tasks that could help delay the dreaded move of loved ones to a nursing home or assisted living facility. Researchers and robotics companies worldwide are designing prototypes to provide automated assistance to the elderly at home, targeting a market that promises to grow as people live longer. [More]

By Tom Bergin and Ernest Scheyder

LONDON/BURAS, Louisiana (Reuters) - BP shares fell on Monday after a U.S. lawmaker released an internal company document over the weekend pegging the worst-case scenario rate for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill far higher than government figures.

The NOAA ship Pisces discovered a dead sperm whale on June 15--a possible victim of the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  

There are at least 1,600 such sperm whales in the Gulf, according to marine biologist Thomas Shirley of Texas A&M University. Minus one.  

Claiming that something can move faster than light is a good conversation-stopper in physics. People edge away from you in cocktail parties; friends never return phone calls. You just don't mess with Albert Einstein. So when I saw a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting this past January on faster-than-light phenomena in the cosmos, my first reaction was to say, "Terribly sorry, but I really have to go now." Astrophysicists have been speaking of FTL motion for years, but it was always just a trick of the light that lent the impression of warp speed, a technicality of wave motion, or an exotic consequence of the expansion of the universe. These researchers were claiming a very different sort of trick. Dubious though I was, I put their press release in my "needs more thought" folder and today finally got around to taking a closer look. And what I've found is utterly fascinating.

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By Eileen O'Grady

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The Sierra Club has appealed a state utility commission vote that allows a Southern Co utility to build an expensive advanced coal-fired plant.