Scientific American Online

By Andrea Swalec

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Rising global temperatures might already be helping infectious diseases to creep north, according to a report by European scientists.

Onboard navigation and mobile applications can tell drivers how to avoid traffic jams. Trouble is, most of the drivers are already on the road, perhaps already in the jam. But IBM is about to deploy a system that will predict traffic flow up to an hour before it occurs, giving travelers ample time to avoid trouble.

During pilot tests in Singapore, forecasts made across 500 urban locations accurately predicted traffic volume 85 to 93 percent of the time and vehicle speed 87 to 95 percent of the time. Similar results were achieved in Finland and on the New Jersey Turnpike.

By Eugenie Samuel Reich

They are more than a 100 times the mass of the Sun, glow more than 10 million times as brightly, and, over the course of their lives, spew out more than half their mass in the form of a relentless stellar wind. [More]

BP's efforts to drill relief wells are generally viewed as the company's best, and perhaps only, chance to plug the Macondo 252 well gushing thousands of barrels of oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico each day for the past month and a half. With the first relief well nearly two months away, however, BP has wiped a bit of sweat from its collective brow as the lower marine riser package (LMRP) cap installed June 3 has begun collecting an increasing amount of oil each day, according to the company. [More]

Talk about vintage footwear--an international team of archaeologists has discovered the world's oldest leather shoe. One thousand years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the 5,500-year-old shoe was perfectly preserved by the cool, dry conditions in the sheep dung–lined cave in Armenia where it was found.

"We thought initially that the shoe and other objects were about 600 to 700 years old because they were in such good condition," Ron Pinhasi said in a prepared statement. He is the lead author on a paper describing the relic , published June 9 in PLoS One . It was only when two tiny strips of leather and some straw from inside the shoe were carbon-dated by independent labs in California and Oxford, England, that the team realized how old the shoe really was--a few hundred years older than those worn by Ötzi, the Iceman .

Saturn is perhaps best known for its intricate ring system, but the giant planet also boasts a collection of moons, numbering in the dozens, that is nothing to sniff at. The largest, Titan , has helped draw a bit more attention to the Saturnian satellites in recent days, following an announcement that various chemical abundances on Titan were consistent with but not necessarily indicative of the presence of methane-dwelling, hydrogen-breathing life. [More]

PITTSBURGH -- Chuck Wichrowski remembers the first car he ever worked on, when he was just a college graduate and knew nothing about cars: His wife's 1970 Chevy Nova.

The second? A 1964 Studebaker Wagonaire.

Bubbles. Big ones entertain children and tiny ones tickle champagne aficionados. Even witches appreciate what they bring to a boiling cauldron. If you, too, are a bubble lover, then you’ll enjoy the latest bubble study published in the journal Nature . In it, scientists show that a bursting bubble can leave in its wake a ring of smaller bubbles, a finding that could have implications for disease transmission. [James Bird et al., http://bit.ly/c9dEFy ] [More]

A sting from a tiny bee triggers a long chain of events. In addition to promoting inflammation and inhibiting coagulation, the molecular hodge-podge that is bee venom can actually cause cells to split open. The toxin responsible for this effect is melittin, and in high enough concentrations, it can be deadly.

When toxins, bacteria and viruses enter the body, they're eventually met by antibodies uniquely designed to recognize and remove intruders. At least they should be. In some instances antibodies are produced slowly or not at all, leaving foreign invaders free to circulate in the blood unchecked, spreading infection and leaving host cells open to attack.

By Michael Szabo

The Selmunett lizard ( Podarcis filfolensis ssp. kieselbachi ) of Malta has been extinct since 2005, contrary to a government report that claims it still exists, the Nature Trust (Malta) announced this week. The lizard existed only on Selmunett Island, part of the archipelago that makes up the nation of Malta. Despite research that says the species is extinct, the lizard still appears on the Malta Environment & Planning Authority's (MEPA) most recent "State of the Environment" report, published in March.

Naturalist Arnold Sciberras blames the decline and disappearance of the Selmunett lizard on invasive rats, which have grown in number on the island in the past two decades. Sciberras and his brother Jeffrey have studied the once-common lizards for years and noticed that the population began crashing in the mid-1990s. The last time they saw the lizards was in 2003, when they were able to find just 30 of the animals. "MEPA doesn't want to acknowledge that its conservation attempts have failed in some cases," Sciberras told MaltaToday .

Premature infants have a known higher risk for poor neurological development, often leading to developmental and educational issues. However, these babies, born before 37 weeks, make up a small number of any generation, and new research shows that the 40 percent of babies born any more than a week before a full 40-week term are also at higher risk for having special education needs during childhood. [More]

In fall 1976 the first recorded Ebola outbreak ravaged a small village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). The virus, named for the river valley where it was found, causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever. It spread quickly via contact with blood and contaminated needles killing nearly 90 percent of the 318 villagers it infected. Since then about 2,300 human cases have been reported, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , 85 percent of which were fatal.

After identifying a new strain called " Ebola-Reston " during a 1989 outbreak scare in Reston, Va., (and earning a central role in Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone ) Thomas Geisbert had tried everything to quash the virus, which continues to threaten civilians and medical aid providers in Africa as well as scientists who work in the highest level biocontainment facilities around the world. Vaccines have protected monkeys, and therefore might protect humans from the ensuing fever when given prophylactically (before exposure), but such treatments offer little hope for those already exposed to the virus.

For the past two decades archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Bristol in England has been studying our closest cousins, the Neandertals, who occupied Eurasia for more than 200,000 years before mysteriously disappearing some 28,000 years ago. Experts in this field have long debated just how similar Neandertal cognition was to our own. Occupying center stage in this controversy are a handful of Neandertal sites that contain cultural remains indicative of symbol use--including jewelry--a defining element of modern human behavior. Zilhão and others argue that Neandertals invented these symbolic traditions on their own, before anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago. Critics, however, believe the items originated with moderns.

But this past January, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA , Zilhão and his colleagues reported on finds that could settle the dispute: pigment-stained seashells from two sites in Spain dated to nearly 50,000 years ago--10,000 years before anatomically modern humans made their way to Europe. Zilhão recently discussed the implications of his team’s new discoveries with Scientific American staff editor Kate Wong. An edited version of their conversation follows.

By Heleen Van Geest

ZELENGA, Russia (Reuters) - As glum Russian fishermen haul in their net, just two small sturgeon are splashing about among the daily catch.

Images of oil-caked brown pelicans ( Pelecanus occidentalis ) have hit the front pages of countless U.S. newspapers and other media in the past week, driving home the still-growing impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. So far, dozens of pelicans have been transported to rescue centers for treatment. The number is only expected to rise as the oil spill spreads and covers Louisiana's Queen Bess Island Pelican Rookery and other important breeding sites.

It is quite a blow for a species that was on the endangered species list until just six months ago . It had taken brown pelicans nearly 50 years to recover from the devastating effects of DDT and other pesticides that nearly wiped them out. In fact, the species was nonextant in Louisiana and had to be reintroduced to the area from a colony in Florida. Queen Bess Island, one of the primary breeding sites responsible for the resurgence of the birds, had to be stabilized after oil companies nearly destroyed the local wetlands so they could lay pipes.

In a previous post, " Grassroots spying will make world peace possible," I argued that the spread of technologies that allow us to spy on each other might also make us safer. New York Press smacked me for having "elevated the idea of no-privacy to jaw-dropping levels." The writer, Matt Harvey, quotes some pro-privacy guy wondering whether my "pro-intelligence rhetoric" reflects my "clandestine corporate or intelligence connections."

Well, I do own a little Apple stock; I would have owned more but I sold most of it in February after my kids showed me an Internet video of Hitler ranting about the soon-to-be-released iPad ; naturally the stock subsequently soared. Also, I once consulted for the National Counterterrorism Center , an episode that I'll describe if someone asks nicely. But I promise that no insidious motives--unless yearning for peace counts as insidious--lurk beneath my hopes for omnidirectional spying.

When the body does not properly manage insulin levels, diabetes and other metabolic disorders are familiar outcomes. That hormonal imbalance, however, has also been linked to a higher risk for psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia . And a new study has uncovered a potential pathway by which this metabolic hormone can upset the balance of a key neurotransmitter. [More]

By Rex Dalton

At the northern end of the Gulf of California, where the Baja peninsula joins the rest of Mexico, the world's most endangered marine mammal is inching closer to extinction.

With adults only 1.5 meters long, the vaquita ( Phocoena sinus ), a rare porpoise found only in these waters, epitomizes the plight of small cetaceans, which bear the brunt of pollution, ship traffic and fishing because they live in rivers and coastal areas. [More]

By Eric Hand

As an engineer, Subra Suresh has made a career of studying stress and fatigue: from aluminum alloys in planes and silicon wafers in chips, to the walls of cells infected with malaria. [More]