Scientific American Online

By Declan Butler

"Drug firms 'encouraged world health body to exaggerate swine flu threat'," screamed Britain's Daily Mail newspaper on June 4. [More]

By Kristen Hays

HOUSTON (Reuters) - British energy giant BP Plc said on Tuesday it had sharply increased the amount of oil it was capturing from its ruptured Gulf of Mexico well, but it is not clear how much crude is still gushing out.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are no longer just gizmos in a geek's garage or military tools that fly reconnaissance missions considered too dangerous for humans. They are increasingly being used for scientific study. And this spring, a UAV dedicated to research science made aerial history.

On May 6, a diminutive aircraft called the Tempest was the first official UAV to intercept a supercell thunderstorm , the type of storm that produces tornadoes. The aircraft and its crew of engineers from the University of Colorado at Boulder (C.U.–Boulder) and meteorologists from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln are a critical part of an armada of 100 storm-chasing scientists conducting the largest study of tornadoes in history. The two-year field experiment known as VORTEX 2 , running from May 1 through to June 15 this year, will help scientists better understand when and how tornadoes form. Teams travel across the Midwest in tight formation chasing and surrounding tornadic storms to measure wind speed, temperature, humidity and pressure using mobile radar trucks, anemometers, disdrometers and balloon launchers.

NEW YORK--When it comes to brain power, we humans like to think we're the animal kingdom's undisputed champions. But in the past few decades we've had to make a lot of room on our mantle place for shared trophies. Problem-solving? Sorry, but crows and octopuses do that too. Tool use? Primates, birds and even fish have learned that trick. It turns out our human cognitive abilities are just not as unique as we once thought. [More]

Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the second-biggest natural satellite in the solar system, is an unquestionably interesting place. It's a world with a thick atmosphere and with lakes, fog and rainfall--only with liquid hydrocarbons rather than liquid water. [More]

In an effort to stem the tide of oil washing ashore in Louisiana, small "berms" of sand now plug gaps in barrier islands along the coast. Such structures are intended to provide a barrier to oil penetrating into marshes and other wetlands, where it can persist for decades. Already, more than 250 kilometers of coastline have been touched by the output of the ongoing oil spill, which has now spewed as much as 170 million liters of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico. [More]

It’s refreshing. It’s invigorating. And it leaves you feeling truly alive. No, I’m not talking about a cold shower or a fruit smoothie with a mochachino chaser. I’m talking about nature. Because according to a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology , getting outside--or even just thinking about it--can increase your vitality. [Richard Ryan et al., http://bit.ly/c01WHQ ] [More]

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How pleasurable and desirable does this image of chocolate cake appear to you? [More]

The gold standard for certifying "green" buildings fails to place enough emphasis on human health and needs to be upgraded, according to a new report from an environmental health group. [More]

Veterans of war have been known to suffer from high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and traumatic brain injury in addition to any physical wounds. And a new study of thousands of U.S. Army soldiers returning from combat duty in Iraq found up to 31 percent reported symptoms of PTSD or depression as long as a year after returning from the battlefield. [More]

The disastrous deluge of BP oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico evokes the memory of a blowout more than 40 years ago that, although not a carbon copy of the Deepwater Horizon incident, remains hauntingly similar in several important ways. The 1969 Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field spill in the Santa Barbara Channel was an unprecedented ecological disaster at the time caused by a natural gas-induced offshore rig blowout that caught the oil and gas industry off guard and required a tremendous effort to fix. [More]

Apple will start selling the iPhone 4 in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. on June 24, although customers can pre-order the new gadget beginning June 15 from Apple's Web site, it was announced Monday. The cost is expected to start at $200 for the 16-gigabyte model and $300 for the 32-gigabyte, with a two-year service contract. [More]

Doctors and other health professionals working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might have been illegally performing research on detainees after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a new report issued by the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights. [More]

Allan Savory 's project, titled "Operation Hope," is an ongoing effort to reverse the desertification that is spreading across the world's savannas and grasslands like a disease. It is rapidly changing farmland into deserts.

What makes the effort unusual for Savory, a biologist, is his use of what he called "the most universally condemned tool in the world" -- livestock. Farming is perhaps the oldest means by which humans have affected the world's climate.

By Kristen Hays

HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc said on Monday that its cap system at a seabed oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico captured 11,100 barrels of oil on Sunday, up slightly from the previous 24 hours, and the company planned to increase that amount to 20,000 barrels.

Surely if a dog is man's best friend, then dogs must also be the best buds of scientists and their pursuit of knowledge. Consider this statistic: assuming that dog ownership among scientists mirrors that of the U.S. population at large, there are just over half a million scientists who are dog owners in the U.S. alone. [More]

Our eyes swivel restlessly in their sockets during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, an aptly named period of intense dreaming that makes up 20 to 25 percent of total sleep time. Whether this fidgeting is random or serves a function has never been clear, but a new study suggests that our eyes shift their gaze to fixate on the imagined people, places and actions in our sleep dreamscape. In other words, the movements of dreaming eyes mimic those of waking eyes. [More]

As a decades-long fan of The Golden Girls , I was saddened to learn of the death of Rue McClanahan last week. In fact, I think I genuinely shed a palpable, detectable tear, which is something I can’t remember ever doing on the death of a celebrity, with the exception perhaps of Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty. It sounds rather homosexually cliché, I know, but my partner, Juan, and I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of The Golden Girls every night before bed. And along with the other “girls,” as we call them, Rue’s character Blanche Devereaux--the libidinous southern belle with an insatiable appetite for rich cheesecake and rich men--has become something of an imaginary, smile-inducing friend in our home. Fortunately, Blanche’s carnal spirit is burned forever on our DVDs. But the news of McClanahan’s death inspired me to read more about her in real life--well, at least to expend enough finger energy to flitter over to her Wikipedia entry. I knew she’d been an outspoken advocate of gays and lesbians, as well as animals, but I didn’t realize that her support for the former went all the way back to 1971. Just a few short years after the Stonewall Riots, she co-starred in a movie set in a Greenwich gay bar called Some of My Best Friends Are … as a “vicious fag hag". [More]

By Natasha Gilbert

Crocodiles are bad long-distance swimmers. [More]