Scientific American Online

In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude , Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health.

In a 21st-century parallel to the townspeople of Macondo, a few hundred residents from Medellín, Colombia, and nearby coffee-growing areas may get a chance to assist in the search for something akin to a real-life version of the gypsy’s concoction. Medellín and its environs are home to the world’s largest contingent of individuals with a hereditary form of Alzheimer’s disease. Members of 25 extended families, with 5,000 members, develop early-onset Alzheimer’s, usually before the age of 50, if they harbor an aberrant version of a particular gene.

How do you stop a leaking oil well nearly two kilometers beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico? The latest effort, following the insert that siphoned some fraction of the gushing petroleum, will be to pump a mixture of thick drilling mud into the well in an attempt to stop it up like clogging a toilet. BP itself gives the operation a roughly 60 percent chance of working and hopes to undertake it on May 26.

By Emma Marris

Endlessly energetic scholar David Sloan Wilson is best known for his work on group selection--the idea that natural selection can operate on traits that improve the success of groups rather than individuals.

As well as running a cross-disciplinary evolutionary studies program from his home institution of Binghamton University in New York and opening the Evolution Institute think tank to inform public policy, he recently began studying altruism in Binghamton neighborhoods and is promoting the field of evolutionary religious studies. [More]

On a crowded mid-afternoon train from Oxford to Manchester several weeks ago, I found myself seated beside a smiling, elderly woman and--as such things go--we soon fell into conversation. Now, it’s easy for one to forget in such situations that one is in fact speaking to an animal; little old ladies are notoriously crafty at creating the illusion that you are conversing with something other than an anomalous kind of ape . But as luck would have it, I had been left immune that day against such deceptions owing to a peculiar conversation with an anthropologist colleague at Oxford, a conversation that left me in a state of mind in which even grandmotherly charms couldn’t keep me from noticing the spirited old ape before me. The hour-and-a-half journey to Manchester saw us meandering through stories of her childhood in Ireland, her many travels, a fruitless marriage to a now-dead husband whom she never really loved, her cats, her wayward niece ... but throughout all this my mind kept returning to the one unutterable, burning question that I’d first boarded with at the Oxford train station: what did this old woman remember about having her first period ?

My curiosity was inspired by the peculiar conversation mentioned before. That morning, my anthropologist colleague had called my attention to a fascinating study--a study now long in the tooth in its own right--published by University of New Hampshire psychologist David Pillemer and his colleagues in a 1987 issue of the Journal of Adolescence . Pillemer, best known for his work in the area of “ flashbulb memories ” (especially vivid memories of surprising, emotionally intense events that people can recall in extraordinary detail and with great confidence, although the accuracy of these recollections is often questionable), discovered that adult women who were uninformed as girls about the bloody practicalities of getting their first period had much more vivid, detailed memories of the event than those who had known what to expect. The women who’d been unprepared as girls could tell you exactly what they were doing when it happened, what they were wearing, who was in the room, and so on, whereas the women who’d been prepared in advance as girls could hardly recall a thing about their first period.

By Mark Schrope

With oil still gushing from an offshore well in the Gulf of Mexico, some scientists and environmentalists worry that US federal agencies have not done enough to gather precious data on the spill, now into its second month. [More]

The last (and only) defense against the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is tiny--billions of hydrocarbon-chewing microbes, such as Alcanivorax borkumensis . In fact, the primary motive for using the more than 830,000 gallons of chemical dispersants on the oil slick both above and below the surface of the sea is to break the oil into smaller droplets that bacteria can more easily consume. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: How effective have plastic bag bans and restrictions been on reducing plastic litter and other problems associated with their proliferation? And is it really better to use paper bags, which will just lead to more deforestation? --Peter Lindsey, New Canaan, Conn.

By Kristen Hays and Sarah Irwin

HOUSTON/VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Facing growing calls to take charge of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill response, the White House insisted on Tuesday that only BP Plc had the tools to plug the energy giant's gushing well.

A new generation of medical devices using wireless communications, sophisticated software and data center-driven "cloud" computing promises to deliver health care in ways previously limited to the confines of fancy hospital rooms. [More]

I’ll admit it. I am partial to neutrinos. And I always have been.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fictionlike contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

It’s often said we know more about the moon than we do about the depths of the ocean. There is a lot we don’t know about the H2O that covers much of the planet. Now we’re getting closer, though, to an important understanding: Just how deep are the oceans, and what’s the volume of all that water? The latest, best estimate is 1.332 billion cubic kilometers, according to research published in the journal Oceanography . [Matthew Charette and Walter Smith, http://bit.ly/diOgbh ]

That’s actually lower than previous estimates by about five Gulf of Mexicos. It’s not that there’s less water out there. Rather, new satelite images have presented a clearer image of all the mountain ranges strewn across the ocean floor. Those peaks displace what we’d thought of as space for water.

By Matthew Bigg

By Steve Gorman

Editor's Note: Douglas Hofstadter gave permission to Scientific American to post this essay in light of the death of Martin Gardner, who wrote the magazine's "Mathematical Games" column for 25 years and published more than 70 books. Gardner died May 22, at 95.

I've been trying to reconstruct how I first encountered Martin Gardner . It may have happened in 1959, when at age 14 I happened to visit the home of a boy a couple of years older than myself, who I thought was extremely smart (and indeed he was--he later became a well-known mathematician on the Princeton faculty). While scanning his bookshelves, I noticed a Dover paperback with the curious title Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science . I pulled it out and my curiosity was further aroused by the front cover, which mentioned such things as flying saucers, human gullibility, strange cults, pseudoscience, and so on. I had of course heard of things like telepathy, ESP, and such, but didn't know what to make of them. Though they seemed a bit far-fetched, they also appealed to my romantic nature. The year before, I had even half-convinced myself that I could discover my romantic fate by spinning a top and seeing where it fell on a marked board; I also enjoyed the thought that maybe, just maybe, the first initial of the girl I would someday marry was revealed by reciting the alphabet as I twisted an apple stem and stopping at that letter when the stem broke off. Why not?  At that tender and rather gullible age, I had never devoted much thought to the demarcation line between sense and nonsense, science and silliness. [More]

The great spine-chilling Tyrannosaurus rex has a reputation for having killed its prey in cold blood . But was this ancient dinosaur really a cold-blooded ectotherm ? [More]