Scientific American Online

By Elie Dolgin

The HIV-like virus that infects monkeys is at least 100,000 if not millions of years old, scientists reported this week at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. [More]

Understanding the nuances of infectious diseases--in particular malaria , which killed about one million people worldwide in 2008 --is a crucial step toward wiping them out. However, getting a clear picture of how malaria spreads and how it responds to eradication efforts means accessing a daunting amount of data from a variety of sources, the type of job best suited to a number-crunching supercomputer. [More]

While climate change may increase the occurrence of malaria , the effect can be almost completely offset by adopting control strategies such as bed netting, spraying and anti-malarial drugs, according to a paper published in the journal Nature .

"There are many claims about malaria increasing over the future climate change scenario," said Pete Gething, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford . "But it will be a small, negligible factor compared to present measures to counter it."

With a scan through a sample of genomes from several individuals, researchers can tease out links among genetic variations and particular diseases . These genome-wide association studies have clarified some of the genes involved in predisposing people for  rheumatoid arthritis, bipolar disorder, Crohn's disease, diabetes and other disorders, paving the way for new study and better treatments. [More]

Editor's Note: William Gilly , a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group's ninth blog post. [More]

Ripples in the fabric of spacetime could someday provide observational evidence for the goings-on in the earliest instants of the universe, revealing high-energy processes that currently remain opaque to even the largest particle colliders . [More]

By Matthew Bigg

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - BP Plc on Friday fended off accusations that it had not fully disclosed the size of a month-old seabed leak billowing brown crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in a spreading environmental disaster.

[Silence.] [More]

In early March, Harris Interactive conducted an on-line survey to gauge the attitudes of Americans toward President Barack Obama. The Harris Poll generated some fascinating data. For example, 40 percent of those polled believe Obama is a socialist. (He’s not--ask any socialist.) Thirty-two percent believe he is a Muslim. (I had predicted that a Mormon, Jew, Wiccan, atheist and Quetzalcoatl worshipper would become president before America elected a Muslim, so a third of this country actually may be quite open-minded, in an obtuse way.) Also, 14 percent believe that Obama may be the Antichrist. Of those who identified themselves as Republicans, 24 percent think Obama might be.

Scientific polling may include multiple questions designed to measure the internal consistency of the responses of those being surveyed. To measure the consistency of the responses of those who think Obama might be the Antichrist, we have prepared an extension of the poll.

By Zeeya Merali

Quantum cryptography isn't as invincible as many researchers thought: a commercial quantum key has been fully hacked for the first time.

In theory, quantum cryptography--the use of quantum systems to encrypt information securely--is perfectly secure. [More]

NEW YORK--One-size-fits-all treatments are particularly rare in the mental health world, where each patient's ailments can seem unique. [More]

Two years ago, the world's smallest water lily, a plant known as Nymphaea thermarum whose pads reach only one centimeter in diameter, disappeared from its only habitat, a few square meters near a hot spring in Mashyuza, Rwanda. Local agriculture had drained the spring of most of its water, and as a result, the water lily became extinct in the wild.

Luckily, a few samples had been collected 10 years earlier by the man who discovered the species in 1985, botanist Eberhard Fischer of Koblenz-Landau University in Germany. But unfortunately, the tiny plant proved almost impossible to propagate.

Is life special, so special that we cannot understand it, much less create it? Are living things endowed with some sort of special power, force or property that distinguishes the inorganic from the organic, the living from the dead?  Can life be nothing more than the precise interaction of physical stuff? [More]

This story was updated at 5:00 p.m.

The first microbe to live entirely by genetic code synthesized by humans has started proliferating at a lab in the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Venter and his colleagues used a synthetic genome--the genetic instruction set for life--to build and operate a new, synthetic strain of Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria, according to an online report published May 20 by Science . [More]

Why do some chords sound sweet but others make you wince? Well it appears our ears--or at least the ears of 250 Minnesota undergrads--prefer chords containing harmonically related frequencies, according to a study in the journal Current Biology . [McDermott et al, www.current-biology.com ]

Even a simple note on my guitar has an array of harmonic frequencies. But the frequencies have a special harmonic relationship, which is why you hear it as a single sound with a single pitch.

The Large Hadron Collider may be up and running outside Geneva, but the particle accelerator it supplanted as top dog in the particle physics community appears to have a few surprises left to deliver. Data from the workhorse Tevatron collider at Fermilab in Illinois show what appears to be a preference for matter over antimatter in the way an unusual kind of particle decays, according to a new analysis in a Tevatron research collaboration. [More]

By Matthew Bigg

By Daniel Trotta

In his 1776 work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith identified the cause in a single variable: “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Today we call this free trade or market capitalism, and since the recession it has become de rigueur to dis the system as corrupt, rotten or deeply flawed.

If we pull back and take a long-horizon perspective, however, the free exchange between people of goods, services and especially ideas leads to trust between strangers and prosperity for more people. Think of it as ideas having sex. That is what zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley calls it in his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010). Ridley is optimistic that “the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all.”