Scientific American Online

Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit are studying injury-related and other information gathered electronically from last year's Detroit Free Press Marathon in preparation for this year's race in October. The goal of the race's organizers is to better position medical staff and other services that help runners along the 26.2-mile route. The experiment also serves as a petri dish for studying the value of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) . [More]

By Matthew Bigg

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Energy giant BP Plc was under siege on Monday over the catastrophic oil spill from its ruptured Gulf of Mexico well, as its shares fell and the U.S. government pressed it to try to limit a major environmental disaster.

The true impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico won't be known for weeks--if not months or years--but already the spreading oil presents a danger to the region's threatened and endangered species.

One of the first species to face risk could be the brown pelican ( Pelecanus occidentalis ), which has just entered its breeding season on Louisiana's coastal islands, including the Chandeleur Islands, which the oil reached over the weekend. The brown pelican was just removed from the endangered species list last year.

Charles Darwin 's studies of heredity, adaptation and evolution included many experiments into the effects of crossbreeding and inbreeding in both plants and animals. Such consanguineous pairing often resulted in weaker, more sickly descendants. [More]

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A former president of Princeton University will lead a review of the U.N. panel of climate scientists after errors in a 2007 report used as a guide for fighting global warming, science academies said on Monday.

Economist Harold Shapiro, 74, will chair the 12-member committee that is due to report by August 30 on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Say a teenager takes the car without permission and crashes it. Or pole jumps off a bridge into white water. Bruised, broken or worse, arrested, the first words out of a parent's mouth are: What were you thinking? [More]

SUTHERLAND, South Africa--High on an arid plateau, an international group of visiting astronomers stands squinting into a simmering orange sunset. Giddy just to be here, they scramble atop a cluster of ancient volcanic boulders to peer over the edge of a vast camouflage green overlook. They have been attending an international conference in Cape Town on communicating astronomy with the public and are only too excited to finally be on the grounds of Africa's premier astronomical observatory. [More]

Old age brings with it a host of physical woes, and among the most common is hearing loss. Forty percent of Americans older than 65 suffer from hearing loss, and by 2030 some 65 million Americans will be hard of hearing.

Now joint work by researchers at the universities of Wisconsin, Florida, Washington and Tokyo has uncovered the mechanism behind age-related hearing loss, and with the help of simple chemicals, they have managed to keep old mice hearing as well as young pups.

When my toddler hears a strange noise, he’ll say, “Mom, what does that sound look like?” His amusing phrasing innocently mixes sight and sound. But now a study in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that the brain actually links the audio with the visual. Because simply seeing a vase shatter activates the part of the brain that handles sound. [More]

By Zeeya Merali

The rain dance is getting a twenty-first-century revamp using laser technology. [More]

By Matthew Bigg

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - The United States suspended fishing across a wide swath of its Gulf of Mexico waters on Sunday as a spreading oil slick gushing from a ruptured undersea well threatened an environmental catastrophe.

Unless your father was a prince with a shady past , you probably haven't thought much about how related you are to a frog lately. But it turns out that about 80 percent of the genes known to cause diseases in humans have counterparts in the genome of Xenopus tropicalis --the western clawed frog native to sub-Saharan Africa.  

Scientists at the Joint Genome Institute in California revealed the Xenopus genome in the April 30 issue of Science . It's the first frog to have its genetic code cracked and the first amphibian.  

On May 1, more than 100 scientists will head out to the Midwest for the second part of VORTEX2 , the most ambitious study of tornadoes in history.  They plan to hunt down and literally surround twisters with a fleet of mobile radars, weather balloons, and ground instruments.  This is VORTEX2’s second and final season and the hope is to better understand how and when a tornado will form. [More]

Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina talks with podcast host Steve Mirsky [ left ] about the contents of the May issue, including articles on induced pluripotent stem cells, high-speed and maglev trains, and blindsight. [More]

The Geobacter bacterium could be the biofuel-generating machine of the future, producing energy-rich butanol costing as little as $2 per gallon.

A project seeking to accomplish this, headed by Derek Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst , received $1 million in funding today from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). It was not even the largest grant, with 37 projects receiving $106 million to further their research in this second round of funding.

Melting sea ice has accelerated warming in the Arctic, which in recent decades has warmed twice as quickly as the global average, according to a new study.

"The findings reinforce suggestions that strong positive ice-temperature feedbacks have emerged in the Arctic, increasing the changes of further rapid warming and sea ice loss," concludes the research published yesterday by the journal Nature .

More than 1,200 tornadoes rip through the U.S. Midwest in an average year, killing about 100 people and costing millions of dollars in damage. Currently the longest warning time meteorologists can give is a nerve-racking 13 minutes, with a 70 percent false alarm rate. [More]

Aphids can be a gardener’s nightmare. But they may be an evolutionary biologist’s dream. Because they’re pioneers in the history of life on Earth. For one thing, they’re now the only known animals to produce the chemical pigments called carotenoids, which help in cell repair and immunity. It’s the same stuff that makes tomatoes red.

More impressive, aphids got their ability to make carotenoids through a major shortcut. Millions of years back, they apparently grabbed the genes for making carotenoids directly from a carotenoid-producing fungus. And then incorporated those genes into the aphid genome. That’s according to a study in the April 30th issue of the journal Science . [Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik, http://bit.ly/928R4t ]