Scientific American Online

A tony social club in midtown Manhattan is not the place one might expect to find a verbal sparring match between famous physicists. But that was the case April 23 at the Harmonie Club , when Alan Guth and David Gross had a feisty off-the-cuff debate about Guth's model for the dawn of the universe. Perhaps in keeping with their genteel surroundings, the two kept their jabs mostly playful, but a few may have stung nonetheless. [More]

By Carlos Barria

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - A massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico washed up to wildlife refuges and seafood grounds on the Louisiana coast on Friday, as authorities struggled to avert what could become one of the worst U.S. ecological disasters.

The benefits of breast milk for babies are numerous. Lower rates of childhood obesity, decreased incidence of asthma and even better brain development are all linked with drinking more of mother's milk in infancy, and despite decades of research and promising marketing claims, the formula industry has not caught up to mother nature in the milk department. [More]

For pianists and guitarists, small fingers are a curse. [More]

A pregnant woman knows she is shaping her child's future from the moment of conception. But she might not realize that the baby is already talking back. Mother and child are engaged in a silent chemical conversation throughout pregnancy, with bits of genetic material and cells passing not only from mother to child but also from child to mother. Scientists increasingly think these silent signals from the fetus may influence a mother's risk of cancer , rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases, even decades after she has given birth. [More]

MAY 1960 DEVELOPING INFANTS -- “We expected that the shocked rats would be affected by their experience, and we looked for signs of emotional disorder when they reached adulthood. To our surprise it was the second control group--the rats we had not handled at all--that behaved in a peculiar manner. The behavior of the shocked rats could not be distinguished from that of the control group which had experienced the same handling but no electric shock. Thus the results of our first experiment caused us to reframe our question. Our investigation at the Columbus Psychiatric Institute and Hospital of Ohio State University has since been concerned not so much with the effects of stressful experience--which after all is the more usual experience of infants--as with the effects of the absence of such experience in infancy. --Seymour Levine”

How do you save critically endangered gorillas? One idea, currently being tested by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), is to introduce snails to Nigeria.

More specifically, snail farming . The idea is that snail farming could provide both a revenue stream and a new source of protein for Nigerians, making the poaching of gorillas less attractive.

By Richard A. [More]

The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill keeps getting worse--now gushing more than 200,000 gallons per day , according to NOAA estimates--five times more than original estimates and more than BP's absolute worst case scenario in disaster plans filed with the government. That may not change any time soon. The last big blowout, at Ixtoc off Mexico in 1979, took almost a year to stop and spilled some 140 million gallons of oil before it was through, making it still the second largest oil spill ever (Saddam Hussein's intentional opening of the Kuwaiti and Iraqi wells during the first Gulf War remains, by far, the largest oil spill at roughly 1 billion gallons .) [More]

Andrée Marion, a 47-year-old accountant from St. Sauveur, Quebec, has mirror movements--involuntary motions on one side of her body that mirror voluntary ones on the other. When she does things that require fine movements, like brushing her hair, reaching for change in her pocket or holding her coffee with her right hand, her left hand strokes, dips or grips in synchrony. She can't help it; it just happens. It also happens to her 19-year-old son. In fact, of Marion's 23 blood relatives spanning four generations, about half have mirror movements. It turns out they also have a rare gene defect, giving scientists new insight into how our bodies are wired.

Dear EarthTalk: I see a lot of “healthy snacks” being marketed for kids that list “natural flavors” but don’t identify them. Should I use these products? --John Stein, Methuen, Mass.

Jaimee Alkinani and her husband had just bought their first home in a quiet suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. The three-bedroom house was in a nice neighborhood: tree-lined street, kids riding their bikes down the sidewalk, and friendly neighbors who waved when they passed. The family was on their way -- they'd also just opened a small business near their home, had an 11-month-old child, and Jaimee was eight months pregnant. Life had officially started for the Alkinanis. But soon things turned for the worse.

A few days after they had moved in, a neighbor welcomed them with disturbing news. "Your house used to be a meth lab," he said--a fact that the seller had never disclosed. So they called their realtor. He told them not to worry, that the house had been decontaminated. He even produced a certificate from the local health department to prove it.

By Chris Baltimore

After spending years fighting claims that cell phone use can cause brain tumors, industry reps may be getting some welcome news. A new study suggests cell phone radiation may actually have a beneficial biological effect--two hours of exposure a day staved off Alzheimer’s disease in mice.

Scientists at the University of South Florida studied mice that are genetically predisposed to develop Alzheimer’s and its accompanying memory problems. Based on previous research, the researchers hypothesized that radiation from phones would accelerate progression of the disease be­cause other types of radiation cause free radical damage. The team used an antenna to expose some of the mice to electromagnetic waves that approximated two hours of daily cell phone use. To the scientists’ surprise, the mice that were dosed with cell phone radiation did not suffer from memory impairments as they aged--unlike their radiation-free counterparts. The mice exposed to phone waves retained their youthful ability to navigate a once familiar maze after time spent in different mazes.

The statistic is hard to swallow: in the U.S., nearly one in three children under the age of 18 is overweight or obese, making being overweight the most common childhood medical condition. These youngsters are likely to become heavy adults, putting them at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other chronic ailments. In February, First Lady Michelle Obama announced a campaign to fight childhood obesity. Helping parents and schools to instill healthier habits in kids is an important strategy in this battle. But the government must take further steps to solve the problem.

In an ideal world, adults would teach children how to eat healthily and would lead by example. But in reality, two thirds of U.S. adults are themselves overweight or obese. Moreover, the food and beverage industry markets sugar- and fat-laden goods to kids directly--through commercials on television, product placement in movies and video games, and other media. Its considerable efforts--nearly $1.7 billion worth in 2007--have met with sickening success: a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that children who see more television ads tend to become fatter. You might expect that watching TV, being a sedentary activity, is responsible for obesity, but the study found that obesity is correlated not with television per se but with advertising. The more commercial programming children watched, the fatter they got compared with those who watched a comparable amount of public television or DVDs. The majority of products marketed during children’s programming are foods.

Any school kid can tell you that comets are made of ice. That frozen water burning off is what gives comets their characteristic tails. But asteroids were generally thought to be dry. Or at least frost-free. Now two studies published in the journal Nature [Andrew Rivkin and Joshua Emery, http://bit.ly/bkL3DU and Humberto Campins et al, http://bit.ly/bI8Eqa ] suggest that notion may be all wet. Because at least one asteroid appears to be coated by a thin layer of ice. And just that kind of asteroidal frosting could have been the source of our water here on Earth. [More]

This past weekend, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking joined what seems to be a growing chorus of cautious naysayers--or nervous nellies?--when it comes to possible contact with intelligent aliens from other worlds. He warned viewers of his Discovery Channel program that contact would be unwise, because the aliens might be seeking new resources and could prove hostile, the way Europeans were to the natives of the New World.   [More]

By Alla Katsnelson

Researchers looking for the genetic roots of disease have long dreamed of inspecting a patient's entire DNA sequence for telltale changes--now achievable thanks to the falling cost of sequencing. [More]