Scientific American Online

Many people assume that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic spread rapidly across the globe largely due to the sheer number of people hopping onto planes . But more than 120 years ago, trains and ships alone sped the transmission of the 1889 "Russian" flu so that it reached the U.S. 70 days after the virus' first peak in St. Petersburg and circled the globe in just a few months, according to a new analysis of historic data. [More]

In the suddenly zooming story of electric cars, it's the cars themselves that have tended to hog the spotlight.

Later this year, Nissan and GM will be the first to unveil their hyped first attempts at cars they hope will appeal to both America's inner motorist and its inner environmentalist: cars that get much or all of their fuel from electricity .

People who are resuscitated from near death often report strange sensory phenomena, such as memories “flashing before their eyes.” Now a rare assessment of brain activity just before death offers clues about why such experiences occur.

Anesthesiologist Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University Medical Center and his colleagues recently published a retrospective analysis of brain activity in seven sedated, critically ill patients as they were removed from life support. Using EEG recordings of neural electrical activity, Chawla found a brief but significant spike at or near the time of death--despite a preceding loss of blood pressure and associated drop in brain activity.

In 1970 the Soviet Union put a laser reflector on the moon, carried by a rover. A few months later, it disappeared. Some speculated that the rover had fallen into a crater or parked in such a way as to render the reflector inaccessible. Now, after 40 years on the lunar surface, the reflector has been found.

A team at U.C. San Diego had been searching for it. Earlier this year, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera provided images of the original landing area. A sunlit speck, miles from where the team was looking, turned out to be the rover and reflector. The San Diego team was quickly able to pinpoint the reflector’s location to within 10 meters.

The video my colleagues and I shot is amazing. A blind man is making his way down a long corridor strewn with boxes, chairs and other office paraphernalia. The man, known to the medical world as TN, has no idea the obstacles are there. And yet he avoids them all, here sidling carefully between a wastepaper basket and the wall, there going around a camera tripod, all without knowing he has made any special maneuvers. TN may be blind, but he has “blindsight”--the remarkable ability to respond to what his eyes can detect without knowing he can see anything at all. [To see the film of the experiment, go to www.ScientificAmerican.com/may2010/blindsight .]

TN’s blindness is of an extremely rare type, caused by two strokes he suffered in 2003. The strokes injured an area at the back of his brain called the primary visual cortex, first on his left hemisphere and five weeks later on the right. His eyes remained perfectly healthy, but with his visual cortex no longer receiving the incoming signals he became completely blind.

Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does--a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis--which combines data from several studies--that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.

After the death of her mother, Rosie had a fitful night, tossing and turning and getting up frequently. [More]

When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things -- airplanes that fly, radios that reach millions of listeners.  When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities -- such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions.  In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain.  When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science . This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic “firsts.” [More]

By Janelle Weaver

Mammals may possess the biochemical machinery to produce morphine--a painkiller found in the opium poppy, according to a new study.

Meinhart Zenk of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Mo., and colleagues detected traces of morphine in the urine of mice after injecting chemical precursors of the drug. [More]

By Janet Fang

For the first time in a quarter of a century, commercial whaling on the open seas could be condoned--and scientists are working to figure out exactly how much should be allowed.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) released a controversial proposal on 22 April which would allow limited hunting in the hope of achieving an enforceable, consensus agreement that would include Japan, Iceland and Norway, which have caught more than 33,000 whales since the 1986 IWC moratorium on commercial whaling. [More]

Editor's note: Joshua Hartshorne is a graduate student at Harvard University's Psychology Department interested in human behavior and language. He wrote the open letter below because HBO is currently creating a new fantasy language, called "Dothraki," for an upcoming television adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones . At least some fans are guaranteed to try to learn Dothraki, just as thousands have studied Klingon, Sindarin and Na'vi. The letter to Martin, the show's executive producer David Benioff and Dothraki creator David Peterson suggests a few different elements or structures for the language that could do science a favor by inventing a language that includes exactly those features that researchers would like to test to see if subjects--in this case, the show's highly motivated fans--can learn. [More]

Editor's Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident is traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to explore undersea volcanism in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the fourth blog post detailing this voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com [More]

Shhh, keep this podcast a secret. Because new research points to a possible blind spot in airport security screening: it may be easier to sneak something dangerous past security–a box cutter, for example–by also including an obvious and innocuous banned object, like a water bottle, into the mix as a distraction.

Scientists recruited college students to find targets on a computer display. Their task: search for lines that formed a T amidst other non-T lines in 10 different experiments. Sometimes the Ts were easy to find, sometimes they were more hidden. When the easy and tough ones appeared with equal frequency, the students found both on the same screen.

When President Richard Nixon launched the war on cancer in his January 1971 State of the Union, he called for "the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon." Yet nearly 40 years and $100 billion in federally funded cancer research later, it seems the lunar landing was a much less daunting task.

Jealousy can be devastating to a relationship--and it is well known that the genders experience the green-eyed monster in different ways. [More]

Toward the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy began mapping an area of northern Alaska extending south from the Arctic Sea across the North Slope and down to the forested valleys south of the Brooks Range . In an effort lasting a number of years, surveyors flew low in a small plane, snapping thousands of photographs with a large-format K-18 camera pointed out the craft’s open door.

The year was 1944. World War II was show­ing signs of winding down, but predictions that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end had the Allies gravely concerned that they would run out of gasoline for the war effort. The 23-million-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve in northern Alaska was a prime location for finding new sources of oil, and the U.S. Navy decided to explore. But the navy had a problem: no maps. So it decided to take an exceptionally detailed set of aerial photographs.

Basing out of Ladd Field, near Fairbanks, surveyors mounted a massive K-18 camera in the open door of a twin-engine Beech­craft. Over several years, flying low and slow, they took thousands of photographs of Alaska’s North Slope, extending from the Arctic Ocean south to the Brooks Range, and of the forested valleys on the south side of the range--itself a part of the boreal forest of evergreens and deciduous trees that stretches across a large swath of the Arctic.

By Chris Baltimore

HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. agencies on Sunday approved a plan to use remote-controlled underwater vehicles to seal a leaking oil well beneath a drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last week.