Scientific American Online

As I type this column, several recent storms are weighing on my mind. Winter snowfalls around the country have sparked questions about climate change yet again. Skeptics ask, How can warming be happening if we’re getting big snows? As if we could determine the world’s condition during a single season. In fact, one symptom of a changing climate could be more varied or more extreme weather--but a couple of heavy snows wouldn’t prove that either. January was slightly warmer in the U.S. than average, in any case.

Another storm surrounds “Climategate.” More than 1,000 private e-mails were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and publicly released last November. Climate doubters have asserted that the e-mails prove that science surrounding global climate change is not settled and that the data in favor of it were misrepresented.

A new online global map could soon help scientists better track and predict outbreaks of infectious diseases like H1N1 much the same way meteorologists can study and forecast the weather. The "Supramap" application illustrates the spread of pathogens and key mutations across time, space and various hosts on a Google Earth map, researchers reported April 9 in the early online edition of Cladistics . [More]

By Brendan Borrell

President Barack Obama last week announced the full membership of his bioethics advisory council, unveiling a more diverse body and one that is likely to have a greater impact on policy than its predecessor.

In the past decade, ethical questions in science have made headlines on issues such as the patenting of human genes, financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research and risk assessments related to environmental exposure to chemicals.

These issues were largely ignored by the bioethics commission established by President George W. [More]

The plaster face cast of a large-nosed Neanderthal stares out into space. The extra cavities in his sinus helped trap air, which was subsequently humidified. There's nothing quite like having a warm pocket of air close to the brain to keep away the chill of the ice age, says Rick Potts , head of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History .

The skulls of our closest ancestors tell the tale of human origins and the closeness of our evolutionary history to climate change , Potts said. The Smithsonian exhibit at the Hall of Human Origins, of which Potts is curator, explores the idea that defining evolutionary events like the discovery of fire or migration out of Africa could be direct results of a changing climate.

A little stress can do us good--it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form. But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline , can directly support tumor growth and spread. [More]

Trees once covered almost the entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. Vast forests supported a rich ecosystem, including flocks of the extinct passenger pigeon big enough to blot out the sun. But by the 1920s at least half of this forest was gone--a victim of tree-clearing for farming, forestry or fossil-fuel extraction. [More]

If there is anything about your “self” of which you can be sure, it is that it is anchored in your own body and yours alone. The person you experience as “you” is here and now and nowhere else.

But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions--and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different--in evolutionary and neurological terms--from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin).

Cheetos Lip Balm. That’s right, you can purchase lip balm imbued with the delicate flavor of Cheetos. Somehow I lived in blissful ignorance of that fact until quite recently, when I discovered that chemists had pulled off this minor miracle back in 2005. As I pondered the idea of a cheese-puffy lip protector, a flood of memories of never having read Proust rose up within me, and I thought of what marvelous recollections he might have come up with had he ever tasted a crunchy curl of faux cheese delicately lifted from a greasy plastic bag, the junkified morsel staining thumb and forefinger a sickly, artificial orange. But I couldn’t think about that for long because I was soon busy thinking about other stuff, stuff I’ll now ask you, dear reader, to think about, too.

Here’s something else I just learned about: in a 2007 poll respondents on average estimated NASA’s funding to be 24 percent of the federal budget. Fixing those busted space toilets is expensive, but not that expensive: NASA has in fact been getting about $18 billion annually in recent years, less than 1 percent of the budget. NASA would get about $1 billion more each year under the draft budget President Barack Obama announced in early February, although that money would go to scientific research and robotic missions rather than sending guys back to the moon to look for Alan B. Shepard’s golf balls. (There are two up there: he shanked his first shot and took the rare moon mulligan.)

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Sporting goods maker Puma will launch eco-friendly packaging for its sneakers next year to reduce its carbon footprint, beating governments to the punch as it kisses old-fashion shoe boxes good-bye.

Puma said it would roll out the new packaging in the second half of next year and that by putting its shoes in cardboard frames wrapped in reusable shoe bags, it would save 8,500 tonnes of paper -- the weight of more than 1,400 adult elephants.

People start stereotyping early. Even toddlers react positively to members of their own race, but often distrust those from different groups. The seeds of racism are planted in most everyone. Everyone, that is, except people with a rare genetic condition called Williams syndrome.

Williams syndrome is marked by heart defects, mental retardation, and a lack of social anxiety that produces exceedingly friendly human beings. And a new study published in the journal Current Biology finds that children with Williams syndrome don’t make racial stereotypes. [See Andreia Santos, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and Christine Deruelle, http://bit.ly/9K0YSx ]

To feed an exploding global population, scientists have called for a doubling of food production over the next 40 years. Genetic manipulation might seem the best way to quickly boost characteristics essential to plant growth and crop yields. New findings from different laboratories, however, suggest that fungi, bacteria and viruses could be an exciting alternative to increase agricultural productivity.

Scientists have long known that microbes can work symbiotically with plants. For instance, mycorrhizal fungi, which are associated with 90 percent of land plants, extend from roots to bring in moisture and minerals in exchange for plant carbohydrates. But microbes have recently been found among plant cells themselves and seem to confer benefits, such as more efficient photosynthesis and increased ability to fix nitrogen from the air. In fact, Mary E. Lucero, a biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, N.M., believes that plants actively recruit these microbes rather than simply being passive hosts for them.

Over time, patients end up providing a wealth of information to their health care providers, and when all our data are aggregated, they are also a boon to researchers studying trends in diseases and demographics for clues in how to better treat illness. And nowadays, as more patient health care records go digital , patient information becomes more widely shared among researchers--which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending upon who has access to it. [More]

Last week, we told you about some of the bad news in Madagascar, a nation whose political troubles have created a thriving illegal economy for rare wildlife species. But here's some good news from that same country: a species of lemur not seen in 100 years has been rediscovered . [More]

How long does a sad movie leave you feeling blue ? Remembering something sad can trigger emotions that persist long after the event itself has passed. But people with impaired memories seem to retain the emotion long after they have forgotten the emotionally charged event itself--longer, in fact, than people who can recall the incident well--according to a new study. [More]

By Janelle Weaver

Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes.

Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. [More]

Some 23 million additional U.S. residents are expected to become more regular users of the U.S. health care system in the next several years, thanks to the passage of health care reform . Digitizing medical data has been touted as one way to help the already burdened system manage the surge in patients. But putting people's health information in databases and online is going to do more than simply reduce redundancies. It is already shifting the very way we seek and receive health care. [More]

Venus, the closest planet to Earth in both size and proximity, remains a source of considerable mystery. Its reflective clouds prevent a clear view of the planet, and for centuries little was known about its surface and inner workings. But radar and gravity data acquired in the past few decades by spacecraft such as NASA's Magellan , which orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994, helped refine planetary scientists' understanding of Venus's past. The impact history recorded by the planet's craters indicated that Venus had been resurfaced by volcanic activity relatively recently, just a few hundred million years ago . [More]