Scientific American Online

On tiny keypads and greasy touch screens, doctors, nurses, NPs and physicians assistants these days are doing a lot more than checking email and phone messages. Increasingly, health care workers are using their iPhones and other smart phones to track patient information, take vital statistics and even make clinical decisions. [More]

Mining is the second most dangerous profession in the U.S., averaging 27 deaths for every 100,000 workers per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That safety record is now blown. On April 5 th , 25 of the roughly 20,000 miners in West Virginia died in a tragic incident at the Upper Big Branch mine. Four remained missing as of Friday.  

The explosion appears to have been caused by a buildup of methane . An odorless, colorless, tasteless gas that you know as natural gas. It explodes at concentrations in the air of as little as 5 percent. The incident also could have been caused or exacerbated by coal dust, which is equally combustible. That's why we burn it to make electricity.  

By now you've probably heard of Australopithecus sediba, the 1.95-million-year-old human species that made news on April 8. In a nutshell, researchers have found two beautifully preserved partial skeletons that they say represent a previously unknown member of the human family--one that may have given rise to our genus, Homo. You can read my story on the find here .

There's a lot to talk about with this discovery, so I thought I'd supplement the story with some tidbits from the cutting room floor and material that came in after my deadline.

The inaugural National Robotics Week , which kicks off Saturday and lasts through April 18 (apparently, a robot's week doesn't start on Sunday like ours does), aims to recognize the role that robots play worldwide in agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, national defense and security , and transportation. [More]

NASA leaders revealed April 8 the framework of their plans to enact President Obama's budget request for 2011 , a contentious proposal that would redirect the agency's current efforts away from a moon landing in the next decade and that would rely on commercial partners to launch astronauts into orbit. In a teleconference with reporters NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver described how future funds and projects would be allocated among the agency's many centers across the country, assuming that Obama's budget wins congressional approval. [More]

A new 2,100-square-meter building outside Frankfurt, Germany, houses a series of chambers that can simulate a hot, humid day or temperatures so frigid that metals crack, and every punishing weather scenario in between. It's all for testing one product--solar photovoltaic panels --and it's the third such facility opened since 2008. [More]

Armed bands of poachers are illegally collecting Madagascar's radiated tortoise ( Astrochelys radiata ) by the truckload for the lucrative pet and meat trades, according to a report from the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). As a result of this rampant overexploitation the once-common species could be driven into extinction in the next two decades. Radiated tortoises, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful of all turtles, and therefore highly valued in the pet trade, are only found in Madagascar. [More]

Brown dwarfs straddle the divide between planets and stars--they are celestial objects too small to burn hydrogen in fusion reactions, as stars do, but they are large enough to sustain other kinds of fusion. At least a few even harbor orbiting planets. The International Astronomical Union sets the planet–brown dwarf boundary at 13 times the mass of Jupiter. But that mass limit is an imperfect definition--what of brown dwarf–size bodies that orbit stars, behaving themselves like supersized planets? [More]

A barometer measures atmospheric pressure. Now a coalition of biologists is calling for a similar scientific tool to measure extinction pressure on Earth's biodiversity--a so-called " barometer of life ". [More]

NASA's Apollo moon missions , which lasted from 1968 to 1972, were responsible for putting the first human on an extraterrestrial surface. Six of the missions landed on the moon , where astronauts carried out a number of experiments, studying soil mechanics, micrometeoroids, seismographic activity, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields and solar wind. [More]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Feb. 28, 2010, was a banner day for Texas wind to set the clouds -- and electrons -- flying.

In the Panhandle, gusts reached 47 miles per hour and wind generators delivered a record 6,242 megawatts of power to Dallas, Austin and other population centers. At 1 p.m., 22 percent of all the electricity consumed in the Texas grid was coming from wind.

As scientists delve deeper beneath the ocean’s surface, they find bizarre creatures that have adapted to harsh and extreme environments. Now comes a new one--the discovery of the first multicellular animals that survive and reproduce entirely without oxygen. [Roberto Danovaro et al, BMC Biology ,  http://bit.ly/dcICgo ]

Researchers had thought that only single-celled organisms such as prokaryotes and protozoa could live in the oxygen-deprived environments of the deepest ocean. When scientists did find multicellular organisms, they assumed that they’d sunk from oxygen-enriched waters.

To Emily Dickinson, it was “fixed melancholy.” To essayist George Santayana, it was “rage spread thin.” The turns of phrase conjure different emotions, but these two writers were describing the same disorder: depression. The variance is more than a matter of literary or philosophical differences; it also reflects the fact that one was a woman, the other a man.

Therapists have long known that men and women experience mental illness differently. Yet when clinicians designed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the guidebook they use to diagnose psychiatric maladies, they purposely made the disease descriptions gender-neutral. Today evidence is mounting that in turning a blind eye to gender, clinicians are doing their patients a disservice. In fact, as more researchers investigate sex differences in depression and other mental illnesses, the inescapable conclusion is that gender influences every aspect of these disorders--from the symptoms patients experience to their response to medication to the course of a disorder throughout a person’s life.

Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

Solar power involves wondrous quantum physics and materials science , but its fate may hinge on whether contractors can learn to bolt on the panels without losing too many screws. The panels themselves account for only about half the cost of a solar array; the rest is the installation and back-end equipment . As panel makers slash their prices , the nuts and bolts loom ever larger. Fortunately, a quiet revolution is now underway in installation. Brendan Neagle, the chief operations officer of Borrego Solar , a major U.S. installer, says they've sped up installation by 40 percent over the past two years. Zep Solar has invented a new roof mounting system, already supported by the module maker Canadian Solar , that speeds things up by another factor of two. And Nat Kreamer, president of Acro Energy , another large installer, says they've streamlined the preparation work and can get a system up on your roof within 30 days of your first phone call -- quite an improvement on the eight or so months it took me .

The human body's immune system can quickly track down and kill cells that don't belong. Take certain kinds of bacteria: molecules on their surfaces flag them as foreign invaders, alerting the body's defenders to the breach and drawing a full-fledged attack on anything waving that molecular flag. But sometimes the system mistakenly attacks the body's own cells. The result is autoimmune disease , such as type 1 diabetes, in which the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas are attacked and destroyed by T cells. [More]

A freshly discovered asteroid, roughly as long as a tennis court, will zoom past Earth at about the distance of the moon Thursday, according to NASA. The space rock, called 2010 GA6, was first observed Monday by the Catalina Sky Survey , a telescope project in Arizona that seeks out near-Earth asteroids and comets. 2010 GA6 will make its closest approach to Earth, at a distance about 430,000 kilometers, at 10:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time. [More]

"They all look alike to me" is no longer an excuse when studying penguins. The same facial recognition software that helps Homeland Security identify terrorists could one day be used to identify individual penguins and monitor their populations, thereby aiding in their conservation.

Traditionally, tracking individual penguins--which is important for monitoring population dynamics, understanding migratory patterns, and assessing the health of a species--has required attaching transmitters to their backs or metal bands to flippers or legs. But transmitters are expensive, and evidence has shown that ID bands can sometimes interfere with swimming and food gathering or even injure the birds if the bands are damaged.

Although many of the Pacific Ocean's big species are floundering, one large creature of the deep seems to be flourishing. The Humboldt squid ( Dosidicus gigas , also known as jumbo squid , owing to its sizable nature) has been steadily expanding its population and range: whereas sightings north of San Diego were rare 10 years ago, the squid are now found as far north as Alaska. [More]

Computer models, weather satellites and ice cores are valuable tools for scientists who study how Earth's climate is changing. But a new study suggests that researchers can add another weapon to their arsenal: the knowledge gathered by indigenous people who have spent generations living off the land in rhythm with weather and seasons.

Researchers at the University of Colorado credit a combination of scientific data and traditional environmental knowledge from two Canadian Inuit communities for shedding new light on an overlooked aspect of climate change.