Scientific American Online

Despite decades of entreaties from the World Health Organization (WHO) and mothers alike to eat more fruits and vegetables , a new study has found that these dietary additions appear to do little to decrease the overall likelihood of getting cancer . [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 third blog post detailing this voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com

For geologist Tracy Gregg, exploring submarine volcanoes is a lot like being a CSI detective, just without the bodies. While a CSI team gathers evidence to find the killer, Gregg explores the aftermath of a volcanic eruption so she can understand what's happening beneath the Earth's surface. [More]

By Janet Fang

Living exclusively oxygen-free was thought to be a lifestyle open only to viruses and single-celled microorganisms. [More]

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Quality truffles can sell for more than a $1,000 a pound. They’re also valuable in environmental research, work that’s discussed in an article called "The Hidden Life of Truffles" in the April issue of Scientific American magazine, by Oregon State University’s James Trappe and Andrew Claridge, visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Australia. [See http://bit.ly/9IDzGF ]

Claridge is getting better estimates of Australian endangered species populations, thanks to truffles. Some marsupials are as crazy for truffles as some humans are. Claridge soaked foam pads with olive oil infused with the scent of European black Perigord truffles, and left the pads near motion-sensing cameras. The animals came in droves, with 50 times as many individuals counted as with other techniques. Claridge used the European truffle product because it was easy to get--his team will next see the reaction of native animals to native truffles.

When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president's desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself--a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton--it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965. [More]

By Laura Thompson Osuri

Global steps to battle climate change might have faltered, but philanthropic institutions in the United States have swung into action, more than tripling their support for climate-related causes in 2008. [More]

By Laura Thompson Osuri

Global steps to battle climate change might have faltered, but philanthropic institutions in the United States have swung into action, more than tripling their support for climate-related causes in 2008. [More]

Mark Oppenheimer, a part-time stay-at-home father of two young girls, is used to stares. “When I’m walking down the street with one baby strapped to my chest and the other in a stroller--and the kids all look happy--and I walk by a group of mothers, they’re just blown away,” he says. “The easiest way in the world to get a smile is to be a man with a baby.”

Fatherhood has undergone a profound change in the past half a century. In 1965 fathers were spending 2.6 hours a week on child care; by 2000 that figure had reached 6.5 hours. There are three times as many stay-at-home fathers as there were a decade ago, and families headed by single fathers are the fastest-growing household type in the U.S. “When I started studying American mothers and fathers, the majority of the fathers I studied had never bathed their children. Many of them had never changed a diaper,” says developmental psychologist Michael Lamb of the University of Cambridge. That was in the 1970s. “Now,” he says, “men would feel embarrassed to say they hadn’t changed their children.”

In the 1922 poem The Waste Land , T. S. Eliot writes, cryptically: Who is the third who always walks beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together /But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you.

In his footnotes to this verse, Eliot explained that the lines “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions [Ernest Shackleton’s] ... that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”

The number of deaths and hospitalizations caused by prescription drugs has risen precipitously in the past decade, with overdoses of pain medications, in particular opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers, more than doubling between 1999 and 2006, according to a new study. [More]

The problem with generating electricity by harnessing the wind is that it doesn't always blow (though it may seem that way at times). And, typically, consumers remain intolerant of power interruptions. [More]

The ability on the part of researchers to manipulate sound waves has led to the development of critical technologies, for example, enabling ultrasonic transducers to image the interior of the human body (aka "ultrasound"). A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena think they've found a way to make sound waves even more powerful with the help of a new type of acoustic lens. Caltech researchers Alessandro Spadoni and Chiara Daraio describe how they create "sound bullets" in a study published in the April 5 issue Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences . [More]

Traditional Ayurvedic medicine could face an uncertain future as 93 percent of the wild plants used in the practice are threatened with extinction due to overexploitation, the Times of India reports.

The Botanical Survey of India recently prioritized 359 wild medicinal plant species and conducted an assessment throughout the country to determine their health. The news wasn't good. Of the 359 species, 335 were categorized as critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable or near-threatened. [More]

OSLO (Reuters) - Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday.

The report in the journal Nature Geoscience indicated that emissions of the gas surged under certain conditions from melting permafrost that underlies about 25 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere.

Emissions of the gas measured from thawing wetlands in Zackenberg in eastern Greenland leapt 20 times to levels found in tropical forests, which are among the main natural sources of the heat-trapping gas.

"Measurements of nitrous oxide production permafrost samples from five additional wetland sites in the high Arctic indicate that the rates of nitrous oxide production observed in the Zackenberg soils may be in the low range," the study said.

The scientists, from Denmark and Norway, studied sites in Canada and Svalbard off northern Norway alongside their main focus on Zackenberg. [More]

Space shuttle Discovery is on its way to the International Space Station (ISS), blasting off at 6:21 a.m. local time Monday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center without any of the weather– or equipment–related delays that have plagued the past several launches. [More]

The Web's wealth of information would lose some of its luster if you read it only one line at a time. Yet this is exactly how blind and other vision-impaired people today must experience the Web when they use electronic Braille displays connected to their computers. [More]

The National Safety Council estimates that 28 percent of all highway accidents and deaths are caused by drivers paying poor attention to the road because they’re holding cell phones to their heads. But a study of 200 volunteers finds that one out of every 40 people apparently can operate a vehicle just fine while chatting on a phone. In simulated driving tests, anyway. The research by University of Utah psychologists Jason Watson and David Strayer will be published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review .

Why are there so few great multitaskers? The researchers say there may be a hidden cost, and that someone might excel at multi-tasking at the expense of other information processing. Or the high-tech environment that rewards multi-tasking is too new for the ability to have widely propagated, if there’s a true evolutionary advantage to having it.

The notion that men have shorter fuses than women has acquired the status of a psychological shibboleth. More than 30 years ago Stanford University psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin concluded in an influential book that sex differences were minimal in most psychological traits but considerable when it comes to aggression. This opinion has endured ever since.

Were Maccoby and Jacklin right? Recent research bears out the broad brushstrokes of their claim but reveals that women can be equally, if less dangerously, belligerent.