Scientific American Online

In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.

Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A stranded Chinese coal ship leaking oil onto Australia's Great Barrier Reef is an environmental time bomb with the potential to devastate large protected areas of the reef, activists said on Monday.

Climate change may already be hitting you--in the stomach. A new analysis reveals that higher average temperatures in Montana over the last six decades equal less wheat.  

Plant scientist Luther Talbert of Montana State University and his colleagues looked at weather records for the Mountain State from 1950 to 2007. The month of March has had the most warming overall, increasing by nearly 0.1 degree Celsius per year on average. As a result, farmers now plant wheat 10 days earlier.  

Neuroscience is one of the more complicated subjects.

But with innovative tools like fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation , and projects that are reengineering a model of a human brain , scientists are working hard on cracking the neural code.

By Ana Belluscio

Argentinian investigators have found flamingos and mysterious microbes living in an alkaline lagoon nestled inside a volcano in the Andes. [More]

Around the world carnivorous plants are on the decline, the victims of habitat loss, illegal poaching and pollution. But now a new factor has come to light: The very insects the plants rely on for food may be poisoning them.

According to new research by Christopher Moody and Iain Green of Bournemouth University in England, prey insects could be contaminated with toxic metals such as cadmium that, when ingested by meat-eating flora, affect the plants' growth.

Why don’t men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation , garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. It appeared on cocktail napkins (“Real men don’t ask directions”) and became a staple of stand-up comics as well as jokes that made the rounds: “Why did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years?” and “Why does it take so many sperm to find just one egg?”

The attention surprised me. I had not known how widespread this experience was, but I included the asking-directions scenario because it crystallized key aspects of a phenomenon that, I had discovered, accounts for many of the frustrations that women and men experience in conversation. I have spent more than three decades collecting and analyzing thousands of examples of how women and men interact and have found that men’s talk tends to focus on hierarchy--competition for relative power--whereas women’s tends to focus on connection--relative closeness or distance. In other words, a man and woman might walk away from the same conversation asking different questions: he might wonder, “Did that conversation put me in a one-up or one-down position?” whereas she might wonder, “Did it bring us closer or push us farther apart?”

With more than 400 genetically distinct breeds worldwide, the domestic dog is the most diverse land mammal. After 14,000 years of artificial selection for traits such as size, shape and color, the 40-chromosome canine genome holds the secrets to man's best friend's most defining features. And as scientists begin to understand what gives dogs their spots, they're learning a little something about humans, too. [More]

In 2007, outside Bangalore, India, an explosion decapitated an industrial worker, hurling his body through a brick wall. In 2005 a routine procedure at a manufacturing plant in Taiwan caused a spontaneous explosion that killed a worker and ignited a blaze that ripped through the factory, shutting down production for three months. Both incidents shared a common cause--silane, a gas made up of silicon and hydrogen that explodes on contact with air. And both incidents occurred in the same industry--solar power. [More]

Carbon prices will be applied to car exhaust for the first time under the Obama administration's new tailpipe rule, launched yesterday. But while environmentalists were celebrating, some economists were quietly concerned that U.S. EPA 's carbon calculation is too low.

The agency incorporated a preliminary price of $21 for every ton of carbon dioxide expelled from vehicles to help reach its new standard of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016. That amounts to about 20 cents per gallon or, as two economists claim, a level that's "far too small a price incentive to prompt substantive mitigation measures."

One of the most complex and expensive construction projects in history could inch ever closer to completion April 5, when space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to lift off on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiter and its seven-member crew will deliver additional sleeping quarters, exercise equipment and racks for science experiments to the station. [More]

A direct effect on human health related to climate change is the likely increase in infectious diseases transmitted by insects or through contaminated water.

In the March 25th issue of The New England Journal of Medicine , infectious disease researcher Emily Shuman points out that insects are more active at higher temperatures and broaden their range. Altered weather patterns bring drought to some areas, flooding to others and a higher likelihood of water contamination to both.

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 .

Earlier this week I posed the question of whether old houses will ever be able to reduce their energy needs by the factor of five or so needed to combat climate change. My discussion was inspired, in part, by a provocative essay written last year by preservationist Sally Zimmerman of Historic New England . Yesterday she wrote to say that my post and the comments that people left have been widely circulated among preservationists. She offered some more thoughts that I think frame the issue beautifully:

Lost Nucleotides Although Alexander S. Bradley’s article “ Expanding the Limits of Life ” provides a fascinating account of the discovery of microbes in a previously unknown kind of hydrothermal vent ecosystem on the seafloor, it does not substantiate his claim that the findings hint that life may have originated in an environment like the Lost City hydrothermal vent.

Some medications already being used to treat HIV appear to inhibit a retrovirus that has been linked to prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome , reports a new study published online April 1 in PLoS ONE . [More]

The nation's first mandatory attempt to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions is now a fact--and it will show up in a driveway near you in 2012. [More]

More than 15 years after a genetic variant was shown to predispose its carriers to schizophrenia, scientists have finally uncovered how the chromosomal abnormality might cause symptoms of the brain disorder . By studying mice with a similar gene defect, the research team from Columbia University Medical Center linked abnormalities in behavior to a faulty connection between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex--two brain areas important for learning and memory. [More]

Parents anticipate sex differences from the first prenatal ultrasound but then seem amazed when their son goes gaga over trucks or their daughter will wear nothing but pink. Boys and girls are obviously different, and in many cases the gaps between them seem stark. But stereotypes do not always hold up to scientific scrutiny. Are boys really more aggressive and girls really more empathetic--or do we just see what we expect in them? Where true sex differences exist, are those gaps inborn, as our current Mars-Venus obsession implies, or shaped by environment--that is, by us?

A natural place to look for answers is in the brain. If there is a neurological disparity between the genders, it could explain important behavioral differences. But surprisingly, researchers have found very few large-scale differences between boys and girls in brain structure or function. Yes, boys have larger brains (and heads) than girls--from birth through old age. And girls’ brains finish growing earlier than boys’. But neither of these findings explains why boys are more active and girls more verbal or reveals a plausible basis for the consistent gaps in their reading, writing and science test scores that have parents and teachers up in arms.