Scientific American Online

Smarts vs. Sense Regarding “ Rational and Irrational Thought : The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss,” by Keith E. Stanovich: I have been teaching at the college level for more than a dozen years, and I’ve often wondered why some of my best and brightest students utterly fail in certain tasks that less “intellectual” students are able to excel in.

Buildings consume about a third of the energy and two-thirds of the electricity in the U.S. Roofs are a good place to try to cut those figures. Because traditional black asphalt roofs heat up in summer and strain the air conditioners. White roofs are better. But they don’t retain heat in winter, so furnaces work harder.

Now scientists from the United Environment and Energy company think they have a roof fix, which they presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society.

APRIL 1960 RADIATION -- “With the new measurement of the mean lethal dose for reproductive function of mammalian cells, it is now possible to explain the relatively low mean lethal dose of 400 to 500 roentgens for the entire body. Such a dose leaves only about 0.5 per cent of the body’s reproducing cells still able to multiply. Death, however, will not be immediate. The cells have each absorbed an almost infinitesimal amount of radiation energy. Though they have suffered an appreciable amount of chromosomal damage, their enzymatic machinery is, by and large, still active. Each such cell continues to perform its physiological functions in reasonably normal fashion until the time comes for it to reproduce. But at the next division, or at the next one or two divisions, reproduction will fail. ­--Theodore T. Puck”

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Philadelphia officials asked a state regulator on Thursday to ban the natural-gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing until its environmental effects, especially on drinking water, are studied.

One carefree summer day in California, a few college students went for a joy ride. It was the perfect day to don the shades, roll down the windows, and crank up the tunes.

But then someone noticed all the bumps in the road. These were engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and the group got to thinking: Isn't there energy in that?

The United Kingdom has firmed up its position within the ranks of the space-faring, announcing on March 23 the creation of a new space center and an impending consolidated national space agency. The U.K. Space Agency (UKSA), which officially launches April 1, will take over from the British National Space Center, a hodgepodge organization operated by 10 governmental agencies . Preliminary plans for a national space agency had been announced in December. [More]

For decades Pluto, later joined by its moon Charon, had a wide swath to itself on astronomers' plots of the solar system--no other bodies were known to dwell beyond Neptune in the long-hypothesized debris field known as the Kuiper Belt. But in 1992 a pair of astronomers turned up 1992 QB1 , a body about 200 kilometers wide circling the sun at a distance of about 6.5 billion kilometers, well beyond Neptune's orbit. The Kuiper Belt, populated by leftovers from the solar system's formation, appeared to be real. [More]

NEW YORK--It's human nature to conserve and hoard, so a lot of Americans today take a certain pleasure in their trash habits when it comes to recycling paper, plastics, glass and cans. But in order to make sure we don't run out of resources as Earth's population peaks, the next garbage frontier is an "upstream" focus on solid waste management and getting industries to take more responsibility for collecting the trash that results from consumption of their products, a panel of speakers said here on March 23. [More]

Tyrannosaur bones are relatively familiar finds on the northern continents of the globe, cropping up everywhere from modern-day Colorado to China. But until now, they appeared to be oddly missing from the southern half of the globe. The discovery of a distinctively tyrannosaur-like hipbone in Victoria, Australia, however, might change the way scientists think about the distribution--and evolution--of this infamous group of dinosaurs. [More]

A Russian astronomer turned a few heads earlier this month when he published a paper noting that a dwarf star, currently 63 light-years away, will very likely dip into the outer edge of our solar system in fewer than two million years. [More]

The Internet Age is upon us. But rather than circulating online, the 23rd Decennial Census stuck with the tried-and-true, and flooded the U.S. Postal Service March 16 through 18 with surveys en route to more than 120 million households nationwide. The 10-question form, which probes for demographic information such as age, sex and race, will help determine how more than $400 billion will be allocated to communities across the country. Citizens and noncitizens alike are required by law to complete the form and mail it back to the U.S. Census Bureau in the accompanying prepaid envelope. That's a lot of mail, but that's not all of it.

In case the mail at your household gets picked up and thrown into the "we'll get to it later" pile, the Census Bureau took the extra step this year of sending out a "heads-up" letter in advance--a "state-of-the-art practice in survey research," according to Census Director Robert Grove's blog--to encourage participation. And in case that's not enough paper for you, an extra nudge was mailed out the week of March 22. This might sound excessive, but the mail-out/mail-back response rate for the 2000 census was only 65 percent, and the missing data has to be collected in person by enumerators at a cost of about $57 per household. So the nudge "more than pays for itself," Groves says.

The Last Supper. The final time that the apostles shared a meal with Jesus. They gathered together, listened to a sermon and really chowed down. At least if you believe more modern depictions. Because over the past thousand years, the portion size of the food shown in paintings of the Last Supper has grown larger. That finding, by researchers and brothers Brian and Craig Wansink, is dished up in the International Journal of Obesity . [See http://bit.ly/cJLS7I ] Brian studies eating habits at Cornell, while Craig is a religion professor at Virginia Wesleyan. Which puts them at the head of the table for this research effort. [More]

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) this week decided not to create any new international trade restrictions to protect five endangered shark species, all of which are highly prized for their use in the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup, or, as I call it, "extinction in a bowl."

Shark fin soup is particularly unappetizing dish to conservationists, as shark "finning" remains one of the most controversial hunting or fishing activities in the world. Sharks are caught, their fins are chopped off, and the bodies (which are not prized) are dumped back into the ocean--often alive, where they suffer a horrible death.

By Zeeya Merali

The Abel prize--considered the "Nobel" prize of mathematics--has been awarded to John Tate, recently retired from the University of Texas at Austin, for his work on algebraic number theory, the mathematical discipline that deals with connections between whole numbers and lies at the heart of Internet security.

Established in 2002, the Abel Prize is presented annually by the King of Norway and carries a cash award of $1 million.

"Number theory knits together the subtle and strange properties of whole numbers in a beautiful way," says mathematician Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. [More]

By Janet Fang

Soils around the globe have increased their emissions of carbon dioxide over the past few decades, according to an analysis of 439 studies.

The findings, published in the March 25 issue of Nature, match predictions that increasing temperatures will cause a net release of carbon dioxide from soils by triggering microbes to speed up their consumption of plant debris and other organic matter.

Ben Bond-Lamberty and Allison Thomson, terrestrial carbon research scientists at the University of Maryland's Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, conducted the study by stitching together almost 50 years of soil-emissions data--1,434 data points--from 439 studies around the world. [More]

Despite viruses' reputation as constant shape-shifters, the recent pandemic flu (influenza A H1N1, 2009) bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1918 flu , new research has found. Two new studies, published online March 24 in Science and Science Translational Medicine , describe a small, but crucial structure that the two flu viruses share--and how that similarity might help prevent future outbreaks. [More]

Out of context, many of our behaviors--if limited to the mere veneer of plain description--would raise many an eyebrow. The most innocent of things can sound tawdry and bizarre when certain facts and details are omitted. Here’s a perfect example: I accidentally bit my dog Gulliver’s tongue recently.

Now you may be asking yourself what I was doing with his tongue in my mouth to begin with. But I would submit that that is perhaps a better question for Gulliver, since he’s the one that violated my busily masticating maw by inserting that long, thin, delicatessen-slice muscle of his while I was simply enjoying a bite of a very banal bagel. Shocked by the feel of human teeth chomping down on his tongue, he yelped--then scampered off. Fortunately, Gulliver showed no signs of lasting trauma and I was saved from having to explain to the vet how it came to be that I bit off my dog ’s tongue; but for days after the “incident” Gulliver kept his prized possession sealed behind the vault of his own clamped jaw. This gave my partner, Juan, and me at least a temporary reprieve from Gulliver’s normally overindulgent use of that particular organ on our faces. The story was strange enough for me to share with friends, and this particular tale of man-bites-dog unleashed the predictable onslaught of humorous bestiality innuendos. And that, ladies and gentleman, is where the real story begins.

For much of the past five million to seven million years over which humans have been evolving, multiple species of our forebears co-existed. But eventually the other lineages went extinct, leaving only our own, Homo sapiens , to rule Earth. Scientists long thought that by 40,000 years ago H. sapiens shared the planet with only one other human species, or hominin: the Neandertals . In recent years, however, evidence of a more happening hominin scene at that time has emerged. Indications that H. erectus might have persisted on the Indonesian island of Java until 25,000 years ago have surfaced. And then there's H. floresiensis --the mini human species commonly referred to as the hobbits --which lived on Flores, another island in the Indonesian archipelago, as recently as 17,000 years ago.

Now researchers writing in the journal Nature report that they have found a fifth kind of hominin that may have overlapped with these species. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) But unlike all the other known members of the human family, which investigators have described on the basis of the morphological characteristics of their bones, the new hominin has been identified solely on the basis of its DNA.

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 .

I had a fun talk yesterday afternoon with Bob MacDonald, the CEO of Skyline Solar , makers of a new concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) array. The thing looks rather like a big solar cooker, with a long mirror that focuses sunlight so that you only need a tenth as many solar cells to cover a given area. CPV may become the first photovoltaic technology to reach cost parity with fossil fuels.

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 first blog post detailing this voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com . 

02º36' N x 94º47' W--Thousands of feet below the research vessel Atlantis , three people are roaming the seafloor. With a bathymetric map--a topographical of the seafloor--to chart the way, two scientists and a pilot glide over a craggy landscape filled with seamounts, volcanoes and small valleys. The darkness around them is absolute--they can only see what's immediately in front of them with the lights they've brought. They've been at the bottom of the ocean for a few hours now, collecting rock samples, taking pictures and capturing video. Soon, they will ascend through the depths and returnto the ship. [More]