Scientific American Online

When Pangaea finally broke up , some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface , ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn't just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth's five major extinction events--and the one that paved the way for the dinosaurs. [More]

Ever get a sour stomach after your morning coffee? Well, you might end up switching to a dark roast--because that coffee concoction may leave you with a happier tummy. That's according to research presented at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco. [And to be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry , http://bit.ly/cberXM ]

Some coffees are labeled "stomach friendly," because they're steam treated to drive out caffeine and other chemicals thought to cause gastrointestinal distress. But food chemists [Veronika Somoza et al.] wanted to know exactly which chemicals were behind the heartburn. So they took extracts of two coffee blends--one light, one dark--and their steam-treated counterparts. Each extract proved to be a unique chemical mix, with different amounts of caffeine and other compounds.

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By Eric Hand

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is planning to streamline the way it oversees the safety and security of its national laboratories. [More]

A group of French hospitals has reduced the burden of MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus ) among patients by more than a third after a 15-year-long multi-prong control program, according to a new report published online March 22 in the Archives of Internal Medicine . [More]

Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies .

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 .

Who could put a price on spring? Ah, the reawakened life, the budding flowers, the dabbles of green in the grey wood. Well, actually, a solar enthusiast can put a price on spring. It shows up right on my electric bill or my real-time electronic display. On March 4th, my solar array passed the milestone of feeding more energy into the grid than we drew back from it. As the days rapidly lengthen and the sun climbs higher in the sky, a surplus is becoming the norm. For five of the past seven days, we have produced more than we've consumed. Solar energy has even reconciled me to that other rite of spring, tax time: I've gotten a nice big pile of money back from Uncle Sam to help pay for the solar array.

Several new species of rare Hawaiian moth caterpillars have been discovered to be able to thrive both totally submerged and totally dry. They are the first insects to be described as fully amphibious, reported a team of researchers in a study published online March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [More]

Semiconductor crystals known as quantum dots have long held the promise of improving solar cells, lasers and lighting fixtures, but the reality is that integrating these fluorescent nanoparticles into existing technologies has proved difficult. One Silicon Valley start-up now aims to change this by the end of next year using quantum dots to vastly improve the picture-taking quality of cell phone cameras. [More]

The illegal trade in elephant ivory is booming. African elephants are being slaughtered at rates exceeding the former peak in the late 1980s, before Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES (pronounced SITE-ees), banned all trade in elephant products. The ban--as well as a worldwide public outcry against the slaughter--helped to stabilize the wild population of elephants. But within the last decade, highly organized international criminal rings have begun killing elephants like never before. The latest figures indicate that 38,000 elephants a year are falling to the poachers' guns.

Last year, Samuel Wasser and Cathy Laurie of the University of Washington along with Bill Clark of Interpol described in Scientific American their efforts to use DNA analysis to trace ivory seizures back to the wild populations of elephants from which they were taken. They found that some of the largest seizures in recent years all came from the same population of wild elephants in Tanzania.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The majority of Americans who favor nuclear-generated electricity hit a new high this year, according to a poll on Monday that suggests growing support for President Barack Obama's aid to the nuclear industry.

Even if world leaders sign a new climate treaty and begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it could be years before their progress can be independently verified, says a new National Academy of Sciences report.

Current U.N. rules require countries to submit national emissions inventories, but the data are self-reported, not required regularly from all countries, and there are no independent data to verify it.

We’re nice to our families. From an evolutionary perspective, that makes sense. But what makes us deal fairly with strangers? One theory holds that the development of large societies necessitated the creation of fairness, through institutions such as markets and religion that extend fairness to a so-called ‘anonymous other.’

In a study published in the journal Science , anthropologists and economists around the world spent 15 years studying communities of 2,000 to 10,000 individuals with highly variable social systems.

In this era of Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone, it is easy to take for granted our ability to connect to the world. Yet communication is most critical precisely at those times when the communications infrastructure is lost. In Haiti, for example, satellite phones provided by aid agencies were the primary method of communication for days following the tragic earthquake earlier this year. But even ordinary events such as a power outage could cripple the cell phone infrastructure, turning our primary emergency contact devices into glowing paperweights.

In situations such as these, an increasingly attractive option is to create an “ad-hoc” network. Such networks form on their own wherever specially programmed mobile phones or other communications devices are in range of one another. Each device in the network acts as both transmitter and receiver and, crucially, as a relay point for all the other devices nearby. Devices that are out of range can communicate if those between them are willing to help--passing messages from one to the next like water in a bucket brigade. In other words, each node in the network functions as both a communicator for its own messages and infrastructure for the messages of others.

NEW YORK - For the average United States' city or 'burb dweller, firsthand evidence of climate change is rare. Hunters and anglers see it every day.