Scientific American Online

Offshore wind turbines will line the Atlantic coast; vast solar arrays will cover swaths of the southwestern desert; transmission towers will cradle high-voltage direct current lines and take electricity from the windy Great Plains to the populated coasts. That is the renewable future for the U.S. that the Obama administration seems to envision and, certainly, what Jon Wellinghoff forecasts. And as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Wellinghoff has a better than even chance of making his vision a reality.

Already, FERC is rewriting the rules for new transmission lines, potentially making it easier to permit new electricity-carrying capacity--and, as a result, unleashing the development of more renewable resources. The commission released a new rule on June 17 that would require that mandates for renewable energy--enacted in 36 states nationwide--be taken into account when determining where and when new transmission lines get installed.

For those of you who like stories with simple plots and tidy endings, I must confess the tale of the Human Genome Project isn't one of those. The story didn't reach its conclusion when we unveiled the first draft of the human genetic blueprint at the White House on June 26, 2000. Nor did it end on April 14, 2003, with the completion of a finished, reference sequence. [More]

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are encouraging U.S. policymakers to consider the nation's growing supply of natural gas as a short-term substitute for aging coal-fired power plants .

In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.

The North American and Pacific plates meet in California at the San Andreas Fault. The plates grind past each other there at as much as an inch-and-a-half a year. Until the plates jam. Then energy builds up, and eventually they lurch--an earthquake.

But on some active portions of the fault, the plates tend to just creep along, without many violent jerks. All thanks, it turns out, to a little mineral lube, according to a study in the journal Geology . [Anja Schleicher, Ben van der Pluijm and Laurence Warr, http://bit.ly/cDpHCQ ]

Had a hard day? It might not be your abstract experiences that are causing you to think that way, but rather the physical surfaces you're touching . [More]

Three-dimensional movies are everywhere these days, and the novelty is poised to become a big-screen mainstay. Now the field of microscopy is getting into the act, too, but the end product is very different from 3-D movies such as Toy Story 3 or Avatar . [More]

Morphine is often a cancer patient's best and final friend. So it came as a shock when researchers at the University of Minnesota published a study showing that doses of morphine similar to those used to ease pain actually spurred the growth of human breast cancer cells grafted into mice. "These results indicate that clinical use of morphine could potentially be harmful" in some cancer patients, the scientists wrote in 2002 in Cancer Research . [More]

JULY

7–10 Upon winning a gold medal, most Olympic athletes have identical emotional reactions--tears of joy, passionate hugs and glowing smiles. Psychologist David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University noticed, however, that after the initial rush wears off, athletes exhibit a range of emotional expressions. He attributes this variation to cultural differences. For instance, Americans are more likely to maintain their jubilant demeanor, whereas Japanese athletes will try to cover up their emotions--say, by neutralizing their joy with a straight face. At the 20th Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology , Matsumoto, who is the keynote speaker, and other presenters will explain how and why expressions of emotion differ among cultures. [More]

By Eric Hand

After the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) settled into orbit around the red planet in 1997, a magnetometer on board began sending back measurements that have puzzled planetary scientists ever since. [More]

Award-winning writer and physicist Graham Farmelo talks with podcast host Steve Mirsky [ pictured ] about The Strangest Man, Farmelo's biography of Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. [More]

By Amanda Mascarelli

A plethora of health problems from exposure to chemicals threatens workers and volunteers involved in clean-up efforts for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. [More]

By Alla Katsnelson

Biomedical engineers have built many types of human organs in the lab, but they've lagged on lung tissue--until now. [More]

From the beginning of the Deepwater Horizon crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been responsible for carrying out every attempt to stop the flow of oil, and their mixed record of success--installing lower marine riser package (LMRP) cap on June 3 but damaging the gas venting system on June 23, for example--reflects just how difficult is it to operate more than a mile below the surface. [More]

The first discovery of a cancer gene marker--the BRAF oncogene for melanoma and colorectal malignancies--back in 2002 changed the way many researchers thought about cancer treatment. Rather than approach the disease based on what region of the body it stemmed from, scientists began to identify cancers in terms of their genetic signatures. Researchers now recognize more than 200 kinds of cancer--all genetically unique. [More]

Our bodies defeat infections in part because our immune system's genes are many and diverse. This genetic heterogeneity, however, has a downside: it means that we each respond differently to vaccines. For example, compared with women men routinely produce fewer pathogen-fighting antibodies after vaccination, and in the last large U.S. measles outbreak in 1989 10 percent of previously vaccinated children were not protected . But these limitations could one day be overcome thanks to a push to replace one-size-fits-all vaccines with genetically "personalized" immunizations that are safe and effective for everyone. [More]

Tell us what you don't know.

That's the message military and national security experts gathered here want to send to climate scientists.

By Tom Pfeiffer

AGADIR, Morocco (Reuters) - More whales are being killed by chemical and noise pollution, entanglement in nets, climate change or collisions with ships than by whaling itself, delegates to the world's main whaling body said this week.

Crohn’s disease is a real pain in the gut. This inflammatory disorder can lead to some serious intestinal difficulties. And heredity is partly to blame: some 30 different genes enhance susceptibility. But not everyone who has the genes gets Crohn’s. [More]