Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2013 i Discover

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time as a “gear guy,” reviewing and writing about all manner of consumer products and equipment, with a particular focus on new technology. I made a decent living at it, especially in the run-up to the holidays, when many magazines liked to feature multipage gift guides for their readers. I enjoyed the gig, in part because I got to play with lots of new toys, but also because the work occasionally gave me a chance to talk to the people who invented this new stuff, or found a way to turn certain technologies into innovative — if not exactly must-have — consumer products. I remember one colorful interview, 20 or so years ago, with an enthusiastic engineer working on a new…

Humans have kept cheetahs in captivity for 5,000 years and recorded the cats sprinting faster than 60 mph. Yet we’re only now grasping the true athleticism of the world’s fastest sprinter in its natural habitat, thanks to the work of a former competitive runner who wanted to understand “the enigma of the cheetah.” Alan Wilson, a biomechanicist at London’s Royal Veterinary College, started out studying the locomotion of racehorses, greyhounds and jackrabbits at top speed. “We started running cheetahs in a zoo setting and didn’t really get them to go very fast,” he says. “Surely,” Wilson recalls thinking, “a wild cheetah goes even faster.” So his team started developing equipment to measure how cheetahs move in their natural habitat. The work brought them to the dry grassland of Botswana’s Okavango…

Move over, Instagram: The first handheld, real-time 3-D camera is here. Hold the Lynx A up to your friend and walk around her. Before your eyes, it scans her appearance and her shape, then builds a rotatable image in three dimensions. Send that file to a 3-D printer, and you can print out a wedding-cake statue. Ask your friend to dance, and the Lynx A instantly captures her motion, turning her into a peppy stick figure. It can model complex spaces, too, like an office, car trunk or cathedral. Inventor Chris Slaughter, a former University of Texas at Austin electrical engineering student who spearheaded the Lynx’s development, got interested in 3-D machine vision in 2011 after a Silicon Valley internship working with robots — which, he learned, have an important…

Prehistorians have long appreciated Paleolithic cave paintings for their intricacy, visual depth and vibrant color. Now there is further reason to admire our ancestors’ artistry. According to a recent study led by Gábor Horváth, a biological physicist at Eötvös University in Hungary, cave painters understood — better than many artists of the modern age — the laws governing animal motion. With the invention of weapons and binoculars that allowed hunting from a greater distance, Horváth suggests, “modern humans really lost the skill to observe.” Fascinated by the anatomy of horses and other animals in motion since his teens, Horváth knew that most four-legged mammals (except primates) walk using a specific footfall sequence — left hind, left fore, right hind, right fore — for maximum stability. But studying paintings and sculptures…

In the 1999 sci-fi film classic The Matrix, the protagonist, Neo, is stunned to see people defying the laws of physics, running up walls and vanishing suddenly. These superhuman violations of the rules of the universe are possible because, unbeknownst to him, Neo’s consciousness is embedded in the Matrix, a virtual-reality simulation created by sentient machines. The action really begins when Neo is given a fateful choice: Take the blue pill and return to his oblivious, virtual existence, or take the red pill to learn the truth about the Matrix and find out “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Physicists can now offer us the same choice, the ability to test whether we live in our own virtual Matrix, by studying radiation from space. As fanciful as it sounds, some…

ABC, easy as 1-2-3: Influenza viruses belong to the Orthomyxoviridae family and are divided into A, B and C types based on their antigen (antibody-producing) protein type. Types B and C are found in humans and, occasionally, seals and pigs, and are not divided into subtypes. Type A shows up in birds and mammals like us, and is the only type of influenza that has caused pandemics. It’s influenza A subtypes that typically pose a health threat. What subtype surfaces: Influenza A is further divided into subtypes based on how it binds to the cell of its host. A glycoprotein on the virus’s surface called hemagglutinin, which has 17 identified types (H1-H17), determines how the virus sticks to and enters the host cell. Another glycoprotein, neuraminidase, with 10 known types…

Kerry Clark never wanted to show that Lyme disease exists in the Southern United States by catching it himself. Clark is a medical entomologist at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. A wiry man with graying brown hair, he is most at home in a kayak on the ponds behind the wooded Jacksonville campus. He jogs and lifts weights, when he is well enough to do so. Clark has spent years all over the South crawling through underbrush and kicking up leaf litter to collect ticks that transmit infections. Despite innumerable tick bites, Clark never had a medical problem until the day he dragged for ticks in the town of Fayetteville, a suburb south of Atlanta. Clark was giving a talk on Lyme disease at a gathering of the…

Genre-blurring titles and groundbreaking hardware dominated the video game scene in 2013. At press time, we were still waiting to get our hands on the much-hyped new consoles, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But there are plenty of other reasons it’s good to be a gamer right now. BIOSHOCK INFINITE Most sequels never surpass the original. Then there’s Bioshock Infinite. Vibrant scenery, swashbuckling combat and a mind-bending, quantumlicious story all improve on 2007’s Bioshock, itself a masterpiece. Protagonist Booker DeWitt roams a floating city with supernatural abilities and improvised weapons, looking for the girl who can solve all his problems. Oh, and it all happens in 1912. Deciphering the byzantine plot only adds to the experience. bioshockinfinite.com OCULUS RIFT Resembling night vision goggles, the OR allows gamers to immerse themselves…

FIZZ By Tristan Donovan Whether you call it soda or pop, the bubbly beverage has become ubiquitous during the past century. Mobsters used it to cover up the mouth-burn of bootleg liquor during Prohibition, while industry giants promoted it as more than just something to sip, such as Coca-Cola being marketed as a symbol of America in the WWII era. Donovan charts a refreshing albeit number-heavy history of fizzy drinks, from the first "fixed air" waters to ever-sweeter iterations that have changed how the world quenches its thirst. — BREANNA DRAXLER NEUTRINO HUNTERS By Ray Jayawardhana "I have done a terrible thing," wrote physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 while investigating a type of radioactive decay. "I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected." Pauli’s particle — eventually known as…

1. You’re pretty much a Neanderthal. While it’s been more than 5 million years since we parted ways with chimps, it has been only 400,000 since human and Neanderthal lineages split. 2. If you’re Asian or Caucasian, your ancestors interbred with Neanderthals as recently as 37,000 years ago, when they crossed paths in Europe. 3. And that sex had benefits. Inherited Neanderthal genes come in alleles that help fight off nasty viruses such as Epstein-Barr — associated with several kinds of cancer, says Stanford University immunologist Laurent Abi-Rached. 4. If you want to know how much Neanderthal DNA you carry, just swab your cheek and send it to the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project. Or you could have your entire genome sequenced as Ozzy Osbourne did in 2010. Researchers found…

JOIN THE CONVERSATION Send email to: editorial@DiscoverMagazine.com. Address letters to: DISCOVER 21027 Crossroads Circle P.O. Box 1612 Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Connect with us on: Facebook facebook.com/DiscoverMag Twitter twitter.com/DiscoverMag Google+ plus.google.com/+discovermagazine I am a longtime reader of Discover, and I also put it into braille for the Library of Congress. I like the new, cleaner look — too many supposed attention-grabbing boxes, colors, font changes, etc. were not necessary. I also really enjoyed the bestiary article — fascinating! I’d love to see more articles on animal behavior. (And the illustrations for the bestiary were delightful.) Christina Brundage Raleigh, NC Thank you for your positive article about the marvel that is the opossum. They are wonderful and gentle creatures, the only American marsupial, immune to rabies and rattlesnake bites, and they deserve…

Astronomers have long sought out the sun’s “siblings,” stars born from the same cloud of gas and dust, because of the clues they’d provide regarding the sun’s origins. For years, the prevailing wisdom suggested that the sun was born in a sparsely populated “suburban” star-forming region about 5 billion years ago, along with roughly 3,000 other stars. (In contrast, densely populated “urban” regions can hold millions of stars.) The sun’s birth environment couldn’t have been too crowded, the logic went, because planetary systems, like ours, could never survive the gravitational jostling of neighboring stars in urban clusters. But what if that’s wrong? Mark Krumholz, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, realized that questioning the untested common wisdom about the sun’s suburban upbringing might mean it’s easier…

A maternal broad-snouted caiman (Caiman latirostris) carries its baby safely within its mouth at a farm for these threatened alligator relatives in Santa Fe, Argentina. "The mother would hear the baby caimans calling from the nest as they began to hatch, at which point we observed her digging out the nest and collecting her babies in ones and twos and carrying them very gently into the water shallows," photographer Mark MacEwen says. Environmental factors like rainfall and temperature influence the ratios of male-to-female caiman hatchlings, making the gender balance dependent on shifts in climate. — BILL ANDREWS, PHOTO BY MARK MACEWEN (NATUREPL.COM)…

In 2009, two teenagers in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed up at their village health clinic, vomiting and with blood in their noses and mouths — hemorrhagic symptoms of the notorious Ebola viruses. In three days they were dead. Yet it took three years for researchers to unmask the likely culprit: a brand-new virus called Bas-Congo, which is not related to Ebola or any other virus known to cause severe hemorrhagic fever. It can take weeks or months to identify a novel virus, and much longer if the sample must be sent to a specialized lab, as the Bas-Congo virus was. Such lags are too long, says virologist Charles Chiu, director of the Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center at the University of California in San Francisco. Deciphering a virus’s…

I’ve never liked flying very much. I know a lot of physicians who feel the same way: By nature, we like to be in control, and flying involves giving up control. But I was returning home from a conference 3,000 miles away, and that would have been a long drive. So as the plane took off, I settled into my window seat and did what I usually do: I closed my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep. I had been on-call for the previous week and must have been exhausted; the next thing I knew my seatmate was jostling me. “You said you were a doctor, right?” he asked urgently. “They’re asking for one up front.” In an instant, I was suddenly, jarringly, awake. Medical training left me…

IN THE TECH AND GADGET FIELD, 2033 has been a year to remember. Who can forget Prince George celebrating his 20th birthday in July with a mesospheric circuit of Earth in SpaceX’s first consumer-targeted vehicle, the Muskie? Or in October, when NASA officially opened its second permanent lunar base with a live BrainSync between honorary Moon President Neil deGrasse Tyson and a select group of fans who won the chance to access portions of his long-term memory through a QuantumWeb sweepstakes? While the Muskie and the BrainSync won’t hit the mass market until well into 2034, that doesn’t mean you have to content yourself with last year’s toys. Discover tested some of the newest, shiniest stuff out there to bring you our top picks for your 2033 holiday wish list.…

When Christine Cunningham, an education researcher and vice president at the Museum of Science in Boston, prompts elementary school students to draw an engineer at work, the pictures they hand in never surprise her. In fact, for the thousands of students Cunningham has polled around the country in recent years, childhood perceptions of engineers have been strikingly consistent — and consistently inaccurate. “Children think engineers drive trains,” she says. Some sketch construction workers assembling buildings, bridges or roads. “The kids think engineers build these structures, not design them,” Cunningham explains. While not altogether unexpected, Cunningham says such childhood misconceptions are troubling. “If you have no idea what engineers do, then it’s not very likely that you’ll think about this as a career path,” she says. Kids learn about the natural…

For most of his fabled career, Santa Claus has had to rely on reindeer for transport of his global export enterprise. Now, however, modern technology is giving the big guy in the red suit options other than ruminants. An elf wishing to remain anonymous gave our reporter access to specs on various alternatives Old Saint Nick is considering to cover his 4.6-million-mile route to all “nice”-listed boys and girls. REINDEER Fuel source: Vegetation Cost: 0.006 cents per mile Analysis: Santa was initially interested in converting reindeer-generated methane into fuel to heat the toy factory, but the standard industry method, the Fischer-Tropsch process, is still fairly inefficient and currently not cost-effective. ELECTRIC Fuel source: Liquid-cooled lithium-ion batteries comparable to those powering some American-brand cars already on the road Cost: 4 cents…

OK, let’s get something straight: We’re not saying dragons ever existed anywhere outside our imaginations. But the idea of dragons has captivated humans for centuries. In theaters Dec. 13, J.R.R. Tolkien’s archetypal fire-breathing villain Smaug dominates in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second installment of Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on the novel. That got us thinking: Could science explain any of Smaug’s fantastical features? We went to the man who’d know, paleontologist and Tolkien aficionado Henry Gee, who devoted an entire chapter to dragons in his book The Science of Middle-Earth. FIRE-BREATHING: The most dramatic aspect of dragons is arguably the most scientifically plausible. The bombardier beetle (Stenaptinus insignis), for example, produces the toxin benzoquinone and byproduct heat in a kind of internal combustion chamber, and then squirts…

Joseph, Mich., North Pier Outer Lighthouse on Lake Michigan after a late January storm this year. The intense buildup of freezing spray requires winds of at least 15 mph, belowfreezing air temperature and water temperature lower than 40 degrees Fahrenheit, says Jordan Gerth, a University of Wisconsin-Madison meteorologist and expert on Great Lakes weather phenomena. "As waves break near the shore, water droplets are blown by the wind and freeze onto subfreezing structures," Gerth says. To create this icy spectacle, temperatures plunged in about eight hours from 43 to 17 degrees and winds gusted more than 60 mph. The huge waves froze nearly on contact. — ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY LISA DAVIDSON RUNDELL…

Q: If the sun were simply removed immediately, would we go flying off into space right away, or would we continue orbiting a missing sun? — Simon Patterson Burnaby, British Columbia A: Were the sun and all its matter to (impossibly) go poof, we here on Earth wouldn’t have any inkling about its demise until some eight minutes and 20 seconds later. That’s because the sun’s gravitational influence travels at the speed of light, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity and all experimental evidence to date. Therefore, at the same time that we see the bright light in our sky go out, eight-plus minutes after the fact, Earth would begin straying from its elliptical orbital path, continuing along in a more or less straight line. Other, far weaker sources…

When a landslide tore through a remote Alaskan valley in July, no one was there to bear witness. But hours later, geoscientist Colin Stark of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spotted the event in the pattern of seismic waves passing through the Earth’s crust. Within days, using data from earthquake sensors and satellite images, he and colleague Göran Ekström were able to estimate, from their lab in New York, the landslide’s size, and even determine its path. The forces generated by landslides aren’t as well understood as those that occur during earthquakes, partly because landslides often strike unpopulated areas with no observers. As a result, landslides leave few clues to how they unfold, making it difficult to predict them or prevent damage the next time. When humans do live nearby, the…

Whether concocting a lie on the spot or trying to stick to a false alibi, the business of deception is hard work. Brain imaging studies show that lying takes greater mental effort than telling the truth, and children’s ability to fib increases hand in hand with their overall cognitive development. “Honesty is our default mode,” says Xiaoqing Hu, a psychology doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. “When telling a lie, you have to inhibit the honest response and activate a dishonest response.” Hu speculated that people might lie more easily and convincingly if they have time to rehearse — as is often the case in real-life situations, such as police interrogations. To find out, Hu and colleagues asked volunteers to respond “yes” or “no” to a series of questions about their…

Quick with a smile and even faster with a pun, native New Yorker Stephen Morse doesn’t seem like a man preoccupied with mass killers. As a boy he toyed with the idea of becoming an Egyptologist or herpetologist — “I spent a lot of time trying to catch snakes in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey” — but eventually he chose microbiology. A lifelong lover of solving puzzles, Morse gravitated toward some of the most mysterious microbes: killer viruses that seemed to strike from out of nowhere, sometimes reaching pandemic levels. “I like intellectual challenges — that’s probably my greatest weakness,” jokes Morse, sitting in his office at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where books, often two or three rows deep, are crammed floor to ceiling. Morse is…

It’s a Friday morning in Princeton when I find this gem in my inbox from a senior professor I know: Subject: Not an easy e-mail to write ... Dear Max, Your crackpot papers are not helping you. First, by submitting them to good journals and being unlucky so that they get published, you remove the “funny” side of them. ... I am the Editor of the leading journal ... and your paper would have never passed. This might not be that important except that colleagues perceive this side of your personality as a bad omen on future development. ... You must realize that, if you do not fully separate these activities from your serious research, perhaps eliminating them altogether, and relegate them to the pub or similar places you may…

After four years of searching for new worlds — discovering 164 planets and finding hints of at least 3,500 more — the Kepler space telescope was brought down on May 15 by a couple of faulty ball bearings. Without those bearings, the spacecraft lost its aim, and Kepler’s prime planethunting days came to an abrupt end. For Bill Borucki, who had championed the mission since the 1980s, it was a deflating and humbling moment. Why, then, is this man smiling? “Oh, I have a feeling of satisfaction,” says Borucki, an astronomer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in his distinctive soft voice. “The worry before we launched was that there were very few planets. That’s not true. We’re finding lots of planets of all sizes, including planets that may be full…

Half a million gallons of water may be a drop in the bucket of an ocean environment, but it’s a tripling in size for the Salt Lake City-area aquarium, which moves to a new and greatly expanded home in a southern suburb. The shark tank alone will be 20 times the size of the exhibit at the previous location, and features a walk-through tunnel, the better to ogle the 2,000 animals that will call it home. Other attractions include a trio of touch pools, a roomy habitat for penguins and special galleries for rainforest and deep-sea creatures. Tentatively slated to open in December, the Draper location’s doors will stay shut until the animals have acclimated to their new home, so check the website before planning your visit. thelivingplanet.com — GT…

12/5–12/8: Futuristic Flicks Brooklyn hosts the Philip K. Dick Film Festival, featuring winning science fiction that humans and replicants alike will enjoy. thephilipkdickfilmfestival.com 12/20: Walking With Dinosaurs 3-D Opens Computer-animated pachyrhinosauruses grow up, make friends and migrate against a live-action backdrop filmed partly in Alaska. Produced by BBC Earth. walkingwithdinosaurs.com You’ve Got a Certain Glow About You Dec. 21, 1898: The Curies discover radium. At the time of the Curies’ achievement, the health risks of radiation exposure weren’t known. Marie even kept radium salts on her bedside table — not a good choice of night lights. tinyurl.com/CuriesRadium 12/1: Red Ribbon Day “Act Aware” by educating yourself about HIV, one of the worst pandemics in history. worldaidsday.org 12/6: Edison Awards Deadline Innovation and impact are the name of the game as…