Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2015 i Discover

In case you couldn’t tell by the cover, Albert Einstein is the hero of the issue. But if this issue were to have an unsung hero, it would be associate editor Bill Andrews. Over the course of several months, Bill took charge of the editorial adventure that is our special Einstein section (beginning on page 28), editing multiple stories into one seamless whole, dealing with countless pesky notes and requests from two different supervising editors and ultimately delivering a package that we trust you’ll find satisfying and illuminating. By the time you read this, Bill will be off on a new adventure — literally. We’re sending him to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard to view a solar eclipse with several Discover readers. We’ll have him write about his trip at…

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1990 Supermassive Black Holes Hubble images revealed that most galaxies contain supermassive black holes millions of times heavier than the sun. Astronomers are still trying to work out the full relationship between a galaxy’s evolution and its black hole. 1991 Nascent Solar Systems Data showing pancake-shaped objects within a distant cloud of gas and dust provided the first views of protoplanetary disks — the birthplace of stars and orbiting planets, including our solar system. 1992 Dark Matter Einstein predicted that the gravity of massive bodies could alter the path of light. (For more, check out our “Outsmarting Einstein” section on page 28.) When Hubble observations showed this also occurring around galaxies too puny to warp light by themselves, astronomers realized that the galaxies must be suffused with an unseen kind…

David Kessel’s high blood pressure started when he was just 13 years old. His doctors gave him many tests, but they never determined the cause. By his early 20s, he was taking 17 different pills a day, yet he still had a hard time climbing a flight of stairs without getting winded. He wore a blood pressure monitor, and its reading routinely hovered dangerously high. In summer 2005, Kessel signed up for a clinical trial in St. Louis, near his home. Surgeons working with a Minneapolis-based company called CVRx implanted an electrode the size of a half-dollar on his carotid artery. After the surgery, a battery-powered generator implanted in his chest electrically stimulated pressure sensors in the artery. Those sensors sent impulses to the brain, which, in turn, fired signals…

When he unveiled his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein wasn’t exactly met with applause. Almost no one else could do the math necessary to understand his abstract ideas, and at the time he didn’t have any evidence to back it up. But in the century since it was proposed, Einstein’s theory has continued to pass ever more stringent tests. It remains our best explanation of the phenomenon of gravity. The theory bears out all sorts of wild predictions, the bulk of which boil down to this: Gravitation behaves the same for all observers, resulting from curving “space-time,” the fabric of the universe. Einstein’s concepts have been verified — just as he reckoned they would — on scales from a foot-long sub sandwich to galaxy clusters millions of light-years wide.…

At first, no one noticed that Joe Borelli was losing his mind — no one, that is, but Borelli himself. The trim, dark-haired radiologist was 43 years old. He ran two practices, was an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and played a ferocious game of tennis. Yet he began to have trouble recalling friends’ names, forgot to run important errands and got lost driving in his own neighborhood. He’d doze off over paperwork and awaken with drool dampening his lab coat. Borelli feared he had a neurodegenerative disease, perhaps early onset Alzheimer’s. But as a physician, he knew that memory loss coupled with fatigue could also indicate obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disorder in which sagging tissue periodically blocks the upper airway during slumber. The sufferer…

The Latest Science News & Notes COSMIC TARGET Bull’s-eye! The gas giant Jupiter looks like a target circle in this composite photo that depicts the planet’s south pole. While no spacecraft has ever traveled directly under the planet, NASA’s Cassini probe shot 18 photos of the pole while en route to Saturn, and the Cassini imaging team stitched them together. In reality, it’s an impossible view since half the planet should always be covered in shadow. At the upper left lies the Great Red Spot, a major storm that has lasted for centuries. In addition, features as small as 75 miles across are visible throughout. — ERNIE MASTROIANNI, PHOTO BY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE Twenty-five years ago, the striking blue waters of Florida’s Peacock Springs were as clear as glass, “like…

On a war-torn street of the future, an American soldier lies sprawled, unsure if a nearby blast has harmed him. Is there internal bleeding? He carries an injector containing artificial platelets, which will augment his body’s normal clotting mechanism and curtail any hemorrhaging. Yet the injection will be harmless if he has escaped injury. “You don’t want a soldier or medic to stress,” says Thomas Barker, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “ ‘If I inject this, am I causing myself harm?’ We wanted to take the decision out of the hands of the soldier.” Supported by a U.S. Department of Defense grant, the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, Barker and his team have created what they call platelet-like particles, or PLPs, according…

Sandra slid the heavy window open. Smog and car exhaust wafted into her high-rise apartment. The sounds of the city on this Sunday afternoon were jarring and loud — the rumble of a subway train, a car honking, bus brakes squealing. In her bare feet, the 28-year-old woman climbed up and eased herself onto the window ledge, her legs dangling. The experience was vivid: the cityscape all around her, the wind blowing her hair into her eyes, the building’s rough concrete scratching at her calves. Her heart beat faster as she watched the traffic far below, and she gathered up the strength to push off. Thankfully, she didn’t jump. Instead, she was in my hospital’s emergency department an hour later. Sandra was sitting up on a stretcher, her legs crossed.…

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity remade gravity and solved problems that Newton’s theory couldn’t. It’s passed each of the dozens of experimental tests devised since its debut in 1915. But physicists have barely gotten started. “We’ve only been playing around in Newton’s world so far,” says Neil Cornish, a physicist at Montana State University. That will soon change, though, as several bold experiments enabled by telescopes of unprecedented reach — and in some cases by entirely new ways to gather data — are poised to study how gravity behaves around some of the universe’s most extreme objects. “This is where general relativity really gets going,” says Cornish. Powerful telescopes are already looking for minute hiccups in the whirring of stellar corpses called pulsars. A global effort will soon photograph,…

An elderly man pries open a jar and fishes out a dripping human cerebellum. He carves off a chunk with a kitchen knife and places it in a plastic pill bottle. Then, wiping a hand on his pants, the man hands the bottle to an admiring visitor. The brain was Albert Einstein’s. The man was Thomas Harvey, a pathologist who in 1955 removed, photographed and preserved the great physicist’s brain during autopsy. In the decades since, the brain has enjoyed a certain celebrity. In the ’80s, Harvey gave away slices to the curious, keeping the rest in a pair of glass cookie jars. (These bizarre transactions appear in the 1994 documentary Relics: Einstein’s Brain.) In the late ’90s, he carried it across the country in a Tupperware container to offer…

→They were small, the tallest barely more than 5 feet. Their bodies were essentially the same as modern humans — from the neck down. Their skulls were another matter, with braincases less than half the size of ours. About 1.8 million years ago, they were the first humans to know winter. Ongoing excavations at Dmanisi, a site in the Republic of Georgia, have yielded scores of early hominid fossils, including five skulls and, most recently, a complete male pelvis found in 2014. The fossils’ mix of primitive and more evolved characteristics — such as small brains but body proportions similar to our own — defies how we currently classify our distant ancestors and relatives. An equally compelling mystery, however, is what the hominids were doing at Dmanisi in the first…

1 Dust is universal: It’s dry, powdery soil or any other material made up of tiny particles, whether that’s in a pile under your bed or the plume of a volcano. 2 Many mammals and birds take dust baths as part of their grooming routines or social rituals. 3 Chickens dust-bathe so devotedly that caged hens sometimes act out “sham” baths on the floors of their cages, without any dust. 4 Humans, on the other hand, go to great lengths to keep dust away. One of the first motorized vacuum cleaners, patented by English engineer Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901, was nicknamed “Puffing Billy” after a famous steam locomotive. Huge, horse-drawn and powered by gasoline, it had to be parked outside, and its hoses were deployed through doors and windows…

SHRINKS By Jeffrey Lieberman Pill pushers, head shrinks, orators of psychobabble — psychiatrists have been called many names, not all of them complimentary. Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, confronts his field’s sometimes negative image head on, acknowledging psychiatry’s seedy past and the rogues and charlatans who led it astray. From squalid asylums and ice pick lobotomies to the dawn of antidepressants and MRIs, Shrinks details psychiatry’s missteps and failures, and eventual triumphs, as Lieberman tries to shake off the debilitating stigma that clings to mental illness — and the people who treat it. — BRENDA POPPY SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL By Zoe Cormier Cormier, part of the artsy collective Guerilla Science, promises stories of scientific discoveries made through tripping, rocking out or getting busy in…

Thanks to the supercomputer that is our brain, we can make lightning-fast inferences and associations between images and situations. For a real computer, though, the same task is a bit harder. That kind of advanced visual processing requires significant artificial intelligence (AI) — the ability to perform humanlike cognitive tasks such as reasoning, generalizing and learning from past experience. Yet, since summer 2013, NEIL — the Never Ending Image Learner — has been hard at work at Carnegie Mellon University analyzing and forming relationships between images from all over the Internet. The better the system gets, the closer we are to truly powerful AI and a new era of smart technology. Made up of two computer clusters housing a total of 200 processing cores, NEIL is programmed to organize its…

Albert Einstein single-handedly changed the universe 100 years ago. For centuries, Isaac Newton’s straightforward equations ruled the cosmos — or at least how physicists thought about it. Any object with mass exerted an attractive force on any other object with mass; the bigger the masses, and the closer the two objects, the stronger the attraction. Simple. But in 1915, Einstein suggested that things were a bit trickier. Even Einstein had to labor for almost a decade to formulate the complex mathematical relationships behind his magnum opus, his own version of gravity: the general theory of relativity. Gravitational attraction, it turned out, was due to nothing less than the warping of the cosmos. A massive object literally bends the three-dimensional fabric of the universe around it, taking any smaller objects in…

Why are researchers so intent on proving Einstein right or wrong? It’s not simply that he is a towering figure whose name is synonymous with genius, someone whose work has profoundly shaped physics for more than a century. Instead, much of the incentive stems from gravity itself, which has been something of a problem child in the field. Physicists, including Einstein, have long hoped to devise a unified theory of the universe, but they’ve struggled to get gravity to mesh with the other fundamental forces. As a result, we currently have a theory of gravity (Einstein’s general relativity) and a separate theory of everything else (the “standard model” of particle physics). Unfortunately, these two extremely successful theories are incompatible with each other — and sometimes even contradictory. This arrangement just…

→Last spring, my young daughter and I went to the opening day of Little League season in our small town of White Salmon, Wash. As always, it was a day for classic Americana: The Boy Scouts raised the Stars and Stripes over the ballfield, we sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a local celebrity threw the first pitch. This year, the ceremonial pitcher was Vic Wild, a White Salmon native who won two gold medals in snowboarding at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. When the announcer called his name, Wild, wearing dark sunglasses and a flannel shirt, jogged to the pitcher’s mound. He grinned and shrugged at the audience, then wound up and let loose a pretty good pitch. The crowd went crazy. What nobody mentioned — not the…