Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2015 i Discover

Einstein says time is an illusion. This conscientious cosmologist has a different view. I’ve always found stories about time, and human perception of it, endlessly fascinating, but also somewhat unnerving. Einstein held that time is just another dimension of the universe and that its passage is an illusion, that past, present and future coexist simultaneously. Which I suppose would mean that Einstein didn’t really come up with this idea 110 years ago — he’s coming up with it at the same time that I’m writing about it, and at the same time that George Ellis, a conscientious cosmologist, is disputing that selfsame view of the universe. Specifically, Ellis holds that the future is not set and that it’s dangerous to suppose that it is. He explains why in our cover…

The Iberian lynx, the world’s most endangered wildcat species, once numbered fewer than 200 in the wild. Now, more than 300 roam the Iberian Peninsula on Spain’s southernmost tip. And late last year, Portugal welcomed its first pair of lynxes that were reintroduced into the wild from captivity. The species owes much of its revival to the Iberian Lynx Conservation Breeding Program, which has reintroduced more than 70 lynxes since 2010. But the program got a key assist from an unlikely source: the bloodsucking triatomine assassin bug. Female lynxes new to pregnancy and motherhood often lose their first litter because of inexperience and stress. So scientists track all females in the program to identify and monitor pregnant lynxes. The problem: They needed blood samples, but tranquilizing the cats to collect…

The Story of Science By Susan Wise Bauer The touchstone texts of science were not written in a void. Historian Bauer introduces readers to the stories behind the words of some of history’s most radical thinkers and theorists. Alfred Russel Wallace, for instance, ill and forced to lie in bed for hours a day with “nothing to do but think,” developed a theory of natural selection at nearly the same time as Charles Darwin. From the work of Hippocrates to Isaac Newton to Richard Dawkins, Bauer dumbs nothing down but makes complex topics comprehensible in just a few pages apiece. The results are accessible as a companion book with individual snippets on specific publications, or as an overall tour through the history of science. — ELISA NECKAR BiblioTech By John…

Duncan Lorimer will never forget the moment he stumbled upon one of the great new mysteries in astronomy. The Australian radio astronomer at West Virginia University had asked an undergraduate, David Narkovic, to comb through pulsar survey data from the Parkes Observatory in Australia. One fateful day in 2006, Narkovic walked into Lorimer’s office with evidence of an unusual observation: a pulse of radio waves from the sky unlike any seen before. It was among the brightest observations ever in radio astronomy, originating from billions of light-years away, and it lasted just a few milliseconds. “I was speechless,” Lorimer recalls. “To be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it.” Lorimer and Narkovic had uncovered the first fast radio burst, or FRB. It was a total surprise to them;…

As he swipes his finger over the touch screen, Joseph Quintanilla senses a subtle bumpiness. Rubbing back and forth, he feels the roughness give way to what seems like a flat glass surface. “Yeah, I can feel it getting smoother,” says Quintanilla, who is blind. The touch pad in his hands displays a snowy, frosted window that his finger wipes smoother with every pass. It’s an effect created in part by Ali Israr, an engineer at Disney Research labs. Israr specializes in haptic engineering, which focuses on applying tactile stimulation to our interactions with computers. The texture under Quintanilla’s finger doesn’t mimic the exact feeling of snow under fingertips — the temperature shifting, solid becoming liquid — but it does convey the feeling of a rough texture becoming smooth and…

In the 1880s, a young Dutch anatomist named Eugène Dubois set out to find the missing link between apes and humans. He chose to look in Indonesia, reasoning that gibbons resembled Homo sapiens. After four years of searching, he uncovered a skullcap with a simian-like brow ridge and a large brain case, along with other fragmentary fossils, buried near the Solo River on the Indonesian island of Java. Dubois’ “Java Man” became a lightning rod for debate at a time when many in the scientific community still resisted the idea that humans evolved from anything. Dubois’ missing-link claim was eventually disproven. Java Man was reclassified in the 1950s as Homo erectus and is now called Trinil 2, in reference to the excavation site. But Java Man wasn’t done causing a…

An outbreak in late 2014 of polio-like paralysis in children, unlike any experienced in North America in more than half a century, has physicians on edge about what this summer and fall may bring. “Neurologists have been really unnerved by what we’ve seen,” says Keith Van Haren, a physician at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital who has been treating cases in California. “We’re all really hoping it disappears, but the most likely outcome is that this will come back.” Looking all but identical to classic poliomyelitis but caused by something other than the poliovirus, the illness — formally named acute flaccid myelitis — usually strikes a week or two after a patient recovers from an apparently ordinary respiratory infection. Patients suddenly cannot move one or more limbs. Occasionally they lose theability…

The tiny batteries in your remote or key fob are convenient, but to a hungry (or curious) kid, they can pose a threat. The thousands of children a year who swallow them face throat burns, digestive tract damage and even death. Now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how scientists made working batteries that are virtually harmless inside our bodies. Researchers coated batteries with a silicon-based material and metal particles, then fed them to pigs. The waterproof and pressure-sensitive coating didn’t hurt the pigs, and the batteries remained functional in small electronic devices. Senior author Jeff Karp, a biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, hopes to see scalable prototypes this year.…

German biologist Renate Matzke-Karasz beamed at the virtual fossil slices on her iPad. “There are definitely internal structures in this animal, and perhaps even sperm!” she emailed retired Australian micropaleontologist John Neil, wanting him to be the first to know. It would take five more years to confirm, but Matzke-Karasz was actually looking at the oldest petrified sperm in the world. The fossil was a 17-million-year-old ostracod, or mussel shrimp. It was one of nearly 800 specimens that Neil had painstakingly handpicked from sediment between 2007 and 2010. Such fossils usually just include the animals’ hard shells, not preserved soft body parts such as inner organs or sperm. But Neil’s samples came from a freshwater cave in Riversleigh, Australia, where millions of years’ worth of bat droppings left the sediment…

“You better see this one,” my ER nurse, Elsa, urged. “Too pale, too pale.” I had already sent in Jeff, my medical student, for what seemed like a routine case: a 30-something woman complaining of cough, low-grade fever and fatigue for a week. I reread the chart: pulse 114 (a tad high), fever 100.4, good blood pressure and oxygen saturation near normal at 96 percent. This sure looked like the flu. Hustling over, I found Jeff diligently noting his findings in a small notebook. The patient — a thin, blond woman wearing a slightly startled expression — did her best to answer him. “Hello,” I announced. “I’m Dr. Dajer, the boss.” “Hello, boss. I’m Gail,” she riposted. Elsa was right. Blond hair and fair skin notwithstanding, her complexion was bone…

History Tripping In the March issue, Editor in Chief Steve George asked, “If you could visit any period of human history or development, which would you visit, and why?” As always, our readers supplied us with tons of interesting and varied answers. Here are just a few: → “I would like to go back to the Renaissance. I would like to interview Leonardo da Vinci and ask him some questions.” — Michael L. → “I would love to journey back to the Mesozoic Era. Paleontology is a passion of mine, and I’d want to see prehistoric animals, especially pterosaurs and aquatic fauna-like plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.” — Wade C. → “Being a New World archaeologist, I would like to travel back to the first migration to the New World. The Egyptians…

TECH Scientists have long experimented with organs-onchips: tiny representations of human organs, such as lungs, hearts and intestines, made from cells embedded on plastic about the size of a computer memory stick. Channels lined by living vascular cells then mimic the body’s circulatory system. But our bodies are complex systems of organs, so testing drugs on individual miniature organs only goes so far. Researchers now are aiming for something more: full-blown human bodies-on-chips. The kick-start came from the U.S. Department of Defense, which wanted a quick and effective way to develop and test drugs and vaccines against biological and chemical weapons. So federal agencies funded various projects to develop chips representing all the major organ systems. Each organon-a-chip hosts real human tissue kept alive by a synthetic circulatory system. Join…

PERSONAL In 2012, the Curiosity rover pulled off a spectacular landing on Mars as the whole world watched. But it was almost not to be. Just days before the landing on a Sunday in early August, NASA Chief Engineer Miguel de San Martín discovered an error. His team placed the spacecraft’s Inertial Measurement Unit, an essential instrument for landing, in the wrong place, a few inches above where the landing software expected it. Maybe the mistake wouldn’t affect anything, but it could destroy the multibillion-dollar rover upon landing. With the clock ticking, San Martín and the rest of the team in Pasadena, Calif., had to help NASA figure out a solution: do nothing and risk a crash, or send a special programming command to the spacecraft and hope it doesn’t…

Susannah Tringe grabs a pair of green rubber boots from the back of her truck, pulls them on and wades into a pea-colored pond until she’s standing calf-deep. We’re just a few miles from Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif., but from where we’re standing, Silicon Valley’s urban sprawl is just a faint, hazy blur. Stilt-legged birds skitter along the banks of the pond; cord grass and still water stretch to the horizon. “This is really mucky,” says Tringe, an environmental microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. “You sink in at every step.” She bends down to take a murky water sample, then holds the cup up to the light. “That looks disgusting,” laughs Susie Theroux, a postdoc in Tringe’s lab who still wrinkles her…

The manly hormone evolved 500 million years ago — from estrogen. 1 Testosterone is produced in men’s testicles, women’s ovaries and the adrenal glands of both sexes. In the early weeks of pregnancy, it kicks off the development of reproductive organs for males. 2 After birth, testosterone plays a role in regulating processes from fat distribution to red blood cell production. 3 Long before the hormone was discovered, people ascribed youth-restoring powers to the testicles. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder noted the sexually stimulating effects of dining on hyena genitals (with honey, of course). 4 Honeyed hyena testes sound preferable to the handiwork of Kansas huckster John Brinkley, who inserted slices of goat scrotum into men’s testicles in the 1920s, claiming it would boost virility and cure a host of…