Discover June 2014

Hands-On Science I have three school-age kids, so I’m occasionally involved in some science project or other: overseeing an experiment with acids and bases in the kitchen; measuring rainfall in the backyard; launching a Diet Coke-and Mentos-fueled rocket over the neighbor’s house. Actually, I’m still not convinced that last one was a school-sanctioned experiment. They’re great fun, but working on these projects reminds me that I was not always an “A” student in science class. I learned better by doing, not by reading, and for most of my early school years, my teachers taught straight from the book. It wasn’t until high school, when I had access to an actual school science lab — and a teacher who made full use of it — that my interest and my grades…

Homeschooling, Hangouts and a Hoax Homeschool Help Our January/February issue annually sums up the previous year in science. Thank you for the “100 Top Stories of 2013.” I am the grandmother of a 9-year-old boy for whom science is his love. I homeschool him, and we used the January/February 2014 issue for our science component this past month. We picked four of the 100 stories each day to read out loud, discuss and ponder about. I realized yesterday while driving him for a haircut that he was sitting there talking out loud about the difference between dark matter and antimatter, and neutrinos to boot. His mind is on a different plane from mine. Keep up the 100 top stories issues, please! Homeschooling parents can really use them — and not…

What’s up? A lot more than you might think. Floating and flying above us are not only the usual suspects — birds, bats, insects — but countless microscopic creatures as well. The disciplines of aerobiology and aeroecology explore how animals, plants and other organisms live in, move through and interact with the aerosphere — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that supports life. (It’s also known as the boundary layer, which typically stretches upward about 650 to 1,650 feet.) Ever since Boston University biologist Thomas Kunz founded aeroecology in 2008, it has seen huge gains because of the growing ability to track air movement with radar and telemetry, and because of humans’ growing use of airspace. Instruments are now so precise that radar observations can spot a single bee at about…

An archaeologically fertile area of the Middle East finally opens up. All of Iraq is not created equal — at least not for archaeologists. Its war-torn northern region, known as Kurdistan, has been closed to digs for more than half a century. But the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is now allowing a team led by Boston University archaeologist Michael Danti to search the mountainous area for artifacts. Their continuing efforts in the western Zagros Mountains, along the Turkish and Iranian borders, likely represent the best chance yet to dig at the root of Kurdish origins. Case in point: While widening a road leading into Iran, Danti says Kurdish workers dug into a 25-kilometer section of hillside, exposing the buried and burned remains of several stone, adobe and timber buildings from…

Q Why aren’t we using thorium in nuclear reactors, given the possibility of a meltdown is nearly zero and the waste cannot be used to make bombs? — Dennis Dorando Concord, Calif. AIn a word: precedent. It’s certainly possible to base nuclear reactors around thorium, as opposed to the most commonly used element, uranium. And thorium reactors likely would be somewhat safer because of thorium-based fuel’s greater stability versus uranium-based fuel, with the added benefit of not producing as much nuclear bomb fuel. Of course, they’re still not perfect. Even though a conventional meltdown would be unlikely, thorium still produces harmful radiation that needs to be contained, and something could always go wrong. But the real reason we use uranium over thorium is a result of wartime politics. Cold War-era…

Inside the electrifying relationship between plants and insects. In a never-ending quest to ensure that bugs distribute their pollen, flowers strut their stuff, displaying their brightest colors and lushest scents to attract bees and other pollinators. Scientists recently discovered another shocking method flowers use to lure bumblebees: electric fields. Biologist Daniel Robert and colleagues at the University of Bristol in England already knew that flowers usually carry a negative electrical charge, while bees tend to be positively charged. To test whether bees could make use of that difference, the researchers electrified artificial flowers. Each group of the fakes had a different kind of charge, like the unique charges around real flowers. But some of the fakes held tasty sugar and others offered a bitter quinine solution. With the electricity on,…