As a corporate logo, Don Eigler’s picture wasn’t much to look at: a bunch of dour-gray dots spelling out the letters IBM. But it did the job. The year was 1989, the dots were individual xenon atoms, and the world was astounded.

These days, Eigler’s lab, at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, is still looking for new ways to make stuff ever more mind-bogglingly tiny. Their ultimate goal: to store digital data on single atoms, each representing either a zero or a one in binary code. Recently, they got a little closer. Well, maybe a lot closer.
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As many city commuters know, it is the nature of buses to be late. Traffic, weather, and fate conspire to create delay and fray riders’ nerves. But while there may be no sure cure for late buses, three mathematicians think they have found a way the system can do better.

A University of Southern California trio—Maged Dessouky, Jiamin Zhao, and Satish Bukkapatnam—last year developed a set of elegant equations for increasing the efficiency of bus schedules. Full Article »

Beyond the windows of one sixth-floor office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the clouds glow in the early-afternoon sun. But just this once, astrophysicist Adam Burgasser is unconcerned with the sky. He scans the shelves littered with physics textbooks, overlooks the unopened model-rocket launch set (an impending treat for his mechanics students), moves aside a pair of gray rollerblades to open and quickly close a cabinet, and then, dissatisfied, sits to study a flat-screen computer monitor through his silver-rimmed glasses.
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“Story ideas come from the sum of your life experiences…In short, and to put it bluntly, cannibalize your life. That’s what it’s there for.”

― Marshall Krantz, Ideas and Research

Let’s start with the seizure. I was ten years old and briefly lost consciousness while retrieving a ball gone astray during a game of pool volleyball in my backyard. My knees hit the grass first, then my arms, and finally my head. My body shook wildly, as if the sudden electrical change in my brain had extended to my muscles. I remember little more than feeling drenched with sweat in the backseat of the car, and then chilled by the air conditioning in the magnetic resonance imaging laboratory of the hospital. Full Article »

Mood swings and grandiose delusions may clearly characterize bipolar disorder in adults, but doctors don’t really know what bipolar disorder looks like in their younger patients. In fact, mania in children can often look like aggression, irritability, even cravings for sweets. That confusion may help explain why researchers found child bipolar diagnoses rising dramatically, more than fortyfold, over the last decade.
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Veterinarians can soon test for avian influenza and foot-and-mouth disease on the spot, using a briefcase-sized portable testing system that works in less than ninety minutes. The old method required shipping samples of the animals’ blood, phlegm, or other body fluids to an often distant laboratory, which then took five hours to produce a result, by which time infections may have spread.

The new device can run up to five independent tests simultaneously with the same kinds of samples. It can also be decontaminated on-site, making it ready to move to the next location.

The testing device, developed by UK-based Smiths Detection, could help manage disease outbreaks, said Stephen Phipson, Smiths Detection group managing director. Such outbreaks have proven fatal to people. According to the World Health Organization, the virulent H5N1 avian flu strain has claimed 203 lives between 2003 and October of this year, including a 5-year-old girl in Indonesia just last October. Losses to the hard-hit Asian poultry sector are estimated at $20 billion.

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Move over Betty Crocker. There’s a new baker in town—a baby star.

This infant ball of gas is so hungry to gain weight and outshine mature stars, like our sun, that it greedily ingests its embryonic cloud, where bits of dust and ice swirl about the star and eventually coalesce into a pancake-like disk around it.
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In South African caves overlooking the Indian Ocean, anthropologists have found evidence that our ancestors were hosting clambakes and painting themselves with makeup more than 160,000 years ago—the oldest signs of such familiar cultural activities found to date.

An international team of researchers, digging at Pinnacle Point near the southern tip of Africa, has uncovered ancient hearths filled with mollusk shells, pinky-finger-sized stone blades, and powdered pigments likely used for body paint.
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Christmas in the New York of my childhood was frosted windowpanes and flannel blankets indoors. We would sit, catatonic with joy over new presents and test them out, toy horses galloping across the carpet while parents, smug at their success, snapped photographs or video-taped. One year he tried out a live feed, straight from the camcorder to the television. He turned the camera on me, in all of my eight-year-old glory. Full Article »