Every day in San Diego began the same way. I stood packed with other students in a tight lattice of ribs, elbows, and kneecaps, swaying as our rickety shuttle rumbled over the freeway, past a couple malls, and up a eucalyptus-lined hill to the university. The bus ride, just over a mile long, was almost always the most menial nine minutes of my day.

But one morning, the shuttle got stuck in traffic, jittering to a halt in the middle of the freeway overpass. Looking out the window, I found myself staring at the eight lanes of cars below. I was suddenly struck by how many there were—hundreds of hot metal vessels, crawling south to downtown and whizzing north towards Los Angeles. And all around us, there were more cars, patiently humming in three stopped lanes, jammed into parking lots by the road. These cars, I realized, were full of people I had never met and never would meet, each with their own concerns and stories, their own reason for rushing somewhere at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning. And these nameless people around me were barely scratching the surface. Full Article »

Nobody realized that something was missing until 1932.

That was the year that Jan Hendrik Oort made a startling discovery. The Dutch astronomer was measuring the speed of stars in our galaxy, and something was wrong with his calculations. Just as it keeps humans tethered to the Earth, and the Earth looping around the Sun, gravity keeps all the stars in a galaxy clustered together. Oort knew that any stars he observed in the galaxy were held in by gravity. But gravity depends on mass, and a lot of gravitational pull requires a lot of material. Yet when Oort measured the speed of the stars and added up all the mass he could see in our galaxy, he found there was too little mass to keep the stars from hurtling right out of the galaxy. In fact, he could only see only one-third of the mass that was necessary. Oort thought he must have failed to account for some dim or hidden stars.   Full Article »

This month, a team of scientists announced that they had identified and combined key genetic mutations to significantly increase fruit production in tomato plants. These new mutations arose from a breeding technique called induced mutation, where seeds are sprayed with DNA-altering chemicals. It’s a research endeavor so risky that some describe it as “spray and pray”–but this time, it appears to have paid off. Tomatoes, the researchers say, are only the beginning: this increased fruit production could someday be translated into other crops, and might help produce more food for a growing world. Read more at NOVA Next.

Miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in cold, pressure, and complete darkness, Earth rips and folds along its seams. Seawater meets molten rock, and shoots upward as a superheated, chemical-laden soup. These are hydrothermal vents, the planet’s underwater volcanoes. Their bizarre world, full of strange creatures and extreme conditions, might seem like the last place to discover broadly applicable scientific breakthroughs. But the smallest organisms from this world, and the unexplored oceans at large, might hold profound insight for our own. Researchers have revealed that one hydrothermal vent microbe contains genetic material seen all over the world, and could help humans fight disease. Full Article »

The National Institutes of Health describes the childhood obesity epidemic as “a devastating public health crisis.” In just thirty years, obesity rates in American children in have doubled, reaching 18% as of 2012. An excess of body fat places these children at increased risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. But how did we get here? A controversial hypothesis published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings has proposed a new way to answer the question—and it doesn’t begin with the usual suspects.

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One afternoon in 1942, Randolph Major called John Clark Sheehan into his office. Major, the balding, self-effacing director of research at Merck Pharmaceuticals, was offering Sheehan his choice of research projects. Merck was looking into two interesting compounds: the steroid cortisone and the antibiotic penicillin. Sheehan said he was comfortable with steroid research, but Major interrupted him to say that Lewis Sarrett, a recent hire, was also qualified in this area.

Sheehan had heard of penicillin. “I knew that it was supposed to be a remarkable drug but very difficult to work with chemically,” he later recalled. This did not deter him. “If it is all right with you, Dr. Major, I’ll take the penicillin,” he said. At twenty-seven years old, Sheehan was about to begin the scientific mission that defined his career. Full Article »

It can be a challenge to make adhesives that stay sticky in wet conditions, but it’s an important task–especially in surgery, where repairs may need to hold strong amidst blood and other bodily fluids. But marine organisms like mussels, barnacles, and bacteria have figured out how to stick to wet rocks and surfaces with incredible strength. Researchers at MIT decided to steal a few tricks from these creatures. Read more at NOVA Next.

The Altamont Pass east of San Francisco holds a surprise for the unsuspecting driver. One moment, the hills appear bare except for a grazing cow or two—then the road curves and the wind turbines come into sight. As a child, I was always awestruck by these windmills, spinning away in eerie, majestic unison.

The Altamont Pass Wind Farm in California. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

They represent a tiny slice of the country’s wind power, which generates enough energy to fuel 11 million American homes every year. Windmills as a whole are also only one player in a larger team, which includes steaming geothermal plants, solar panels in fields and rooftops, hydropower and biomass plants, and other renewable sources. Together, these sources produce about 13% of the nation’s energy, converting the power of nature into electricity that can be funneled into a power grid and to our lights and devices. Full Article »

For the first decade of the twenty-first century, global warming seemed to take a vacation. The early 2000’s saw a much slower rate of warming at Earth’s surface than previous years, fueling skepticism about climate change. But recent studies show that global warming has neither slowed nor disappeared—it’s just very complex. Full Article »

One very small device may hold very big promise for answering some of the most complex questions in physics. A team led by researchers at Princeton University has developed a system that can force light into a solid state. They are hopeful that their device could lead to the discovery of new forms of light energy, and that it might pave the way toward new answers in the mysterious realm of quantum mechanics.

It is hard to imagine crystallized light, and with good reason. Photons, the tiny particles that make up light energy, “…are massless particles…in nature, photons don’t interact at all,” says co-first author Dr. Darius Sadri, a postdoctoral fellow in condensed matter physics at Princeton. “[What] we’ve managed to do is figure out how to get photons to interact with each other in a strong way.”

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