The Week: Most Recent Science Posts

Why Facebook makes breaking up even worse

The Week — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:30:00 -0400

Before you gleefully change your status to "in a relationship" and post photos with your new love for all of Facebook to see, consider this: A new study suggests that photos, posts on Facebook, and other digital reminders of an ex-love may prolong the pain of a break-up. Corina Sas of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and Steve Whitaker of University of California Santa Cruz have researched how having to "dispos[e] of digital possessions" — posts, blog entries, videos, photos, even songs — hinders people's ability to move on after a relationship.

The authors interviewed 24...

Scientists: Climate change is real

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:04:00 -0400

As if the backing of NASA, 18 independent American scientific societies, and an intergovernmental panel established under the United Nations weren't enough to quell the protests popping up in comment sections across the Internet, a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters confirms — once again — that climatologists almost unanimously believe that climate change is directly related to human-made carbon emissions.

Researchers pored over nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1991 to 2011. These papers, according to Michael Todd at Pacific Standard...

Why do we lie? A look at the evolution of mendacity

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:34:00 -0400

The answer to the question "Why do we lie?" seems fairly obvious: The truth is messy, inconvenient, and a time-consuming pain to untangle. Hence, the existence of little white lies: "I'm on my way!" when really you're still brushing your teeth.

It turns out that there's scientific evidence to back that theory. A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B looks at the phenomenon of lying through an evolutionary lens, and the research suggests that lying has helped grease the wheels of human interactions for ages.

"Tactical deception," claim the study's authors, "[or] the misrepresentation...

Can Kepler's hunt for another Earth be salvaged?

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:42:00 -0400

The mission of NASA's Kepler spacecraft is in peril.

The space agency says a malfunction has disabled a reaction wheel that keeps Kepler's telescope pointed precisely at far-away planets, a glitch that could, conceivably, put an end to Kepler's search for possibly habitable, Earth-like planets orbiting far-away stars. Losing Kepler would be a tremendous setback.

Kepler, launched in 2009, has identified 130 planets and 2,740 other possible planets, many of which are probably rocky worlds similar to Earth. Just last month, astronomers reported that the telescope — which detects slight dips...

Scientists for the first time create human stem cells through cloning

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:39:00 -0400

A team of scientists have successfully cloned human embryos that can produce stem cells, a major breakthrough that could lead to new medical treatments — and, potentially, human cloning.

Scientists from Oregon Health and Science University, reporting their finding Wednesday in the journal Cell, said they had taken a baby's skin cells and combined them with human eggs. The result? Human embryos genetically identical to the original baby that, crucially, were able to produce fresh stem cells.

The process, known as a somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), involves taking the nucleus of one...

The melting of Mount Everest: By the numbers

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:45:00 -0400

The authors of a new environmental study warn that the glaciers surrounding Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, are receding at an alarming rate as temperatures rise and snowfall decreases. The team, led by researcher Sudeep Thakuri of Italy's University of Milan, used satellite imagery and topographic maps to piece together the glacial history of Everest and the surrounding 713-square-mile Sagarmatha National Park. Here's a look at the report the scientist compiled, by the numbers:

13
Percentage that the glaciers in the Everest region have shrunk in the last 50 years

590
Feet Everest...

4 huge solar flares in 48 hours: What's going on with the sun?

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:28:00 -0400

2013 has been a relatively quiet year in terms of solar activity — at least until this week. For the past two days, the sun anchoring our solar system has been throwing something of a temper tantrum. And it's made for some rather spectacular fireworks.

In the past 48 hours alone, the sun has sent four colossal X-class solar flares whipping into space, all emerging from darkened sunspots dotting our star's chromosphere. (X-class flares, it's worth noting, are assigned a number to illustrate their relative strength: An X2 flare is twice as powerful as an X1, and so forth.)

Wired reports...

The advantages of a lab-grown hamburger

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:59:00 -0400

In the future you may be able to sink your teeth into a salty, meaty burger in good conscience, thanks to in-vitro innovations dreamed up by Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

About two years ago, Dr. Post set out to create a real hamburger assembled from tiny slivers of muscle tissue grown entirely in a petri dish — no cows, moos, or slaughterhouses required. Post says the gelatinous-looking flesh he has created — and ingested — actually tastes "reasonably good."

In a few weeks, The New York Times reports, Post plans...

PHOTOS: 7 beautifully terrifying lightning storms

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:39:00 -0400

Bolts of cloud-to-ground lightning are unleashed during a thunderstorm at dusk over Tucson, Ariz. (Ed Darack/SuperStock/Corbis)

Lightning streaks across the low-hanging clouds above the Financial District in Shanghai, China. One lightning bolt even connects with the spire of the Oriental Pearl Tower. (Reuters/Corbis)

Lightning strikes above the city of Zurich, Switzerland, giving the midnight sky a momentary, bright blue hue. (AP Photo/Keystone, Alessandro Della Bella)

One almost-impossibly-bright bolt of lightning strikes the Haitian city of Port-au-Prince. (EDUARDO MUNOZ/Reuters...

WATCH: A Canadian astronaut performs David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' in space

The Week — Mon, 13 May 2013 02:28:00 -0400

If you had to guess what was on any given astronaut's iPod, Davie Bowie's "Space Oddity" would be a pretty good pick. Bowie's dark celebration of space travel, recorded in 1969, has an ambiguously unhappy ending, but it's a great song that spins a believable tale of the loneliness ("here am I sitting in a tin can") and distant adulation ("the papers want to know whose shirt you wear") of floating above the world.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield — commander of the International Space Station (ISS) for the past five months, until he boarded a Soyuz space capsule bound for Earth on Sunday...

What two dead stars reveal about Earth's origins

The Week — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:31:00 -0400

Sitting on the nose of the constellation Taurus, about 150 light-years away from Earth in the star cluster Hyades, are the dulling embers of two white dwarf stars.

Under normal circumstances, the stars' burnt-out cores would be unremarkable. But scientists from Cambridge University peering through NASA's Hubble telescope noticed something peculiar.

Instead of being surrounded by mostly empty space, the stars' remnants were swimming in a dusty cloud of asteroid debris, likely smashed to bits by the dwarves themselves.

Surprisingly, the matter in this instance was mostly composed of heavy...

Tongue erections: The adaptation that helps bats lap up nectar

The Week — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:15:00 -0400

Hovering over a flower to feast on nectar isn't easy. All that wing-flapping can really drain the energy out of an airborne creature, making it in a winged animal's best interest to suck up all those tasty nutrients as quickly as possible.

To that end, hummingbirds have evolved long, straw-like beaks and forked, bifurcated tongues with more surface area. Bees have long, hairy tongues that literally soak up all that liquid vitality, kind of like a mop.

Nectar-guzzling bats — in this case, Glossophaga soricina — have similar hair-like projections coating their tongues. They're...

Would you risk your life for a chance to go to Mars? These people would

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:22:00 -0400

Mankind's dream of setting foot on a foreign planet inched one step closer to reality (or at least reality TV) this week, when the Mars One mission announced that more than 78,000 people had submitted video applications for a chance to live on the Red Planet. The application process, which opened April 22, is being used to find a brave foursome of space explorers who will hopefully establish a permanent, self-sustainable colony on Mars by the year 2023.

Would-be Martians — who were charged an application fee ranging from $5 to $75 depending on their country of origin (U.S...

Turn off the lights: Glow-in-the-dark houseplants are on the way

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:59:00 -0400

This is really cool: A team of scientists based in California are looking to engineer a new generation of bioluminescent plants by tinkering with their genetic makeup. And they've already smashed their funding goal on Kickstarter.

The kooky experiment is about more than making something neat to show your friends. As Andrew Pollack at The New York Times notes, the research could pave the way for "trees that can replace electric streetlamps" or even "potted flowers luminous enough to read by."

"We are using Synthetic Biology techniques and Genome Compiler's software to insert bioluminescence genes...

America's coming cicada invasion: 5 key facts

The Week — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:15:00 -0400

They're back! After 17 years of hiding in the earth, vast clouds of cicadas are set to swarm the eastern United States in the coming weeks, from Georgia all the way up to New York. The noisy insects — a menacing black with fiery red eyes — are expected to be everywhere and on everything, buzzing through the air and clinging to the sides of buildings. But despite their terrifying appearance, the bugs are relatively harmless. Here, five facts worth knowing about the coming swarm of Brood II Magicicadas:

1. There will be hundreds of millions of them
The insects aren't very big —...

3 simple tips for smuggling a gigantic, $1 million dinosaur skeleton

The Week — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:38:00 -0400

The fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is famous for several reasons, including having comically short arms. It's also been dead for millions of years, which makes its bones, short ones and all, eminently valuable. Now, a nearly complete skeleton of one its close relatives — the Tyrannosaurus bataar — is at the center of a major repatriation effort that has seen the U.S. government return the remains to Mongolia.

The 70 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton was looted from the Gobi Desert and smuggled to the United States over a five-year period by a self-described "commercial paleontologist...