Health & Science

The sun takes a rare hiatus

Sunspot activity may be entering a lull for the first time in almost 400 years, offering scientists a rare chance to gauge how solar conditions affect Earth’s climate. “This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Frank Hill, a researcher at the National Solar Observatory, tells Agence France-Presse. Three new NSO studies suggest that the sun’s fluctuating magnetic field may soon become too weak to produce sunspots, those dark regions of gas on the solar surface that normally wax and wane every 11 years. The sun should reach the peak of that cycle next year, but its recent calm “weather’’—including slower surface wind patterns and fewer solar flares—could signal it’s entering a period of relative dormancy. That would mean less solar radiation reaching the Earth. The last time sunspots disappeared, in 1645, their absence lasted for 70 years, during which Earth experienced a frigid period known as the “Little Ice Age.” Hill says there’s not “enough evidence either way” to say whether that dip in the sun’s magnetic activity caused the Earth’s cooling. But he says the coming sunspot hiatus will be “a splendid opportunity’’ to figure out how the sun’s weather affects our climate.

Autism clues revealed

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Some cases of autism are inherited, but what about those that show up in families with no history of the disorder? Several new studies suggest those cases are caused by spontaneous mutations that can occur at hundreds of sites on DNA strands. “For the first time, we’re getting a sense of how many areas of the genome are likely to contribute to autism,” study author Matthew State of Yale University tells the Los Angeles Times. “We know there are multiple different ways to get autism.’’ When he and his colleagues analyzed the genes of more than 1,000 autistic children who had unaffected siblings, they discovered mutations at as many as 300 different sites in the genome. They also found that it takes considerably fewer such mutations to cause autism among boys than among girls—which could explain why boys are four to five times more likely than girls to have the disorder. Diagnosed cases of autism have been rising steadily, and today one in 110 children in the U.S. has the disorder; a compelling question is why. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an autism researcher at the University of California at Davis, thinks the evidence of DNA damage and mutation points to exposure to chemicals and toxins. “The obvious conclusion one has to reach is that something environmental may well be the cause of these changes in DNA,’’ Hertz-Picciotto said.

Lasers get the gift of life

Could our cells be engineered to shoot laser beams inside our bodies? It sounds like science fiction, but researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital say they’ve managed to turn a kidney cell into a laser. It’s “the first time that we have used biological materials” to generate laser-quality light “from something that is living,” study author Seok-Hyun Yun tells Nature.com. He and his colleagues first altered human kidney cells so that they produced the same green fluorescent protein that some jellyfish do. Then they placed a glowing cell between two tiny mirrors and pulsed it with blue light, causing it to emit a directional beam of “beautiful green,” Yun says. The study authors say that further research could make it possible to use what they call biolasers to target and destroy cancerous tissue from deep within the body, or even to make brain cells flash, allowing disabled people to communicate with computers using only their thoughts.

Scanning brains for pop hits

Hit songs tap into inherent preferences in our brains. This is the conclusion of a new study that found that songs that become highly popular light up areas of the brain linked to reward and anticipation, regardless of whether listeners say they like the tunes. In 2006, researchers at Emory University scanned the brains of teenagers while they were listening to little-known pop songs, and asked them whether they thought the tunes would be popular. Four years later, they compared the results to the songs’ sales. It turned out that the teens were no good at guessing which songs would do well. Their brain scans, on the other hand, often registered excitement for many of the songs that did become commercially successfully—even if the teens said they didn’t really like the songs. The results are further proof that consumers may not be aware of—or at least want to admit—what they like. A new field of research—neuroeconomics—studies just that phenomenon, anticipating popular trends by surveying gray matter. “You really can’t fake the brain responses,” study author Gregory Berns tells LiveScience​.com. “That taps into a raw reaction.”