Science News Prime | August 27, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 32 Human beings are highly social creatures. But sometimes we seem to be a little too worried about what our fellow humans are up to. Think of the girl who runs out and buys the same exact shirt you wore last week, or that guy who repeats the hilarious joke you just cracked, but louder. People like to do what other people do and want what other people have. This comes as no surprise to any human being who has ever attended, or known someone who has attended, high school. How else to explain the exponential proliferation of furry sheepsk...

SN Prime | September 17, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 35 The Mother of All Dragon Kings sounds like a character from Game of Thrones. But in fact, it’s a mix of wartime rhetoric and a technical scientific term. A “dragon king,” in the lingo of scientists who study complex systems, is an outlier. It’s an event, or effect, or activity, that’s literally off the scale — so big, so calamitous, that it doesn’t fit in the range of expected magnitudes. Huge earthquakes, sudden economic depressions, companies worth $600 billion are the dragon kings of the natural and socioeconomic worlds. ...

SN Prime | September 3 & 10, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 34 Back in the days before electronic ignitions, “kick-starter” referred to an old-fashioned means of igniting an engine with a hearty thrust of your foot. Today the term usually alludes to a thoroughly modern means of igniting financial support for a project. The Pebble, a wristwatch that can display data from your smartphone, is the poster child for this kind of fund-raising. Hacker and engineer Eric Migicovsky had the idea for the watch and the technological know-how for making it, but finding funding from venture capitalists or o...

SN Prime | August 20, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 32 Sometimes the best thing you can do with a monster is to poke it with a stick. Gently, of course. Prod too hard, and he might roar back in your face. That’s the chance scientists are taking in Italy, where they are drilling right into the heart of a restive supervolcano to see what it might do. Volcanologists like to work in southern Italy, and not just for the wine. Here, where the crustal plate carrying Africa dives beneath the plate carrying Europe, volcanoes bubble up like marinara on the stove. From Rome southward, the country is studde...

SN Prime | August 13, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 31 In school we learn that science proceeds logically from one experiment to the next, leaving in its wake a complete and certain body of knowledge. But science isn’t like that. It twists and turns, careens and tumbles and gets stuck in deep, sticky mudholes. And sometimes, science backtracks. That’s happened in cosmology recently, as observations of the universe’s accelerating expansion have forced theorists to go back and restore a notion — the cosmological constant — that Einstein abandoned by the scientific roadside eight d...

SN Prime, March 12, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 10 Scientific textbooks are repositories of accumulated wisdom, gathered by painstaking investigation and verification producing the distilled essence of humankind’s knowledge of nature. They’re also loaded with undocumented dogma. Much conventional scientific wisdom can be readily verified by consulting a textbook. But sometimes nobody has bothered to verify the verifier. Textbooks often contain assertions based on nothing more than a similar assertion in an older textbook. When you try to track down the original evidence for some scientific �...

Science News Prime | August 6, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 30 “You are not special. You are not exceptional.” Blunt words, delivered in June by English teacher David McCullough Jr. to the graduating class of Wellesley High School in Massachusetts. They quickly went viral. Lauded as an especially fitting message for today’s self-entitled “me generation,” McCullough’s speech garnered praise around the media world, from the Christian Science Monitor to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. McCullough’s remarks struck a chord, speaking to a sentiment that’s echoed in popular culture. Childre...

SN Prime | July 30, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 29 For 20 years now, scientists have been spying on the brain. The technique they use, called functional MRI, has changed the face of brain science, illuminating aspects of the human mind at work without the need for brain surgery or radio­active tracers. Just lie in a noisy metal tube for a while, and then presto — out pops a gorgeous image of a live brain. (OK, not really. Before that presto comes lots of complicated work, like preprocessing the data, choosing the right comparison, figuring out exactly where to look, fancy statistical test...

SN Prime | July 23, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 28 For some scientists, measuring time is harder than clocking Olympic sprinters. To date big events in Earth history, geologists need a clock that stretches back accurately far into the past. In fact, they do have two such clocks — one based on the steady radioactive decay of minerals, the other on the rhythmic swoops of Earth’s orbit. But recently researchers have found that these timekeepers are out of sync, in ways that would horrify any Swiss watchmaker. It’s like having the clock on your coffeemaker 45 seconds or so ahead of your ki...

SN Prime | July 16, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 27 The people who lived in Tasmania 8,000 years ago were pretty sophisticated, technologically speaking. They made bone tools, boomerangs, nets for catching a variety of prey and warm clothing to protect themselves from blustery weather. But when Europeans came upon that island, off Australia’s southern coast, just a few centuries ago, they found some of the most primitive hunter-gatherers in the world — subsisting without seaworthy vessels, sewn clothing or bone tools of any kind. What happened to the Tasmanians over the intervening mill...