SN Prime April 23, 2012 | Vol. 2 No. 16 Sometimes, hard work can be measured in sweat. Weeding a garden, painting the house or hooking golf balls out of the woods to win the Masters can leave a person physically wrung out. But hard work isn’t only about muscles. It takes place between people’s ears, too. Mental efforts, whether dedicated to writing a flawless sentence, figuring out how to respond to an e-mail or solving a long list of algebra problems, can be just as hard as Bubba Watson’s swinging a club at Augusta National. “Difficulty is more than caloric expenditure,” says...

SN Prime April 16, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 15 For some people, all math problems are difficult. But for computer scientists, most math problems are easy. The computer does all the work. Sometimes, though, problems come along that even computers can’t handle. Even the most powerful supercomputers on the planet can gag on certain types of mathematical puzzles. Computer scientists have a special term to describe such problems. They’re called “hard.” Physicists, of course, know all about hard problems, such as figuring out the laws of nature. That task is a bit different, though. Inste...

SN Prime April 9, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 14 If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the solar system. The sun is just getting warmed up. That big thermonuclear ball is powering toward the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity, which should occur late next year. Solar storms are already starting to barrel in this direction, like those in February and March that lit up space weather warning systems across the planet. Usually your biggest worry about the sun is whether it will be out in time for your picnic. But every decade or so, headlines start flaring with more dire forecasts: Solar storms...

SN Prime | April 2, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 13 From the forces behind devastating natural disasters to what’s best for women’s health, religion is frequently called upon to answer questions better left to science. But in a refreshing turn­about, some religious leaders are seeking advice from scientists. Three rabbinical experts from the Orthodox Union recently asked researchers from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for help with a problem: Are the parasitic worms that turn up in fish roe and canned sardines kosher? For those of us who don’t keep kosher, ...

SN Prime March 19, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 11 In a matchup of Newt versus the volcano, it’s hard to tell who would win. Volatile, unpredictable, prone to outbursts at any moment — this might mean Gingrich or Grímsvötn. But when Gingrich erupts, he just splatters words all over the place. When a real volcano erupts, it can splatter enough ash into the air to ground other candidates’ airplanes. And everybody else’s. Two years ago, for instance, an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano temporarily closed Europe’s airspace for days. Since then scientists have gathered plenty of evid...

SN Prime March 26, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 12 Randomness and reality go together like pizza and beer. March and madness. Ice and cream. It didn’t used to be that way. Isaac Newton supposedly established that reality wasn’t random at all. It was “deterministic” — as regular as clockwork. Tock always followed tick. If you knew where everything was and how it was moving, you could figure out what everything would be doing at any time in the future. But in the 19th century, determinism’s grip on the scientific view of reality began to slip. Maxwell, Boltzmann and ...

SN Prime March 5, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 9 Call it the curious incident of the trees in the volcano-time. Like the dog in the night-time, which Sherlock Holmes realized did not bark during a horse theft, so too are these trees mute on a big happening right under their nose. Their bark doesn’t reveal evidence for the largest volcanic eruption of the last millennium. And that could be bad news for scientists trying to understand how natural factors affect Earth’s climate. Powerful eruptions can spew sulfur particles kilometers high, where they spread out and act like an umbrella to block ...

SN Prime January 16, 2012 | Vol 2., No. 2 After European diseases arrived on American shores, chroniclers wrote graphic descriptions of depopulated villages, great leaders felled by illness and whole tribes wiped out by smallpox. Yet apart from such accounts almost nothing is known about the wave of disease that hit the Americas 500 years ago. Some researchers have argued that the New World’s immunological naiveté caused as much as 90 percent of the Native American population to be wiped out almost as soon as Europeans and their African slaves began arriving. Others counter tha...

SN Prime January 16, 2012 | Vol 2., No. 2 After European diseases arrived on American shores, chroniclers wrote graphic descriptions of depopulated villages, great leaders felled by illness and whole tribes wiped out by smallpox. Yet apart from such accounts almost nothing is known about the wave of disease that hit the Americas 500 years ago. Some researchers have argued that the New World’s immunological naiveté caused as much as 90 percent of the Native American population to be wiped out almost as soon as Europeans and their African slaves began arriving. Others counter tha...

SN Prime January 23, 2011 | Vol. 2, No. 3 On the Chinese zodiac calendar, 2011 was the Year of the Rabbit. For scientists it was more like the year of the rat. A seminal study published in Science demonstrated that rats aren’t the conniving, selfish creatures that popular culture has long made them out to be. Rats will liberate another rat from a locked cage, researchers found, even when given a choice to gorge on chocolates instead. Perhaps humans should extend some similar graciousness to rats. Rats have long been maligned in literature, movies and popular expressions. Take Te...