SN Prime | September 5, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 12 The first animals that could arguably be called “human” made the evolutionary scene a little less than 2 million years ago. These aren’t folks you’d mistake for modern-day Homo sapiens, or even the GEICO caveman. But they were clearly distinct from their more apelike predecessors. They had bigger brains, for one thing, and walked fully upright — presumably an adaptation to life out in the open rather than up in the trees. They hunted at least some of their food, tamed fire and may have spoken some form of language. ...

SN Prime | August 29, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 11 Peter Belhumeur just wanted to know what type of tree was outside his apartment. He scanned field guides, looking for willowlike leaves with a wavy, spiked edge, but he couldn’t find the right one. Neither could his neighbors. As it happened, though, he was building a tool designed to address just this problem.  Belhumeur is a computer scientist at Columbia University who has worked on face recognition, and he and David Jacobs of the University of Maryland in College Park had dreamed up an iPhone app that would use similar ma...

SN Prime | August 22, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 10 Birds of a feather flock together, without knowing anything about the mathematics of pattern formation. Or maybe they do. Who knows what goes on in bird brains? A more interesting question, though, is not whether birds understand the math behind their flocking but whether physicists do. Physicists have long sought formulas to describe the flying patterns of bird flocks. A flock in flight offers a spectacular example of collective bio­logical behavior: Dozens or hundreds of birds assemble into a blob that flies off as a unit in...

SN Prime | August 15, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 9 Combine two of the biggest planetary challenges — climate change and public health — and you’ve got a problem as huge as Rupert Murdoch’s. Most scientists would find either climate or health a challenging career on its own. But a few brave souls have recently ventured into the realm in between, a place where discerning the truth is harder than tracing a phone-hacking scandal to Scotland Yard. At first glance, climate change and public health have some obvious links. As heat-trapping greenhouse gases build up in the...

SN Prime | August 8, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 8 In the event of a zombie apocalypse, you might want to befriend a Frisbee golf pro — the skills may transfer to record-slinging, a decapitation technique favored in Shaun of the Dead. Or if you prefer a traditional zombie-slaying approach, recruit a baseball player. Choose wisely, as skill is essential to human survival in the face of a zombie epidemic. Of all the mythical characters threatening humankind, the walking dead are most like an infectious disease, says Robert J. Smith? (the question mark is part of his name) of the Un...

SN Prime | August 1, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 7 Anything but lush, the U.S. Southwest has been especially parched lately. About a decade ago a cycle of droughts began; the latest one has dried much of the region to a degree that meteorologists expect only twice a century. But look back a millennium or more, and you’ll find signs that today’s conditions are not all that unusual. Studies of ancient climate suggest that the last decade’s water crisis, and even the 1930s Dust Bowl, pale in comparison to a series of droughts that struck the Southwest 700 to 1,100 years ago. Temp...

SN Prime | November 14, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 21 They may not know it, but grocers face some of the most difficult questions in mathematics when stacking produce each day. Four centuries ago, the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler guessed that the standard grocers’ method of piling oranges packs the most fruit into the least space. Confirming he was right had to wait until 1998, when mathematician Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh, working with his student Samuel Ferguson, proved Kepler’s conjecture with the aid of 180,000 lines of computer code. Bu...

SN Prime | November 7, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 20 Scientists love statistical significance. It offers a way to test hypotheses. It’s a ticket to publishing, to media coverage, to tenure. It’s also a crock — statistically speaking, anyway. You know the idea. When scientists ­perform an experiment and their data suggest an important result — say, that watching TV causes ­influenza — there’s always the nagging concern that the finding was a fluke. Maybe some of the college sophomores selected for the study had been recently exposed to the flu via some oth...

SN Prime | October 31, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 19 Climate change is supposed to be about climate, you’d think — not weather. After all, climate is what you expect in the long term, like how bad the average winter will be; weather is what you get day to day, like whether there will be frost on Halloween night. Predicting even next week’s weather often seems like a crapshoot. But seasoned gamblers know not to fold. All the cards in play suggest that climate change isn’t only about the long-term future, but can noticeably alter the planet’s day-to-day weather as well �...

SN Prime | October 24, 2011 | Vol. 1, No. 18 Most horror movie fans recall unforgettable scenes of spine-chilling thrill with glee. Whether it’s the creepy twins beckoning Danny in The Shining or the dark shadow approaching the shower curtain in Psycho, everyone has a favorite, most terrifying cinematic moment. Which if you think about it, is kind of odd. Favorite and terrifying should not go together. Yet from children possessed by the devil to deranged writers to chainsaw-wielding killers, our appetite for horror seems endless. Clearly, many people love being scared. Scien...