The ability to do math has long been thought of as a purely human trait – it comes with the whole higher-intelligence thing. But what if the ability to do math wasn’t as restricted to our makeup as we thought? Are we really as special as we think we are, or is our ego much larger than our reality?

Recent studies are turning up mathematical abilities in many different species of animals. Chickens, bees, and of course monkeys have all shown promise in being able to deal with simple mathematical operations, like differentiating between numbers, counting, and summing. The animals are performing math linguistically like we do – they are not physically counting out objects or identifying numbers. Rather, it is some sort of innate ability constituting rough math. (Read more…)

So, you exercised today? Good. You followed your low fat, low carb diet? Good.  Your parents lived in New York City? Bad. Very bad.

Health, it seems, has more to do with what stuff you were exposed to while being born than previously thought, according to Bette Hileman from Scientific American. Diseases and disorders, such as diabetes, cancer, depression, and even obesity are much more likely to occur after exposure to gene altering substances. What are these substances? Chemicals we are all exposed to daily, as much a part of our society as we are, that reside in our food, our water, our air. Children in New York City exposed yet unborn and at a young age to contaminants in the air (common air pollutants from traffic) were much more likely to develop asthma than those who were not. This statistic is staggering: in NYC, a full 25% of children are born asthmatic. What’s more, these effects are compounded by the fact that they persist and accumulate from generation to generation. In other words, chemicals your grandmother was exposed to while pregnant with your mom could still affect you severely. That means that all that bad stuff government agencies have been banning over the years could still be affecting us today. And it certainly helps explain the rapid increases in health problems worldwide. (Read more…)

Compared to many other battery technologies out there, the EESU battery has advantages in many areas, especially in terms of charge time and weight. Typically, electric cars, laptops, cell phones, and all manner of portable electronics are now powered by lithium ion batteries. The problem with these batteries is several layers deep.

One, Li ion batteries can be bulky when designed to power something like a car; for a typical laptop, to get about 5 hours of battery life, you need a reasonably large battery, bigger than the standard one they come fitted with. Two, li-ions have a finite number of discharge cycles – this means that as they are used over time, their charge capacity (how long they last) degrades, until they die. The more they are used, the faster they die, leaving a near useless husk of toxic chemicals. There are some agencies that take in old batteries and recycle them, but the fact remains that reliability over time must go down.

What this means for electric cars, is that a typical unit designed to power them would keep the range of the car limited between recharges, with that range constantly decreasing, until the large battery would need to be removed and replaced. This is seen in cell phones often – their batteries typically last a couple of years, just long enough in most contracts to be eligible for a phone upgrade. This leads to a massive amount of cell phone trash – instead of buying new batteries, which are nearly as expensive as the phones themselves, people just get new phones and throw their old ones away.

The way EESUs work is quite different. (Read more…)

Some of you may have seen the film, Who killed the Electric Car (2006), a documentary about the rise and fall of electric cars in the United States. For those who haven’t, you should definitely see it – as much as it is biased, it makes some good points about where our electric cars went. However, a return to electricity-powered cars is coming; hybrids are just one step down that road. The main issues people had with the electric cars of old were the lack of range, problems of recharging and battery replacement, and overall market penetration. For manufacturers, that was the ever-present question – if they made these electric cars, would people buy them? First and foremost is always money. However, to achieve what Obama’s administration has been working toward, freedom from energy dependence and a course change away from eco-damaging energy sources, we are going to need changes on every step of the way: changes in attitude, changes in energy sources and efficiency of transfer, changes in social norms, changes in how we get around.

Perhaps most shocking is the way our society has shifted itself towards personal transportation – commuters going to work are driving cars by themselves, fuel efficiency is among the lowest standards in the world, and there is a general dislike of public transit compared to European nations. EEStor, a Texas based company, is working with Zenn motors, a company devoted to efficient and clean cars, to produce a battery and consequently an electric car able to meet society’s needs. The battery, called an EESU, is a ceramic ultracapacitor, a different technology than our current lithium-ions that address many of the weaknesses of the li-ion batteries. Lightweight, easily recycled, high energy capacity and low recharge time, these EESU batteries are ideal for making electric cars viable. According to company press releases, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles with zero emissions, versus $60 worth of gasoline in an average combustion engine car (average 22mpg, fuel prices based on 2004 averages). EESUs carry 10 times the power of traditional lead acid batteries without the toxic chemicals and materials. EESUs could very well be the return of the electric car. More on this next week.

According to BBC News, testing is currently underway for a treatment of stem cells that can be injected directly into the body and guided to damaged points via magnets and guiding magnetic nanoparticles in the blood stream. By injecting the magnetic nanoparticles into the stem cells, the researchers at Keele University are able to move the stem cells anywhere in the body, solving the problem of how to focus the regenerative aspects of the cells. (Read more…)

Science education has been the subject of much reform and debate over the years, sensitive to national test scores, career statistics, and perhaps most importantly, thw priority of science in many nations’ social and political agendas. Many stress the importance of science education as the best possible hope of solving the multitude of mankind’s problems, because only with a good education can scientific breakthroughs continue to populate news headlines and make their way into the average person’s life. It isn’t often, however, that the younger generation is able to teach the older generation, which is exactly what physics undergrad Xiaohang Quan has done in researching her thesis, according to The Daily Princetonian. (Read more…)

Watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart yesterday, I was shocked to learn that one of the co-advisers to both Clinton’s and now Obama’s science and technology team was being interviewed. Harold Varmus, a distinguished scientist was introduced on the interview segment of the show, which you can watch here, and discussed the various intricacies and complications posed by balancing pure science with lobbying for government funds. One of the points he made was quite profound: “Some of the most important advances come from the part of medical science that nobody is an advocate for: doing basic science and learning how things work.” It got me thinking – without the pressures of government for results in specific areas, and fast, how might scientific research be changed with a set of funds that could be allocated anywhere. Of course, this is not realistic in anyway, but it is some food for thought; by removing the restrictions on where the money went, it is very possible that scientific progress could balloon. (Read more…)

According to the BBC News, a recent study conducted by a US and Canadian team has managed to “manipulate human skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells.” This is very exciting news, with importance both to the scientific community and to the average person in need of medical treatment. (Read more…)

As the title suggests, this is not possible. You cannot take an opposing view on something doesn’t have an opposing view. That is, unless you want to sound like a radical fanatic.

And that is exactly what S. Fred Singer is doing by delivering his speech “Nature — Not Human Activity — Rules the Climate.” Singer, and his supporters (among them Barney Groten, who published a treatise on the holes in the arguments behind global warming) are publicly opposing a scientific consensus on grounds that are both unreasonable and desperate.  Singer, according to this article, asserts that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant” and aims to destabilize the argument for global warming. He focuses on the idea that human influence on the global climate is undetectable and insignificant, and that any expenditure on attempting to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions is a waste of money. (Read more…)

As an economics and political science major, my take on scientific news and events will be more geared towards the implications of the discovery in terms of policy. Science in today’s world and global economy, especially here in the United States, is increasingly important to consider when making policy choices. The more we research, the more we strip away our ignorance of the impact past practices have had on the environment and on ourselves. Things like global warming, automobile emissions, dwindling oil reserves, improvements in the fields of genetics and alternative energies all make the number of factors to consider when making a choice exponentially larger. New questions arrive (such as the ethics behind stem cell research and cloning), and solutions are found to existing problems (such as new cures for diseases). (Read more…)