60 - Second Science1

Chemistry | 60-Second Science
001_West Point Uniforms Signify Explosive Chemistry
Los uniformes de West Point significan química explosiva

“ In the early years of the
development of gunpowder it was
known as the devil’s distillate because
of its seemingly apparently sinister
properties. So then where do those
properties come from? Well, they
come from the three principal
ingredients of gunpowder, which are
sulfur azufre, charcoal and saltpeter
salitre. Three naturally occurring
materials, which when combined produce something much greater mayor than
the sum of their parts.”
Stephen Ressler. He served 34 years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

and retired as a Brigadier General. como General de Brigada
He spoke at sea aboard a Scientific American cruise August 17th off the coast
of Scotland. His subject was how fortifications had to evolve once gunpowder
was widely in use. Ressler revealed a little basic chemistry about the
constituents components of gunpowder and how they are represented in a
familiar uniform.
“Sulfur, a mineral found in nature, yellowish amarillento or golden color,

burns arde at a relatively low temperature, and that made it a material of
intense interest in the middle ages where alchemists were constantly looking
for magical properties of materials, sulfur seemed to be one of those materials
that had magical properties because it was a stone that burned, and it burned at
relatively low temperature.
“Charcoal carbón vegetal, the product of the combustion of wood, typically

hardwood madera dura, in an oxygen starved sin, privado environment
produces pure carbon. But not just any old pure carbon, pure carbon with a
very fine microscopic lattice-like entramada structure that actually turns out
resulta to be absolutely essential to the functioning of gunpowder.
Page 1 of 61
“And then finally the third and really in many ways sentidos the most
important ingredient in gunpowder, and that’s saltpeter. The chemical
composition is actually potassium nitrate.
And it’s a waste residue product of decomposing organic matter. That’s all it
is. It’s a white material that appears on the surface of fermenting organic
material. And turns out to be resulta ser the absolutely essential material in
gunpowder.
“Okay, I have to pause for a totally unrelated totalmente sin relación diversion
distracción, because sulfur, charcoal and saltpeter have great personal
significance to me above and beyond the fact that they are constituent
materials of gunpowder. And that is y es que they form the basis for the school
colors of my alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
distracción que no tiene nada que ver
Black, gray and gold, the school colors, are explicitly defined as the three
materials of gunpowder. Black charcoal, gray is saltpeter and gold is the
sulfur. So así que the next time you see
that inevitable video on the evening
news of the graduation at West Point
and all the cadets throwing their hats up
in the air, think about gunpowder.
Because that’s what the black, gray and
the gold are meant to signify.”
002_Secrets of the Universe Trapped

in Antarctic Snow
In the summer of 2015, a strange delivery entrega arrived in Munich,

Germany: 25 boxes of still-frozen snow—sent all the way from Antarctica.
The reason for shipping enviar 1,100 pounds of snow halfway around the
world? Scientists were hunting for interstellar dust—which might hold
contener clues about our place in the universe. al otro lado del mundo
So first, scientists melted derritieron the snow and then filtered it for la

filtraron en busca de fine particles. Analyzing the remaining restante dust
with mass spectrometry, they found traces of the isotope iron-60, which is
primarily produced in two ways: by exploding supernovas or by cosmic rays
zapping eliminan interplanetary dust. But it’s also produced in nuclear
reactions here on Earth, by bombs or nuclear reactors.
Page 2 of 61
So to determine how much of the stuff materia was truly interstellar—from
beyond our solar system—the researchers used other isotopic clues to screen
out descartar quantities of iron-60 produced by nuclear reactions and cosmic
rays. And they still had some iron-60 left over to account for dar cuenta —the
stuff material produced by supernovas.
“Just by looking at con sólo mirar something which is on our own planet to

learn something which is so far away and happened so many millions of years
ago—I mean, that’s pretty amazing. And that’s why y por eso I really like this
work.” Dominik Koll, an experimental nuclear physicist at the Australian
National University. His team reported the results in the journal Physical
Review Letters. [Dominik Koll et al., Interstellar 60Fe in Antarctica]
Koll says this iron-60 might be showering down cayendo on us from the Local
Interstellar Cloud, the patch area of space the solar system is moving through
right now. And if the cloud contains material produced by supernovas, Koll
says, it could be the ancient remnants of exploding stars—a clue to the
structure and formation of the universe. Luckily, we can investigate it all by
hunting for dust, right here aquí mismo on spaceship Earth.
003_Certain Personality Types Are Likely to Make a "Foodie Call"
Ciertos tipos de personalidad son propensos a hacer una "llamada

gastronómica".
When it comes to cuando se trata de
the ritual act of dating, participants
often have very different expectations
expectativas. Some hope to meet their
soul mate. Others seek companionship.
Some are looking for a good time
pasar un buen rato and think that
springing for a meal entitles dar
derecho them to one. And now a new
study finds that some women say that, now and again de vez en cuando, they
just want to score puntuar some lobster tails.
The finding is in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

[Brian Collisson, Jennifer L. Howell and Trista Harig, Foodie calls: when
women date men for a free meal (rather than a relationship)]
Page 3 of 61
“You’re probably wondering how we came up with ocurrió this idea.”
Brian Collisson, a social psychologist at Azusa Pacific University in

California. Collisson says he’s always been intrigued, in a scientific sense, by
romantic relationships.
So when one of his co-authors—Trista Harig, also at Azusa Pacific—told him

about this interesting new phenomenon that Maxim magazine had nicknamed
a “foodie call”: "Llamada gastronómica"
“We were curious to explore how often women date men for food rather than
a relationship.”
"Teníamos curiosidad por saber con qué frecuencia las mujeres salen con
hombres por comida en vez de por una relación."
In this study, the researchers focused on heterosexual women—in part
because, based on con base en longstanding de larga data cultural
expectations, men often pick up the tab pagan la cuenta, particularly on a first
date.
In a pair of online surveys, the researchers asked more than 1,000 women:

Have you ever agreed to date aceptado salir someone you were not interested
in a relationship with because he might pay for your meal?
“We found that approximately 23 to 33 percent of women surveyed had

engaged in involucrado en a ‘foodie call.’”
Of those who admitted to having swiped right aceptado for the free eats, the
majority claimed to have done so only occasionally or rarely en raras
ocasiones. But about a quarter admitted accepting the restaurant outing with
greater frequency.
The respondents encuestados most likely más propensos to engage in

involucrarse en this type of dating-for-dinner behavior were those who
endorsed apoyaron traditional gender-role beliefs and who scored high
obtuvieron un puntaje alto on a personality test designed to detect what’s
called the Dark Triad. Tríada Oscura
“The dark triad refers to subclinical levels of psychopathy—which is a lack of

remorse and empathy and perspective taking—Machiavellianism—which is
where you purposely manipulate others for your own self-benefit—and
Page 4 of 61
narcissism, which is a grandiose and over-the-top self-love.” desmesurado

amor propio
With that as a checklist lista de verificación, control, it might be possible to

avoid the users who are in it for pasta—rather than en lugar de possibilities.
004_Artificial Intelligence Sniffs Out olfatea Unsafe Foods alimentos

inseguros
The Food and Drug Administration

has to recall retirar hundreds of foods
every year. Like cookie snack
packs with chunks of blue plastic
hiding inside, Salmonella-tainted taco
seasoning or curry powder laced with
lead.
Como los paquetes de bocadillos de

galletas con trozos de plástico azul escondidos dentro, condimentos para
tacos contaminados con Salmonella o polvo de curry mezclado con plomo.
It can take months before a recall is issued emitido. But now researchers have
come up with a method that might fast-track acelerar that process, leading to
early temprana detection and, ultimately en última instancia, faster
recalls. FDA Administración de Alimentos y Medicamentos
The system relies on se basa en the fact that people increasingly cada vez buy
foods and spices online. And people tend to write reviews reseñas of products
they buy online—which are like bread crumbs migas de pan to food-safety
officials funcionarios sniffing out olfatean dangerous products.
The researchers linked relacionaron FDA food recalls retiros from 2012 to
2014 to Amazon reviews revisiones of those same products. They then trained
machine-learning algorithms to differentiate between reviews for recalled
items and reviews for items that had not been flagged marcados.
And the trained algorithms were able to predict FDA recalls three quarters of
the time. They also identified another 20,000 reviews for possibly unsafe
foods—most of which had never been recalled. The results are in
[JAMIA Open]. [Adyasha Maharana et al., Detecting reports of unsafe foods
in consumer product reviews]
Page 5 of 61
The World Health Organization estimates that 600 million people worldwide
get sick annually from contaminated food, and more than 400,000 people die
for it .
“So así que having tools that allow us to detect this faster and hopefully con
suerte investigate and do recalls faster will be useful not just in the U.S. but in
other countries around the world as well.” Study author Elaine Nsoesie of
Boston University.
She did add one caveat advertencia: even recalled products can still get
recibir five-star reviews críticas. So
así que stars alone don’t tell the whole
sickening nauseabunda story. The
proof, unfortunately, may still be in the
pudding pudín.
005_Computer Tells Real Smiles

from Phonies falsas
Slight ligeros changes around the eyes

are indeed a giveaway regalo (señal
reveladora, revelación involuntaria), as to whether acerca de si a smile is
sincere or faked fingida.
Is that person really glad to see me? Or are they just being polite? Some
people struggle to distinguish a perfunctory grin sonrisa superficial from a
truly happy smile. And computers have found this task even more difficult—
that is es decir, until researchers trained a program to detect when a smile is
genuine.
Visual computing researchers at the University of Bradford in the U.K. started

with software for analyzing a changing facial expression. This program can
examine a video clip of a human head and identify specific details around the
eyes, cheeks and mouth. Then the program tracks realiza un seguimiento de
the details moving relative to each other as a medida que the face smiles.
Next, the scientists had hicieron their program evaluate two sets conjuntos of
video clips. In one, subjects performed posed smiles. In the other, they
watched a film that inspired genuine displays of emotion. The program
calculated the differences among the subjects’ faces during the two clips. And
Page 6 of 61
it turns out that your mouth, cheeks and eyes move differently de manera
diferente when you’re faking finges that smirk sonrisa.
In particular, the muscles around the eyes shift 10 percent more for por a real
smile than they do for por a fake one. These results are in the journal
Advanced Engineering Informatics.
The researchers suggest their work could improve a computer’s ability to

analyze facial expressions and thus así to interact more smoothly fácilmente
with humans.
But their real accomplishment logro is in proving demostrar Tyra Banks right
tiene razón: “You have to smile with your eyes.”
006_Stare Down intimidar con la mirada a Gulls gaviotas to Avoid Lunch

almuerzo Loss
Researchers slowed the approach of

greedy codiciosas gulls by an average
of 21 seconds by staring at the birds
versus looking elsewhere hacia otro
lado. Christopher Intagliata reports
informa.
No trip to the beach would be

complete without a swarm enjambre
of hungry gulls.
But don’t get distracted. Because one of those gulls may soon go after ir tras
your food. “There’s a very small proportion of extremely bold audaces
individuals that seem to ruin the reputation of the whole species.” toda la
especie
Neeltje Boogert, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Exeter.

She studied the food-snatching robo habits of gulls in seaside costeras towns
in the southern U.K. and found that very few muy pocos —only the boldest—
would actually take the bait morderían el anzuelo. Or make that the bite.
The experiment went like this fue así: A researcher crouched agachó near
cerca a gull, then set out puso a plastic bag of french fries. For those brave
valientes gulls that then entonces started to approach, the researcher either
Page 7 of 61
stared straight at the gull, as in “I see you, thief,” or the researcher simply
looked away miró hacia otro lado. And it turns out resulta que, staring down
the gulls made them hesitate dudar, vacilar 21 seconds on average before
approaching the fries.
The results are in the journal Biology Letters. [Madeleine Goumas et al.,
Herring argéntea gulls respond to human gaze mirada fija direction]
Gulls aren’t the only ones who behave better when being watched. A 2006
study found that people paid three times as much for their drinks at an
unattended desatendida honor-system coffee bar cafetería when just an image
of staring fijos eyes was displayed se mostraba nearbycerca.
As for en cuanto a the gulls, Boogert points out señala that we need to learn to
live with them—because the particular species she studied, the herring
argéntea gull, is on the U.K.’s Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern
Interés para la Conservación.
“The thing is: people don’t want to have a seaside a la orilla del mar holiday
without gulls there. So así que it’s just finding ways to harmoniously live with
one of the only de las pocas
wildlife vida silvestre species we
still have around in these coastal
areas.”
So así que don’t turn your back on

no le des la espalda a the gulls, she
says. Both figuratively for
conserving the species and, of
course, literally—for conserving
your lunch almuerzo.
007_Real Laughs Motivate More Guffaws carcajadas
Honest, and involuntary laughter cued estimuló people to laugh more at some
really bad jokes than they did when hearing forced laughter.
[CLIP: I Love Lucy with laugh track]
Page 8 of 61
Laugh tracks in television shows like I Love Lucy have been encouraging us to
chuckle reír levemente since the 1950s. But they originated even before that
with old radio shows.
“If you just acabas put out poner a comedy program on the radio, people
didn’t necessarily realize it was supposed to be funny. So they started
recording them with a live audience because then people had all the cues
pistas that they would get obtendrían if they were at the theaters, say—of an
audience response. And, indeed, laughter can be highly contagious.”
Sophie Scott is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. She

and her team wondered whether adding laughter to a joke could also make it
seem funnier. So they scoured buscaron the Internet for the most groan-
worthy jokes they could find and enlisted conseguir, solicitaron the help of a
professional comedian to record them.
“So things like ‘What’s the best day for cooking? Friday. How does a dinosaur
pay its bills? Using tyrannosaurus checks,’ that kind of thing. And then we got
people to rate calificara how funny lo graciosos que they were without any
laughter added.”
The researchers paired emparejaron the jokes with both spontaneous,

involuntary laughter and with laughter that had been produced on demand a
pedido.
[CLIP: Lemonade joke with laughter]
They played these recordings to adults, some neurotypical and some on the
autism spectrum.
“The main thing that we found was that the people with autism and the
neurotypical controls were both influenced by laughter in the same way. So
everybody found se dio cuenta de that the more intense the laughter, the
funnier that made the joke. So everybody’s rating califica the jokes as even
funnier when they’re paired combinan with spontaneous laughter.”
That is es decir, honest, and involuntary laughter cued estimuló people to

perceive the jokes chistes as funnier more than fake, forced laughter did. And
that result was universal: “I think we were expecting there to be some
differences for the people with autism, and we did not find them.”
Page 9 of 61
But autistic participants did find the jokes funnier overall. chistes
“And I think what we’re seeing here is that the people with autism are more
generous in their assessment evaluación of the jokes, I suspect, although that’s
just one interpretation.”
The study appears in the journal Current Biology. [Qing Cai et al., Modulation
of humor ratings of bad jokes by other people’s laughter]
In future laughter experiments, the researchers plan to scan participants’

brains to better understand the neural systems responsible for tickling
cosquillas our funny bones. When they do, they may discover that dogs can’t
operate an MRI machine, but CAT scan. máquina de resonancia magnética,
tomografía computarizada.
008_Extinction Wipes Out aniquila Evolution's Hard Work
By killing off many of New Zealand’s

endemic birds, humans destroyed 50
million years’ worth of evolutionary
history. Christopher Intagliata reports.
New Zealand once had a Dr. Seuss–worthy

digno assortment surtido, colección of
birds—take the giant moa, a flightless bird
twice as tall as an adult human, which
weighed more than a sumo wrestler
luchador. Then there was the Haast’s eagle, the largest eagle ever known to
exist. It hunted the moa.
But, as the story often goes como suele decirse, then came humans: first the
Maori, about 700 years ago, and then European colonists, a couple hundred
years ago. Both sets ambos grupos of people drove llevaron many of New
Zealand’s unique birds to extinction. And many of the surviving species today
are now threatened or endangered en peligro de extinción.
“So you have species like the kiwi, the kakapo, kea, the kaka, the takahe—all
with nice Maori names, but all in danger of going extinct.” en peligro de
extinción
Page 10 of 61
Luis Valente, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of

Berlin.
Valente and his colleagues used genetic data to build a tree of New Zealand’s
living and extinct native birds. They then used a model to estimate how long it
took new species to emerge emerger. Which allowed them to assess evaluar
humans’ bird-killing habits—on an evolutionary time scale.
“In a couple of centuries, humans wiped out borraron 50 million years of

evolutionary history. So the little impact we think we have is actually
repercussions for durante millions of years.” The analysis is in the journal
Current Biology. [Luis Valente, Rampal S. Etienne and Juan C. Garcia-R.,
Deep macroevolutionary impact of humans on New Zealand’s unique
avifauna]
Looking ahead mirando hacia el futuro, the scientists say it could take another
10 million years to recover species that are currently threatened, or near casi
threatened, if nothing is done to save them. But it’s not all doom perdición and
gloom oscuridad, tristeza. Doomsday día del jucicio
“The conservation efforts being done realizando in New Zealand at the

moment are quite pioneering, and they’ve been quite successful.
So I think we’re still at a position where we can still prevent evitar lots of
millions of years of evolution from further being lost.” As ecologist Aldo
Leopold said, “To keep every cog diente and wheel is the first precaution of
intelligent tinkering.” cogwheel rueda dentada
009_London Is Crawling with Drug-Resistant Microbes
If you’re a germaphobe navigating the city,

there are certain mandatory obligatoria
rules of engagement compromiso: Use a
paper towel to shield proteger your hand as
you touch the bathroom door handle. Lift
toilet seat covers with your shoe.
Touch buttons at ATMs, and crosswalks,

and elevators with a knuckle nudillo or the
back dorso of your hand—never a fingertip
punta de los dedos. I know this, because I am that person.
Page 11 of 61
And a new study in the journal Scientific Reports somewhat algo, un poco
justifies my behavior. Because when researchers in London sampled tomaron
muestras all those kinds of surfaces—in public shopping comerciales centers,
train stations and common areas in hospitals—they found a whole lot of una
gran cantidad de antibiotic-resistant bacteria lurking al acecho there. [Rory
Cave et al., Whole genome sequencing revealed new molecular characteristics
in multidrug resistant staphylococci recovered from high frequency touched
surfaces in London]
The scientists swabbed pasar un hisopo sobre sites all over London and ended
up with 600 samples muestras of Staphylococcus bacteria. Of those, nearly
casi half were resistant to two or more commonly used de uso común
antibiotics, like penicillin and erythromycin. The hospital samples had
significantly more drug-resistant microbes—which makes sense, because
hospitals are a place where they used a lot antibiotic.
If there’s a silver lining lado positivo here, it might be how few staph
estafilocócicas bacteria in public places were multidrug-resistant: a mere
apenas 47 percent. Because a few years back, one of the same scientists
swabbed London hotel rooms—and found that 86 percent of the staph
bacteria there were multidrug resistant. Which may not help you sleep easy
tranquilo.
010_Male Black Widows Poach Rivals' Approaches
Los machos de las viudas negras

cazar furtivamente a sus rivales con
engaños
Mating apareamiento is risky business
for black widow males—so they
hitchhike autostop on the silk threads
hilos left by competitors to more
quickly find a mate. Christopher
Intagliata reports.
For male black widow spiders, finding a mate is risky business. “They have to
go on hacer an epic journey.”
Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto.
Page 12 of 61
At the population she studies, on Canada’s Vancouver Island, she says the
spiders have only a 12 percent chance of surviving their scramble climb, subir
a gatas over sand dunes and plants. And “they have very poor eyesight muy
mala vista, and they’re traveling at night.”
So one way males find females is by sniffing, from afar desde lejos, the

2
pheromone 1perfume on their webs. But Scott has now discovered an
alternative way male find mates: by subjecting someter the spiders to a race.
“For each male, before he started, we weighed him in on a tiny scale, and we
painted him with racing stripes rayas and measured the length of his legs.
We had a finish line línea de meta of pheromone-emitting females.... And we

released liberábamos males at various distances from those females to see
whether they arrived at a female’s web or not and how fast they got there.”
What surprised them was that the males that started farthest más lejos —
nearly casi 200 feet away de distancia —actually
traveled fastest toward females. The reason? They poach cazan furtivamente
the paths of their rivals, who spin girar continuous silk draglines líneas de
arrastre as they move.
“These spiders are much more adept

hábiles at walking and running on silk
than they are on the ground. So we
realized maybe the males that we
released far away lejos from the
females were encountering these silk
highways left by rival males and
running along por them.”
And follow-up de seguimiento experiments in the lab confirmed that male

black widows are indeed willing dispuestos to risk a run-in with a rival to win
a chance to pass on their genes—a chance that makes it worth hace que valga
la pena traveling along the silk road ruta de la seda.
011_Babies Want Fair justos Leaders
Babies as young as a year and a half want leaders to fix situations in which

they see someone else is being treated unfairly injustamente.
Page 13 of 61
Anyone who’s ever been with a toddler can tell you: if they’re upset about
something, they will let you know.
<CLIP: Toddlers crying> Niños pequeños
Scientists have been aware of this behavior, but what they did not know, until
now, is that if babies as young as a year and a half old de tan sólo un año y
medio de edad see someone else being treated unfairly, they expect the leader
—the parent or caregiver cuidador —in that situation to step in intervenga and
do something about it al respecto.
“Babies evaluate others a los demás constantly.”
Renée Baillargeon is a psychologist at the University of Illinois. She led the

research on babies expecting fairness. que esperaban justicia
“When these transgressions occur, babies evaluate parents and other leaders
and say, “Well, you saw this transgression. You know this is not fair. Are you
going to do something about it?” And if you don’t, then you are shirking
eludiendo your responsibilities, and it makes you less of a leader, less of a
parent.” menos líder, menos padre
That’s right así es, babies are judging you. Baillargeon says it seems babies
are born with these expectations of what a leader is and how they should
behave. The work is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA. [Maayan Stavans and Renée Baillargeon, Infants expect leaders to right
wrongs]
The researchers used bear puppets to perform skits sketches for 17-month-old
babies, who sat comfortably on a parent’s lap regazo.
In one scenario, the puppet leader intervenes when one of the other puppets
hogs acapara all the toys. In another, the leader does nothing to address
abordar the injustice. Baillargeon says such inaction inacción that allows an
unfair situation to persist bothers the babies, and they stare longer miran más
tiempo at that leader, as if waiting for him to act. In puppet scenarios when
there was no clear leader, babies did not have this expectation expectativa of
an intervention.
Page 14 of 61
“It shows that they expect a leader to not just use power for his or her own
self-interest para su propio interés but to use their authority to regulate the
morality of their followers.”
Alan Fiske, an anthropology professor who studies human relationships at the

University of California, Los Angeles. He was not involved in this study. He
says many people underestimate what babies are capable of understanding and
figuring out comprender about the world, since ya que they’re just barely
apenas están learning how to walk and talk.
“And so you might think they don’t understand the world because, you know,
they don’t seem to be very competent at doing things in the world. But ...
amazing things are happening ocurriendo
in their minds. They understand an
enormous amount muchísimo.”
Baillargeon says the study supports the

idea that babies have an innate
understanding comprensión about power
dynamics that then gets shaped se forma,
moldea by the culture they grow up in.
Maybe we should lower reducir the voting

age to 17 months?
—Christine Herman
[A version of this story originally ran publicó on Illinois Public Media, the
NPR member station serving que da servicio a east-central Illinois.]
012_Parrots loros Are Making the U.S. Home
Released or escaped parrots are now living in most states and are breeding
reproduciéndose in at least 21. For some, it’s a second chance at survival.
You might expect to hear parrots like these in the wild naturaleza in South
America. But these birds are actually nesting in the middle of Chicago.
Despite being known as monk parakeets pericos monje, the green-and-gray
birds are true parrots. And they’ve been living in the Windy City since the
1970s. But not just there allí.
Page 15 of 61
“There are monk parakeets in many, many states. They’re breeding in around
21 states.”
Jenny Uehling, a Ph.D. doctorado student now at Cornell, who was estaba at
the University of Chicago when she studied these birds.
“Certain populations will pop up aparecerán in certain states and then

disappear, but they’re by far the most widespread extendidas of any of the
species.”
Uehling wanted to know how many nonnative parrots were living in the U.S.
To do this para ello “we used eBird and Christmas Bird Count Conteo
Navideño de Aves, or CBC. We use these two databases because they have the
largest spatial espacial distribution of data, basically, for the United States.”
Uehling and her team looked at examinaron data collected recopilados from
2002 to 2016 and deduced that there were 56 different species of parrots living
free in 43 states. Of these species, 25 of them had become naturalized, that
is es decir “able capaces to successfully con éxito breed and maintain their
own population without the addition of additional individuals from captivity
del cautiverio.”
Most of these nonnative parrots were either released by owners or escaped

from captivity. Some established breeding populations. And some of these
new populations are saving entire bird species.
“The red-crowned parrot is declining disminuyendo in its native range área de

distribución, but it’s actually increasing in the U.S., and it’s becoming pretty
common. And so I think that leads to a really interesting question of, you
know: Could we podríamos possibly use these populations of nonnative parrot
species to understand the biology of a species declining en declive in its native
range?”
The study is in the Journal of Ornithology. [Jennifer J. Uehling, Jason Tallant

and Stephen Pruett-Jones, Status of naturalized parrots in the United States]
Florida may have a half-million monk parakeets. And they’re even hardy
enough suficientemente resistentes como to live year-round todo el año in
Brooklyn and the Bronx, as well as Chicago. And if you’ve ever heard the
racket ruido they make, it’s clear that these monks never took hicieron a vow
of silence.
Page 16 of 61
013_Science News Briefs from All Over
Noticias breves sobre la ciencia de todo el mundo

A few pocos brief breves reports informes about international science and
technology from Guatemala to Australia, including one about the first
recorded tornado in Nepal.
Hi, I’m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here’s a short
piece pequeño artículo from the July 2019 issue edición of the magazine, in
the section called Advances: Dispatches despachos from the Frontiers of
Science, Technology and Medicine.
The article is titled Quick Hits, and it’s a rundown resumen of some science
and technology stories from around the globe de todo el mundo, compiled by
editorial contributor Jim Daley.
Guatemala: Archaeologists unearthed desenterraron the largest known Mayan

figurine factory. The more than 1,000-year-old workshop taller mass-
produced intricate statues that were likely used in diplomacy as gifts to allies
aliados.
Nepal: Researchers confirmed the nation’s first recorded tornado, which

occurred during a devastating storm in March. The team relied on se basó en
satellite imagery imágenes and posts publicaciones on social media to make
the identification.
Antarctica: Emperor penguins have

abandoned one of their biggest
breeding cría colonies, possibly
because of sea-ice hielo marino loss.
Biologists found that the population,
which reached about 25,000
breeding reproductoras pairs of
birds in 2010, collapsed in 2016 and
has not rebounded recuperado since
desde entonces.
China: The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory on the eastern edge
of the Tibetan Plateau meseta began operating in April. Located some 4,400
meters above sea level, the observatory will study high-energy cosmic rays.
Page 17 of 61
Australia: The government announced it will not regulate gene-editing edición

genética technology provided siempre
y cuando it does not introduce new
genetic material to target sites sitios
objetivo in the genome. Editing human
embryos used for reproduction is still
sigue estando banned, however.
Kenya: Paleontologists have identified

a fossil jawbone mandíbula in the
Nairobi National Museum that came
from provenía de a previously unknown giant carnivore, which roamed
deambulaba Africa 22 million years ago. The predator was likely larger than a
polar bear and had fangs colmillos the size of bananas
That was Quick Hits, by Jim Daley…
014_Tourist Photographs Help African Wildlife vida Silvestre Census
Photographs snapped by safari tourists are a surprisingly accurate precisa way

to assess evaluar populations of African carnivores. Christopher Intagliata
reports informa.
Tracking rastrear wildlife is a tough job tarea difícil. Take the case of a one-
eared una oreja leopard named Pavarotti. For this guy: <“Nessun Dorma”
clip> “He was a very big beautiful male, and he had a very, very deep,
deep roar, and so así que they named him after Pavarotti.”
Kasim Rafiq, a wildlife biologist at Liverpool John Moores University.
“So I used to get up at the crack of dawn amanecer, follow his tracks and try
and find him. It’d been a few months since I'd seen him. One day, I went out,
and I was looking for him. His tracks huellas took me off me sacaron de road
through this woodland area zona boscosa....”
Before he knew it, the wheel of his Land Rover was stuck in a warthog burrow
madriguera de jabalíes. He wasted several hours getting out saliendo. Then,
Page 18 of 61
on the way back to camp, he bumped into some local tour guides and their
safari guests invitados, who’d had better luck spotting see in the distance
Pavarotti.
“Basically, they laughed and explained that they’d seen him that morning.”
Rafiq then realized that tourist wildlife sightings avistamientos might be an

untapped sin explotar source of information about wild silvestres animals.
So he and his team worked with a safari lodge in Botswana to analyze 25,000
tourist photographs of wildlife. They used those as sightings of lions, spotted
hyenas, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs.
They then compared those data to the estimates estimaciones they made with
traditional wildlife biology tactics: camera traps, track surveys, and “call-in
stations”—where they play sounds of distressed angustiados animals in the
middle of the night and see who
pops by pasa por allí.
Turned out that the estimates

from tourist photos were just as
good as those gleaned extraídas
from traditional methods. And
the tourists were actually the
only ones to see elusive
cheetahs—the researchers
would have missed the cats
without the citizen science data. The results are in the journal Current Biology.
[Kasim Rafiq et al., Tourist photographs as a scalable framework for wildlife
monitoring in protected areas]
The idea is not to put wildlife researchers out of a job dejar sin trabajo. "“The
reality is there’s so many interesting things we still have to find out about
these large carnivores and so many conservation projects that need to be
carried out that we don’t have the time or resources to do them all.”
And tourist photos might help make sure ayudar a asegurar that all the local
carnivores are spotted.
015_For Ants, the Sky's the Compass brújula
Page 19 of 61
Computer modeling revealed that insects with a celestial compass can likely
determine direction down to just a couple degrees of error. Christopher
Intagliata reports.
GPS has completely transformed how we get around. But other animals have
long had desde hace mucho tiempo their navigation systems built right in
integrados —like ants and bees.
“We know their eyes are quite sensitive to polarized light, and the sky has a
particular pattern of polarized light, relative to the position of the sun.”
Barbara Webb, a bioroboticist at the University of Edinburgh.
You can see polarized light firsthand de primera mano if you take a pair of
polarized sunglasses and rotate them against the sky—the light passing
through the lenses changes. Webb says the insects have polarization like that
built into incorporada facets facetas of their compound eyes.
“You can think of it en ello as the equivalent of having a little polarization

directional filter over them or lots of sunglasses pointed in different
directions.”
But Webb was curious whether there’s really enough information in the sky to
give insects an accurate preciso sense of direction. So her team built a sensor
modeled after a partir de a desert ant eye and put it under artificial light meant
intentar to simulate the sky. They then fed that sensor input into a
computational model meant destinado to mimic the brains of desert ants,
crickets and other insects with a celestial compass.
And they found descubrieron that with the insects’ 2innate 3sensing detección
and 4processing 1equipment, they can likely probablemente sense compass
direction down to just con sólo a couple degrees of error. The results are in the
journal PLOS Computational Biology. [Evripidis Gkanias et al., From skylight
input to behavioural output: A computational model of the insect polarised
light compass]
A system based on that of insects could someday be a cheap, low-energy bajo

consumo energético alternative to GPS. “Insects have very tiny brains. A brain
the size of a pinhead cabeza de alfiler that’s using hardly any energy apenas
consume energía. And yet aún así they’re still able to navigate better than we
can with GPS, which is a huge infrastructure.”
Page 20 of 61
Webb is now working on building a robot that can, like the desert ant, use
light to get its bearings rumbo, orientación. Although after sundown puesta
del sol, it may have to ask for directions pedir direcciones.
016_Why Two Moonships Were Better Than One
Engineer John Houbolt pushed for empujó a a smaller ship to land on the
lunar surface while the command de mando module stayed in orbit around the
moon.
<CLIP: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”>
July 20 marks se cumplen 50 years since human beings first landed on the
moon. That momentous trascendental day in 1969 made astronauts Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin household names. But years before that, a lesser-
known figure was on a mission to make that first moon landing alunizaje
possible.
His name was John Houbolt. The son of Dutch holandeses immigrants,
Houbolt grew up on a farm in Joliet, Ill. He studied engineering at the
University of Illinois and eventually finalmente worked his way llegó to
NASA.
It was there fue allí, in the early 1960s, that he put his career on the line en
juego to champion defender what was, at the time, an unpopular idea—but
would ultimately en última instancia be critical fundamental to getting Apollo
11 to the moon and safely a salvo back.
“John faced enfrentó a mixture of

indifference, at times, abuse and, at times,
ridicule that he never forgot until things
started to change, and engineers started to
realize his data might be right.” Todd
Zwillich, author of the new Audible Original
spoken-word book about Houbolt’s life. It’s
called The Man Who Knew conocía the Way
to the Moon.
So what was Houbolt’s unpopular idea? He championed defendió what’s

called lunar orbit rendezvous encuentro. The concept involves implica sending
Page 21 of 61
a spacecraft into orbit around the moon—and from there, sending only a
small, lightweight craft down to the moon’s surface, instead of the entire ship.
Zwillich says while aunque Houbolt didn’t invent the idea, he was the one
who started to apply it to the technologies that were within NASA’s grasp al
alcance at the time.
“Most of the people who know the most about más saben de this mission feel
that without lunar orbit rendezvous, Apollo couldn’t have succeeded. And
without John Houbolt, you probably would not have had lunar orbit
rendezvous cita.”
Zwillich’s book also explores the kinds of challenges desafíos NASA

engineers face enfrentan today hoy en día, as they make plans to get back to
the moon and, ultimately en última instancia, to Mars.
“When you talk about Mars, gosh Dios, 150 million miles, orders of
magnitude of a bigger mayor problem. Do we do some form of Martian orbit
rendezvous? Do we build a station in Martian orbit that we can stage down
llevar to the surface to manage all that mass? A lot of problems to think
about.”
Those problems, he says, create plenty of debates today hoy en día. With the
story of John Houbolt as an example, something considered highly unlikely
now might be the key to eventually putting people on the Red Planet.
017_One Small Scoop cucharada, One Giant Impact for Mankind
Just before Neil Armstrong climbed

back into the lunar module, he scooped
up recogió a few last-minute soil
samples--which upturned aumentó our
understanding of planetary formation.
Christopher Intagliata reports.
The Apollo missions brought back 842

pounds of rock and soil tierra from the
moon… nearly casi 2200 different
samples. But there's one sample that planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa
says is the most interesting of all: "Apollo 1-0-0-8-5."
Page 22 of 61
Neil Armstrong collected recogió it on Apollo 11.
"He was about to step back into regresar a the lunar module and he turned
around dio la vuelta and had this rock box and saw little spaces in there allí
and he knew that these geologists on earth would be just so tan excited
emocionados to study these materials, he just acaba scooped up I think nine
scoops of soil that he put into the box and brought it back."
It became one of the most well studied samples of the Apollo missions, she
says. And a geologist named John Wood, at the Smithsonian, noticed notó
white flecks manchas of rock in the soil… which he identified as a rock type
called anorthosite. And it clued pista him in to the moon's ancient past.
"And this was quite a leap salto of imagination but he proposed that the whole
of toda the moon had at one time in the past, close to 4.5 billion years ago,
been almost covered with a global magma ocean. An ocean of lava. This was a
revolutionary idea at the time. Because people had thought the moon had
formed cold, so it completely changed our idea how the moon formed, how
the terrestrial planets formed, 1like the Earth 2as well. So it really changed a lot
about our understanding of planetary science."
But Wadhwa has a second—and more personal—reason to appreciate this

sample.
"I met my husband because of gracias a this rock. My husband is Scott

Parazynski, he was with NASA as an astronaut for 17 years, from 1992 to
2009. After his retirement from NASA, he as well was a mountaineer
alpinista as well. And he had always aspired to climb Mount Everest."
Scott's boyhood heroes were Neil Armstrong, and the climber Edmund
Hillary, who made realizó the first confirmed ascent of Everest with his
partner Tenzing Norgay.
"In honor of them, he wanted to take a moon rock from Apollo 11 to the top
cima of Mount Everest, and to bring back an Everest summit cima rock."
Wadhwa was, at the time, the chair presidente of the NASA committee that
grants concede access to the samples for scientific purposes fines. This request
petición, she says, was definitely out of the ordinary común.
Page 23 of 61
"I just remember it because it was a really funny discussion in the committee
room, you know, hey oye, what qué pasa if that moon rock falls down a
crevasse grieta, you know, and Scott would be going down se hundiría with
that moon rock of course!"
But Scott made it to the top llegó a la cima. Wadhwa never met him, and
moved on from the lunar sample committee. But then, a year or two later, she
saw a friend suggestion pop up on Facebook: you might know Scott
Parazynski.
"And I reached out acerqué to him and I said, 'hey, how did that expedition go
and did you return the moon rock to NASA?' And he said 'No, I didn't send
the moon rock back to NASA. I actually de hecho sent it back to the
International Space Station with a summit rock. And if you ever happen to be
alguna vez estás in Houston I'd love to meet you and thank you for making
that possible.' I happened to meet him some months later… and that was it." y
eso fue todo
And so Neil Armstrong's last-minute scoop of moon dust brought two people
together here on Earth… and upturned aumentó our understanding of how the
moon—and the Earth itself—got here. llegaron aquí
Christopher: There's something in there ahí dentro, 'One small scoop for a
man…'
Meenakshi: "Yeah! A magma ocean for all mankind."
018_Investigating the Zombie Ant's "Death Grip"
Researchers dissected diseccionaron

the jaws of ants infected with the
Ophiocordyceps fungus to determine
how the fungus hijacks secuestra the
ants' behavior. Christopher Intagliata
reports.
It's straight out resultado of a horror

movie: an ant, infected with a fungus,
starts behaving strangely de forma
extraña. It crawls arrastra as high as it can in the forest, grabs a leaf or twig in
its mouth and bites. Hard.
Page 24 of 61
"It enters into this 'death-grip agarre de la muerte' phenotype' is what we call
it." Colleen Mangold, a molecular biologist at Penn State. "And then a couple
hours after initiation después del inicio of that behavior the ant will die."
The fungus, known as Ophiocordyceps, then eats through the corpse cadáver

and sprouts brota a stalk tallo from the ant's body to release more spores and
infect more ants. It's a harsh way to go de morir.
"It's not ideal, definitely not ideal."
Mangold and her colleagues wanted to get to the bottom llegar al fondo
of why the ants do this—specifically, how they get apoderan their death grip.
So they dissected infected ants and zoomed in acercaron on their jaw muscles

with electron microscopes.
They saw that the fungus had invaded and grown into jaw muscle cells,
perhaps to suck up absorber nutrients. And they spotted descubrieron lots of
mysterious tiny particles, which might be produced by the ant's immune
system—or by the fungus, as a way of communicating with the muscle and
forcing it to contract.
Whatever cualquiera que sea the mechanism, they found that the ant's jaw
muscles had contracted so hard, they'd been irreparably damaged. The full
details—and gory sangrientas pictures—are in the Journal of Experimental
Biology. [Colleen A. Mangold et al., Zombie ant death grip due to
hypercontracted mandibular muscles]
Mangold hopes to get to the bottom of what those tiny particles do in follow-
up de seguimiento work. And in the meantime y mientras tanto, unless you're
a carpenter ant, rest assured tenga la seguridad you have nothing to worry
about.
"It's highly species of specific. I 2seriously 1doubt we'll be seeing any real-life
human zombies anytime soon." en un futuro cercano
Page 25 of 61
019_Attractive Young Females May Have Justice Edge
Las atractivas jovencitas podrían tener ventaja sobre la justicia

Youths rated calificados as attractive were less likely to have negative
encounters with the criminal justice system sistema de justicia penal —but
only if they were women. Christopher Intagliata reports.
Eight years ago, the jury in the trial of Casey Anthony announced their
verdict. "As to en cuanto a the charge of first-degree murder, verdict as to
count one sobre el primer cargo, we the jury find the defendant acusado not
guilty inocente."
Anthony had been charged with murdering her two-year-old daughter.

But like al igual que the murder
charge, the jury's decision for
additional charges of aggravated
child abuse abuso infantil and
aggravated manslaughter
involuntario agravado were again
"not guilty."
"That caused this huge outcry

protesta." Christopher Ferguson, a
clinical psychologist at Stetson
University in central Florida, not far from no muy lejos de where the trial
occurred. "There was this narrative that she got recibió preferential treatment,
maybe not on purpose, but that the jury was sympathetic comprensivo,
compasivo, solidario to her because she was this pretty young female and that
kind of estaba en conflicted with people's impression of who a murderer is."
Mock trial studies have suggested that attractive people have an edge ventaja
in the criminal justice system. So Ferguson and his colleagues looked into
investigaron that stereotype using data from the National Longitudinal Study
of Adolescent to Adult Health, the largest long-term study of people who
began participating in the study as cuando eran teens adolescentes.
The interviewers asked the youths a multitude of questions—and also rated

calificaron the respondents' encuestados degree of attractiveness, a measure
that's been used to examine links to vínculos con health and wealth.
Page 26 of 61
In this case, Ferguson and his team looked at analizaron a subset subconjunto
of nearly 8,800 respondents and examined the correlation between
attractiveness atractivo and arrest, conviction condena and sentencing. After
controlling for things like gender, race and socioeconomic status, they found
descubrieron that attractiveness did have a protective effect—but only for
females.
"Girls or women who are more attractive were less likely menos
probabilidades to be arrested if they'd committed a crime and less likely to be
convicted if they were arrested for that crime. However, it did not have any
impact on their sentencing. So once they were convicted, attractiveness
conveyed reportó no further benefits." The results are in the journal
Psychiatry, Psychology and Law. [Kevin M. Beaver et al., Physical
attractiveness and criminal justice processing: results from a longitudinal
sample of youth and adolescents]
It's just a correlation, of course, and there are limitations. The attractiveness
ratings índices were an average of four different interviewers' assessments
evaluaciones, made over a lo largo de a dozen years. But beauty, as they say,
is in the eyes of the beholder espectador.
And the effects weren't huge. Still, Ferguson says, "being alert atentos to our
stereotypes and prejudices sometimes can help us combat them a little bit"—
and perhaps get us closer acercarnos to the ideal that justice should be blind.
020_Tobacco Plants Made to Produce Useful Compounds compuestos
A proof-of-concept prueba de
concepto study got consiguió
transgenic tobacco plants to make a
useful enzyme in their chloroplasts,
not nuclei, minimizing chances for
transfer de transferencia to other
organisms.
Tobacco plants of, course, are grown

cultivan to make cigarettes. But
tobacco is also used a lot in scientific research. And a new study shows
tobacco can be genetically engineered diseñado to churn out producir large
amounts of a commercially important bacterial enzyme known as cellulase.
Page 27 of 61
The enzyme has many industrial uses, including as an agent in the production
of biofuel.
And even while aun cuando their plant machinery is being co-opted as an
enzyme-making producción de enzimas factory, the plants suffer no reduction
in yield rendimiento while grown out in the field compared with unaltered
plants. That fact is rather remarkable bastante notable, because you might
suspect that when a plant is expending gastando resources to create large
amounts of cellulase it would tendría struggle dificultades to grow. But that’s
not the case here.
The proof-of-concept study is in the journal Nature Plants. [Jennifer A.

Schmidt et al, Field-grown tobacco plants maintain robust growth while
accumulating large quantities of a bacterial cellulase in chloroplasts]
University of Illinois plant biologist Justin McGrath is a co-lead author of the

study. principales
He says the work could lead to lower costs for producing useful proteins like
enzymes and some vaccines. That’s because it can be way cheaper to cultivate
tobacco plants in a field than to grow genetically modified yeast levadura and
other microbes indoors interiores in large fermenters. Here’s McGrath:
“Our estimates from this study are that it would cost between 20 cents and one
dollar to produce a gram of this cellulase, whereas mientras que current
methods, depending on the type of method you’re using, could cost from a
couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars.”
Growing el cultivo such plants in the field rather than y no en indoors also
makes it much easier to pursue really large-scale production of medicinal and
industrial proteins.
But any time cada vez you talk about growing genetically modified plants out
in open areas, there’s existe a concern that the DNA inserted into the crop
cultivo could escape and find its way into hacia other organisms. But the
researchers safeguard protegen the system against such an tal incident by
avoiding the cell nucleus, where DNA is available disponible to be duplicated
and passed along transmitido. Instead, they modified the DNA in the
chloroplasts—organelles responsible for photosynthesis, not reproduction.
Page 28 of 61
“That adds a very nice agradable safety feature característica.” Rainer

Fischer, a veteran biotechnology researcher at Purdue University. He wasn’t
involved in this study. “So basically you don’t have any chloroplasts in
tobacco pollen, so por lo que there should be no danger for outcrossing
cruzamiento”—that is es decir, no foreseeable previsible risk of having the
foreign DNA find its way into hacia other plants in nature.
Further adicionales research will determine if this system can work to produce
other valuable enzymes, which could help transform the tobacco plant from
health enemy enemiga de la salud to ally.
021_Rhinos and Their Gamekeepers guardas Benefit from AI
Starting in a partir de 2017, an artificial intelligence monitoring vigilancia

system at the Welgevonden Game Reserve reserva de Caza in South Africa
has been estado helping to protect rhinos and their caretakers cuidadores.
“So what is the connection between AI and rhinoceri? Surprisingly direct.”
Bernard Meyerson, chief innovation officer at IBM. He spoke at the Cooper

Union here in New York City as part of a panel discussing the intersection of
artificial intelligence (AI), ethics and healthcare cuidado de la salud. So where
do rhinos come in? ¿Y qué tienen que ver los rinocerontes?
“As you know, poaching caza furtiva rhinos is a huge problem. The
rhinoceros horn represents about 30
years of revenue ingresos, 30 years of
income ingresos, to an individual in
sub-Saharan Africa. And that is why,
basically, if you manage consigues to
kill a rhino and get a horn, it
represents—it’s essentially like
winning the lottery. Unfortunately it’s
not so good for the rhino, not to
mention you deplete agotar a precious
species yet again una vez más. And poaching caza furtiva is a huge issue
problema....
“What people don’t know is about a thousand gamekeepers guardas de caza

—the UN kept numbers until, I think, 2014—have been murdered by
poachers cazadores furtivos in order to con el fin get llegar at the animals
Page 29 of 61
being protected. This is about humans. Well, how do you basically protect
rhinos with AI? Well, that’s a good question. Being a kid who grew up in the
Bronx my thought idea was, well, you know, you put a collar on the rhino,
analyze where they are, their travel patterns. And the guy tipo who ran dirigía
the reserve in South Africa sort of laughed se rió, said, ‘This does not help.’”
That’s the Welgevonden Game Reserve Reserva de Caza. Back to de vuelta a

Meyerson.
“I said, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘Well, when the rhino stops deje moving you’ll know
it was dead. That’s really not helpful.’
“‘Obviously you have a better idea.’ He says, ‘Yeah, what you do is, get
conseguir a bunch montón of animals that are easily spooked asustdos, like
gazelles, antelopes, that sort of thing, and what you do is you collar them.’ We
looked at that eso, and we thought about it and said, that’s brilliant, because
they become sentinels. Because you see, when a poacher enters an area that it
will encounter these creatures, it’s going to encounter rhinos, they’re by far
mucho more rare. When they encounter the creatures, like any other animal
they spook asustan and run huyen.
“Where does AI come in entra en juego? Well, turns out when you have these
collars on them, there’s really a bunch of reasons these animals run: they
migrate, some leopard is trying to make lunch almuerzo out of it, and yes,
they’re spooked asustados by somebody who’s coming viene, entering in a
truck to go poach ir a cazar furtivamente.
“You have to know the difference. And it turns out resulta que by looking at
the pattern of movements and looking at historic data, we were able pudimos
to tell distinguir the difference between each of that using a system that
essentially employed empleaba machine learning máquina que aprendía to
separate, yep sí, these are incidents where we’re running into encontramos
con poachers, these are incidents where we’re actually just sólo —there’s a
lion trying to make lunch out of this poor animal.
“The bottom line resultado final is by doing that we were able to spot ver the
poachers when they were nowhere near the preserve reserva, much less on the
preserve where the rhinos are. And this avoids the kind of conflict where
people ended up dead in large numbers, not just the rhinos.... Basically, the
idea is that nobody dies. You don’t want the poachers to die—they are
desperate. You don’t want the rhinos to be killed—we lose a species.
Page 30 of 61
And of course, the people gente who are incredibly brave valiente protecting
these animals ... it really was an amazing thing to us because at the end of the
day it worked. And that’s the kind of thing where, you know, AI used sensibly
con sensatez adds value that no human could possibly have achieved
conseguido....
“It’s not just about healthcare No se trata sólo de la atención médica... ...
where you’re trying to help somebody diagnose a better way to live. You’re
talking about saving lives in large quantities. So I consider the fact that we’re
trying not to have a thousand of these caretakers cuidadores murdered a very
high bar for health care.”
022_Backpack Harvests cosecha Energy as You Walk
The pack paquete produces a steady trickle goteo constante of electricity from
a partir del the swinging de balanceo motion of your stuff. Christopher
Intagliata reports.
When you walk with a backpack, you know how the stuff inside sways
balancea from side to side? Now scientists have figured out descubierto how
to tap into aprovechar that motion to para generate electricity.
Here's how it works. Picture a pendulum mounted to a backpack frame and

stabilized with springs resortes on either side a ambos lados. The pack's
mochila weight is attached se fija to the pendulum, so the pendulum swings
side to side as a medida que you walk. Gears then use that swinging motion to
drive impulsar a generator, and the
generator spits out escupe electrical
current to charge a battery.
Volunteers carried the pack while

walking on a treadmill cinta rodante
and wore masks to measure the flow of
oxygen and carbon dioxide. Walking
with the slightly swaying ligeramente
oscilante 20-pound load, the device
dispositivo did not significantly affect
the volunteers' metabolic rate ritmo compared to en comparación con when
they carried the same weight fixed in place.
Page 31 of 61
In fact, the energy-harvesting pack

reduced the forces of acceleration
they'd feel sentirían in a regular pack,
which might mean greater comfort for
a long hike. And the device did
produce a steady trickle of electricity
—the operative word being trickle
chorro.
Because if you up the load to 45

pounds, the passive motion of the pack could fully charge a Samsung Galaxy
S10 smartphone only after 12 hours on the trail camino. The details are in the
journal Royal Society Open Science. [Jean-Paul Martin and Qingguo Li,
Generating electricity while walking with a medial–lateral oscillating load
carriage transporte de carga device]
But here's the rucksack rub: the energy-harvesting device currently weighs
five pounds. The researchers say that's about four pounds too many de más to
be a smart alternative to batteries. So they hope that more research lets them
les permita lighten aligerar the load, to ensure the pack charges you up
without weighing you down agobiarte.
023_Why Baseballs Are Flying in 2019
An analysis of the 2019 edition of the Major League baseball points to señala
reasons why it's leaving ballparks campos de béisbol at a record rate ritmo
récord.
Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros will start tonight’s Major League
Baseball All-Star Game for the American League.
He’s in the news for more than that, though. Monday, he told ESPN that the
huge rise in home runs this season is due se debe to the fact that the 2019
Page 32 of 61
baseball is what he called “a f-ing joke.” "una broma de mal gusto" Many
other players and commentators have questioned whether the ball is “juiced”
"jugado" —that is es decir, made so that it travels farther and faster. es decir
“So así que, however como sea que they are making or creating the baseballs
pelotas de béisbol... they’re coming up with a rounder más redonda baseball.”
Sports data scientist la científica de datos deportivos Meredith Wills. With a

doctorate in astrophysics, her first studies were in publications like the
Astrophysical Journal and Solar Physics. But her most recent research, on the
2019 baseball, appeared June 25th in the online sports publication the Athletic.
So entonces how do you make a baseball that’s rounder than other baseballs?
Wills got her hands on consiguió 39 Major League baseballs used in 2019.
Compared with last year’s ball, “The laces cordones are thinner más finos...
the leather is substantially smoother más liso... any one of these changes will
make the aerodynamics of the ball better, they will decrease disminuirá the
drag resistencia.
So the way to think of it is that the ball doesn’t slow down ralentiza as quickly
when it’s traveling through the air, which means that it stays se mantiene
faster longer durante más tiempo, which means it’s able to travel farther más
lejos.”
Which could account for explicar part of why the players are on pace to
camino de hit alcanzar more than 6,600 homers cuadrangulares this year, up
from 5,585 last year. Hitters los bateadores 2are 4clearly 1also 3changing their
swing plane to try to hit golpear more homers home runs, which lo que is
probably also a factor. But another indicator of less drag resistencia on the
ball is home run distance. Wills notes señala that 82 home runs went fueron at
least 450 feet in 2018. This year has already seen 84 of that distance, with
almost half a season to play. casi media temporada por delante
The changes in the ball also make it harder más difícil for the pitchers
lanzadores to manipulate it. “There are two problems: one is that it becomes
harder to grip agarrar the ball in a way that allows you to spin girarla it
enough lo suficiente to get break para que se rompa, and then the other one is
that the height altura of the seams costuras themselves en sí can affect how
much the ball does break se rompe, assuming you get it up to the same spin.”
la haces girar hasta el mismo punto
Page 33 of 61
Last year, Major League Baseball bought compró Rawlings, the company that
makes the baseballs. So así que don’t be surprised no se sorprenda if next
year’s ball is once again una vez más ever-so-slightly tan ligeramente less
round—to give pitchers a square deal trato justo.
024_Some Hot Dog Histology
Un poco de Histología de perritos calientes

A lab analysis found that even an all-beef
de ternera frankfurter salchicha had very
little skeletal muscle, or "meat." So what’s
in there? Christopher Intagliata reports.
Entonces, ¿qué hay ahí dentro?

If you find yourself at a cookout parrillada
this 4th of July, gazing mirando at the hot
dogs, wondering ... what exactly are they?
¿qué son exactamente? Here's your answer:
"They're just tubes of fat." Tyler Rouse, a pathologist at the Stratford General
Hospital in Ontario, Canada. And I may as well give a spoiler alert before
continuing this story, because "I've ruined hot dogs for many people."
A couple years back, Rouse, too, was wondering about the composition of
franks. Given his day job trabajo diurno, "I said, that's an easy answer to find
out. We work in a lab, we make slides diapositivas all day. Hot dogs are kind
of the perfect shape to make into a slide. We can actually answer this
question."
So he and his colleague Jordan Radigan got their hands on three types of dogs:
a no-name brand from the supermarket, another all-beef dog and a third from a
ballpark campo de béisbol vendor. They then took cross sections secciones
transversales for slides and used stains tintes to identify different types of
tissue. And found, to their surprise, that most slices rebanadas consisted
primarily of fat globules, with very little skeletal muscle—the stuff we tend to
think of considerar as "meat."
In fact, the no-name brand actually had more skeletal muscle than the all-beef
brand. The researchers also found bits trozos of bone and blood vessels and
Page 34 of 61
cartilage—even plant material. How did vegetable matter get in there? ¿Cómo
llegó la materia vegetal allí?
"Let me put it this way. Sometimes I get biopsies from human colons and I
find vegetable matter. I'll just leave it at that." Lo dejaré así". The results were
published in the Medical Journal of Australia. [Tyler Rouse and Jordan
Radigan, What’s in your hot dog? A histological comparative analysis]
But there's one thing they didn't find: tissue from the lips or anuses of animals
—putting to rest that urban legend, at least for this study sample muestra de.
Nevertheless sin embargo, "I will admit that my hot dog consumption dropped
to nearly zero."
025_Mind and Body Benefit from Two Hours in Nature Each Week
La mente y el cuerpo se benefician de dos horas en la naturaleza cada

semana
People who spent at least two hours outside—either ya sea all at once de una
sola vez or totaled over several shorter visits—were more likely más
propensas to report good health and psychological well-being bienestar. Jason
G. Goldman reports.
By now it's almost common knowledge that spending time in nature is good
for you. Areas with more trees tend to be less polluted, so spending time there
allows you to breathe easier.
Spending time outdoors al aire libre has been linked with reduced blood
pressure and stress, and seems to motivate
people to exercise more.
“So it'll come as no surprise así que no es

de extrañar that there's research showing
that spending time in nature is good. I
mean, that's been known for millennia.
There's dozens of papers documentos
showing that." eso se sabe desde hace
milenios
University of Exeter Medical School Facultad researcher Mathew P. White.
Page 35 of 61
"We get this idea, patients are coming to us and they're saying, 'doctor, how
long should I spend?' and the doctor is saying, 'I don't really know.'"
So White and his team decided to find out by using data collected recopilados
from nearly 20,000 people in England through the Monitor of Engagement
with the Natural Environment Survey.
And their answer? Two hours a week. People who spent at least that much
time amid nature—either all at once or totaled over several shorter visits—
were more likely to report good health and psychological well-being than
those with no nature exposure.
Remarkably sorprendentemente, the researchers found that less than two hours
offered no significant benefits. So what's so special about two hours?
"I have absolutely no idea. Really. We didn't have an a priori guess suposición
at what this would be, this threshold umbral. It emerged surgió. And I'd be
lying if I said we predicted this. I don't know." No tengo ni idea. De verdad.
Even more noteworthy digno de mención es el, the two-hour benchmark punto
de referencia applied to men and women, to older and younger folks, to
people from different ethnic backgrounds, occupational groups,
socioeconomic levels and so on. Even people with long-term illnesses or
disabilities benefited from time spent in nature—as long as siempre que it was
at least 120 minutes per week. The study is in the journal Scientific Reports.
[Matthew P. White et al., Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is
associated with good health and wellbeing]
While the findings are based on a tremendous number of people, White

cautions advierte that it’s really just a correlation. Nobody knows why or how
nature has this benefit or even if the findings will stand up resistirán to more
rigorous investigation.
"I want to be really clear about this. This is very early stages. We're not saying
everybody has to do 120. This is really to start the conversation, saying, what
would a threshold look like? ¿cómo sería un umbral? What research do we
need to take levarthis to the next step before doctors can have the true
confidence verdadera confianza to work with their patients? But it's certainly
a starting partida point."
Page 36 of 61
026_Scientist Encourages Other Women Scientists to Make Themselves

Heard
Científica anima a otras científicas a

hacerse oír
Geneticist Natalie Telis noticed notó
few women asking questions at
scientific conferences.
So she publicized the problem and set

about to make a change. Christopher
Intagliata reports.
Así que hizo público el problema y se puso a hacer un cambio. Christopher

Intagliata informa.
If you attend science conferences, ever alguna vez pay attention to who in the
audience asks questions? Geneticist Natalie Telis did. And she noticed
something ... off que no estaba bien. "For the entire first day durante todo el
primer día of the conference, I was the only woman to ask a question. And I
thought, wow, that's kind of weird poco raro, right?" ¿no?
So, being a scientist, she decided to systematically study who asks questions at
scientific conferences. Together with colleagues from Stanford University,
where she was based at the time, and Emory University in Atlanta, she
recorded grabó more than 2,000 questions from hundreds of talks at eight
different scientific conferences.
After assigning either 2male or 3female 1designations to question askers—

which the researchers acknowledge in the paper documento doesn't fully
capture the spectrum of gender identity—they found that women ask far fewer
questions than a 2representative 1result based on their numbers. In fact:
"You need about 85 to 90 percent of your room to be women before 50

percent of your questions come from provengan women."
But Telis did identify a possible solution. Halfway through the Biology of
Genomes conference in 2015, Telis started tweeting some of her preliminary
findings about how few women had been estado asking questions compared to
their relative numbers at the meeting. That information sparked desencadenó a
public discussion—and a policy change from por parte de the conference
Page 37 of 61
organizers, who quienes instituted a rule regla that the first question at every
talk had to come from a scientist still working towards trabajaba her PhD
doctorado, in the hope con la esperanza that the approach enfoque would
produce a more diverse set conjunto of question-askers. And it worked.
"Before our intervention, about 11 percent of questions came from women,

which is one third of what you'd expect cabría esperar. After our intervention,
you get more like más del 35 percent of questions coming from women. It's
actually en realidad what you'd expect from that audience."
The analysis is in the American Journal of Human Genetics. [Natalie Telis et

al., Public Discussion Affects Question Asking at Academic Conferences]
Telis says that strategy of simply publicizing the problem has been effective at
other conferences too, getting logrando que more women to not only attend,
but to participate in scientific conferences.
"A lot of women have messaged me and said, 'Oh, you know, I asked my first
question at a conference when I saw this work,' or stuff like that. And I hope
that means people are taking advantage of aprovechando that incredible
opportunity to really add their voice, not just their face rostro in the
conference photo, to that 2scientific 1community."
027_Male Bats Up Mating Odds with Mouth Morsels
Los murciélagos machos

aumentan probabilidades de
apareamiento con bocados de
boca
Males that allow females to
take food right out of their
mouths are more likely to sire
engendrar offspring crías with
their dining comedor
companions.
Sharing a meal is a standard first step in the mating apareamiento rituals of

many mammals. But Egyptian fruit bats frugívoros take “splitting an entrée”
plato principal to a whole other level. Because males that allow females to
take the food right out of their mouths are repaid with reproductive rights—
Page 38 of 61
and are more likely to sire offspring with their favorite female fruit finaglers.
That’s according to a study in the journal Current Biology. [Lee Harten et al.,
Food for Sex in Bats Revealed as Producer Males Reproduce with Scrounging
Females]
A couple years back, researchers noticed that in fruit bat colonies some bats
forage for recolectaban food while others simply snatch recolectaban it from
the foragers’ buscadores mouths.
“And there are different hypotheses for explaining this.”
Yossi Yovel of Tel-Aviv University has studied these bats for years. Maybe
the scroungers ladrones were relatives, he says. Or maybe they were just
socially dominant bullies.
“What we observed is that mostly scroungers gorrones are females.”
That got the researchers thinking about en something of great importance to

most animals: reproduction.
“And specifically we were wondering whether females might then mate

aparearse with males that provide them with food. So this was the hypothesis,
the sex-for-food hypothesis, that we tested.” que probamos
Yovel and his colleagues monitored the interactions among bats in their
colony for more than a year, and they checked verificaron the paternity of the
baby bats that were born nacieron. What they found is that females were more
likely to make babies with those males that provided proporcionaban free
meals.
But Yovel says that the process is not strictly transactional: “So sometimes
they took a lot of food from a specific individual but did not mate with him.
What’s important is, what we think pensamos, is the bond vínculo between the
two. So if this individual is the main provider of the female then the
probability that they will later luego mate increases aumenta.”
That means that offering free lunch is no guarantee for an amorous male, but it
does up aumenta his odds probabilidades. And unlike a diferencia human
males, batboys clearly learn that it’s in de their romantic interest to chew
masticar with their mouths open.
Page 39 of 61
—Karen Hopkin
028_Scientists Fool Flies with "Virtual Tastes"
By switching fruit flies' sensory

neurons on and off encender y apagar
with light, scientists were able to
create the sensation of sweet or bitter
tastes. Christopher Intagliata reports.
There's a scene in the Matrix where the

character Cypher talks about the
illusory experience of eating a fine
buena meal:
CARLOS RIBEIRO: "And then he eats from the steak filete and says:"
<<FILM CLIP: "I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in
my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.">>
CARLOS RIBEIRO: "It tastes so good, I prefer this virtual reality to the
cruelty of the world."
<<"FILM CLIP: Ignorance is bliss bendición, felicidad absoluta.">>
Recounting that scene is Carlos Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud

Foundation in Portugal. He has a special interest in that scene because he has
essentially recreated that phenomenon—in fruit flies. "This is exactly what
we're doing to the flies."
Here's así es how it works. He and his team raised criaron genetically
engineered modificadas flies with taste sabor neurons that can be turned on
and off with red and green light. That kind of process is known as
optogenetics optogenética.
His team fed the flies bland food, which they understandably disliked no les
gustaba. But then the researchers bathed the flies in light to turn on sweetness-
perceiving dulzura neurons, and the flies gobbled up devoraron the food,
which to them now tasted sweet. The team was also able to do the same with
bitter amargas neurons. The flies got recibieron bitter food, which they
avoided que evitaron—but the scientists then turned off the bitter neurons, and
Page 40 of 61
all of a sudden the flies changed their minds. "And so we have used this to
create 3completely 4virtual 2taste 1realities for our flies."
The experimental details are in the journal eLife. [José Maria Moreira et al.,
optoPAD, a closed-loop optogenetics system to study the circuit basis of
feeding behaviors]
So, why do this? "We really want to understand how the brain uses sensory
taste information to make feeding alimentación decisions—and also what goes
wrong in obese people, for example, or when there are other diseases related
to nutrition."
He also imagines we could someday use gene therapy techniques to plug

senses back volver a conectar into a the noses or tongues of people who've
lost the ability to smell or taste saborear. But for now, that is, like the Matrix,
firmly the realm reino of science fiction.
029_Wheat Plants "Sneeze" and Spread Disease
Las plantas de trigo "estornudan" y propagan la enfermedad

Wheat plants' leaves repel repelen water, which creates the perfect conditions
for dew rocío droplets to catapult off the leaves—taking quitando pathogenic
spores for the ride. Christopher Intagliata reports.
Humans can spread propagar disease by sneezing. But less well known is the
wheat plant's ability capacidad to do something strangely similar—from its
leaves.
"It's basically analogous to a human sneeze in terms of, you have a very fast
and sudden expulsion of droplets that contain the disease or pathogen inside of
it, and they get thrown away from the surface."
Jonathan Boreyko, a mechanical

engineer at Virginia Tech. He
and his team were studying the
ability of wheat plants to expel
spores of a common pathogen,
the wheat rust fungus el hongo
de la roya del trigo, from their
leaves via a través this unusual
Page 41 of 61
mechanism. So they inoculated wheat plants with the disease, created dew on
the plants' leaves and then studied the
ensuing subsiguiente action with high-
speed microscopy microscopía.
Here’s esto es what they saw. The leaves

are extremely hydrophobic, meaning
water beads up to minimize contact with
the surface. And when two or more drops
touch, energy gets released se libera in
the form of a catapulting action, which
"sneezes" the droplets into the air several
millimeters above por encima the leaf surface. The droplets can then be
picked up by light breezes or simply fall and spread propagarse to other
plants. The process is surprisingly effective at en el launching spores: the
researchers figure calculan each leaf can launch 100 spores per hour during a
morning dew rocío matutino.
The results—and photos of the jumping drops gotas saltarinas —are in the
Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Saurabh Nath et al., ‘Sneezing’ plants:
pathogen transport via jumping-droplet condensation
Next, Boreyko and his team want to see what happens if they spray rocían
stuff material on the leaves that changes the way forma dew forms. "If we
change the wettability humectabilidad of the leaves so they're no longer super
hydrophobic, now the dew drops will be unable to jump when they grow.
They'll just sort of cling aferrarán to the leaf surface and not be jumping
anymore." y no volverán a saltar
Such treatment could perhaps put a stop poner fin to wheat sneezes and slow
down frenar the transmission of disease.
030_Elite Runners' Microbes Make Mice ratones Mightier
Mice that were fed bacteria isolated from elite athletes logged registraron
more treadmill caminadora time than other mice that got bacteria found in
yogurt.
The microbes in our intestines help keep us healthy, strengthening

fortaleciendo our immune systems and promoting promoviendo metabolism.
But they may also give us a leg up una ventaja when it comes to moving our
Page 42 of 61
legs up—and down again, rapidly and repeatedly—because a new study finds
that mice that are fed bacteria isolated from elite athletes log more time pasan
más tiempo on the treadmill than other mice that are treated only to bacteria
found in yogurt. The results appear in the journal Nature Medicine. [Jonathan
Scheiman et al., Meta-omics analysis of elite athletes identifies a performance-
enhancing microbe that functions via lactate metabolism]
Aleksandar Kostic, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School, was initially

interested in how the gut microbes of people with diabetes might differ diferir
from folks without the condition afección —the idea being that tweaking
ajustar the microbiome might help to treat the disease. But the question of
enhancing mejorar overall en general health and fitness forma física can also
come from the other direction:
“Here the question was more, what’s unique in the gut microbiome of
someone who is supremely healthy? And can we use that feature of the
microbiome to transfer into other people to potentially make them healthier?”
And a handy a mano window into the gut is poop caca. So Kostic and his
crew asked 15 runners who competed in the Boston Marathon in 2015 to
provide daily stool heces samples from a week before the race to a week after.
They also collected recolectaron samples from 10 people who are decidedly
more sedentary, and they tallied contaron the bacteria present in each cada
una de ellas.
“And when we looked at this data, there was really one thing that jumped out
at llamó la atención us, and it was this genus género of bacteria that isn’t so
well studied: Veillonella. We found it was very significantly higher in mucho
más abundance in the gut after the marathon. But not only that, it was found
much more frequently in elite marathon runners than in the general
population."
To see whether this microbe might provide the athletes with any algún
benefit, they gave some to mice and then let the little rodents roedores run.
And they found that the mice loaded with Veillonella spent more time on the
treadmill than those that got Lactobacillus.
“And this was an increase aumento of 13 percent ... I think any endurance
resistencia athlete or any athlete in general will tell you that a 13 percent
increase is pretty significant.”
Page 43 of 61
Now, the interesting thing about Veillonella is that they thrive prosperan on
con lactate lactato, which is a chemical produced by fatigued muscle. The
bacteria consume lactate and convert it into a fatty acid ácido graso called
proprionate. And mice that were treated to proprionate, which was delivered
administrado via a través teeny tiny enemas to mimic imitar its release
iberación by gut bacteria bacterias intestinales, similarly de manera similar
extended extendió their treadmill time.
“So this creates a kind of a positive feedback loop bucle de retroalimentación

and helps us to understand why Veillonella might be enriched in elite athletes
in the first place.”
Exercise produces lactate, which feeds Veillonella. Veillonella produces

proprionate, which somehow de alguna manera promotes promueve
endurance, at least in treadmill-trotting mice. Which means that gut microbes
may hold the secret to extending that workout entrenamiento —without
getting pooped. sin necesidad de cagarse
031_Science News Briefs from around the World
A few brief reports informes about international science and technology from
Canada to Kenya, including one about how humans thousands of years ago in
what is now Argentina butchered masacraron and presumably ate giant
ground sloths perezosos.
Hi, I’m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky, and here’s a short
piece artículo from the June 2019 issue edición of the magazine, in the section
called Advances: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology and
Medicine.
The article is titled "Quick Hits," and it’s a rundown resumen of some science
and technology stories from around the globe compiled by editorial
contributor Jim Daley.
From Canada: Archaeologists have

now confirmed that a Tyrannosaurus
rex skeleton found in the 1990s at a
fossil site yacimiento de fósiles in
Saskatchewan is the biggest and
heaviest on record. At nearly con casi
42 feet long and almost 20,000
Page 44 of 61
pounds, “Scotty” surpassed superó the record set establecido by “Sue,” which
was found in South Dakota in 1990.
From Argentina: Archaeologists

identified a site where ancient humans
killed and butchered giant ground
sloths (Megatherium americanum) in
the Pampas region in eastern
Argentina. The find provides evidence
that humans contributed to the sloths’
extinction.
From Kenya: A science teacher who won the 2019 Global Teacher Prize
announced he intends to donate the $1-million award to 1benefit 2society. Peter
Tabichi, a Franciscan friar fraile franciscano, mentors a science club that
came in first fue el primero in its category in the 2018 Kenya Science and
Engineering Fair. Feria
From the Comoros: Geochemists at Columbia University found a lode veta of

quartzite, a metamorphic rock formed from sandstone arenisca, on the Indian
Ocean island of Anjouan. The island is volcanic and had been thought se creía
to contain only igneous rocks.
And from North Korea: Physicists at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang

have brokered negociado a rare agreement to collaborate with Italy’s
International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. The North Koreans will
study computational neuroscience with Italian physicists.
That was Quick Hits, by Jim Daley.
032_Antiperspirant Boosts Armpit and Toe-Web Microbial Diversity
El antitranspirante aumenta la diversidad microbiana de las axilas y de la

red de los dedos de los pies
Rather than wiping microbes out, antiperspirants and foot powders increased
the diversity of microbial flora in armpits axilas and between toes dedos de
los pies. Christopher Intagliata reports.
You hear a lot about how what you eat will affect your microbiome.
Probiotics. Prebiotics. Stuff like that. But your skin is swarming plagada with
Page 45 of 61
microbes too—and the grooming para el cuidado personal products you use
might affect what’s living there. That's according to según a study in the
journal BMC Biology. [Amina Bouslimani et al., The impact of skin care
products on skin chemistry and microbiome dynamics]
For their tests, researchers recruited six men and six women. The volunteers
left their skin alone for the first three weeks except for a light body wash
lavado corporal. Then, for the next three weeks, the participants applied a
modern skincare cuidado de la piel arsenal: sunscreen and skin lotion,
antiperspirant and foot powder. Finally, the volunteers returned to their usual
routine, whatever it was for each person sea cual sea para cada persona, for
durante another three weeks.
Throughout that time the scientists swabbed tomaron muestras the volunteers'

faces and forearms antebrazos, armpits axilas and feet. Then they did
chemical and genetic analyses of the samples. The lotion and sunscreen didn't
appear to alter the microbiome. But they found, counterintuitively en contra
de la intuición, that the antiperspirant and foot powder actually boosted
aumentaban the diversity of microbes in the armpits and in between the toes—
perhaps because those products change 2nutrient and 3moisture humedad
1
levels and thus create conditions that foster fomentan a wider variety of tiny
occupants.
The researchers also found that different skin care routines altered the types of
hormones and pheromones present on the subjects' skin.
And they hypothesize plantean la hipótesis that someday, personalized skin-

care recipes could be tailored adaptadas to individuals to alter alterar our
pheromones in a systematic way, thus making us more attractive to others. Or
less attractive, should si anyone need to lessen disminuir their kavorka.
[Seinfeld clip: “I have this power.” “Yes, kavorka." "Kavorka?" "It is a
Latvian word which means 'the lure of the animal.'”] "Es una palabra letona
que significa"el señuelo del animal"."]
—Christopher Intagliata
033_Monkey Cousins Use Similar

Calls
Page 46 of 61
Two monkey species who last por última vez shared a common ancestor 3
million years ago have "eerily extrañamente similar" alarm calls.
In the wild naturaleza, monkeys need to keep their eyes peeled bien abiertos
for ante all sorts of dangers, like leopards and eagles and snakes. But the green
monkeys studied by Julia Fischer of the German Primate Center have an
additional challenge: they also have to scan explorar the skies for drones
zánganos.
“Why did we fly a drone over green monkeys, one may ask.”
One may indeed en efecto. The answer is that Fischer and her colleagues are
interested in how primates communicate.
In a classic study back in the 1980s, scientists showed that East Oriental
African vervet monkeys produce alarm calls that are specific for the predators
they encounter. So for example, vervet monkeys hearing escuchan a leopard
alarm [clip] might scurry up trepar a tree, whereas the eagle call [clip] sends
manda them running for cover refugiarse under the closest shrub arbusto.
Now, the green monkeys that live in Senegal share a similar system to warn
para advertir of leopards and snakes. But they aren’t known to raise a ruckus
alboroto in response to birds of prey aves rapaces.
“And so therefore we decided to fly a drone over them.”
The researchers treated 80 green monkeys to con a show muestra of drones.

How did the animals react to this unfamiliar aerial intruder intruso aéreo?
“The monkeys did respond. They responded with alarm calls [clip], and they
responded by running away.”
Here’s where things get really interesting: the calls the green monkeys made
after spotting ver the drones were different from the ones they use to signal
leopards [clip] or snakes [clip]. But even more intriguing:
“And when we did an acoustic analysis, these alarm calls [clip] were almost
eerily espeluznantemente similar to the ones of the east African vervets.
[clip]”
Page 47 of 61
The findings are described in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
[Franziska Wegdell, Kurt Hammerschmidt and Julia Fischer, Conserved alarm
calls but rapid auditory learning in monkey responses to novel flying objects]
The fact that the two monkey species seem to speak the same language, if you
will por así decirlo, even though they diverged apartaron from their last
common ancestor some 3 million years ago, suggests that this vocal warning
system is hardwired cableado.
So if you hear a monkey go [clip], watch out for ten cuidado con a hungry
bird. Or check verifique to see if you got a package delivered.
—Karen Hopkin
034_How Millipedes Avoid Interspecies entre especies Sexual Slips

resbalones
Millipedes, often blind, have come up with clever physical signals to ward off
evitar sexual advances insinuaciones from members of wrong species.
Most animals are pretty good at avoiding the embarrassing embarazoso faux
pas engaño of having sex with the wrong species. But what if you’re a
millipede under a cramped estrecha, dark, slippery resbaladiza rock with a
dozen or more species all scurrying about corriendo por ahí, looking for love?
Fortunately, the critters bichos evolved desarrollaron a solution: elaborate

male gonopods—literally “genital feet” "patas genitales"—with all manner of
branches ramas, bumps protuberancias and bristles cerdas. And even with
12,000 species of millipedes, no no
hay two varieties of gonopods are
exactly the same iguales. So de este
modo the little arthropods can
immediately tell saber if they’re
consorting asociando with the wrong
species—convenient not only for the
millipedes, but also for biologists.
“So you just have to pick it up and

look at it and you say, yup sí, that’s
the species, and you can identify it.”
Page 48 of 61
That’s millipede researcher Petra Sierwald at the Field Museum in Chicago.

The only problem is—no offense to any male millipedes—the gonopods are
tiny diminutos.
“If you look at a millipede, it’s not that big to begin with para empezar. So
you can imagine their modified legs ... are even smaller.”
Now, before we go any further, you might be wondering, “Who cares about
millipedes, let alone mucho menos their genitals?” And the answer is, not
enough of us no somos suficientes. Millipedes are believed se cree to be the
first land animals, lured out of the water by tasty sabrosa dead vegetable
matter on earth’s primeval primitivas shores orillas.
“They have been in the business of waste management gestión de residuos for
460 million years. And that means they are eating rotting podrida vegetation.
That returns the nutrients to the soil. And the healthy soil is what we need to
grow cultivar our food alimentos.”
But today there aren’t enough millipede researchers to determine if their

populations are stable and healthy. In fact, Sierwald says there are thousands
of unknown millipede species out there por ahí, just tapping golpeando their
many, many, many, many feet, waiting to be noticed notados.
Which brings us back to lo que nos lleva de vuelta a gonopods. Recently

Sierwald and her colleagues decided to shine iluminar ultraviolet light onto
the millipede collection at the Field Museum, because that’s just exactly the
sort of thing people who work in museums do.
“We found ... that their copulatory organs fluoresce son fluorescentes.”
And not just with one color, which lo que would have habría been cool guay
enough suficientemente.
“Different parts of this copulatory organ will fluoresce in different colors:

blue, greenish verdoso, bluish-greenish azul-verdoso and yellow.” The finding
is in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. [Petra Sierwald et al.,
Taxonomic synthesis of the eastern North American millipede genus género
Pseudopolydesmus (Diplopoda: Polydesmida: Polydesmidae), utilizing high-
detail de alto detalle ultraviolet fluorescence imaging]
Page 49 of 61
As to en cuanto a why the male sex organs fluoresce, Seirwald says no one—
perhaps not even the millipedes themselves—know for sure sabe con
seguridad. But the color-coded codificadas por colores private parts do make
identifying millipedes much easier for scientists. Sierwald and her colleagues
are now working to photograph different species.
“We need pictures of the male gonopods, and we need them online, and we
need them fast!”
So that para que scientists can help millipedes keep the soil healthful, for
them and for us.
—Bob Hirshon
035_You Contain Multitudes of Microplastics
People appear to consume

between 74,000 and 121,000
microplastic particles annually,
and that's probably a gross
underestimate.
Plastic is lightweight,
malleable, durable. But it has
also become so widespread that
it’s ending up in a lot of
unwanted no deseados places—including our own bodies. That’s according to
a new study, which found that humans are consuming a shocking chocante
amount of so-called “microplastics.”
“Microplastics, the kind of current working definition definición de trabajo, is

plastic less than five millimeters. So people commonly equate equipara that to
something like a grain of rice or a sesame ajonjolí seed and down reduce in
terms of size de class. I will say that most of the microplastics that people are
interacting with are quite a bit smaller than the sesame seed size, which I think
always kinds of shocks sorprende people when we start talking about the
numbers because they kind of can’t see a lot of these things, at least with the
naked eye a simple vista.”
Kieran Cox, a PhD candidate in marine biology at the University of Victoria

in Canada and one of the authors of the study, which is in the journal
Page 50 of 61
Environmental Science & Technology. [Kieran D. Cox et al., Human

Consumption of Microplastics]
Microplastics come from numerous sources. They can be pieces shed

desprendidas from larger plastics or they may have been designed small to
begin with para empezar.
For their study, Cox and his team pulled together past scientific literature that
calculated the number of microplastics in things we commonly consume, such
as in tap and bottled water agua del grifo y embotellada, sugars, seafood—
even in the air that we breathe. This analysis helped them figure out calcular
the baseline de referencia amount of microplastics that people are consuming
every year. They couldn’t include common foods like beef carne de res,
poultry aves de corral, vegetables and dairy lácteos in their analysis because
data on them doesn’t exist yet. In fact, their study could account for
representar only 15 percent of people’s caloric intake ingesta.
Even missing sin tener en cuenta the majority of what people swallow, the
research revealed that—at the very least como mínimo—humans appear to
consume somewhere between 74,000 and 121,000 microplastic particles
every year. That number goes up for people drinking bottled water rather than
tap water. Now, is all this plastic ingestion safe? We simply don’t know.
“This is kind of the first estimate of dose, you could say, right? ¿no? So if
you're thinking in terms of toxicology and ecotoxicology, dose is a very
important factor to think about en el que pensar, and so this kind of presents
the first estimate, but it is very much an underestimate subestimación because
of what we don't know.”
—Annie Sneed
036_A Biodegradable Label Doesn't Make It So así
At the third Scientific American

“Science on the Hill” event, “Solving
the Plastic Waste Problem”, one of the
issues discussed by experts on Capitol
Hill was biodegradability.
So you buy something made of plastic

and it’s labeled biodegradable. You
Page 51 of 61
can rest easy descansar tranquilo knowing that after you throw it out it will
harmlessly inofensivamente break down descompondrá. Well, not so fast.
“When we look at biodegradability as it pertains to en lo que respecta a

landfills vertederos, biodegradability is not a desirable attribute for a material.
And the reason for this is that when we design for biodegradability, we’re
typically designing for rapid biodegradability, and yet sin embargo landfills
rellenos sanitarios do not begin to collect the gas that’s produced typically for
two years…so much of the gas, the methane, from biodegradability is released
to the environment before gas collection systems are installed.
Morton Barlaz. He heads the Department of Civil, Construction and

Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. And he spoke
June 6th on Capitol Hill at the third “Science on the Hill” event, co-hosted by
Scientific American and California Congressman Jerry McNerney. The theme
of this session: “Solving resolviendo the Plastic Waste Problem.”
“Now I just answered the question from a landfill vertedero perspective. If I

were tuviera to switch cambiar hats and say, well, is it desirable from a litter
perspective, sure claro.
If it actually biodegrades biodegrada and is converted to gas, then the litter

would disappear, and that’s desirable. But let’s make sure asegurémonos it’s
really biodegrading and not just degrading into small pieces that nobody can
see. That’s degradability, it’s not biodegradability.”
Also on the panel, Kara Lavender Law, Research Professor at the Sea
Education Association in Woods Hole. She studies plastic debris restos in the
ocean. What about biodegradability there?
KL: “I do not think that it is possible to design a material that will do that in
the open environment and certainly not in the ocean…my understanding is
that a lot of the standards around classifying a material as biodegradable are
done under temperatures of 30 C, and for reference the average temperature of
the surface ocean spans abarca 0 C to 25 C. With an average temperature of 4
C. So even if you had a magical material that satisfied all the other
environmental ambientales criteria, it’s likely probable that that kind of
breakdown descomposición would occur on such slow timescales that waste
would build up acumularían and probably cause environmental medio
ambiente harm. So…we shouldn’t think of en the ocean or the environment as
a magical disposal of our waste desechos.
Page 52 of 61
More of the session and a discussion of some solutions will air transmitirá on
an upcoming episode of the long-form Scientific American podcast, Science
Talk. And the next 60-Second Science podcast will look at analizará a new
study on just how many tiny pieces of plastic you’re ingesting every day.
—Steve Mirsky
037_High School Cheaters Nabbed by Neural Network
Los tramposos de la escuela

secundaria atrapados por la red
neuronal
Researchers trained capacitaron a
neural network to scrutinize
escudriñara high school essays and
sniff out ghostwritten escritos por
fantasmas papers escritos. Christopher
Intagliata reports.
The English-language version of Wikipedia has almost six million articles.

And if you're a cheating student, that's six million essays already written for
you, footnotes and all. Except que el plagiarism isn't really an effective tactic
—just plug the text into conecte a search engine motor de búsqueda and game
over.
But what about having a ghostwriter at a 2paper 1mill molino, fábrica compose
your final essay?
"Standard plagiarism software cannot detect this kind of cheating."
Stephan Lorenzen, a data analyst at the University of Copenhagen. In

Denmark, where he's based tiene su sede, ghostwriting is a growing problem
at high schools. So Lorenzen and his colleagues created a program called
Ghostwriter that can detect the cheats tramposos.
At its core is a neural network trained formada and tested on 130,000 real
essays from 10,000 Danish students. After reading through tens of thousands
of essays labeled as being written by the same author or not, the machine
taught itself se enseñó a sí misma to tune sintonizar into the characteristics
that might tip off cheating. For example, did a student's essays share the same
Page 53 of 61
styles of punctuation? The same spelling mistakes? Were eran the

abbreviations the same?
By scrutinizing inconsistencies like those,

Ghostwriter was able to pinpoint
identificar a cheated engañoso essay nearly
90 percent of the time. The team presented
the results at the European Symposium on
Artificial Neural Networks, Computational
Intelligence and Machine Learning.
[Magnus Stavngaard et al., Detecting
Ghostwriters in High Schools]
There's one more aspect here that could help students. Your high school
essays presumably get better mejoren over time con el tiempo as a medida que
you learn to write—and the machine can detect that. "The final idea is to
detect students who are at risk because their development in writing style isn't
as you'd expect." el esperado
Teachers could thus de este modo give extra help to kids who really need
it, while sniffing out the cheaters too.
038_Preserved Poop Is an Archaeological Treasure
Anthropologists found parasite eggs in ancient poop samples, providing a

glimpse ojeada, vistazo of human health as hunter-gatherers transitioned to
settlements. Christopher Intagliata reports.
Page 54 of 61
For a long time, archaeologists have dug cavado for the shiny stuff, the sorts
of artifacts that belong in museums. "They like gustan pots ollas and jewelry
and gold and stuff like that."
Piers Mitchell, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge.

Mitchell spends his time looking for something decidedly different from such
handmade relics. The thing he seeks? "A preserved piece pedazo of human
feces."
Coprolites, as they're called, are dried or mineralized pieces of poop. And

Mitchell and his team found some prime specimens in a trash heap montón at
the ancient settlement of Çatalhöyük in modern-day en la actual Turkey,
which dates from 6000 to 7000 B.C.
Mitchell's team ground up molió the poop samples with a mortar and pestle,
then dissolved them and used micro sieves tamiz, cedazo to filter out particles
of various sizes. The presence of certain molecules tipped them off avisó that
it was indeed human poop.
And in two of the samples they found the intact eggs of whipworm, an

intestinal parasite that is far more likely mucho más probable to flourish in
settlements than among people who poop and then move along trasladan to a
new location lugar. The discovery gives us a glimpse idea of how human
health may have changed as a medida que hunter-gatherers started to adopt a
stationary, agricultural lifestyle.
"It's only by looking at these earliest primeras villages and towns that were set
up establecieron in the Middle East that we can really start to understand that
when humans change their lifestyle to a different way of getting obtener food,
how it can increase aumentar or decrease disminuir their risk of getting
contraer different kinds of diseases."
The results are in the journal Antiquity. [Marissa L. Ledger et al., Parasite
infection at the early farming community of Çatalhöyük]
The findings prove that ancient poop is flush llena... with de details about past
civilizations.
Page 55 of 61
039_Remembering Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann, 1969 Nobel Laureate in Physics who identified the quark,
died May 24th.
“Murray Gell-Mann was one of the great physicists of the 20th century.”
Historian of physics Graham Farmelo. Nobel Laureate Gell-Mann died May

24th. He was 89. I spoke with Farmelo May 30th at Princeton’s Institute for
Advanced Study, the morning after a symposium
related to Farmelo’s latest último book, The
Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math
Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets. Gell-Mann
appears in the book.
“More, I think, than anybody else más que nadie in

the 1950s and ‘60s, he helped to take us—we
human beings—deep into the heart of atomic nuclei
núcleos, the core núcleo of atoms, and help us
understand the bewildering desconcertante variety
of those subnuclear particles. It looked like a complete mess desastre. But
with Gell-Mann’s physical intuition, his mathematics, his sure-footedness
seguridad, he enabled us to organize our understanding of those particles. And
it was that that eso lo que led him and another colleague, George Zweig, to
identify the quark, which is a particle that is a constituent of the 3strongly
2
interacting 1particles, like the proton and neutron. So he was a really big
figure ... a 2tremendously 3powerful 1theoretician.
“He liked to stay close to data as well también, that’s really important.... I
think it’s fair justo to say that he was pretty much unrivaled no tenía rival as
somebody who could interpret these 2weird 3particle 1tracks huellas and what
have you y lo que sea, and somehow de alguna manera see the fundamental
patterns of the universe in terms of those particle tracks, so to speak.... por así
decirlo
“Gell-Mann was admired by everyone—feared by some people because of his

lacerating wit ingenio, his poisonous put-downs desprecio and what have you
y lo que sea, but he—there was absolutely no doubting his intellectual
quality.... Gell-Mann will be remembered as one of the great theoreticians of
the 20th century.”
Page 56 of 61
—Steve Mirsky
040_Bonobo Mothers Supervise Their Sons' Monkey Business
Some wild female bonobos introduce presentan their sons to desirable females
—then make sure their relations won’t be interrupted by competing males.
Karen Hopkin reports.
Some parents get overly demasiado involved in their kids’ personal lives, but
bonobo mothers take this tendency to the
extreme.
They fix up their adult sons with a female of

their choosing elección, and they even keep
other males from getting near their future
daughter-in-law nuera. The behavior may
seem overbearing autoritario, but it boosts
aumenta the odds probabilidades they’ll be
surrounded by grandkids nietos. That’s
according to a study in the journal Current
Biology. [Martin Surbeck et al., Males with a mother living in their group have
higher paternity success in bonobos but not chimpanzees]
Researchers studying wild bonobos in the Congo noticed notaron that some
females behaved a bit like males—fighting over fertile females and fending
off defendiendo some of the males who come a-courtin’ a cortejar. That
observation struck primatologist Martin Surbeck as odd.
“So I just wondered, hey oye what is it actually of their business, no? Most of
the mammals it’s just a male business, this competition over the access to
females.” ¿qué es lo que realmente les importa, no?
To get to the bottom of this unusual activity, Surbeck, who is currently at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, got DNA samples from
the players intérpretes in this melodrama.
“And so it became more apparent evidente when we did the paternity analysis
and it turned out these females were mothers of some males. And in this
female-dominated society of bonobos the mother acts kind of like a social
passport, allowing their sons to be sean more central in the group and
therefore having more opportunities to interact with other females.”
Page 57 of 61
And after the moms introduce their sons to the most desirable ladies, they
make sure the couple won’t be interrupted. As a result:
“We found that males have about 2three 3times 4higher mayor 1likelihood
probabilidad to sire offspring while their mom was still alive vivía in the
community.”
In contrast, mothers of the closely related chimpanzees don’t chaperone

acompañan their sons. In fact, male chimps are less likely to sire offspring
tener hijos when their moms are around cerca. Seems that chimps prefer
privacy for their monkey business.
—Karen Hopkin
041_Music May Orchestrate Better Brain Connectivity in Preterm

Infants
Preterm prematuros babies who listened to music in the neonatal intensive

care unit had brain activity that more closely resembled se parecía más that of
full-term babies. Christopher Intagliata reports.
Fifteen million babies are born prematurely

every year, worldwide. In some cases, the
early births nacimientos prematuros can be
life-threatening—or cause developmental
de desarrollo issues.
"They have more attention-deficit

difficulties. They can have a higher risk of
having autism, and in general socio-
emotional regulation issues problemas."
Petra Hüppi, a pediatrician and
neonatologist at the University Hospital of Geneva.
Now, she and her colleagues have evidence that a simple sencilla tool could
help those preterm babies' brains develop: music. <Mozart music> But before
you cue the Amadeus:
"When I thought about Mozart, I thought, this is a very complex musical

structure and I could hardly difícilmente imagine that such an immature brain
would be able to fully capture the complexity of Mozart."
Page 58 of 61
So instead, she recruited the harpist Andreas Vollenweider, who worked with
neonatal nurses to determine which sounds would most stimulate infants'
brains. He then composed a suite serie 1of 2three 4eight-minute-long 3tracks,
which the nurses played to 20 preterm babies using wireless headphones
embedded incrustados in little baby caps. Each baby heard five tracks a week
for six weeks on average.
Then Hüppi's team used MRIs to visualize activity in the babies' brains, and
they found that preemies prematuros who listened to tunes melodías had brain
networks redes cerebrales that more closely resembled que se parecían más
those of full-term babies compared to their counterparts who didn't get
recibían the treatment. The music listeners oyentes had greater mayor
connectivity among brain regions, such as areas involved in 2sensory and
4
higher-order de orden superior 3cognitive 1functions—indicating that music
listening might have enduring duraderos effects on brain development.
The details are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Lara

Lordier et al., Music in premature infants enhances mejora high-level de alto
nivel cognitive brain networks]
Of course, many questions still remain. “How much should they listen to that?
Was the music given in the right way? Would it be much better if it was
something more lively animado than recorded music? Was it too demasiado
simple? Could it be more complex?"
But Hüppi said one thing parents can already do is sing to their children. Plus
además, she said, it doesn't really matter if you can carry seguir a tune.
042_Icy Room Temperatures May Chill Productivity
A new study suggests women's

performance on math and verbal tasks
increases as a medida que room
temperature rises, up to about the mid
70s F. Christopher Intagliata reports.
A few years ago scientists determined

that our thermostats are sexist—
namely, that office climates had been
Page 59 of 61
optimized for a hypothetical roomful of 40-year-old, 150-pound men, using

standards developed more than 50 years ago. And that ends up leaving a lot of
women in the cold.
"It's called se llama the battle of the thermostat." Tom Chang, a behavioral
economist at the USC Marshall School of Business. He says it goes beyond
comfort comodidad for women: "It seems that it's not just a matter of comfort,
but it also affects their productivity."
Chang and his colleague tested that link between temperature and performance
by quizzing comodidad 543 German students on 2basic 3addition 1skills and
word scrambles in rooms that varied from 60 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
"And if you went pasaba from the low 60s to the mid a mediados de los -70s,
you saw an increase in female performance rendimiento of almost 15 percent,
which I found remarkably notablemente large—much larger than I'd
expected." The effects tapered off disminuyeron after the mid-70s. But men,
on the other hand, had a small decrease in performance—about 3 percent—as
a medida que temperatures rose to the mid-70s. The results are in the journal
PLoS One. [Tom Y. Chang and Agne Kajackaite, Battle for the thermostat:
Gender and the effect of temperature on cognitive performance]
And there's existe a chance posibilidad these findings might explain disparities
disparidades in test scores resultados on the SAT.
"The longstanding resultados gap in performance desempeño between high

school boys and high school girls on the SATs is approximately 4 percent.
Given the effect size magnitud we're finding, 3 degrees' difference in indoor
temperature would close cerraría that gap entirely." Still, he says, "I wouldn't
go running off writing policy off of one study." Aún así, dice, "Yo no me iría
corriendo a escribir la política de un estudio".
But it seems Cynthia Nixon had the thermostat dialed ajustado in just right
last year. The actor turned convertido politician was preparing to debate
Andrew Cuomo as mientras they vied compitieron for the Democratic
nomination for New York State’s governor. Debate venues lugares are usually
kept pretty chilly fríos. But she requested a more balmy templado —and
perhaps cognitively cognitivamente friendly amigable —76 degrees.
Page 60 of 61
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/60-second-science/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/60-second-science/?page=2
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/60-second-science/?page=3
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-
d&q=best+podcast+to+learn+english+spotify&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKw7aw
jJDkAhWFxFkKHZnkDAAQ1QIoAHoECAoQAQ&biw=1366&bih=590
Page 61 of 61

60 - Second Science1

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

60 - Second Science1

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Chemistry | 60-Second Science

001_West Point Uniforms Signify Explosive Chemistry

Los uniformes de West Point significan química explosiva

Stephen Ressler. He served 34 years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

“Sulfur, a mineral found in nature, yellowish amarillento or golden color,

“Charcoal carbón vegetal, the product of the combustion of wood, typically

002_Secrets of the Universe Trapped

In the summer of 2015, a strange delivery entrega arrived in Munich,

So first, scientists melted derritieron the snow and then filtered it for la

“Just by looking at con sólo mirar something which is on our own planet to

003_Certain Personality Types Are Likely to Make a "Foodie Call"

Ciertos tipos de personalidad son propensos a hacer una "llamada

The finding is in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“You’re probably wondering how we came up with ocurrió this idea.”

Brian Collisson, a social psychologist at Azusa Pacific University in

So when one of his co-authors—Trista Harig, also at Azusa Pacific—told him

In a pair of online surveys, the researchers asked more than 1,000 women:

“We found that approximately 23 to 33 percent of women surveyed had

The respondents encuestados most likely más propensos to engage in

“The dark triad refers to subclinical levels of psychopathy—which is a lack of

narcissism, which is a grandiose and over-the-top self-love.” desmesurado

With that as a checklist lista de verificación, control, it might be possible to

004_Artificial Intelligence Sniffs Out olfatea Unsafe Foods alimentos

The Food and Drug Administration

Como los paquetes de bocadillos de

005_Computer Tells Real Smiles

Slight ligeros changes around the eyes

Visual computing researchers at the University of Bradford in the U.K. started

The researchers suggest their work could improve a computer’s ability to

006_Stare Down intimidar con la mirada a Gulls gaviotas to Avoid Lunch

Researchers slowed the approach of

No trip to the beach would be

Neeltje Boogert, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Exeter.

So así que don’t turn your back on

007_Real Laughs Motivate More Guffaws carcajadas

[CLIP: I Love Lucy with laugh track]

Sophie Scott is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. She

The researchers paired emparejaron the jokes with both spontaneous,

[CLIP: Lemonade joke with laughter]

That is es decir, honest, and involuntary laughter cued estimuló people to

In future laughter experiments, the researchers plan to scan participants’

008_Extinction Wipes Out aniquila Evolution's Hard Work

By killing off many of New Zealand’s

New Zealand once had a Dr. Seuss–worthy

Luis Valente, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of

“In a couple of centuries, humans wiped out borraron 50 million years of

“The conservation efforts being done realizando in New Zealand at the

009_London Is Crawling with Drug-Resistant Microbes

If you’re a germaphobe navigating the city,

Touch buttons at ATMs, and crosswalks,

010_Male Black Widows Poach Rivals' Approaches

Los machos de las viudas negras

Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto.

So one way males find females is by sniffing, from afar desde lejos, the

We had a finish line línea de meta of pheromone-emitting females.... And we

“These spiders are much more adept

And follow-up de seguimiento experiments in the lab confirmed that male

011_Babies Want Fair justos Leaders

Babies as young as a year and a half want leaders to fix situations in which

<CLIP: Toddlers crying> Niños pequeños

“Babies evaluate others a los demás constantly.”

Renée Baillargeon is a psychologist at the University of Illinois. She led the

Alan Fiske, an anthropology professor who studies human relationships at the