Readers Respond on "Knowing Your Chances"--And More...

Unintentional Comedy I have been really enjoying your magazine since I started reading it last year.

Readers Respond on "Obama's Science"

Tax Dollars at Work Despite Barack Obama appointing scientists to top posts, I hardly think this qualifies him personally to be named in the “ Scientific American 10 .” His inclusion pales beside the favor bestowed to the others on the list who have actually done some real work for science and humanity. [More]


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Long-Awaited Research on a 4.4-Million-Year-Old Hominid Sheds New Light on Last Common Ancestor

The first full analysis of a 4.4-million-year-old early human paints a clearer picture of what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may have looked like, which is not, after all, that much like a chimp at all. The ancient Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi", as the most complete female specimen is known) is described in 11 research papers published online today in Science . The prodigious research effort combines Ardi's fossils with those from many other Ar. ramidus individuals--both male and female--found near the Awash River in the Afar Rift region of Ethiopia. [More]


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What (Maybe) Didn't Kill the Dinosaurs: Comets

The chunks of ice and dust that make their home in the Oort cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, sometimes become dislodged and head into the solar system as streaky comets. Some disruptions, caused by passing stars and other interactions with the Milky Way galaxy, are severe enough to send Oort comets into orbits that buzz or even collide with Earth. New simulations have revealed a novel mechanism for their entry into our part of the solar system, a method that also suggests that comet showers may not have been strongly involved in major extinctions on Earth.

Comet dynamics depend heavily on Jupiter and Saturn: their huge gravitational fields tend to keep objects away from Earth. Comets that manage to skirt Jupiter and Saturn, the conventional thinking goes, had to have originated in the outer reaches of the Oort cloud, where perturbations from outside the solar system can be felt most strongly and are writ large across vast cometary orbits that take hundreds of years to complete. Only during comet showers caused by close stellar passages, the theory holds, have extreme gravitational disruptions brought inner Oort cloud comets into the mix.

Are Torosaurus and Triceratops one and the same?

A rare horned dinosaur known as Torosaurus may not be a distinct species after all, according to a presentation given Friday at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Bristol, England. [More]


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Greenhouse Rock: Stone-Cold Data from Ancient Glacial Deposits May Help Reveal Future Climate Change

Aptly named for its location behind a ball field in New York City's Central Park, Umpire Rock may offer a useful vantage point for calling balls and strikes. For scientists, however, it has served as a speed gun for calculating the trajectory and timing of an ancient glacier that once played an active role in global climate change. [More]


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Dino Deals: Prehistoric Fossils for Sale on the Vegas Strip [Slide Show]

Most celebrities hit the Las Vegas circuit a few years past their prime. For "Samson," the journey took a bit longer. The remains of the 66- million-year-old female Tyrannosaurus rex , along with 50 other lots of fossils and dinosaur parts, are being auctioned off on October 3 by Bonhams Butterfields  New York  at The Venetian resort in Las Vegas. [More]


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Mini T. Rex Recovered

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

Ask any young dinosaur fanatic about the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex and you’ll probably get a fairly accurate description: huge reptile, big head, powerful jaws, tiny little arms. Scientists had thought that the animal evolved its bizarre proportions as it grew to its gargantuan stature. But in this week’s issue of the journal Science , paleontologist Paul Sereno describes a newly discovered miniature tyrannosaurid that evolved millions of years earlier--and has all the attributes of the larger one.

Recommended: The Philosophical Baby

The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009 [More]


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Prehistoric Human-Fashioned Fibers Found

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

We humans love to decorate things. We wear flashy clothes, tie ribbons to suitcases and personalize the cases for our iPhones. And apparently we’ve had this tendency for a long, long time. More than thirty-four thousand years, to be exact.

Colorful 32,000-year-old fibers prove to be some of the world's oldest

Archeologists have uncovered a veritable tangle of ancient flax fibers in a cave in the Republic of Georgia. The find consists of tiny bits of flax fibers that had been spun--and in some cases dyed --by Upper Paleolithic hunters who occupied the cave intermittently beginning some 32,000 years ago. [More]


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Expedition Finds World War II Navy Wreck

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], spends most of its time trying to understand and predict changes in the environment, along with conserving and managing coastal and marine resources. But its scientific expertise also just made it possible to locate the remains of a US Navy patrol boat sunk by a German submarine in World War II.

On-The-Job Chimps Use Multiple Tools

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To do a job right, you need the right tools. Even a chimp knows that. According to a study in the American Journal of Primatology , chimps in the Congo use multiple tools to capture army ants. [More]


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Did Lactose Tolerance First Evolve in Central, Rather Than Northern Europe?

Dairy farmers living in Central Europe around 7,500 years ago may have been the first human adults to drink cow's milk--at least comfortably. [More]


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The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals: The Video

In a small cave along the rocky coast of Gibraltar 28,000 years ago a Neandertal died, possibly the last of his kind. After more than 200,000 years of existence in Europe and Western Asia, the closest living relative to Homo sapiens had gone extinct.

Scientists have long debated what led to their disappearance. The latest theories focus on rapid climate changes and subtle differences in behavior and biology that might have given modern humans an advantage over Neandertals. In her article in the August 2009 Scientific American , Kate Wong probes these and other extinction theories, concluding in part that the precise factors varied from group to group, with perhaps some perishing from disease, others from inbreeding.

Conflicted Conservation: When Restoration Efforts Are Pitted against Human Rights

Even as industrial civilization reaches into the farthest corners of the globe to extract resources such as oil, timber and fish, environmentalists are striving to mitigate its deleterious effects on the biosphere. Projects to reduce pollution, prevent climate change and protect biodiversity, however, are drawing criticism that they could drive indigenous people off their lands and destroy their livelihoods.

Conservationists have historically been at odds with the people who inhabit wildernesses. During the last half of the 20th century, millions of indigenous people in Africa, South America and Asia were ousted from their homelands to establish nature sanctuaries free of humans. Most succumbed to malnutrition, disease and exploitation, recounts anthropologist Michael Cernea of George Washington University. Such outcomes--coupled with the realization that indigenous groups usually help to stabilize ecosystems by, for instance, keeping fire or invasive weeds at bay--have convinced major conservation groups to take local human concerns into account. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) now describes indigenous peoples as “natural allies,” and the Nature Conservancy pledges to seek their “free, informed and prior” consent to projects impacting their territories.

Digging Up Valuable Fossils in Suburban New Jersey

Outside Freehold, N.J.--The water is icy cold and the stone is slippery as I wade in up to my calves. Along the banks of this slow-flowing stream, guarded by prickly brambles, lies one of the richest caches of fossils dating back to the extinction that claimed the dinosaurs. The remains of marine creatures buried here, kept secret to prevent looting, tell an unusual tale: rather than dying off 65 million years ago, these creatures lived on afterward, albeit briefly. The discovery is causing scientists to rethink why some creatures survived the so-called KT extinction while others did not.

Unlike this one, significant fossil sites tend to be found in exotic locales such as the searing hot Gobi Desert or the windswept pampas of Patagonia, areas remote from the kind of urban development that can ruin them. “You don’t expect to find them here in suburban New Jersey some 90 minutes away from New York City,” explains Neil Landman, curator of fossil invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History.

National Academy as National Enquirer ? PNAS Publishes Theory That Caterpillars Originated from Interspecies Sex

Caterpillars transform into butterflies and moths via a radical process known as metamorphosis, where their bodies virtually turn to soup and develop anew. [More]


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That's No Vestigial Organ, That's My Appendix

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Two years ago, Duke University Medical Center researchers said that the supposedly useless appendix is actually where good gut bacteria safely hide out during some unpleasant intestinal conditions. [More]


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Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding

In June the famed Lucy fossil arrived in New York City. The 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis could attract hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of her four-month engagement--part of a six-year tour that began in 2007.

Before this tour, Lucy had never been on public display outside of Ethiopia. One might expect scholars of human evolution to be delighted by the opportunity to share the discipline’s crown jewel with so many members of the science-interested public. But news reports announcing her New York debut included the same objections that aired when she first landed in the U.S.: namely, that the bones could sustain damage and that the tour takes a key specimen out of scientific circulation for too long. Indeed, some major museums turned the exhibit away in part for those reasons.