Focusing Light on Silicon Beads

Placing tiny spheres of silicon in reflective trays could be the key to cheap, efficient solar cells.

The High-Tech Search for Amelia Earhart!

Here’s an interesting video from WSJ Online about new wrinkles in the never-ending search for high-profile flier Amelia Earhart, including using new gadgets like an autonomous underwater vehicle and magnetometers.

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Software That Knows What You Like

Cleverset's approach to e-commerce exposes consumers to the long tail.

The Neurological Roots of Aggression

Recent findings shed light on the brain deficits that underlie aggression and could aid in the development of preventative treatments.

The Listener

Photograph by Doron Gild

In 1974 Oliver Sacks was climbing a mountain in Norway by himself. It was early afternoon, and he had just begun his descent when a slight misstep sent him careening over a rocky cliff. His left leg was "twisted grotesquely" beneath his body, his limp knee wracked with pain. "My knee could not support any weight at all, but just buckled beneath me," he wrote in A Leg to Stand On. Sacks began to "row" himself down the mountain, sliding on his back and pushing with his hands, so that his leg, which he'd splinted with his umbrella, was "hanging nervelessly" in front of him. After a few hours, Sacks was exhausted, but he knew that if he stopped he would not survive the cold night.

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The Climate Crucible

In March, the city of Sydney, Australia switched off the lights for one hour, kicking off a year-long campaign to reduce the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent. Credit: Ian Waldle/Getty

No country on Earth is experiencing the early signs of a warming world as keenly as the land down under. Recent data shows that temperatures in Australia are escalating faster than the global average: Of the country's 20 warmest years on record, 15 have occurred since 1980. The past 10 years have seen the lowest rainfall amounts in at least 100 years and perhaps since Europeans arrived on the continent. According to leading climatologists, the doubled severity of heat and drought suggests that Australia could be a "canary in the coal mine" of climate change, providing the world with a glimpse of what's to come.

While other nations are debating how best to tackle a somewhat nebulous future scenario of climate change, for Australia that future is today. And this country—with the biggest per capita carbon footprint of any developed nation in the world—is now emerging as an exemplar for sweeping environmental reform. Rising social concerns about water have created a greater awareness of global warming, which has, in turn, prompted a broad political response. Scientifically informed solutions to both the water and climate dilemmas are being rolled out for the first time on a national stage. As experts predict crises akin to Australia's "Big Dry" in many other parts of the world, how this nation responds will reveal much about our collective ability to reverse course on climate change.

A Profound Sense of Time

In the fly, segments fuse and display new features such as wings or legs. Illustration by Alison Schroeer

One of the fundamental features of the organization of multicellular animals is segmentation: We are initially built by subdividing a relatively undifferentiated embryonic tissue into smaller, repeated elements, like a stack of mostly identical building blocks. Look at an earthworm or a caterpillar or a maggot, and the organization is clear, with the wormlike animal showing the obvious seams and subdivisions that constitute its assembly from rings of similar chunks of tissue. Another property of this pattern of organization is that individual segments can then acquire specializations. In a caterpillar, the front end is modified with mouthparts and sense organs to form a head, while other segments will bear stubby limbs or be festooned with bristles or colored spots and patterns. Specialization is carried further when a maggot becomes a fly. Segments become much more obscure, retaining their visible identity in the abdomen, but are otherwise fused, elaborated upon, and display new features, such as wings or legs or mouthparts, that make the segments, ultimately, look very different from one another.

We vertebrates were also overtly segmented animals early in our embryonic development. As with the fly, the nature of our construction from similar blocks of tissue has been obscured by later additions in development, with limbs patched on and some segments (like human tails) reduced to near invisibility. Others (like significant portions of our brains) have been telescoped, contorted, and fused so that the boundaries between the original segments are detectable only to sensitive molecular probes. As with the fly's abdomen, we also retain some still apparent vestiges: the chain of vertebrae in our backs and the muscles of our torsos.

Dr. President

Illustration by Adam Billyeald

During the past seven years of the Bush administration, America has been subject to what can only be called antiscientific governance. Scientists have been ignored, threatened, suppressed, and censored across agencies, across areas of expertise, and across issues. Policies have gone forward repeatedly without adequate scientific input and sometimes in spite of it, and have subsequently backfired.

The picture couldn't have been any more stark this past summer, when former US Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified before Congress that he'd been blocked by the Bush administration from offering his expertise on issues ranging from embryonic stem cell research to mental-health problems emerging in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To hear Carmona relate his experiences not only stirred outrage; his testimony further inspired an already powerful demand for change. Under George W. Bush—the man who pronounced climate science "incomplete," who misled the nation in his first major address about the availability of embryonic stem cells for research, who claimed that Iraq was collaborating with Al Qaida—America's relationship with reality itself has reached a nadir.

Read the rest at Seed

Science is Golden

Illustration by Adam Billyeald

In 2005, UNESCO's Science Report identified the Arab region as the least R&D intensive area in the world. Moreover, rather than focus on scientific innovation at home, Arab nations spent a staggering trillion dollars importing scientific and technological knowhow over the past three decades.

Now, a number of these nations are shifting their attention to developing regional R&D. Earlier this year, the 22 nations of the Arab League approved a 10-year plan to boost scientific research. It calls for member states to raise their allocation to science twelvefold to 2.5 percent of GDP—more than the average 2.3 percent spent by developed nations.

Arab political leaders are laying down the foundation for a strong scientific community. "It is a substantial step forward," says Mohamed Hassan, director of the Third World Academy of Sciences in Trieste, Italy. "If there is a political will to regionalize and internationalize initiatives, it would be of great benefit to the Arab world. The worry is that these [initiatives] will remain localized."

The Evolution of Language

Illustration by Thomas Porostocky

Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years—an eye-blink of evolution.

Why are humans the only species to have suddenly hit upon the remarkable possibilities of language? If speech is a product of our DNA, then surely other species also have some of the same genes required for language because of our basic, shared biochemistry. One of our closest relatives should have developed something that is akin to language, or another species should have happened upon its attendant advantages through parallel evolution.

A quasi-paradox has persisted within the field of linguistics, because the sudden emergence of such a complex, limitless system in a single species is hard to rationalize in terms of standard evolution. Its rapid spread makes language seem more like a viral epidemic that swept through the human population rather than a trait inherited through the typical dynamics of evolution.

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