p The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is being fined for botching 97 of 116 procedures to treat prostate cancer among men seeking care at the agencys medical center in Philadelphia. Although the punishment, which adds up to a mere $227,500, might not sound like more than a slap on the wrist, it is coming from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and is one of the largest the commission has ever given out for medical mistakes. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=nuclear-commission-fines-va-over-bo-2010-03-19[More]/a
p style=text-align:leftBy Daniel Cressey/pp style=text-align:left/pp style=text-align:leftOnly around 300 endangered right whales remain in the North Atlantic, and a number of them end up tangled in fishing gear off the east coast of the United States. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=whale-sedation-conservation[More]/a
pOn complex issues, as is often said, it is possible for intelligent people to disagree. That was certainly the case March 15 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, when five leaders of the space exploration intelligentsia met to discuss NASAs plans for human spaceflight. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=asimov-obama-space-plan[More]/a
p Dinosaurs are frequently cited as the ultimate exemplars of failure. ldquo;Dead as a dinosaurrdquo; is now deeply embedded in our vernacular. Yet death for a species, and even for groups of species, is as inevitable as your death. Somewhere around 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. The 10 million to 50 million species that comprise the modern day biosphere (the uncertainty due mostly to our lack of understanding of microbial diversity) are but the latest players in a four-billion-year drama--ldquo;The Greatest Show on Earth,rdquo; to borrow the title of Richard Dawkins most recent book. nbsp; a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=dismiss-dinosaurs-as-failures--and-2010-03-18[More]/a
p As automakers ramp up their plans to put greener vehicles on the road, hydrogen storage has become a pivotal issue. Whereas its been suggested that graphene could play an important role in retaining hydrogen for use in fuel cells and other technologies, a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia say theyve found a way to configure graphene that enables it to hold 100 times more hydrogen molecules than a single layer of the carbon-based substance. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=graphene-used-to-make-a-hydrogen-mo-2010-03-19[More]/a
pEvery dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules--and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups--and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality./ppMorality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice , is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-ethical-dog[More]/a
pAh, puberty. A time for raging hormones, growing independence and being stupid. Okay, not every teenager gets stupid. But they actually do learn less. And in a study published in the journal Science [see Hui Shen et al, http://bit.ly/dbeLY6 ], researchers describe the cellular and molecular changes that drive this puberty-associated desmartification. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=puberty-a-time-for-less-learning-10-03-19[More]/a
pFor nearly 10,000 years--since the dawn of civilization and the Holocene era--our world seemed unimaginably large. Vast frontiers of land and ocean offered infinite resources. Humans could pollute freely, and they could avoid any local repercussions simply by moving elsewhere. People built entire empires and economic systems on their ability to exploit what seemed to be inexhaustible riches, never realizing that the privilege would come to an end./ppBut thanks to advances in public health, the industrial revolution and later the green revolution, population has surged from about one billion in 1800 to nearly seven billion today. In the past 50 years alone, our numbers have more than doubled. Fueled by affluence, our use of resources has also reached staggering levels; in 50 years the global consumption of food and freshwater has more than tripled, and fossil-fuel use has risen fourfold. We now co-opt between one third and one half of all the photosynthesis on the planet./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=boundaries-for-a-healthy-planet[More]/a
p With fewer places left to breed and live, European butterflies, beetles, dragonflies and damselflies are dying in droves, according to the latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species . a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=bugs-off-habitat-loss-killing-europ-2010-03-18[More]/a
