New Horizons in Science

About 700 new chemicals are introduced each year, on top of 80,000 already in use. Since 1976, the EPA has restricted the use of five existing chemicals, according to Zimmerman. “If you live and breathe in the United States,” she says, “you are exposed to chemicals with little or no knowledge of their impacts on health more…

If you’re a gene and you don’t make a messenger RNA that makes a protein, you’re useless. Or so researchers thought until they discovered genes that were once as invisible to us as the dark side of the moon. According to this central dogma in biology, there are about 26,000 genes in our cells that make more…

In the course of his exceptional career, Lee Hood has lived through, and helped in significant ways to catalyze, four major paradigm shifts in biology (i.e., the joining of engineering to biology, the human genome project, cross-disciplinary biology and, of late, systems biology). Together, he explains, they have brought us to the threshold of the next more…

The “holy grail” of autism research is to be able to diagnose it many months before its symptoms are clear, giving doctors time to change its course before it has seeped into and resculpted the brain of an affected child. Researchers disagree over whether this will ever be possible, but Ami Klin has little doubt. “There more…

Some patients with depression are helped by therapy, or drugs, or, more often, a combination of the two. But for others, nothing medicine has been able to offer could soften the blackness and bleakness of the illness. Helen Mayberg is working hard to change that, using a technique called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are inserted more…

In November, 2009, hackers released emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in England, prompting wide-ranging attacks on climate research and climate researchers—Michael Mann among them. The author of the famous “hockey-stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium, Mann was not amused; indeed, for a time his career as one of the more…

Surely the conditions that lead to insurgency and war depend upon such things as ideology, anger, the desire for revenge and other factors unique to each location, to each insurgent group, to each mortal conflict. Neil Johnson and his colleagues, experts in the modeling and understanding of complex systems, weren’t buying that assumption. They reviewed 11 more…

How do we make decisions and exercise judgment? We might expect that these are uniquely human activities, among the things that distinguish us from our non-human primate relatives. But Santos is pursuing a different notion—namely, that some aspects of the irrational decision-making that human adults are famous for might be shared with children and monkeys. Santos more…

Why do people often sharply disagree about things that scientists mostly agree on? As Dan Kahan has written, “The same groups who disagree on 'cultural issues' — abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer — also disagree on whether climate change is real and on whether underground disposal of nuclear waste is safe.” How could views on more…

In 2001, Jo Handelsman spoke at New Horizons in Tempe, Arizona, where she told us about her pioneering work in extracting DNA of previously unknown organisms from soil—an area of study known as metagenomics. These were organisms that could not be cultured in the laboratory, and so the DNA revealed bits of countless organisms unkown to more…

Supported by a large body of data, the current cosmological model describes the evolution of the Universe from a very early burst of accelerated expansion, known as inflation, a tiny fraction of a second after the beginning, through the assembly of galaxies and large-scale structure shaped by dark matter, to the present epoch and the rule more…

At the 1988 briefing in Boulder, “Future Climate/Future Life” served as the rubric for tandem presentations by Ralph Cicerone and the late Stephen Schneider, both at the time senior atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Among the issues under scrutiny then:  How fast – and how far – would temperatures rise in response more…

For 50 years, researchers have pursued the idea that cancer cells divide quickly. All the drugs developed so far are aimed at those cells. Such drugs now cure 80 percent of cases of ovarian cancer. But much of that cancer recurs within 2 to 5 years, and when it comes back, it kills many of the more…

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been referred to as the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history. As Lohrenz points out, scientific observations played a critical role in the response to the crisis and in understanding the impacts on the marine life and ecosystems in the northern Gulf of Mexico. But the magnitude of the more…

Most colors on animals are produced by molecular pigments that absorb some wavelengths of visible light and reflect the others. But many of the most brilliant and vivid colors in nature are what are called “structural” colors. Like a rainbow, an opal, or an oil slick, structural colors are produced by optical interactions of light with more…

When we report on clinical trials, we need to ask ourselves the following questions, Krumholz says: Where is the kernel of truth that really matters? When does a study convey more spin than substance? Why is it sometimes so hard to determine exactly what a study says? Krumholz brings the perspective of someone who does such more…

Antibodies make excellent drugs for such things as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer, but they can’t be taken as a pill, and they can cause life-threatening allergic or immune responses, only making matters worse. David Spiegel has a work-around. He is developing antibody recruiters that can induce a patient’s own antibodies to attack illnesses such as prostate more…

State, a psychiatrist who went back to school to study genomics, has become one of a group of elite researchers using the newest and fastest genomics analysis—so-called high-throughput technology—to pursue the genes behind Tourette syndrome, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other neuropsychiatric ailments in children, which have clear genetic components but which have proven elusive and more…