Aiming to Be the Next Big Amenity

Aiming to Be the Next Big Amenity
By MOTOKO RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/garden/13TURF.html

AS the horizon turned to a deep pink outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of their serene living room, the Cantone family looked out over the Hudson River and pondered the meaning of living "green."

Robin Cantone was enthusiastic about the air filtration in their apartment at the Solaire, which opened in Battery Park City in May to great fanfare, billed as the country's first high-rise residential "green building." She pointed out the energy-saving washer and dryer and the kitchen cabinets, made without the usual formaldehyde.

Her husband, Robert, talked about living for less. Though the apartment has three bedrooms and three bathrooms, its electricity requirements are about the same as for the smaller apartment they used to rent in Chelsea.

Does Science Matter?

[excellent series of articles commemorating the New York Times' 25th anniversary of the Science Times section (25 Provocative Questions), including articles discussing — intelligent design (this article below), war, sleep, and number theory.]

(1) Does Science Matter?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11MATT.html

Through its rituals of discovery, science has extended life, conquered disease and offered new sexual and commercial freedoms. It has pushed aside demigods and demons and revealed a cosmos more intricate and awesome than anything produced by pure imagination.

But there are new troubles in the peculiar form of paradise that science has created, as well as new questions about whether it has the popular support to meet the future challenges of disease, pollution, security, energy, education, food, water and urban sprawl.

The public seems increasingly intolerant of grand, technical fixes, even while it hungers for new gadgets and drugs. It has also come to fear the potential consequences of unfettered science and technology in areas like genetic engineering, germ warfare, global warming, nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear arms.

Is War Our Biological Destiny?

(2) Is War Our Biological Destiny?
By NATALIE ANGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11WAR.html

In these days of hidebound militarism and round-robin carnage, when even that beloved ambassador of peace, the Dalai Lama, says it may be necessary to counter terrorism with violence, it's fair to ask: Is humanity doomed? Are we born for the battlefield — congenitally, hormonally incapable of putting war behind us? Is there no alternative to the bullet-riddled trapdoor, short of mass sedation or a Marshall Plan for our DNA?

Was Plato right that "Only the dead have seen the end of war"?

In the heartening if admittedly provisional opinion of a number of researchers who study warfare, aggression, and the evolutionary roots of conflict, the great philosopher was, for once, whistling in a cave. As they see it, blood lust and the desire to wage war are by no means innate. To the contrary, recent studies in the field of game theory show just how readily human beings establish cooperative networks with one another, and how quickly a cooperative strategy reaches a point of so-called fixation. Researchers argue that one need not be a Pollyanna, or even an aging hippie, to imagine a human future in which war is rare and universally condemned.

What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?

(23) What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?
By GINA KOLATA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11MATH.html

Many mathematicians would say it's the problem they're working on, but of all the famous unsolved problems, one stands out — the Riemann hypothesis. Posed in 1859 by the German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, it has tantalized mathematicians ever since. Recently, efforts to prove it have taken on a new intensity, with mathematicians turning to physics for insight.

The conjecture is Riemann's only venture into number theory, a branch of mathematics that investigates whole numbers. And it says something truly profound about prime numbers. Such numbers, like 2, 3, 5 and 7, have no divisors other than themselves and 1 and seem to appear unpredictably on the number line. Euclid proved that there were infinitely many primes, but the question is, Where are they? Is there a pattern or rule that can tell where to find them?

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?
By DENNIS OVERBYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11BANG.html

Like baseball, in which three strikes make an out, three outs on a side make an inning, nine innings make a regular game, the universe makes its own time. There is no outside timekeeper. Space and time are part of the universe, not the other way around, thinkers since Augustine have said, and that is one of the central and haunting lessons of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

In explaining gravity as the "bending" of space-time geometry, Einstein's theory predicted the expansion of the universe, the primal fact of 20th-century astronomy. By imagining the expansion going backward, like a film in reverse, cosmologists have traced the history of the universe credibly back to a millionth of a second after the Big Bang that began it all.

But to ask what happened before the Big Bang is a little bit like asking who was on base before the first pitch was thrown out in a game, say between the Yankees and the Red Sox. There was no "then" then.

Why Do We Sleep?

(15) Why Do We Sleep?
By ERICA GOODE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11SLEE.html

Any second grader knows why humans need food and water. The logic behind sex becomes obvious with a quick lesson on birds and bees.

But even the most gifted scientist on the planet cannot explain why people sleep.

"It may be the biggest open question in biology," said Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen, a sleep expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.

How Does the Brain Work?

(4) How Does the Brain Work?
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11BRAI.html

In the continuing effort to understand the human brain, the mysteries keep piling up. Consider what scientists are up against. Stretched flat, the human neocortex — the center of our higher mental functions — is about the size and thickness of a formal dinner napkin.

With 100 billion cells, each with 1,000 to 10,000 synapses, the neocortex makes roughly 100 trillion connections and contains 300 million feet of wiring packed with other tissue into a one-and-a-half-quart volume in the brain.

25 Questions

25 Questions
November 10, 2003
Science
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2003/11/10/science/text/index.html

The first issue of Science Times appeared 25 years ago, on Nov. 14, 1978. Its guiding principle ever since has been that science is not a collection of answers, but a way of asking questions, an enterprise driven by curiosity. To celebrate the anniversary, we pose 25 of the most provocative questions facing science. As always, answers are provisional.

Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Strikes Earth

Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Strikes Earth
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:43 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Solar-Flare.html

DENVER (AP) -- The most powerful geomagnetic storm possible hit Earth early Wednesday, threatening power outages, disrupting airlines communications and damaging some satellites.

Space weather forecasters at a federal laboratory in Boulder said the first pulse of highly charged particles from the sun collided with Earth's magnetic field at 1 a.m. EST, about 12 hours earlier than predicted.

The storm is rated a G5, the highest intensity on scientists' scale of space weather. The last time a G5 storm hit Earth was in 1989, researchers said, which damaged the power grid and caused electrical blackouts in Canada's Quebec province.

Cosmologists Point to God

Zillions of Universes? Or Did Ours Get Lucky?
By DENNIS OVERBYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/science/space/28COSM.html

CLEVELAND — Cosmology used to be a heartless science, all about dark matter lost in mind-bending abysses and exploding stars. But whenever physicists and astronomers gather, the subject that roils lunch, coffee breaks or renegade cigarette breaks tends to be not dark matter or the fate of the universe. Rather it is about the role and meaning of life in the cosmos.

Cosmologists held an unusual debate on the question during a recent conference, "The Future of Cosmology," at Case Western Reserve University here.

According to a controversial notion known as the anthropic principle, certain otherwise baffling features of the universe can only be understood by including ourselves in the equation. The universe must be suitable for life, otherwise we would not be here to wonder about it.

The features in question are mysterious numbers in the equations of physics and cosmology, denoting, say, the amount of matter in the universe or the number of dimensions, which don't seem predictable by any known theory — yet. They are like the knobs on God's control console, and they seem almost miraculously tuned to allow life.

Marketing Neuroscience

There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex
By CLIVE THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/26BRAINS.html

When he isn't pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70's and 80's that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

Santorini Eruption and the Demise of the Minoan Civilization

Scientists Revisit an Aegean Eruption Far Worse Than Krakatoa
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/science/earth/21VOLC.html

For decades, scholars have debated whether the eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean more than 3,000 years ago brought about the mysterious collapse of Minoan civilization at the peak of its glory. The volcanic isle (whose remnants are known as Santorini) lay just 70 miles from Minoan Crete, so it seemed quite reasonable that its fury could have accounted for the fall of that celebrated people.

This idea suffered a blow in 1987 when Danish scientists studying cores from the Greenland icecap reported evidence that Thera exploded in 1645 B.C., some 150 years before the usual date. That put so much time between the natural disaster and the Minoan decline that the linkage came to be widely doubted, seeming far-fetched at best.

Now, scientists at Columbia University, the University of Hawaii and other institutions are renewing the proposed connection.

Through the Lens, the Severe Beauty of Nuclear Test Blasts

Through the Lens, the Severe Beauty of Nuclear Test Blasts
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/science/21SUN.html

These mushroom clouds, rising bug-eyed over the desert, spreading like an alien sun over the ocean, are the nagging headache behind what passed for reality for a generation.

From July 1945 until November 1962, American scientists and the military, exploring the apocalyptic new powers they had unleashed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the war, exploded 216 bombs in the atmosphere, according to public records. Afterward, until 1992 when they were banned, the explosions went underground.

In a new book, "100 Suns," published this week by Knopf, the photographer Michael Light has retrieved images of these blasts from government and scientific archives and presented them in all their stark and severe beauty. They document a menace that continues even though we can no longer photograph it.

As Mr. Light reminds us, some hundred thousand nuclear weapons have been built and remain on the earth. That is what makes these old photographs "utterly relevant" today.

"Photographs only tell us about the surface of things, about how things look," Mr. Light writes. "When it's all we have, however, it's enough to help understanding. It exists. It happened. It is happening. May no further nuclear detonation photographs be made, ever."

Low-Cost Supercomputer Put Together From 1,100 PC's

Low-Cost Supercomputer Put Together From 1,100 PC's
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/technology/22SUPE.html

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — A home-brew supercomputer, assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.

Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by faculty, technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, is shaking up the esoteric world of high performance computing, where the fastest machines have traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and taken several years to build.

In Pioneering Duke Study, Monkey Think, Robot Do

In Pioneering Duke Study, Monkey Think, Robot Do
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE (NYT) 753 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 14 , Column 1
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/science/13BRAI.html

ABSTRACT - In experiments at Duke Univ, implants in monkeys' brains pick up brain signals and send them to robotic arm, which carries out reaching and grasping movements on computer screen driven only by monkey's thoughts; achievement is significant advance in continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements; experts agree that thought-controlled personal robots are many years off, but Duke Univ team has shown that humans produce brain signals like those of experimental monkeys; study is published in inaugural issue of The Public Library of Science, peer-reviewed journal (M)