Scientific American - December 2012.pdf - Scientific Anmerican - simonrodnip55

WORLD CHANGING IDEA S

MEDICAL ETHICS

Is Drug Research

Trustworthy?

SPACE

Clues to the

Milky Way’s Evolution

CLIMATE CHANGE

Why Winters

Are Harsher

FOR FETUSES READING

GENE TESTS

YOUR MOBILE LIFE

ULTIMATE

INJECTABLE

December 2012

ScientiicAmerican.com

OXYGEN

SUSTAINABILITY

I NDEX

ELECTRONIC

TAT TOOS

OIL

LIFE

WITH

THAT

XNA

CLEANS

WAT E R

SPY

PILLS

DRONES

TO PREVENT

AT HOME

ALZHEIMER’S?

World

SUGAR

POWERED

Idea Chan in g

Idea Changing

PACEMAKERS

Practical Innovations

Emerge from the Lab

to Improve Our Lives

ON THE COVER

Anyone can have a bright idea, but it takes considerable

brainpower (and hard work) to igure out how to trans-

form an enticing notion into a practical product or process

that can signiicantly improve people’s lives. In this special

section, we reveal 10 smart innovations that could scale

up to commercial levels soon—and perhaps change the

world. Image by Bryan Christie.

December 2012 Volume 307, Number 6

FEATURES

INNOVATION

20 World Changing Ideas

Artiicial life based on “XNA.” Injectable oxygen-rich

foam. Early Alzheimer’s prevention. A ridiculously

cheap way to purify water. Full genome sequencing for

fetuses. Blood-powered pacemakers. Flexible

sensor tattoos. And more.

MEDICAL ETHICS

42 Is Drug Research Trustworthy?

The pharmaceutical industry funnels money

to prominent scientists who are doing research.

Can the results be trusted? By Charles Seife

SPACE

50 Four Starry Nights

An astronomer sifts through starlight to ind clues

about the Milky Way’s evolution. By Anna Frebel

ART CONSERVATION

56 The Case of the Disappearing

Daguerreotypes

How an unlikely team saved priceless images from

the earliest days of photography. By Daniel Grushkin

NEUROSCIENCE

60 Mind Theorist

Neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe peers into the brain

for clues to solving seemingly intractable political

and social conlict. Interview by Gareth Cook

PHYSICS

32 The Unquantum Quantum

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of quantum

mechanics, the physical world may be continuous

after all—more analog than digital.

By David Tong

CLIMATE CHANGE

36 The Winters of Our Discontent

Scientists expect winter in the U.S. and Europe

to be more extreme than it has been in the past.

Here is why.

By Charles H. Greene

December 2012, ScientiicAmerican.com 1

DEPARTMENTS

3 From the Editor

4 Letters

6 Science Agenda

Virgin rain forests are being sacriiced for palm oil

plantations. We must stop it. By the Editors

8 Forum

Geoengineering is needed to save Arctic sea ice.

By Peter Wadhams

9 Advances

Preventing a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” No star left behind.

Best science toys and books. His milk, her milk. A math

museum. Real cavemen wear feathers. Water on Mars.

17 The Science of Health

Rethinking red meat’s bad rap. By Ferris Jabr

19 TechnoFiles

Forget voice control. Gadgets may soon link directly

to our brain. By David Pogue

64 Recommended

The world’s hyperarid regions. Wind wizard. The language

of animals. Best science blogging. By Anna Kuchment

65 Skeptic

Our moral communities dictate how we behave.

By Michael Shermer

70 Anti Gravity

Man-bites-dog and the pit of hell. By Steve Mirsky

71 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago

72 Graphic Science

A plenitude of exoplanets. By John Matson

ON THE WEB

40 Years ater the Final Apollo Moon Mission

In December 1972 humans left the moon for the last time.

When will the lunar surface once again see fresh boot

prints? And whose colors will ly alongside the U.S. lags

already planted there?

Go to www.ScientiicAmerican.com/dec2012/apollo

Scientiic American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 307, Number 6, December 2012, published monthly by Scientiic American, a division of Nature America, Inc., 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10013-1917. Periodicals postage

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2 Scientiic American, December 2012

From the Editor

Mariette DiChristina is editor

in chief of Scientiic American.

Follow her on Twitter @mdichristina

The Human

Factor

F or hundreds of years people

human foibles. For instance, without the

support of pharmaceutical companies, re-

searchers could never get their ideas to

market. Genentech, laudably, is funding a

large portion of the $100-million trials for

Alzheimer’s prevention drugs; if the com-

pany is successful, the work will beneit

many millions of people—including pa-

tients and their families. Yet in other ways,

money from Big Pharma could be exerting

an inluence on supposedly independent research.

Starting on page 42, journalist Charles Seife explores that

important question in his feature article, “Is Drug Research Trust-

worthy?” He traces the intricate low of money from drugmak-

ers to medical researchers whose work could beneit those com-

panies, creating conlicts of interest that could, in the worst

cases, endanger patients’ well-being. The inancial support ex-

presses itself in such ways as payments for conference speaking

and travel, ghostwritten papers for journals, and consulting

fees. To ind out what is going on, Seife iled Freedom of Infor-

mation Act requests over many months and even a lawsuit. The

picture he paints of entanglements between companies and re-

searchers is a troubling one—made more so by our institutions’

current inability to grapple properly with the matter. We hope

his story will inspire the conversations necessary to solve the

problem of conlicted science.

have used the scientiic process

to build a better future, one step

at a time. This year is no excep-

tion, as you will see in our cov-

er story and annual appreciation of inno-

vation, “World Changing Ideas,” beginning

on page 20. The section celebrates ideas as they emerge from the

lab to make a practical diference in our lives.

As is usual, strong themes emerge across the developments.

As technologies have woven our lives together ever more intri-

cately, our opportunities to take advantage of scale grow com-

mensurately. Consider the “big data” sifting of anonymized in-

formation from our innumerable mobile phones to improve

services ( page 28 ). As the distinctions between technology and

biology continue to blur, we note the arrival of bandagelike wear-

able sensors ( page 30 ), blood-sugar-powered pacemakers ( page

29 ) and synthetic life built with XNA instead of DNA ( page 22 ).

In health care, tomorrow’s medicines look to prevent ailments

before they can occur, such as pills to block the onset of Alzheim-

er’s ( page 24 ) and genome sequencing of fetuses ( page 27 ).

A natural consequence of the advances propelled forward by

our ingenuity, however, is that they are also subject to our very

BOARD OF ADVISERS

Leslie C. Aiello

President, Wenner-Gren Foundation

for Anthropological Research

Roger Bingham

Co-Founder and Director,

The Science Network

G. Steven Burrill

CEO, Burrill & Company

Arthur Caplan

Director, Division of Medical Ethics,

Department of Population Health,

NYU Langone Medical Center

George M. Church

Director, Center for Computational

Genetics, Harvard Medical School

Rita Colwell

Distinguished Professor, University of

Maryland College Park and Johns Hopkins

Bloomberg School of Public Health

Drew Endy

Professor of Bioengineering,

Stanford University

Ed Felten

Director, Center for Information

Technology Policy, Princeton University

Kaigham J. Gabriel

Deputy Director, Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Director, Sage Center for the Study of Mind,

University of California, Santa Barbara

David J. Gross

Professor of Physics and Permanent

Member, Kavli Institute for Theoretical

Physics,University of California, Santa

Barbara (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004)

Lene Vestergaard Hau

Mallinckrodt Professor of

Physics and of Applied Physics,

Harvard University

Danny Hillis

Co-chairman, Applied Minds, LLC

Daniel M. Kammen

Class of 1935 Distinguished

Professor of Energy,

Energy and Resources Group, and

Director, Renewable and Appropriate

Energy Laboratory, University of

California, Berkeley

Vinod Khosla

Partner, Khosla Ventures

Christof Koch

CSO, Allen Institute for Brain Science,

and Lois and Victor Troendle Professor

of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology,

California Institute of Technology

Lawrence M. Krauss

Director, Origins Initiative,

Arizona State University

Morten L. Kringelbach

Senior Research Fellow,

Queen’s College,

University of Oxford

Steven Kyle

Professor of Applied Economics and

Management, Cornell University

Robert S. Langer

David H. Koch Institute Professor,

Department of Chemical

Engineering, M.I.T.

Lawrence Lessig

Professor, Harvard Law School

Ernest J. Moniz

Cecil and Ida Green

Distinguished Professor,

M.I.T.

John P. Moore

Professor of Microbiology and

Immunology, Weill Medical

College of Cornell University

M. Granger Morgan

Professor and Head of

Engineering and Public Policy,

Carnegie Mellon University

Miguel Nicolelis

Co-director, Center for

Neuroengineering, Duke University

Martin A. Nowak

Director, Program for Evolutionary

Dynamics, and Professor of Biology and

of Mathematics, Harvard University

Robert Palazzo

Professor of Biology,

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Carolyn Porco

Leader, Cassini Imaging Science

Team, and Director, CICLOPS,

Space Science Institute

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Director, Center for Brain and Cognition,

University of California, San Diego

Lisa Randall

Professor of Physics,

Harvard University

Martin Rees

Astronomer Royal and Professor

of Cosmology and Astrophysics,

Institute of Astronomy, University

of Cambridge

John Reganold

Regents Professor of Soil Science

and Agroecology, Washington

State University

Jefrey D. Sachs

Director, The Earth Institute,

Columbia University

Eugenie Scott

Executive Director,

National Center for

Science Education

Terry Sejnowski

Professor and Laboratory

Head of Computational

Neurobiology Laboratory,

Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Michael Shermer

Publisher, Skeptic magazine

Michael Snyder

Professor of Genetics, Stanford

University School of Medicine

Michael E. Webber

Co-director, Clean Energy Incubator, and

Associate Professor, Department of

Mechanical Engineering, University of

Texas at Austin

Steven Weinberg

Director, Theory Research Group,

Department of Physics,

University of Texas at Austin

(Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979)

George M. Whitesides

Professor of Chemistry and

Chemical Biology, Harvard University

Nathan Wolfe

Director, Global Viral Forecasting Initiative

R. James Woolsey

Chairman, Foundation for the Defense

of Democracies, and Venture Partner,

Lux Capital Management

Anton Zeilinger

Professor of Quantum Optics,

Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum

Information, University of Vienna

Jonathan Zittrain

Professor of Law and of Computer

Science, Harvard University

December 2012, ScientiicAmerican.com 3

Illustration by Bryan Christie (brain) , Illustration by Nick Higgins

Scientific American - December 2012.pdf

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