What Would Durkheim Do?

Using a revolutionary new microscope, scientists can now peer into embryos and watch, in one of the world's smallest 3-D movies, as brains, eyes and other organs form. A team at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, watched zebra fish and fruit flie embryos develop under the scope for as long as 58 hours, charting the location of every cell as it danced around the embryo. This experiment would have been impossible a mere two years ago before a recent spate of innovations in advanced microscopy years into the future.

When it comes to watching the inner workings of cells , fluorescence microscopy is second to none. In this technique, scientists attach fluorescent tags to cellular proteins and, by shining a laser on the cells, cause them to light up.

If attendees at the Minnesota State Fair aren't too busy reveling in the performances of Kiss or "Weird Al" Yankovic, or enjoying a celebrity cow-milking contest, they might just try spitting for science.

This week, researchers from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis are collecting DNA from young fair-goers and their parents as part of an effort to uncover genetic influences on normal child health and development.

Logan Spector, a pediatrics researcher who is leading the project, dubbed the Gopher Kids Study, feels the fair provides an innovative opportunity to attract participants. [More]

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue declared a state of emergency on Wednesday due to the approach of Hurricane Earl.

The emergency measures would waive restrictions on highway transport, thus allowing more speedy delivery of essential fuel and gasoline supplies where needed during the time Earl threatened the state, the governor's office said.

* Calmer seas will allow equipment switch to proceed

* Drilling to resume on relief well after switch

The science blogosphere is shrinking and growing at the same time. Today, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) starts a new network called PLoS Blogs . A nonprofit publisher of open-access journals focused on biological sciences, PLoS will fold its three existing blogs under its new network, managed by Brian Mossop (the author of a recent Mind Matters column on fatherhood here).   [More]

There’s been an unexpected development in our understanding of drug resistance in bacteria. The accepted scenario was a simple case of evolutionary selection. In a bacterial population exposed to a killer drug, a few lucky individuals might have a genetic mutation that kept them alive. They survived to reproduce, while the rest of the population perished. In short order, the entire colony consisted only of the offspring of the drug-resistant founders. [More]

With rhinoceros poaching in Africa approaching an all-time high , one nature preserve owner has had enough. Ed Hern, owner of the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve near Johannesburg, South Africa, is experimenting with injecting cyanide into his rhinos' horns. He believes the poison will not harm the rhinos, because there are no blood vessels in the horn to carry the poison the rest of the rhino's body. But if anyone kills the animals and sells the horns for use in traditional Asian medicine, the end-consumer could pay the ultimate price. [More]

With this final column I will transition Sustainable Developments from Scientific American to the home page of the Earth Institute ( www.earth.columbia.edu ). Although I will continue to contribute occasional essays to the magazine, I will use this last regular column to say thank you and take stock of the deepening crisis of sustainable development.

During the four years of this column, the world’s inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis has become even more palpable. Every major goal that international bodies have established for global environmental policy as of 2010 has been postponed, ignored or defeated. Sadly, this year will quite possibly become the warmest on record, yet another testimony to human-induced environmental catastrophes running out of control.

For decades, apocalyptic environmentalists (and others) have warned of humanity's imminent doom, largely as a result of our unsustainable use of and impact upon the natural systems of the planet. After all, the most recent comprehensive assessment of so-called ecosystem services -- benefits provided for free by the natural world , such as clean water and air--found that 60 percent of them are declining. [More]

By Lucas Laursen

When a new species comes to light, its effect on the arrangement of its family tree might be better measured by statistics than by headlines. [More]

By Meredith Wadman

Candace Kerr was working late on 23 August when a postdoc sent her the link to a CNN story in an e-mail entitled: "Bad news for stem cell researchers." Kerr, a stem-cell scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, says that as her eyes flew down the screen, she thought: "This can't be real. [More]

The middle-aged Internet ( ARPANET first went live more than 40 years ago ) could easily slide into complacency, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) might be staving this off with four multimillion-dollar grants that the agency has recently awarded. The Future Internet Architecture (FIA) research projects are expected to re-think the network from the ground up, taking into account emerging security concerns, the demand for greater bandwidth and the growth of mobile devices. [More]

Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their seventh blog post for Scientific American.

The rooster in the room next to us crowed loudly at sunrise, and we despondently got out of bed with the goal of finding Fundi [see photo at left] , the town of Kalinzi's elusive stove maker. We found him farming and arranged to meet with him after work at the seventh hour of the Swahili clock, 1 p.m. international time (Swahili time starts with the first hour of sunlight and is therefore six hours behind). [More]

Editor's note: This article originally appeared on February 27, 2009. We are re-posting it because of current concern about bedbugs.

NEW YORK--Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite? If only . The creepy critters have become such a nuisance here that the city council is mulling legislation that would establish a bedbug task force, ban the sale of used mattresses, train exterminators, and regulate mattress disposal. Just how infested is Gotham? According to the New York Daily News , there were 22,218 complaints to the city's 311 hotline about infestations of the blood-sucking hemipterans, a 34 percent jump since this time last year. [More]

We humans love excuses to gather for a rousing evening of community--featuring lots of food. Now researchers have evidence for the earliest known group feasting.

At a 12,000-year-old burial site in northern Israel, archaeologists found the remains of at least 71 tortoises and two wild cattle in specially built hollows in a cave. The tortoise shells surrounded the remains of individuals who the scientists say were shamans. And there’s evidence that the animals were cooked and eaten. Based on the bones, the researchers estimate that the meat could have supported about 35 people, maybe more.

The ancient scourge smallpox was relegated to biowaste bin of history more than 30 years ago, the result of the world's first and only successful disease eradication programs. Since then, however, cases of monkeypox--a serious, although less severe smallpoxlike illness--have substantially increased in central Africa, according to a study published August 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The authors stress that better surveillance and a thorough assessment of the public health threat posed by this once-rare viral infection are needed.

"I'm concerned about monkeypox," says Don Burke director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh, who wasn't involved in the study. "It isn't going to emerge as pandemic tomorrow, but could at any time start to increase its transmission. It's worrisome. This is the type of warning siren we need to take very seriously."

Milk is well known as a great dietary source of protein and calcium, not to mention an indispensable companion to cookies. But "nature's perfect food," a label given to milk over time by a variety of boosters, including consumer activists, government nutritionists and the American Dairy Council, has become a great source of controversy, too. The long-running dispute over whether milk, both from cows and goats, should be consumed in raw or pasteurized form--an argument more than a century old--has heated up in the last five years, according to Bill Marler , a Washington State lawyer who takes raw milk and other food poisoning cases. [More]

“ ’Tis the gift to be simple,” the Shakers sing. Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks take vows of poverty. Why? A new study published online in May in Psychological Science offers a hint. Money--even the thought of it--reduces satisfaction from life’s simple pleasures.

Studies have shown that a person’s ability to savor experiences predicts their degree of happiness. Savoring is defined as the emotions of joy, awe, excitement and gratitude derived during an experience. Psychologist Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liège in Belgium and his colleagues divided 374 adults, ranging from custodians to senior administrators, into two randomly assigned groups. The first group was shown a picture of a stack of money; the control group was shown the same picture blurred beyond recognition. Then the participants were given psychological tests to measure their ability to savor pleasant experiences. The results showed that people who had been shown the money scored significantly lower.

How much will it cost to protect an endangered fish in South Carolina? The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) wants local utility Santee Cooper to make several changes to its dams on Marion and Moultrie lakes, which would help endangered shortnose sturgeon ( Acipenser brevirostrum ) to pass through the dams and breed. But Santee Cooper says the changes NMFS wants will cost more than $100 million. [More]