Science News - April 9, 2011

“It is in some way a core mission of laboratories that they provide mechanisms to help ideas mature and eventually reach audiences outside the lab. Recognizing the vulnerability of unrealized ideas when separated from the passion of their creators, the most successful labs tend to move creators, along with their ideas, to new creative environments. This is as essential for the ideas as it is for those who come up with them. Creators are less original when they develop their fledgling ideas before the same small, predictably supportive groups of people. Guided in predictable ways, creators will do predictable things.… If we are not all taking a big risk together, our dependence on one another diminishes, we care less about what others do, and we cease to care all that much about our collective creative existence.”

— HARVARD UNIVERSITY BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER AND WRI TER DAVID EDWARDS, IN HIS 2010 BOOK THE LAB: CREATIVI T Y AND CULTURE

SN Online www.sciencenews.org

ATOM & COSMOS Astronomers observe two closely orbiting stars merge. Read “Two stars caught fusing into one.”

BODY & BRAIN Scientists turn fretful mice fearless by tweaking a brain connection. See “Anxiety switch makes mice shy no more.”

Science Past | FROM THE ISSUE OF APRIL 8, 1961

REMAKE VENUS ‘WEATHER’ — Man can land on the mys-
tery planet Venus after making its air suitable for humans.
This job could be done by dropping primitive plants into
the planet’s atmosphere, then waiting
for results. The primitive algae would
remove the carbon dioxide believed to
poison the air on Venus for humans. The
result would be carbon and oxygen. Dr.
Carl Sagan of the University of California,
Berkeley, believes the best algae to drop on
Venus are the blue-green algae (primarily of the Nosto-
caceae family). He said many experiments on developing
algae in a simulated atmosphere like that on Venus should
be made … [but] should only come after the existing con-
ditions on Venus have been thoroughly investigated.

Science Future

April 16

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City opens an exhibit exploring the world’s largest dinosaurs. Visit www.amnh.org

Immune cell flotsam may trigger lupus’s inflammation. Read “Digging into the roots of lupus.”

April 22

Learn about the planet and its ecology at events around the country. Go to www.earthday.org

April 28

Sample the science of chocolate
at an evening of entertainment
in Durham, N.C. See www.
ncmls.org/visit/events
Nearly 20 percent of high
school students reported
current tobacco use in 2009,
according to the American
Heart Association. That’s down
from 36.4 percent in 1997.
SOURCE: AHA AND ASA 2010
Science Stats | LIT UP

How Bizarre

Water confined to nanometer-sized spaces becomes quantum water, a team of U.S. and British scientists report online January 27 at arXiv.org. The tight quarters make the protons in the water’s hydrogen atoms act claustrophobic — quantum mechanically speaking, anyway — and the protons become harder to pin down. Their behavior, distinct from that found in bulk water, has been hinted at by other squished experiments (SN: 1/26/08, p. 58) but not recognized as a direct result of the confinement. Why the quantum behavior arises the researchers don’t yet know, but they note that it’s also sensitive to how the bonds between the water molecules are set up inside the two types of nanotubes that have been tested. The unusual state also is present at both room and ultracold temperatures. Because water moves in similarly small spaces in cells — and in ways that befuddle researchers — understanding this new quantum state could help scientists study water’s behavior in living organisms.