Новости науки и техники в "Scientific American"

NEW STUDY PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on. The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations.

SEDIMENT CORES YIELD OLDEST DNA YET DISCOVERED

Researchers have retrieved from sediment cores the DNA of plants that lived nearly 400,000 years ago, making it the oldest DNA yet recovered. Analyses of these samples should help scientists paint a more detailed picture of prehistoric landscapes.

BOOKSTORE: THE PATH: A ONE-MILE WALK THROUGH THE UNIVERSE by Chet Raymo

"For thirty-seven years I have walked the same path back and forth each day from my home in the village of North Easton, Massachusetts, to my place of work, Stonehill College. The path takes me along a street of century-old houses, through woods and fields, across a stream, along a water meadow, and through an old orchard and community gardens." Raymo, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College and a science writer at the Boston Globe, walks with an observant eye and a ruminative mind. The stream, which in the 19th century powered the machines of the Ames Shovel Company, leads him into a discussion of gravity. Similarly prompted by what he sees, Raymo discusses engagingly such topics as photosynthesis, geology and evolution. The path so intimately familiar to him runs for barely more than a mile, "but the territory it traverses is as big as the universe."

SPECIAL CONTACT LENSES COULD ALLOW DIABETICS TO "SEE" GLUCOSE LEVELS

For diabetics, monitoring blood sugar levels can be a pain in the finger - iterally. The standard method currently requires several pinpricks a day to obtain small blood samples for testing. But new work could make these jabs unnecessary for the more than 10 million Americans diagnosed with the disease. Scientists have fashioned a material capable of monitoring glucose concentrations that could one day be incorporated into contact lenses.

ANCIENT DEITY DRAWING MAY SHED LIGHT ON RISE OF ANDEAN RELIGION

A painted gourd fragment recovered from Peru has added an interesting piece to the archaeological puzzle of where and how religion evolved in pre-Columbian Andean society. Estimated to be more than 4,000 years old, the find hints that Andean religion may have originated nearly 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

NEW STUDY FINDS AGENT ORANGE USE WAS UNDERESTIMATED

More than three decades after the Vietnam War ended, scientists have uncovered long-forgotten government documents describing just how much Agent Orange (and its carcinogenic component dioxin) was used during the war. From those records they have, for the first time, re-created the flight paths of U.S. military aircraft that distributed the millions of gallons of herbicide across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1961 and 1971. Their findings reveal that far more herbicides were used during the early years of the war than has been reported - including the more dioxin-rich herbicides Agent Purple and Agent Pink.

ASK THE EXPERTS: WOULD YOU FALL ALL THE WAY THROUGH A THEORETICAL HOLE IN THE EARTH?

Mark Shegelski, an associate professor of physics at the University of Northern British Columbia, explains.