The Standard Model of particle physics, that old workhorse of a theory, has dodged another bullet. The model lays out the properties of all known elementary particles and describes three of the four fundamental forces that govern nature (gravity is left out--finding a home for it is one of the most pressing problems in physics). But it also raises some questions--for instance, why should protons and neutrons, which make up atomic nuclei, be so heavy when their constituent parts, quarks and gluons, are so light? (In fact, the Standard Model holds that gluons are massless.) [More]

Verizon Wireless today apologized to President-elect Barack Obama after discovering that employees had snooped into his cell phone records in the latest example of a VIP’s private information being accessed by nosy staffers. [More]

Editor's Note: Marine geophysicist Robin Bell is leading an expedition to Antarctica to explore a mysterious mountain range beneath the ice sheet. Following is the second of her updates on the effort as part of Scientific American.com's In-depth Report on "The Future of the Poles."

CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND --The flight from the land of green to the land of white may be within our grasp today.  Everything seems to be working.  The van showed up at the allocated time.  The check in process went quickly. Everyone was practiced at changing into the bulky winter gear, packing his or her boomerang bag and passing through security. Yesterday people slept and read their books, but now the air is filled with anticipation.  The group sits with arms folded, glancing toward the door waiting for our school buses to arrive.  Soon they do.  Once again, we are driven to the runway and walk toward the plane. Yesterday the aircraft crews greeted us on the runway, today the door to the aircraft is open and we are just sent up the stairs with no formalities. The young sergeant in charge of the cargo bay (we are cargo) today is bouncing in his fur hat.  The unspoken message is “let's just get out of here now.” We all settle in and cross our fingers. I am seated next to the large container again, and my view  is mostly of the thick chain holding the large metal package in place.  This time our luck holds.  We actually take off and head south. [More]

Turning urine into drinkable water apparently isn't so easy. At least not in space. As the space shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station (ISS) crews gear up for tomorrow's scheduled seven-hour spacewalk, they're still wondering what to do with their malfunctioning $250 million water-and-urine recycling system. The processor ran for about two hours today before shutting itself down, reports SpaceFlight Now. This failure follows yesterday's tense moments, when the urine processor assembly set off an alarm on the space station as astronauts attempted to test it, according to Space.com. [More]

Four years ago, Jeanna Giese, now 19, became the first person to survive rabies without a preventive vaccine. Now, the medical procedure developed for treating Giese may have saved the lives of two children in South America. [More]

With more nations sending up more spacecraft conducting more advanced scientific studies, how will the world's space agencies keep everyone and everything in the loop? NASA has devised a system, touted as a sort of deep-space Internet protocol, to form the backbone of interplanetary communication: Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN. The space agency announced this week that its DTN network, which would allow the automated relay of information to and from far-flung spacecraft or landers via intermediate points, had passed its first test, relaying info millions of miles into space. [More]

This summer, Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, sent a memo to staffers warning them to limit their cell phone use and to use hands-free sets in the wake of "growing evidence that we should reduce exposure" to cell phone radiation. Among the possible consequences: an increased risk of brain cancer. [More]

Saturn's small, snow and ice–covered moon, Enceladus, only 310 miles (500 kilometers) across, has made a big impact on astronomers. On a series of close flybys in 2004, the Cassini spacecraft revealed a great deal of unexpected activity bursting forth from this frozen world, which travels with 33 other satellites in Saturn's domain over 740 million miles from Earth. [More]

Two years after federal health officials recommended that everyone get tested for HIV at least once, the exam still isn’t routine. [More]

Asthma, a respiratory disease whose prevalence skyrocketed in the latter part of the 20th century, is  believed to have a genetic component, and environmental triggers--including pollution and pests-- are also blamed.  Now a common infant virus--respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)--is being fingered as a possible cause. [More]

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

The most common natural disaster in the U.S. is flash flooding, which usually hits out of the not clear blue sky. Now researchers are trying to establish an early warning system for flash floods--by counting another flash, lightning. [More]

DECEMBER 1958EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR-- “But is it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group--just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today? Yes, it is possible! Let me give an example which, while seemingly trivial, has a bearing on this question. Anyone who has watched a dog scratch its jaw or a bird preen its head feathers can attest to the fact that they do so in the same way. A bird also scratches with a hind limb (that is, its claw), and in doing so it lowers its wing and reaches its claw forward in front of its shoulder. One might think that it would be simpler for the bird to move its claw directly to its head without moving its wing, which lies folded out of the way on its back. I do not see how to explain this clumsy action unless we admit that it is inborn. --Konrad Z. Lorenz”

If Hollywood makes a movie about the worst financial crisis since the Great De­­pres­­sion, a basement room in a government building in Washington will serve as the setting for a key scene. There investment bankers from the largest institutions pleaded successfully with Securities and Ex­­change Commission (SEC) officials during a short meeting in 2004 to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves needed for a rainy day. This decision, a real event described in the New York Times, freed billions to invest in complex mortgage-backed securities and derivatives that helped to bring about the financial meltdown in September.

In the script, the next scene will be the one in which number-savvy specialists that Wall Street has come to know as quants consult with their superiors about implementing the regulatory change. These lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos were the ones who both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio. Without the formal requirement to maintain debt ceilings and capital reserves, the commission had freed these firms to police themselves using risk tools crafted by cadres of quants.

Microsoft is changing its tune on computer security, two years after its much-heralded foray into the security space turned out to be less than spectacular. Instead of charging customers $50 per year for its Windows Live OneCare subscription security service, Microsoft says that beginning June 30 it will instead offer free software code-named "Morro," designed to seek and destroy viruses, spyware, rootkits and Trojans. [More]

Most lasers rely on continuous waves of energy to generate heat that allows doctors to make cuts during surgery, computers to burn information onto CDs and DVDs, and scanners to read bar codes. But a newer type of laser promises to do all of these things more efficiently using quick, short blasts of energy. This pulsed-laser technology has been around since the 1980s but high cost has kept it from becoming widely used. Petaluma, Calif.–based Raydiance, Inc., however, hopes to overcome that obstacle with the latest version of its ultrashort pulse (USP) laser system unveiled Wednesday. [More]

The more we learn about Mars, it seems, the icier the Red Planet appears to be. The recently departed Phoenix lander dug up water ice and even spotted falling snow from its position in the northern polar plains. And now data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris, much closer to the equator. [More]

Piracy on the high seas is making a comeback this year, particularly off the coast of the African nation Somalia, where raiders are using increasingly more powerful and sophisticated technologies to attack ships and hold their crew and cargo for ransom. Technology makers are hoping to come to the rescue with ultraloud sound systems, electrified guardrails and other gadgets designed to help shippers avoid becoming the next victim. [More]

What exactly makes a fish organic? Apparently, one that feeds on a nonorganic diet. [More]

Attention, shoppers: If the cart you selected has a handle greased with Vaseline, you may be an unwitting participant in an undercover experiment. [More]

[Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]

The Bush Administration's push for "midnight regulations" in the last moments of office continues. [More]

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

The jury is still out on the relationship between cell phone use and brain tumors. But the American Association of Neurological Surgeons has issued a statement to remind people that cell phones present lots of other risks to your brain. Of course, we all know about yapping while driving. A Harvard study finds that 2,600 people die each year in accidents related to cell distraction and 12,000 more are injured. Canadian research shows that you’re four times more likely to be in an accident while on the phone. [More]

Irene Pepperberg is associate research professor at Brandeis University and the author of a new book, Alex and Me. She and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what Alex and other African Grey Parrots can teach us about the evolution of intelligence and the concept of zero. [More]

Rules for Genetically Engineered AnimalsAfter years of anticipation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released in September preliminary guidelines for genetically engineered animals [see “Does the World Need GM Foods?”; SciAm, April 2001]. The agency, which deemed that cloned meat poses no extra risk, wants to regulate engineered animals as it does drugs. Producers would have to substantiate claims and demonstrate safety. Consumer groups complain that the draft sets no provision for labeling and that safety trials can be done behind closed doors, as is the case for drug applications. Public comment on the draft ended in mid-November, and the FDA was to issue its final guidelines shortly thereafter.

A good working definition of quantum mechanics is that things are the exact opposite of what you thought they were. Empty space is full, particles are waves, and cats can be both alive and dead at the same time. Recently a group of physicists studied another quantum head spinner. You might innocently think that when a particle rolls across a tabletop and reaches the edge, it will fall off. Sorry. In fact, a quantum particle under the right conditions stays on the table and rolls back.

This effect is the converse of the well-known (if no less astounding) phenomenon of quantum tunneling. If you kick a soccer ball up a hill too slowly, it will come back down. But if you kick a quantum particle up a hill at the same speed, it can make it up and over. The particle will have “tunneled” across (although no actual tunnel is involved). This process explains how particles can escape atomic nuclei, causing radioactive alpha decay. And it is the basis of many electronic devices.

A large-scale study released this week showed that the herb gingko biloba has no effect in preventing dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. But alternative medicine aficionados may find hope in a new research touting the bennies of another "herb" in preserving memory. [More]

The tiny Furby-like pygmy tarsier, presumed to be extinct, was found during a recent expedition to Indonesia. And the cuddly, huge-eyed nocturnal critter is the very definition of cute. [More]

Could next election season's dirty tricks include disclosures about the candidates' genes? [More]

Quantum computers are a sort of holy grail of information science. Their inherent computational advantage comes from their fundamental computational unit, the quantum bit ("qubit"). Unlike a digital bit in a classical computer, which can take the form of either 0 or 1, a qubit can be both zero and one simultaneously, throwing open the door to vastly more powerful computation. And although a usable computer based on qubits remains a far-flung fantasy, investigators continue to make strides toward their realization. [More]

The international commission charged with saving the once abundant bluefin tuna of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea is meeting this week in Morocco to discuss ways to reverse the decline of the dwindling fish. On the watch of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the bluefin population has plummeted as much as 90 percent due to illegal and chronic over-fishing. [More]

President-elect Barack Obama has tapped former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to be his secretary of health, the Associated Press is reporting. [More]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week fined electronics recycler Jet Ocean Technology of Chino, Calif., just over $10,000 for illegally exporting cathode-ray tubes from old television sets to China. Jet Ocean is only the second electronics recycler to be penalized for shipping and deliberately mislabeling the tubes, which contain the brain-damaging metal lead. It falsely labeled the cargo as "mixed metal scrap" when it shipped it out--and as "scrap metal" when China (after being warned by Greenpeace of the true contents) refused to accept delivery and returned it. [More]

You may recall that President George W. Bush pledged to do something about climate change when campaigning for the presidency back in 2000--but reneged on that promise once in office. But it appears that President-elect Barack Obama will not follow suit, telling a gathering of governors yesterday that "few issues facing America--and the world--are more urgent than combating climate change":

Bye-bye, grease gun. [More]

New results from an instrument that detects energetic particles in the upper altitudes above Antarctica show an excess of cosmic-ray electrons that may be a signal of dark matter, researchers say. The study, published today by Nature, examines data from a balloon-borne detector called ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter). The unexpected wealth of electrons in a specific energy range, about 300 to 800 giga-electron-volts, points to a nearby source, the authors write. [More]

Editor's note: This story will appear in our January issue but is being posted early because of a publication in today's Nature.

Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth lumbered across the tundra, scientists have sequenced a whopping 50 percent of the beast’s nuclear genome,  they report in a new study. Earlier attempts to sequence the DNA of these icons of the Ice Age produced only tiny quantities of code. The new work marks the first time that so much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved. Not only has the feat provided insight into the evolutionary history of mammoths, but it is a step toward realizing the science-fiction dream of being able to resurrect a long-gone animal. [More]

A 30-year-old Colombian woman with damaged airways is healthy months after receiving what European doctors are reporting is a first-ever, stem-cell-based windpipe transplant. They say the technique has allowed the woman to thrive without the use of the drugs that other transplant patients must take to prevent their immune systems from rejecting the new organs.

The unique transplant was performed in June on Claudia Castillo, who was severely short of breath after part of her trachea had collapsed from tuberculosis, hampering the flow of oxygen to her left lung. Doctors in Barcelona took a trachea from a 51-year-old female donor who’d died of a stroke and, over a six-week “washing,” stripped it of its cells. British doctors then grew stem cells from Castillo’s own bone marrow in the lab and had them grow on the donor trachea with them before implanting it, creating a kind of hybrid windpipe with the donor organ as a scaffold, the doctors write in this week’s edition of The Lancet.

Some veterinarians treat animals much more exotic than the family pet. Jeffrey Boehm, executive director of the Marine Mammal Center, talks about the challenges of caring for sick sea mammals. And Alisa "Harley" Newton, a pathologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, discusses how vets figured out that a pathogen attacking humans was in fact West Nile Virus. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites related to this episode include www.tmmc.org; www.wcs.org

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years. Even by the diverse standards of Saturn’s satellites, Enceladus was an outlier. Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity. At just over 500 kilometers across, Enceladus seemed far too small to generate much heat on its own. Yet something unusual had clearly happened to this body to erase vast tracts of its cratering rec­ord so completely.

Voyager’s brief encounter allowed no more than a cursory look, and, in hindsight, its imaging coverage of Enceladus was terribly unfortunate: a few medium-resolution images of the northern hemisphere, some low-resolution coverage in the south, and none of the south pole. We had no idea what we had missed.

Forty years ago, in December of the troubled year of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders piloted the Apollo 8 spacecraft into orbit around the moon, the first humans ever to circle any globe but our own. From that unique vantage, they sent back the iconic photograph (taken by Anders) shown below, known as “Earthrise.” It unforgettably captured the fragile beauty of our living planet as it hovered in stark contrast over the arid sterility of the lunar horizon: a precious droplet of life--perhaps the only one we could ever know--in the velvety darkness.

For a world torn by conflicts over an unpopular war and other social upheavals, that photograph was a timely reminder of how inextricably united the fates of everything and everyone on Earth were. Indeed, the image is widely credited with having energized the environmental movement. [More]

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Truth in advertising is a questionable concept, because it’s often self-serving to lie. Whether you’re talking about a used car salesman or a poisonous snake. No, they’re not the same thing. [More]

What is consciousness? What is this ineffable, subjective stuff--this thing, substance, process, energy, soul, whatever--that you experience as the sounds and sights of life, as pain or as pleasure, as anger or as the nagging feeling at the back of your head that maybe you’re not meant for this job after all. The question of the nature of consciousness is at the heart of the ancient mind-body problem. How does subjective consciousness relate to the objective universe, to matter and energy?

Consciousness is the only way we experience the world. Without it, you would be like a sleepwalker in a deep, dreamless sleep, acting in the world, speaking, having babies, but without feeling anything. You would feel nothing, nada, nichts, rien. Indeed, in the most famous deduction of Western thought, philosopher and mathematician René Descartes concluded that because he was conscious he existed. That was his only unassailable proof that he wasn’t just a chimera. Maybe he didn’t have the body he thought he had, maybe he had fake memories (premonitions of The Matrix), but because he was conscious he must exist.

If you were a nine-foot tall animal covered in dense fur – say, Bigfoot – you would  probably seek cooler climes if temps began inching up. That’s the hypothesis one Queens College biologist posed to me last night – without, I should note, acknowledging that such an animal exists at all. [More]

Alaska is making the best use of cigarette taxes and Big Tobacco settlement money distributed to states in the decade after authorities negotiated a deal with the companies over smoking-related health costs incurred by the states, according to a new report released today by a coalition of advocacy groups. South Carolina ranks the worst. [More]

It's been in stores for only one week, but Mirror's Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts, Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games without Frontiers." [More]

It sounds like something a villain might construct in a James Bond film: a laser, trained on a thin gold target, that churns out antimatter to annihilate ordinary matter. But scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced that they made just such a device, from which they were able to detect the production of more than a million positrons, the antimatter particle counterpart to electrons. (By this detection they infer the presence of many times more positrons, in the realm of 100 billion particles.) [More]

Editor's Note: Marine geophysicist Robin Bell is leading an expedition to Antarctica to explore a mysterious mountain range beneath the ice sheet. Following is the first of her updates on the effort as part of Scientific American.com's In-depth Report on "The Future of the Poles."

CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND (11/16/08)--Things have improved since the days of ship and dog sleds, but it still is not easy to get to the center of Antarctica. It will have been a month from the time I stepped into the car on a rainy Thursday until we reach our field camp in mid-December. A month, that is, if things go well. Today was an example of things not quite going according to plan. [More]

The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems--all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. [More]

Complaints of memory and concentration problems, headaches, pain and fatigue among Gulf War vets have often fallen on deaf ears – until now. A Department of Veterans Affairs advisory panel has concluded that Gulf War syndrome is a real illness affecting at least 174,000 soldiers, a quarter of those who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict. [More]