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You only use 20 percent of your brain, says the new film Limitless. But what if you could use it all? The premise of this thriller is that a magic pill called NZT lets users take advantage of 100 percent of their gray matter. So struggling writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) can suddenly reach his maximum intellectual potential. He finishes his book. He learns to speak Italian. He becomes a master of martial arts.
So does that mean all of us could be as cool as Bradley Cooper if we only could tap the vast unused parts of our brain?
Ummm, no.
Now it is true that different parts of the brain are used for different functions at different times. But that doesn't mean humans let 80 percent of their brain lie fallow.
"We use all of our brain," says Alex Martin, senior investigator of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institutes of Health. "Saying we use ten percent of our brain is like saying we use ten percent of our muscles."
"There are no hidden or secret regions waiting to be uncovered or released," explains Martin. "How would evolution ever build a brain like that?"&8212;Kerri Pinchuk
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, Pennsylvania; photo by Chris Hamilton
The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan has resulted in damage to one nuclear reactor on Honshu Island, and a second is at risk. The world has seen nuclear disasters before, notably 25 years ago next month, in Chernobyl. Use the links below to find out what happened during the Chernobyl meltdown and see who lives there now. Then find out what the experts say about the potential future of nuclear energy, often touted as a better way to provide clean energy to an energy-hungry world.
Seismic Hazard Zones, 2010
A damaging earthquake and tsunami hit Japan early today, triggering tsunami warnings around the Pacific. Find out about earthquakes and tsunamis from our website and past National Geographic content.
Comparison of a woolly mammoth (left) and Asian elephant (right); by Kazuhiko Sano
Can you picture a live woolly mammoth hanging out with a herd of elephants? It could happen. An international project is underway to clone a woolly mammoth using frozen mammoth DNA and in vitro fertilization, with an African elephant as the surrogate mother. Read about an original baby mammoth, Lyuba, the 40,000-year-old frozen star of a National Geographic article, and a companion article discussing the complexities and ethics of cloning extinct species.
Most of us know it as the gas that floats party balloons, blimps, and giant superheroes in holiday parades. But helium also purges rocket engines for NASA and the military and is crucial for diving equipment, particle accelerators, and MRIs.
The deflating news, says the National Research Council, is that we’re running out. Most of the world’s helium comes from beneath America's Great Plains, where it's trapped in natural gas. The U.S. began stockpiling it in the 1960s, but in 1996 opted to recoup its investment and sell off the reserve by 2015. After that, other producers—including Russia, Algeria, and Qatar—will control what’s left of the global market: perhaps a mere 40 years' worth.
Scientists, including Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Richardson, think increasing the price would help conserve the element. Richardson knows that charging big bucks ($100) for a little balloon is a partypooping idea. But it would also encourage the major helium users, like NASA, to recycle—and help the world hold on to its up, up, and away. —Gretchen Parker
Photo: Price of a helium balloon: 75 cents. What some say it should cost: $100. Photograph by Rebecca Hale, NGM Staff
December 1 is World AIDS Day and our site offers facts about this pandemic, photos showing the impact of AIDS worldwide and a quiz on infectious diseases. HIV, the virus that triggers AIDS, is thought to have originated from primates, and a recent article investigates zoonosis, the transfer of pathogens from animals to humans. South Africa has been hit hard by AIDS and a 2005 National Geographic magazine article details the impact; a story in NG News looks at how text messaging might help fight AIDS in South Africa. Finally, some survival tips from Adventure if a fast-moving pandemic finds you overseas.
Graphic by John Tomanio; statistics on South Africa published in South Africa: Mandela's Children, June 2010 National Geographic magazine.
Tonight marks the start of the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City, a weeklong event full of short and long features with a scientific bent. Though many of the films are fictional and fanciful, they all have a bit of science in their DNA.
Here are half a dozen short selections that can teach you something in just a few minutes.
—Brad Scriber
Lucy is part bonobo.
Classifying the world’s tallest, thickest, biggest, and oldest trees can be an extreme challenge. For the National Geographic "Extreme Trees" poster, featured in several of the magazine’s international editions, we took a look at what counts when measuring. Trees grow, limbs fall, ways of measuring change, and new trees are discovered, so figuring out which trees to highlight wasn’t easy.
These pills represent the
relative amounts of four
pharmaceutical drugs found
in fish pulled from Chicago’s
North Shore Channel and
tested by Baylor scientists.
The traditional foe of water quality is waste from factories and farms, but now environmental regulators are eyeing a new pollution source: our medicine chests. Fish caught downstream from sewage treatment plants in five U.S. cities contained traces of pharmaceuticals and toiletries, Baylor University researchers found in a recent study. You’d have to eat tons of fish for such small concentrations to affect human health, but the products could pose a threat to marine life. To assess the risk, the EPA has expanded monitoring to 150 sites, with results due in 2011.
Tsunami! A towering wall of water smashing all man creates is the general theme of this entertaining 60s-ish art piece from the National Geographic Image Collection. Truthfully, however, as soon as man began building cities, tsunamis began smashing them. Probably the earliest recorded tsunami struck the Biblical city of Ugarit mid second century B.C. Art by Pierre Mion/National Geographic Stock.
National Geographic's recent focus on water inspired me to write something about "water gone mad" and the efforts of several grantees seeking to understand the frequency of such events.
For most indigenous coastal populations a strong earthquake
means one thing—it’s time to run for the hills. As reported by The New York
Times most of the 3,000 residents of the fishing village of Tubul, Chile knew
to make tracks to higher ground as soon as they felt the onset of a powerful
earthquake .
A water strider distorts the surface of a puddle with its legs. Photo by Hideta Nagai
Gazing at a pond, you see a smooth surface. A tiny waterwalking bug sees difficult terrain. Everywhere the water meets a leaf, a twig, or the shore, the surface curves up a fraction of an inch. The result is a meniscus, from the Greek word for “moon,” whose crescent shape is much like the water’s slope.
*per cup
Photos: Mark Thiessen, NG staff
Sources: USDA; Ian Merwin and Christina May Stark, Cornell University
The cure for color blindness may be within sight. Gene therapy has given adult male squirrel monkeys—which, like colorblind people, lack the pigment gene that lets them distinguish red and green—a glimpse of hues they’ve never seen before.
We were awakened at 5:30 a.m. for a helicopter briefing. Brilliant weather this morning in Barilari Bay, on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Blue skies—the first in 14 days. Management was determined to make full use of a rare opportunity.
Our two helicopters, already fueled from days of previous failed attempts to fly, were scrambled for quick launches. Flight one: Two glaciologists lifted from our ship to the top of a 6,500-foot ice cap, the Bruce Plateau, which runs down the spine of the peninsula. Flight two, 15 minutes later: Two more glaciologists lifted to the same spot on the plateau, called Site Beta, a field camp where scientists have spent the past six weeks drilling a 1,500-foot core to the bottom of the ice cap. By then the first helo had returned to our ship, the Nathaniel B. Palmer, for flight three: taking 25 gallons of ethylene glycol (antifreeze, that is) to folks at Site Beta who are working to unjam a drill bit stuck a thousand feet down the bore hole.Many of nature’s creatures could put on their own version of a Milan fashion show. With their eye-catching coats of fuzzy algae, fluttery tiered layers, star patterns, and delicate crimson strands, they would inspire even the most particular designer.
The remarkable coat of algae on this river cooter turtle, one of the animals in One Cubic Foot, isn’t an original. Summer in the Tennessee River is “good growing season,” says photographer David Liittschwager. River turtles commonly have algae on their shells then, explains Don Hubbs of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, because they “spend a lot of time both feeding in the river and then basking on logs and onshore.” Their shells provide an ideal place for algae to attach and grow.
Art: Brian Rea
Last year the periodic table welcomed the 112th element, a product of nuclear fusion. A German-led team had identified 112, the heaviest element yet, in 1996. They want to dub it copernicium in honor of 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, whose sun-centric model of the planetary system mirrors the structure of an atom, with electrons orbiting a nucleus. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry should sign off on the label this year. Traditionally, scientists named elements more or less at will, favoring planets, mythological figures, or properties like color.
In the 1800s nationalism kicked in, and researchers paid homage to native lands. U.S. and Soviet scientists later tangled over names of elements they’d vied to discover. In recent years IUPAC issued naming guidelines to avert scuffles. One rule: Until a name is finalized, a Latin-based placeholder is assigned. For element 112, it’s the ungainly “ununbium”—or one one two. —Hannah Bloch
Students excavate a kiln at Cheung Ek, Cambodia. Photo courtesy of Phon Kaseka
Cheung Ek is infamous for being the site of a Khmer Rouge killing field—some 20,000 Cambodians were murdered here between 1975 and 1979. Yet Cheung Ek also has a much older history, and today a team of archaeologists led by Phon Kaseka of the Royal Academy of Cambodia is investigating what lies beneath this once horrifying landscape.
The team has found that Cheung Ek was settled around 300 B.C. and played an important part in the emergence of Southeast Asia’s first great economy, the mysterious Indian-influenced civilization known as Funan. Centered in the lower Mekong floodplain, Funan flourished from about the first to the sixth century and eventually gave rise to the well-known kingdom of Angkor, which culminated in the 13th century.Our ship sits in Flandres Bay, a deep fjord on the Antarctic Peninsula ringed by mountains whose sheer granite torsos fade, headless, into a ceiling of mist. The air is still. The water is glass. And rain—Who'da thunk it? Rain in Antarctica!—scatters ripples onto the bay.
Today’s muggy 36 degrees Fahrenheit finds me tossing aside my down jacket as I head outside. I walk into the drizzle wearing blue jeans and a light synthetic pullover. From the top deck of the Nathaniel B. Palmer one can see half a dozen humpback whales feeding on swarms of krill. At times, two of them pause and lazily hover side by side—so close they must be touching—just below the water’s surface.
The Palmer sailed for several days to reach this place on the west side of the peninsula, after turning back twice in the face of impassable sea ice on the east side.
The west is a different place. The low-pressure weather systems that sashay in an endless parade around Antarctica dump their full weight of warmth and precipitation on the western edge of the peninsula. Sea ice that forms during winter doesn’t survive summers here; since arriving three days ago, we haven’t seen a speck of it. The heavy snowfall gluts glaciers beyond their capacity. All around us traffic jams of ice blocks tumble out of the mountains, in freeze-frame, down 45-degree chutes to the water's edge. Without any familiar frames of reference such as cars or trees, the mind can scarcely comprehend the size of the scenery. The nearest glacier seems a couple hundred yards away. In fact, it’s more than a mile. Those blocks of ice are as big as houses.
When it comes to hostile environments, few places can match Chile’s Atacama Desert. It’s one of the most arid places on the planet, moistened by just half an inch of rain a year. So no one thought the region’s 20,000-foot-tall Socompa volcano could sustain much life. In fact, its oxygen-starved atmosphere and intense ultraviolet radiation suggest conditions on Mars.
Recently, though, microbial ecologist Steven Schmidt, a National Geographic grantee, and his team discovered the world’s highest altitude bacteria near the volcano’s summit. It’s not clear how the microbes grow in such inhospitable terrain. But for scientists seeking life signs on Mars, they’re cause for hope. Here on Earth, the bacteria may hold biotechnological promise‚ perhaps providing building blocks for sunscreen compounds. After all, Schmidt says, they “have an amazing ability to resist the sun.” —Hannah Bloch
Photo: The desiccated remains of livestock litter the Atacama Desert, inhospitable to most life-forms. Photograph by Preston SowellA 64-year-old Duluth woman fell on the ice last December. Arthritis kept her from getting up. She lay in the snow for hours. Her temperature dipped to 70°F. Her heart stopped. She should have been a goner. But doctors revived her; today she is fine. Medical science is always learning more about how much a body can take. Yet as Duke University physician Claude Piantadosi notes, “At some point it’s impossible to rescue yourself.” —Shelley Sperry
Art: Jason Lee
I'm used to folding laundry and bills. But when I was working on "Fold Everything," a short article about innovative uses of origami, my fingers began itching to try the ancient art of paper folding.
After all, there are people creating not only fantastic paper animal sculptures but using the mathematical principles of origami to build foldable telescope lenses and heart stents and to better understand how proteins fold. Origami for art’s sake has also come a long way. The father of 20th century origami, Akira Yoshizawa (1911-2005), created more than 50,000 unique figures. The most modern folders have something Mr. Yoshizawa didn’t: mathematical principals and computer programs that help them transform flat into functional, or just plain phenomenal.
Second tallest animal
African elephant (#1: Giraffe)
The heaviest land mammal is the
second tallest. Males grow to about
12 feet, females hit 9 feet. But at 15
to 19 feet tall, a grown giraffe could
eat beans off an elephant’s head.
Something was messing with Texas in May 2008. A dip in Daisetta, a tiny town near Houston, became a hole the size of two football fields, sucking trucks, trees, and buildings into its 250-foot-deep maw. Residents were shaken; scientists were left shaking their heads. “This exceeds anything I’ve seen or read about,” says the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mark Kasmarek.
Improving science understanding in America is the goal of many insitututions, scientists, educators, and media organizations. A new study shows there is much room for improvement. Shown here is a NASA outreach effort at Moses Lake in Washington. NASA/Sean Smith/Courtesy nasaimages.org.
The sorry state of science understanding in America is not
news. Many good minds are grappling with the problem of how to improve the
situation. Much of the discussion concerns the relationship of scientists, the
public, and media. A recent publication, Unscientific America: How
Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future,
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, lays out some ideas about the problem
and how to fix it. Yet, judging from
Jerry Coyne’s stinging review of the book in the August 7, 2009 issue of
Nature, we are still a long way
from consensus. Here, guest blogger Christina Elson speaks out on the topic
from a scientist’s perspective. —Chris Sloan
Vanilla is definitely not plain. In fact, it's full of surprises. For instance, says economic botanist Pesach Lubinsky, a wild vanilla orchid flower "actually smells like cinnamon." Then there’s pollination. Only one Central American bee is thought to do it; everywhere else people move the pollen by hand.
Click illustration to enlarge.
Art: Don Foley. Photograph by Dan Fornari, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Just to be clear, this blog post does not endorse the movie Bruno. In fact, this photo depicts a beloved (and now stufffed) German bear named Bruno so no one will think that we are in Bruno's camp—not that there's anything wrong with that.
Love him or loathe him, provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen's latest creation arrives in American theaters this weekend with the subtlety of a (sequined) anvil tossed to the (well-coiffed) head. I found the movie to be utterly tasteless, offensive, vulgar, and completely cringe-inducing. Needless to say, I loved it. And as a National Geographic employee, I would be remiss to send those who wish/dare to see this film into it without a short geographic and cultural glossary. After the jump, we offer terms that highlight some of the film's finer/horrifying moments.
Click illustration to enlarge.
“Listen carefully to the patients, and they’ll tell you the diagnosis,” a medical maxim advises. But what if the patient’s been dead for a millennium?
After Israel invaded Gaza last winter, protests sprang up in Europe. Firebombs and tear gas were part of the mix—though not in Sweden, thanks to a new kind of crowd control.
Corn is now a genetically
modified king, along with soybeans
and cotton. Over the past
ten years, crops engineered
to tolerate herbicides or resist
pests have become a good
chunk of the market. The edible
products go mainly for animal
feed. Environmentalists have
warned that genes could leak
from modified crops and create
superweeds. So far, that has
not happened.
Most of the cropland is in the Americas, where the public is relatively accepting of genetic modification. China may soon OK its first modified rice, which could become the largest GM crop for human consumption—and could cross borders illegally. Even without government approval, farmers eager for the GM edge have obtained seeds. “In 30 years,” says food policy expert Robert Paarlberg, “GM crops will be pervasive.” —Jim Giles
Some birds that look very different— say, bright hummingbirds and drab nightjars—are long-lost kin. Some never considered together, like songbirds and parrots, are really close relatives. Others that act similarly, such as falcons and other birds of prey, may be genetically unrelated.
We are getting closer to the point where we may have to employ emergency engineering solutions to cool the planet, according to panelists at a geoengineering session during last week's Aspen Environment Forum.
The economic climate is right for redefining the automobile industry, Elizabeth Lowery, vice president for environment, energy, and safety policy at General Motors said last week at the Aspen Environment Forum.
Electric cars are the short-term solution to wean the world off of gas and oil and in return reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are driving climate change, according to a panel at the Forum on the future of transportation.
Just six days into the job, Jane Lubchenco, the new head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tells National Geographic "there is a great urgency in addressing [ocean] acidification by reducing CO2 emissions."
"The decisions that individuals make every day add up to affect our global climate," Lubchenco added. "The changes we are seeing now are influenced by our energy choices and uses over the last couple hundred years."
Oceans serve as a carbon sink, absorbing about a third of human-generated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The additional CO2 changes the chemical composition and lowers the pH of the seas. Acidic waters can prevent some marine life from producing calcium carbonate needed for shells and exoskeletons.
Lubchenco, a marine biologist and former Oregon State University professor, was at the Aspen Environment Forum in Colorado yesterday to talk about climate change politics and science.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson outlines her priorities and tells National Geographic that the EPA is back, ready to protect human health and the environment, despite the bumpy road ahead.
Jackson told a crowd of more than two hundred Aspen Environment Forum participants last night that EPA's top strategy for tackling climate change is to work with Congress on legislation, instead of focusing on amendments to the Clean Air Act that would allow regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.
The 2009 Aspen Environment Forum—focused on sustainable energy—kicks off today in Colorado.
Wal-Mart executives, green building experts, climate scientists, Economist and Washington Post reporters, and government officials from Mozambique, Panama, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among many others, will mingle among the mountains as they discuss climate change, energy extraction and use, innovation and technology, efficiency, and conservation.
Lawrence Weinstein doesn’t know how many jelly beans are in this jar, but he has a very good guess. And it’s higher than you might expect. Weinstein, who teaches estimation at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, has a knack for solving problems with little data. His secret is more method than magic: Break questions into pieces, approximate, and use metric units for easier math.
Have you made plans for Pi Day? Do you even know what Pi Day is?
As the name implies, it’s a day to celebrate 3.14. The Exploratorium, a San Francisco museum, hosts an annual homage to the number that never knows when to stop. In fact, the museum claims to have invented this celebration 21 years ago. It has since spread across the country (among mathletes, at least).
We spoke to Larry Shaw, technical curator emeritus, who takes partial credit (or blame) for Pi Day’s conception.
I once met a hunter in British Columbia who could read a trapline as if it were a novel. Where others saw merely trees, scrub, and earth, he could interpret the wanderings of foxes, deer, and lynx. He was a man who did more than look. He could see.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the almost Darwin, was such a man. Without benefit of formal education, Wallace, a young English field biologist and collector of exotic species, described a theory of evolution that paralleled one Darwin had developed but hadn’t yet published. What lifted Wallace from the realm of the ordinary, points out David Quammen in this month’s story, was his extraordinary capacity to observe, a skill honed in his early days as a land surveyor, during long walks across the Welsh moors. It helped that Wallace, on his monumental expedition to the Malay Archipelago, collected specimens in multiples. One might construct a sentence from one golden birdwing butterfly. Given 50 golden birdwings, Wallace could construct a story. Another naturalist might not note ever-so-slight variations in size, color, and pattern. Wallace did. He not only saw, he meticulously recorded his findings, then connected the dots. Of such stuff is great science made.
“Learn to see,” said the eminent 19th-century physician William Osler. Before the advent of sophisticated medical imaging like MRIs, Osler could diagnose a complicated disease simply by noting subtle signs visible to the eye. To be able to see, not merely look, is the foundation of discovery.
Photo: Robert Clark; photographed at Sophia M. Sachs
Butterfly House, Missouri Botanical Garden
My father and I are saying goodbye at a
small airport in southern Africa. He and close friends of his have
joined me in one of my favorite places, Botswana's Okavango Delta.
We've always been close, but for some reason he seems especially
emotional as I put him on the plane. Tears well in his eyes as he says
how much he loves me and hopes we'll see more of each other. I assure
him that I'll be home soon. He smiles and climbs into the plane.
Immediately I call my mother and sister and tell them that something is
not right. During our safari he became easily confused. He drifted off
in conversations. He seemed disengaged. One evening as we talked, Dad—a
world traveler and geography whiz—couldn't remember the name of the
Swiss village he and my mother stayed in at least a dozen times.
My mother takes him to a neurologist for testing. The diagnosis is
dementia, most likely Alzheimer's. Dad remains cheerful and positive.
As often happens in these cases, my mother is the one who struggles
with despair. Shortly thereafter, she is diagnosed with cancer. Six
months later, she is gone.
My sister and I face the toughest decision of our lives: How to give
our father the care he deserves? We find an excellent facility, three
miles from my sister's home, that specializes in caring for those with
dementia. At first he resists, then settles in. When I call, my father
tells me he's buying a new yellow Mustang, and that he and my mother
are driving over to visit this afternoon. It breaks my heart to hear
his gentle voice making plans that will never happen, but then I think
that if he is happy living in an imaginary world with his beloved wife,
perhaps memory loss isn't such a bad thing. I accept his illness and
cherish every moment with him.
Memory, perishable and enduring, is the brain's archive. It is a marvel
of neuronic circuitry, as Joshua Foer explains in this month's cover
story. Its loss can be cruel, but remember this: It is through memory
that we hold on to those we love.
We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.
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