august 2008

The roar of the engines is deafening. Directly in front of me, I’ve got the No. 1 car, more than 3,000 pounds of hot steel, locked in my sights. I’m right on my rival driver’s rear bumper, a supermodel-thin distance between us as my 760-horsepower Chevy bears down at 184 mph. As we go into the last turn, No. 1 offers the tiniest of openings to the inside. I go low for the pass, giving my ride everything it’s got left to pull ahead in the final straightaway . . .

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If you’re a sports fan, you can probably list the top pitchers, the top quarterbacks . . . and the top orthopedic surgeons. A franchise’s success—and an athlete’s next contract—hinges on how quickly injured superstars return to the field. Here’s how doctors are turning what would have been career-ending injuries a decade ago into speed bumps on the way to Canton or Cooperstown

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That’s not a carnivorous blob escaped from a B-movie—it’s a musical instrument called the Slime-O-Tron II. When Brooklyn engineer Eric Singer isn’t building elegant, music-playing robots, he designs unconventional audio controllers that send digital signals, known as MIDI data, to music software, turning them into sounds. For his latest such invention (he built the original Slime-O-Tron last year), Singer cooked up some slime from a recipe he found online and infused it with graphite to make it conductive.

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Will drinking carbonated beverages weaken my bones?

Maybe—but only if you're drinking several gallons of seltzer a day. Here's the chemistry that has soda drinkers worried: As carbon dioxide hits the water in your blood, it turns into carbonic acid. Too much acid in the blood can lead to a condition called acidosis, which could intercept small amounts of calcium from food as it makes its way to your bones, or steal it from them directly. Your greater concern, though, says endocrinologist Robert Heaney of Creighton University, should be the vomiting, headaches and impaired organ function that result from extreme acidosis.

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So it looks like it's not all gloom and doom after all. A few recent studies have managed to find the slim silver lining of climate change. Below, a look at the three small positive outcomes of global warming.

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lying dormant for more than 9,000 years, the Chaitén volcano belched forth a 40,000-foot-tall ash plume in early May, touching off lightning and a monthlong eruption. The volcano, situated 700 miles south of Santiago, Chile, forced the evacuation of 8,000 people from the nearby village of Chaitén. It was roughly comparable in size to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption that released hundreds of millions of tons of debris in an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

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Before the discovery in the 1920s of quantum mechanics—laws that explain the way the world works on the very small scale of atoms and electrons—the fact that bleach and peroxide glow when mixed would have seemed like just another chemical reaction that gives off light, like fire or fireflies. But it’s actually a glimpse into the impossible.

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It’s not necessarily laziness that makes people hit the “snooze” button in the morning. Most likely, your body clock is mismatched with the demands of your life.

Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule.

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