Joe Palca

Small meals, big payoff: Keeping hunger and calories in check

Joe Palca — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:07:01 +0000

When presented with a tempting buffet of French food, not overeating can be a challenge. But a new study by researchers in Lyon suggests there are strategies that will help people resist temptation.

People trying to keep off excess weight are frequently told that it's better to eat small amounts of food frequently during the day, rather than the typical breakfast, lunch and dinner.

NASA 'very careful' with Mars data ... but it's all so exciting!

Joe Palca — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 04:52:01 +0000

NASA is finally receiving data on Martian soil samples from Curiosity, its rover currently traversing the red planet. The results from the soil samples hint at something exciting, but rover scientists are making very sure not to raise expectations.

NASA had always planned to present early results from the mission this week at a press conference.

Space probe finds ice in Mercury's craters

Joe Palca — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 19:12:03 +0000

Mercury is not the first planet to come to mind if you were searching for ice in the solar system. After all, the surface temperature across most of the planet is hot enough to melt lead.

But at the poles on Mercury it's a different story. Almost no sun reaches the poles, and as a result, temperatures can drop to less than -100 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, three papers in the journal Science suggest there really is ice at the bottom of craters near the poles on Mercury.

The evidence comes from an instrument on NASA's Messenger spacecraft called Mercury Laser Altimeter.

Curiosity's tasting soil on Mars, may have big news

Joe Palca — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:29:16 +0000

Scientists working on NASA's six-wheeled rover on Mars have a problem. But it's a good problem.

They have some exciting new results from one of the rover's instruments. On the one hand, they'd like to tell everybody what they found, but on the other, they have to wait because they want to make sure their results are not just some fluke or error in their instrument.

It's a bind scientists frequently find themselves in, because by their nature, scientists like to share their results.

Fun with physics: How to make tiny medicine nanoballs

Joe Palca — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:37:20 +0000

For the past decade, scientists have been toying with the notion of encapsulating medicine in microscopic balls.

These so-called nanospheres could travel inside the body to hard-to-reach places, like the brain or the inside of a tumor. One problem researchers face is how to build these nanospheres, because you'd have to make them out of even smaller nanoparticles.

"With micro- or nanoparticles, you cannot just touch them with a finger and put them together and stick them together.

Pinky DNA points to clues about ancient humans

Joe Palca — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:28:19 +0000

Scientists in Germany have been able to get enough DNA from a fossilized pinky to produce a high-quality DNA sequence of the pinky's owner.

"It's a really amazing-quality genome," says David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. "It's as good as modern human genome sequences, from a lot of ways of measuring it."

The pinky belonged to a girl who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Scientists aren't sure about the exact age. She is a member of an extinct group of humans called Denisovans.

Scientists look to Martian rocks for history of life

Joe Palca — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 16:02:52 +0000

NASA has sent rovers to explore Mars before. But three words explain what makes this latest mission to Mars so different: location, location, location.

The rover Curiosity is slated to land late Sunday in Gale Crater, near the base of a 3-mile-high mountain with layers like the Grand Canyon. Scientists think those rocks could harbor secrets about the history of water — and life — on the Red Planet.

"It's got a giant mountain in the middle of the crater.

Crazy smart: When a rocker designs a Mars lander

Joe Palca — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:02:03 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s

Can you think your way to that hole-in-one?

Joe Palca — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:32:29 +0000

Psychologists at Purdue University have come up with an interesting twist on the old notion of the power of positive thinking. Call it the power of positive perception: They've shown that you may be able to improve your golf game by believing the hole you're aiming for is larger than it really is.

Jessica Witt, who studies how perception and performance are related, decided to look at golf — specifically, how the appearance of the hole changes depending on whether you're playing well or poorly.

So she took a large poster board to a golf course with circles of different sizes drawn on it.

NPR Science: Deconstructing dengue - How old is that mosquito?

Joe Palca — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:10:45 +0000

Scientists can spend years working on problems that at first may seem esoteric and rather pointless. For example, there's a scientist in Arizona who's trying to find a way to measure the age of wild mosquitoes.

As weird as that sounds, the work is important for what it will tell scientists about the natural history of mosquitoes. It also could have major implications for human health.

Here's why. There's a nasty disease called dengue that is just beginning to show up in the United States. It's caused by a virus, and it's transmitted from person to person by a mosquito.

NPR food: Safety concerns linger around genetically modified salmon

Joe Palca — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:01:03 +0000

This just in: After 15 years of deliberation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to decide whether it will approve a genetically modified salmon for human consumption.

Now there's a catchy lead. But the truth is, the long-running regulatory saga of AquaBounty's application to sell salmon with a growth hormone gene from one fish plus an antifreeze gene from another — which help it grow twice as fast as typical farmed salmon — does not seem headed toward a conclusion.

You might ask why.