Apple’s site for developers was attacked by an intruder last week, the company said Sunday. In a note to developers, the company said that an “intruder” tried to gain access to developer information, prompting the company to take the service down. Sensitive information on that site was encrypted, Apple said, however it’s keeping the site down while security is being hardened. No estimate was provided for when it will be back up....
Is it true that when we drive, walk or reach for something our brain performs calculations? Is this ability learned or innate? —Helena Larks, San Francisco Computational neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego, answers: OUR BRAIN IS WIRED to perform calculations that let us judge how far away an object is when we walk or jump around or reach for a container of milk....
Climate change is happening now, with impacts that are hitting American citizens in their wallets and affecting their quality of life, according to the new National Climate Assessment report scheduled to be released today. The report, the third National Climate Assessment, catalogs the ways in which climate change is affecting the United States. A leaked summary document accompanying the report focuses on the fact that climate change is not an event scheduled to take place at some later date....
Cost is a crucial to making fuel-cell-powered vehicles a commercially viable technology. Over the past decade, engineers have made significant progress in shrinking the price tag for these systems, but there is still room for improvement before fuel cells are a competitive alternative to gasoline engines or battery-driven motors. A big chunk of a fuel cell’s price tag comes from the materials, namely precious metals like platinum. In a fuel cell’s anode, the metal strips electrons off hydrogen gas, and in the cathode, it reduces oxygen to water....
To some, clouds resemble bunnies. To others, they can look like squished flowers. When scientists used NASA data to peer into clouds, what they saw resembled a hazard sign warning of a fast-deteriorating climate ahead. Analysis of the first seven years of data from a NASA cloud-monitoring mission suggests clouds are doing less to slow the warming of the planet than previously thought, and that temperatures may rise faster than expected as greenhouse gas pollution worsens—perhaps 25 percent faster....
Major electricity providers and some government officials in West Virginia, the state leading the charge against federal climate change regulations, want to use carbon trading to meet their greenhouse gas reduction targets, according to public records obtained by ClimateWire. More than a dozen documents reveal for the first time that despite political pushback against U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan, key interests in the state are searching for ways to comply in case legal challenges fail....
By Richard Van Noorden of Nature magazineThe dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz’s laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity.Into each mollusk, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the glucose and oxygen in the snail’s blood. Munching mainly on carrots, the cyborg snails live for around half a year and generate electricity whenever their implanted electrodes are hooked up to an external circuit....
Joseph Kable, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, offered a simple choice: Either walk out of his lab with 20 bucks for sure or start rolling dice for a shot at far fatter prizes, like a 40 percent chance to win $80. Many economists would say making this kind of decision depends on how much risk a person is willing to endure—in other words, on personality. But Kable is not an economist or psychologist....
Vocal cord paralysis can strike as a result of a stroke, disease or trauma to the head or neck, thereby making breathing, swallowing and speaking difficult. Depending on the severity of the paralysis—it can affect either one or both of the elastic bands of muscle tissue that give us our voices—treatment can involve speech therapy, surface electrical stimulation or even surgery. Now a team of researchers is pursuing a way of alleviating such paralysis through a hybrid approach that involves placing electrodes just under the skin, where they can stimulate very specific nerves and potentially restore movement to a damaged vocal cord....
Despite efforts to brew ethanol as a sustainable automotive fuel substitute for gasoline, the plant-derived alcohol has its drawbacks. A gallon (3.8 liters) of ethanol, for one, contains almost a third less energy than the same volume of gasoline. So when James A. Dumesic and his fellow chemical engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison developed a straightforward way to extract a synthetic fuel from sugar that in many ways surpasses ethanol, the scientific community took notice....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A ballistic missile warning alarm that was wrongly triggered in Hawaii recently rams home the importance of the way interfaces are designed to prevent such major bloopers from happening in the first place. It’s an unfortunate reality that we need to prepare for national emergencies due to war or natural disasters. Civil defence organisations, set up to coordinate and respond to such emergencies, are an important part of any modern state....
Anyone living with chronic pain knows that it amounts to much more than an unpleasant bodily sensation. Fuzzy thinking, faulty memory, anxiety and depression often accompany long-term pain, suggesting that the condition is more of a whole-brain disorder than simply pain signaling gone haywire. New research from Northwestern University reveals a possible cause: an impaired hippocampus, a region critical for learning, memory and emotional processing. Using anatomical brain scans, the researchers found that people suffering from chronic back pain or complex regional pain syndrome had a smaller hippocampus than healthy people....
Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn shared a Nobel Prize for her research on telomeres—structures at the tips of chromosomes that play a key role in cellular aging. But she was frustrated that important health implications of her work weren’t reaching beyond academia. So along with psychologist Elissa Epel, she has published her findings in a new book aimed at a general audience—laying out a scientific case that may give readers motivation to keep their new year’s resolutions to not smoke, eat well, sleep enough, exercise regularly, and cut down on stress....
After the storm-swollen Scuppernong River nearly drowned Columbia, N.C., last year, town leaders were convinced that their waterside hamlet had become dangerously low. So they passed a measure requiring new buildings to be 2 feet higher. It’s an aggressive standard that eclipses many local height requirements in North Carolina, but it sailed through the Board of Aldermen with barely a crosswind. The easy sell came three months after Hurricane Irene wheeled onto the wooded shoreline near Columbia, driving a surge of seawater down the river’s throat and through the small town....
As COVID cases drop in the U.S. and vaccinations increase, many companies are bringing their employees back to office buildings. And lots of those workers are worried: Will shared spaces remain safe as restrictions are lifted and viral variants spread? Can businesses require all employees to be vaccinated? What office and building features best minimize risk? To get answers, Scientific American asked experts in infectious disease, air-flow engineering, and the law to explain the office designs and policies that will most improve coronavirus safety and the ways you can evaluate these factors....
La Niña is here. But unlike the El Niño that preceded it, this climate event is expected to be weak and short-lived, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. won’t see some of the typical impacts of a La Niña; forecasters expect it to tilt the odds in favor of warmer, drier conditions across the already drought-stricken southern portions of the country and wetter, cooler conditions across some of the northern regions....
Athletes find themselves “in the zone.” Professors become “lost in thought.” Meditators get absorbed “in the moment.” Can humans really lose their awareness of self when they are powerfully caught up in an experience? Neurobiologists Ilan I. Goldberg, Michal Harel and Rafael Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, assert there is neural evidence to answer in the affirmative. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain-activation patterns of nine people engaged in tasks involving either intense sensory stimulation or self-reflection....
Almost 100 years ago Margaret Sanger opened a tiny birth-control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, N.Y. Poor Yiddish- and Italian-speaking women, overwhelmed by large families that they could not support, would come for advice about how to avoid pregnancy and the dangers of horrific, sometimes life-threatening, self-administered abortions. The clinic taught women to use the diaphragm. Nine days after it opened, Sanger and two other women who ran the center were jailed for violating a New York State law that prohibited contraception....
Klaatu is back and badder than before, with Gort the robot four times the size of the original and a new message for humans to shape up and save the environment…or else. The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still closely parallels Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction film classic that was a Cold War warning shrouded in a Christ allegory. In the original screenplay by Edmund H. North, an alien ambassador named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) arrives in Washington, D....
We wake up to time, courtesy of an alarm clock, and go through a day run by time–the meeting, the visitors, the conference call, the luncheon are all set to begin at a particular hour. We can coordinate our own activities with those of others because we all implicitly agree to follow a single system for measuring time, one based on the inexorable rise and fall of daylight. In the course of evolution, humans have developed a biological clock set to this alternating rhythm of light and dark....
