In a recent edition of NASA’s “Ask a Climate Scientist” video series, scientist Joshua Willis stands in front of a black screen, makes a few goofy faces and gives a brief answer to what has become a common question about climate science. “A lot of people ask me: ‘Has there been a pause in global warming because, like, temperatures aren’t increasing as fast as they were a decade ago?’” Willis says....
About 40 years ago Richard Peto surmised that if every living cell has a theoretically equal probability of getting cancer, then large animals should have higher rates of cancer than small animals because they have many more cells and typically live longer. When he went about testing his idea, however, the University of Oxford epidemiologist, now 71 years old, found that this logic does not play out in nature. It turns out that all mammals have relatively similar rates of cancer....
Ramona Turner, a veterinarian specializing in feline care for 25 years, owns two Fresno, California–based animal hospitals. She answers this riddle about our furry friends’ strange behavior. Cats, from our domestic companions to lions and tigers, are exquisitely susceptible to a volatile oil found in the stems and leaves of the catnip plant. When cats smell catnip they exhibit several behaviors common to queens in season (females in heat): They may rub their heads and body on the herb or jump, roll around, vocalize and salivate....
It took Kathlean Wolf a few extra minutes to get ready. She had to put the braces on her feet that allow her to walk. But once ready to go, she was winding through tall grasses of the marshy stormwater swale across from her apartment on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin. As she walked, Wolf, a certified master naturalist, pointed out edible plants and called out a hello to a butterfly....
U.S. Western Joshua trees will get a year of temporary endangered species status in California while the state considers permanently listing the distinctive succulents as the first-ever plant species protected because of climate change–related threat. PANAMA A tropical forest ground survey revealed that one lightning strike often damages more than 20 trees, a quarter of which can die within a year. Researchers combined this finding with satellite data to estimate that lightning kills 200 million tropical trees worldwide every year—a significant cause of their demise....
At first glance, the machine seems to be building a miniature cityscape. A ring of nozzles fires four jets of powdered metal into a downward-pointed laser beam, which fuses the colliding grains in a bright orange glow. The mixed grains then solidify on the growing tip of a small pillar of metal alloy. Once the pillar is 1–2 centimetres high, the platform that holds it shifts to the side, and the machine starts to build another one right next door....
With an awning of length A at right angles to the canvas and the canvas vertical, no rain drops will hit the canvas if vc / vr = A/H. This follows directly by looking at the figure. The rain velocity vr is the vertical component of the velocity of the rain, while the wind moves with velocity vw. By the Pythagorean theorem therefore, the rain moves at a speed of sqrt(vr2 + vw2) with respect to the ground....
As athletes from around the globe converge on Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the 2018 Winter Olympics, they must steel themselves for winds that will whip in from the Manchurian Plain and Siberia and fan icy temperatures that are likely to drop to around 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Meteorologists say this year’s games will likely be the coldest Olympics since Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994—a year when the opening ceremony was so frigid organizers had to cancel plans to release doves because they worried the birds would suffer....
Paul Nurse knows viscerally what it takes to build a productive scientist. Raised by his grandparents—a handyman and a cook—in class-conscious England, Nurse went on to do pioneering research in DNA and cell division, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2001. In 2003 he was named president of the Rockefeller University in New York City, and in 2010 he became president of the British Royal Society, which makes him something of an expert in the cultural differences between European and North American scientists....
Soccer star Lionel Messi wears cleats inscribed with his son’s name and part of Argentina’s flag. The cleats of Austrian star David Alaba have a Nigerian flag in honor of his father and say, “Jesus loves u.” But do these personal touches help them play better? Research suggests that may be the case. In several studies in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, students worked and played better when using items they had decorated to portray aspects of themselves....
Diabetes has reached virtually epidemic levels in the modern world. In 2005 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 7 percent of the American population (20.9 million people) had diabetes–and 6.2 million of them were unaware of it. More than 1.5 million people over the age of 20 will be diagnosed with it in the U.S. this year. About 21 percent of those older than 60 have the disease....
US poison control centres have experienced a 229% increase in the number of calls related to synthetic cannabinoid use in 2015 compared with last year, prompting concern from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency has announced that it has registered more than 3572 such calls between January and May 2015, versus 1085 calls that came in during the same period in 2014. In addition, there were 15 reported deaths related to use of synthetic cannabinoids in 2015, compared with five in 2014....
Excerpted and adapted from Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records. Copyright © by Adam Tanner. With permission of the publisher, Beacon Press. All Rights Reserved. Companies that have nothing to do with our medical treatment are allowed to buy and sell our health care data, provided they remove certain fields of information, including birth date, name and Social Security number. These guidelines, outlined in the U....
MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. – John Droz Jr. is not the stereotypical back-room political player: A tall and trim 67, bespectacled with a shorn scalp, he’s a man who prefers sweater vests and jeans rather than crisp suits and bears more resemblance to a retired high-school science teacher than a political heavyweight. Yet this semi-retired real-estate investor and self-described environmental advocate spends much of his time quietly and effectively plying the halls of power in Raleigh, N....
Blasting and boring through a warren of tunnels in the abandoned Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, engineers are preparing for the installation of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), the U.S.’s latest, greatest major particle physics project. But things are not proceeding as planned: construction-related setbacks have delayed DUNE’s full-scale debut from sometime later this decade to, at best, the mid-2030s. And, as DUNE’s schedule has slipped, so too has its competitiveness with other neutrino experiments, leading the U....
In recent years, Jack Grieve of the department of English and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England has embraced Twitter as a bountiful lode for looking at language-use patterns. One of his projects examined the regional popularity of profanity in the U.S. (“crap” is big in the center of the country; “f—” turns up more on the coasts). Another study he conducted looked for new word usages spreading on American social media (“baeless” for single, for example, and “senpai” for elder or expert)....
The United Nations last week took a major step toward reducing climate pollution from aviation—even as the airline industry reels from the economic fallout of the novel coronavirus pandemic. At issue are rules released Friday by the International Civil Aviation Organization, an independent U.N. body tasked with regulating the sector. The rules govern the implementation of the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, known as CORSIA. While it sounds complicated, CORSIA is simply a mechanism that allows airlines to purchase carbon offsets....
The JASONs, a group of elite scientists that advises the US government on national security, has weighed in on issues ranging from cyber security to renewing America’s nuclear arsenal. But at a meeting in June, the secretive group took stock of a new threat: gene drives, a genetic-engineering technology that can swiftly spread modifications through entire populations and could help vanquish malaria-spreading mosquitoes. That meeting forms part of a broader US national security effort this year to grapple with the possible risks and benefits of a technology that could drive species extinct and alter whole ecosystems....
The US government is launching a new effort to study the vast, and mostly invisible, array of microbes that thrive in the human body and across ecosystems. The US$121-million National Microbiome Initiative (NMI) will attempt to map and investigate these collections of microorganisms over the next two years, with help from multiple federal agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said today. Private investors will contribute another $400 million to the effort over several years....
The Internet “doomsday virus” that people were warned about over the weekend didn’t quite materialize Monday — but that doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real. Several large American Internet service providers, among them AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable, picked up where the FBI left off early this morning (July 9). The ISPs were redirecting Web traffic to make sure any customers affected by the DNSChanger malware would still be able to get online....
