Lucas Jasso, 66, has seen a lot of changes in Karnes County, Texas, since oil and gas companies first began flocking to his part of the state several years ago. “I call it Flare City USA — every time I go into the countryside, I see flares,” Jasso said. “It used to be paradise.” Once mainly fields and ranchland, Karnes County is now a top crude oil producer in Texas, due to its location on top of the Eagle Ford Shale play....
In the months before his death, Robin Williams was besieged by paranoia and so confused he couldn’t remember his lines while filming a movie, as his brain was ambushed by what doctors later identified as an unusually severe case of Lewy body dementia. “Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it. Can you imagine the pain he felt as he experienced himself disintegrating?” the actor’s widow, Susan Schneider Williams, wrote in a wrenching editorial published this week in the journal Neurology....
The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt. Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft. They can loft enormous payloads without requiring the acres of tarmac or miles of roadway necessary for conventional air and truck transport....
They may be small, but krill—tiny, shrimp-like creatures—play a big role in the Antarctic food chain. As climate change warms the Southern Ocean and alters sea ice patterns, though, the area of Antarctic water suitable for krill to hatch and grow could drop precipitously, a new study finds. Most Antarctic krill are found in an area from the Weddell Sea to the waters around the Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of land that juts up toward South America....
The people who seek out endocrinologist Domenica Rubino have tried again and again to lose weight. Diets of all kinds. Exercise regimens. Health-tracking apps. Some have turned to gastric bypass surgery, lost scores of pounds but then regained them. Many patients have medical problems related to severe obesity, including diabetes, fatty liver disease, hypertension, polycystic ovary syndrome, sleep apnea and painful arthritic joints. Rubino, director of the Washington Center for Weight Management and Research in Arlington, Va....
Alice is six years old. She struggles to make friends at school and often sits alone in the playground. She loses her parents in the supermarket and approaches strangers at pickup. Once she became separated from her family on a trip to the zoo, and she now has an intense fear of crowded places. Alice has a condition called face blindness, also known as prosopagnosia. This difficulty in recognising facial identity affects 2 percent of the population....
Back in 1981, Alan H. Guth, then a struggling physics postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a series of seminars in which he introduced “inflation” into the lexicon of cosmology. The term refers to a brief burst of hyperaccelerated expansion that, he argued, may have occurred during the first instants after the big bang. One of these seminars took place at Harvard University, where I myself was a postdoc....
By the time he was seven years old, Arkin Rai, a child living in Singapore, drew dinosaurs with exquisite realism. At age three his dinosaurs were simple and schematic. A year and some months later, however, he created a complex drawing in which dinosaurs were layered one on top of the other, an image that bears an uncanny resemblance to a drawing of horses and a bull by the adult Pablo Picasso....
July 1965 House Fly: Disease Vector? “By now flies have been found to harbor well over 100 different species of pathogenic organisms. Yet the evidence is still only circumstantial. The reputation of the domestic flies is in the position of a man charged with homicide because he is found standing beside the victim with a loaded gun in his hand. In most cases it cannot be proved conclusively that the flies in question fired the gun....
Just after 3:30 A.M. EST this morning—and a half-hour past noon on Mars—NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter became the first aircraft to fly on another world. Hovering at an altitude of three meters for some 30 seconds, the solar-powered aircraft’s first flight was more of a modest hop than a giant leap. But it opened the way for up to four more aerial forays in coming weeks—and a new era of airborne interplanetary exploration....
Football has become notorious for the degeneration it causes in players’ brains. Now a preliminary study of soccer players has found that frequently hitting the ball with the head may adversely affect brain structure and cognition. The study imaged the brains of 37 amateur soccer players, 21 to 44 years old, and found that players who reported “heading the ball” more frequently had microstructural changes in the white matter of their brains similar to those observed in patients with traumatic brain injury....
Just as the phenomenon of political blogging broke through to the mainstream with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s groundbreaking bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, this election cycle marks the first presidential campaign of the YouTube era. And just as the Internet “invented Howard Dean” by tapping into youthful enthusiasm and creative fund-raising techniques, the current campaigns have taken those building blocks and constructed the next level of functionality. A recent Pew study contrasted the content of the two candidates’ online presences, noting that “as of September 9, Obama had 510,799 MySpace ‘friends’ (compared to McCain’s 87,652) and more than 1....
Make it small! is a technological edict that has changed the world. The development of microelectronics–first the transistor and then the aggregation of transistors into microprocessors, memory chips and controllers–has brought forth a cornucopia of machines that manipulate information by streaming electrons through silicon. Microelectronics rests on techniques that routinely fabricate structures smaller than 100 nanometers across (that is, 100 billionths of a meter). This size is tiny by the standards of everyday experience–about one-thousandth the width of a human hair–but it is large on the scale of atoms and molecules....
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. — Milan Kundera, Immortality,1988 Faces are the glue that holds us together and that gives us our identity. All of us but the visually impaired and blind are experts at recognizing people’s identity, gender, age and ethnicity from looking at their faces. First impressions of attractiveness or competence take but a brief glimpse of somebody’s face....
Scientific American presents The Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In everyday language, the word “limit” is used to describe the boundaries beyond which some quantity or some idea or some thing can’t exceed. For example, the speed limit tells you the maximum rate you’re legally allowed to drive. And your credit card limit tells you the maximum balance you can carry....
Ever take a whiff of a smoker’s hair and feel faint from the pungent scent of cigarette smoke? Or perhaps you have stepped into an elevator and wondered why it smells like someone has lit up when there is not a smoker in sight. Welcome to the world of third-hand smoke. “Third-hand smoke is tobacco smoke contamination that remains after the cigarette has been extinguished,” says Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at the Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston and author of a study on the new phenomenon published in the journal Pediatrics....
For some things, such as deciding whether to take a new job or nab your opponent’s rook in chess, you’re better off thinking long and hard. For others, such as judging your interviewer’s or opponent’s emotional reactions, first instincts are best—or so traditional wisdom suggests. But new research finds that careful reflection actually makes us better at assessing others’ feelings. The findings could improve how we deal with bosses, spouses, friends and, especially, strangers....
The U.S. outspends all other countries, as well as the entire European Union combined, in total dollar amount put toward research and development. The U.S. also produces the most scientific publications of any country and is home to many of the top-ranked universities for the study of science and engineering. This reputation has been and continues to be due in large part to the contributions of immigrant and refugee scientists. For example, in 2016, there were six scientists from the U....
Women have made their mark throughout the annals of scientific history, but their contributions are so hidden that when asked to name a famous scientist, children typically cite only men – Newton, Einstein, Edison. When asked to name famous women scientists, most cannot name anyone besides Madame Curie. Recently, I found myself at the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England having a beer, when I had a chance run in with Dr....
If environmental reports published this year were connected to an alarm system, the sound inside the United Nation’s Manhattan headquarters would be deafening—we are facing a five-alarm fire. Myriad reports warned us we must take immediate action to ensure a sustainable supply of clean food, water and air to a human population projected to rapidly grow to 10 billion, all while stemming a globally catastrophic loss of biodiversity and averting the worst economic impacts of a changing climate....
