The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. I dissected a Tyrannosaurus rex in front of television cameras. That may be the most surreal sentence I’ve ever written. So let me explain. I’m part of a team that built a life-sized model of Tyrannosaurus rex and then cut it up. The spectacle is a bloody, gory two-hour television special called T.rex Autopsy....
Last month Robert Duehmig and Bill Griesar—a married couple in their 50s who live in Astoria, Ore., and Portland, Ore.—were each relieved to get their second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19. After the jab, Griesar felt nothing more than a sore arm. But for Duehmig, the effects were more pronounced. “I woke up during that first night … with the chills and some body aches and just not feeling well by the morning,” Duehmig says....
Most auto industry employees expect the Obama administration will make fuel economy rules more strict following an ongoing review, according to a new survey. Fifty-two percent of the engineers, managers and other workers in the automotive manufacturing and supply chain industries who responded to a WardsAuto survey said they expected the government to tighten corporate average fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards. Only 13 percent expected the rules to be loosened....
Childhood lead exposure is costing developing countries $992 billion annually due to reductions in IQs and earning potential, according to a new study published today. The report by New York University researchers is the first to calculate the economic cost of children exposed to lead in Africa, Asia, Latin America and other developing regions. The researchers found that, despite major declines in exposure in the United States and Europe, lead is still harming brains and bottom lines in poorer regions around the world....
By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade. Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work....
Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a study now shows that a kind of binary system was already in use 300 years earlier among the people of the tiny Pacific island of Mangareva in French Polynesia. The discovery, made by analysing historical records of the now almost wholly assimilated Mangarevan culture and language and reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that some of the advantages of the binary system adduced by Leibniz might create a cognitive motivation for this system to arise spontaneously, even in a society without advanced science and technology....
From the earliest days of the CRISPR-Cas9 era, scientists have known that the first step in how it edits genomes—snipping DNA—creates an unholy mess: Cellular repairmen frantically try to fix the cuts by throwing random chunks of DNA into the breach and deleting other random bits. Research published on Monday suggests that’s only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg: CRISPR-Cas9 can cause significantly greater genetic havoc than experts thought, the study concludes, perhaps enough to threaten the health of patients who would one day receive CRISPR-based therapy....
Solar-powered cars have been little more than an experimental novelty to date. Expensive batteries, relatively inefficient energy conversion and the scarcity of sunny days in many regions have made photovoltaic passenger vehicles impractical. Ford is looking to change that. A version of its plug-in C-MAX Energi hybrid, unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Association’s recent International CES in Las Vegas, would use roof-mounted solar panels to charge a lithium-ion battery. The battery would power the car for trips of up to 34 kilometers, after which the hybrid’s gasoline engine would kick in....
Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf. The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world’s largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33....
Artificial muscles already help human eyes blink, robotic fish swim and mechanical arms in space replace solar panels. Now a new, potentially wearable type of artificial muscle is expected to do all of those things while being lighter, smaller, softer and cheaper. These improved artificial muscles use the same type of rubbery, electrically activated polymer membrane as their predecessors but rely on a new design that integrates circuit elements into the membrane itself....
It’s still half dark on an April morning when agents with shotguns clamber into a few scuffed dinghies and push off from Oregon’s East Sand Island into the Columbia River Estuary. The agents load their guns and look up, waiting for their targets to fly overhead. The sun crests the horizon and the 25-hectare island comes alive as its 30,000 double-crested cormorants begin taking to the water to swim and dive for fish....
By Brendan O’Brien and David Bailey (Reuters) - Crowds of people are flocking to northwestern Wisconsin to trek on a frozen-over Lake Superior to reach dramatic ice caves accessible on foot for the first time in several years, courtesy of the long frigid winter. The ice caves on Superior’s shoreline are carved out of sandstone by waves from the lake and derive their name from the icy freeze in winter that makes them glisten with hoar frost, icicles and ice formations....
Anyone who is diabetic—or knows a diabetic—recognizes the importance of insulin. The hormone helps cells store sugar and fat for energy; when the body cannot produce enough of it (type 1 diabetes) or responds inadequately to it (type 2 diabetes), a range of circulatory and heart problems develop. But that is not all: recent research suggests that insulin is crucial for the brain, too—insulin abnormalities have been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s....
Residents of Jackson, Miss., recently experienced a week without reliable water service. And an advisory to boil any water that does flow from faucets in that capital city of 150,000 people has been in place since late July. This is just some of the alarming drinking-water-related news that has surfaced as summer winds down in the U.S. Other reports have told of arsenic in tap water in a New York City public housing complex, potentially sewage- or runoff-related Escherichia coli bacteria in West Baltimore’s water supply and a lawsuit alleging neurological issues linked to thousands of liters of jet fuel that leaked into drinking water in Hawaii last year....
Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century by Paddy Woodworth University of Chicago Press, 2013 For some environmentalists, saving the planet is not just about preserving natural resources; it is also about fixing the disruptions caused by centuries of human activity. The practice, called ecological restoration, is the subject of journalist Woodworth’s Our Once and Future Planet. Woodworth gives a stirring portrait of the hardworking environmentalists who are trying to restore landscapes to their former, untouched glory, but he also captures the dark side of the enterprise: it sometimes requires the brutal destruction of very large numbers of invasive species to make room for long-departed native ones....
Challengers in climate change lawsuits are failing to use the latest science on global warming to bolster their legal claims, a new study has found. The research published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change shows how scientific studies could support climate litigation against companies and governments in courtrooms around the world. “We found that the scientific evidence provided in these cases lagged substantially behind the state of the art in climate science—in particular, the evidence provided on the link between greenhouse gas emissions and specific injuries that plaintiffs allege they suffered as a result of climate change,” said Rupert Stuart-Smith, lead author of the study and a Ph....
The finding, published on 5 June in Current Biology, adds to scientists’ understanding of how corals and the fish that feed on them affect each other. Wrasses that don’t feed on corals have thin lips and protruding teeth that resemble a beak. But tubelip wrasses have elongated, fleshy lips that they use to suck up a reef’s protective mucous coating. A scanning electron microscope reveals that the lips are furrowed with tiny channels and divots, soft and ribbed like gills on the underside of a mushroom....
Vaccines may not be the moneymakers that drug firms like, but they have transformed U.S. health. A study looking at the prevaccine and postvaccine eras finds that of 13 childhood vaccinations, nine showed at least a 90 percent decline in death and in hospitalization rates. Today’s nonimmunized child typically comes from a wellto-do family granted religious or philosophical exemptions, rather than from a poor family lacking insurance, as was the case in the past....
Physicists have announced their fourth-ever detection of gravitational waves, and the first such discovery made together by observatories in Europe and the United States. The Virgo observatory near Pisa, Italy, has been hunting for ripples in the fabric of space-time since 2007. But it was being upgraded at the time of the historic first detection of gravitational waves by the twin laboratories of Virgo’s US cousin, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and was also out of action for two subsequent sightings....
Two hazardous chemicals never before known as oil and gas industry pollutants—ammonium and iodide—are being released and spilled into Pennsylvania and West Virginia waterways from the booming energy operations of the Marcellus shale, a new study shows. The toxic substances, which can have a devastating impact on fish, ecosystems, and potentially, human health, are extracted from geological formations along with natural gas and oil during both hydraulic fracturing and conventional drilling operations, said Duke University scientists in a study published today in the journal Environmental Science & Technology....
