Anyone living in Manhattan can tell you that of all the wonders the urban lifestyle affords, great vistas of the city itself are not one of them. Sweeping views of this American metropolis are available only from the outside, from places like New Jersey or Queens. Researchers who study the Milky Way have the same problem. They cannot see the entirety of our galaxy, because, along with the rest of us, they’re right in the thick of it....
Dear EarthTalk: What ever happened to the idea of turning Mount Saint Helens into a national park?—Esther Monaghan, Boston Mt. St. Helens, one of the less prominent yet massive peaks of Washington State’s Cascade Range, made history on May 18, 1980 by erupting with the force of 500 atomic bombs, devastating 230 square miles of formerly verdant forest and killing 57 people. After considerable debate about what to do with the decimated landscape in the aftermath, Congress sided with scientists advocating it be left alone for research and education....
2016 was the hottest year in 137 years of record keeping and the third year in a row to take the number one slot, a mark of how much the world has warmed over the last century because of human activities, U.S. government scientists announced Wednesday. 2016 is a “data point at the end of many data points that indicates” long-term warming, Deke Arndt, chief of the monitoring branch of the National Centers for Environmental Information, said....
About 39 million acres, or 61,000 square miles, of forest cover disappeared in 2017—an area approximately the size of Bangladesh. That makes it the second-worst year on record, topped only by losses in 2016. It’s discouraging news for global climate mitigation efforts. Healthy tropical forests store vast amounts of carbon, while deforestation can release that carbon back into the atmosphere. And research suggests declines in tropical forest cover are taking their toll: Last year, a blockbuster study in Science concluded that tropical forests—because of their widespread destruction—are actually a net source of carbon to the atmosphere, rather than a carbon sink, as many experts had previously assumed....
My restaurant, called Miya’s Sushi, is just a few miles from Long Island Sound in New Haven, Conn. We have made it our goal to return our cuisine to the roots of sushi, meaning simply to use what we have available where we live. Too often what we find now are invasive species—unwanted plants and animals humans have introduced to ecosystems. Nationwide, invasive species such as the wild boar and Asian carp are destroying farms and fisheries, causing economic damage that has been estimated at $120 billion a year....
The motion of the ocean is rocking our world, or at least helping to give it a vigorous shake in some locations when the conditions are right, a team of seismologists says. The idea that celestial bodies can cause earthquakes is one of the oldest theories in science. In 1687 Newton’s universal law of gravitation revealed ocean tides are caused by the attraction of the sun and moon. And in the 1700s scientists started to wonder if these same distant bodies might also affect geologic faults....
From Nature Medicine’s “Spoonful of Medicine” blog: The serendipitous finding that a potential cancer-fighting compound temporarily halts sperm production in mice has seeded new hopes for a reversible male contraceptive pill. At a time when the only non-hormonal contraceptive choices for men consist of condoms and vasectomies, the finding, published today in the journal Cell, has stirred the interest of pharmaceutical companies, although it’s quite far from entering clinical trials....
Climate change likely worsened the devastating floods that inundated Pakistan this summer, according to a new scientific analysis. Extreme rainfall has intensified across the country, and warming probably played a role. The study also finds that these kinds of extreme rainfall events may grow even more severe as the planet gets hotter. The findings were published Wednesday by the science consortium World Weather Attribution, an international initiative specializing in the links between climate change and extreme weather events....
The world of law as practiced in the real world is far removed from that usually discussed by law professors and philosophers or shown on television and in movies. In idealized or fictional cases the law always operates formally and may seem to pursue some abstract quest for justice. In the everyday practice of law, however, things work differently—it is all about cobbling together the most compelling and convincing story possible either for or against a defendant....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the northern part of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the future for green sea turtles appears to be turning female. A recent study has revealed that climate change is rapidly leading to the feminisation of green turtles in one of the world’s largest populations. Only about 1% of these juvenile turtles are hatching male....
Plumes of bubbles streaming from hundreds of newly discovered sea-floor seeps between North Carolina and Massachusetts are likely to contain methane and could be adding as much as 90 tonnes of the planet-warming gas to the atmosphere or overlying waters each year, research published Sunday in Nature Geoscience suggests. An estimated two-thirds of the emissions emanate from sediments at depths where methane-rich ices may be decomposing due to warming waters along the ocean bottom, the researchers say....
Two years ago physicists demonstrated that a laser beam traveling through the air can bend slightly if certain components are asymmetrical, forming what is called an Airy beam. Now researchers have shown that pulsed, high-intensity versions can leave curved trails of plasma. Shot out like a stack of pennies, each pulse, one centimeter wide and lasting 35 femtoseconds, passes through a glass plate that turns it into a triangular shape, in which an intense peak falls on one side of several weaker peaks....
The archetypal Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci is admired for his unequaled range of intellectual passions. The creator of the Mona Lisa and other artistic masterpieces in the second half of the 1400s and early 1500s was also an accomplished musician, scientist and engineer whose inventions included ball bearings, instruments to measure the specific gravity of solids, and fantastic war machines (although he abhorred the “most bestial insanity” of battle). Less well known—largely because hundreds of pages of his notes and detailed anatomical drawings went unpublished until the late 19th and early 20th centuries—are his remarkable and penetrating findings in the field of neuroscience....
Ever since the 1950s, when physicists first dreamed up the idea of doing astronomy with neutrinos, the holy grail has been to observe the first object outside our solar system that emits these ghostly particles. A handful were collected from a nearby supernova in 1987, but that was a rare event and the instruments that made the detection were hardly telescopes; they could not discern much more than up from down or left from right....
NEW ORLEANS—The first offshore wind farm in the United States is set to begin delivering power to Rhode Island’s electricity grid by year’s end, a milestone that could help reshape energy markets from New England to South Florida, experts say. But for U.S. offshore wind power to achieve its full potential, as much as 4 gigawatts of capacity, it will need a major influx of capital and know-how, much of which will come from Europe, where the technology has a 25-year performance record and now accounts for 11 GW of generation capacity on the continent....
A vast project to map neural connections in the mouse retina may have answered the long-standing question of how the eyes detect motion. With the help of volunteers who played an online brain-mapping game, researchers showed that pairs of neurons positioned along a given direction together cause a third neuron to fire in response to images moving in the same direction. It is sometimes said that we see with the brain rather than the eyes, but this is not entirely true....
Pack hunting spiders exist in places other than your nightmares. While most spiders enjoy solitary lives, 20 of the roughly 50,000 known spider species live in colonies. One species, Anelosimus eximius, lives in extremely large colonies of up to 1,000 individual spiders that work together to build webs spanning several meters. When prey falls into their web, these social spiders coordinate and attack their victim together, which allows them to take down much larger prey than they could if they hunted alone....
Smoke began billowing into the skies of northwestern Nevada in September, clouding the mountains, dimming the sun—and quashing residents’ hopes that they would be spared from wildfires and the awful air quality the blazes produce. The lung-irritating particles were blowing in from burning forests in California and settling in Douglas County, Nevada, home to nearly 50,000 people, prompting warnings that air quality had reached hazardous levels. Those levels meant the air was very unhealthy, bad enough to raise alarms about people’s immediate health care needs and questions about whether worsening pollution could result in long-term health issues....
Teresa Puente begins cutting celery with a machete before 4 a.m. It’s the coolest time of day to harvest the green stalks from the chocolate-brown soil of the Rio Grande Valley. Puente is among thousands of people at work in the fields of South Texas, picking, cutting and packaging the cilantro, watermelon, onions and oranges stocked in American grocery stores. For them, a hard day’s work is getting hotter. As climate change intensifies heat waves and drought and helps spread diseases carried by mosquitoes, the life of a farmworker in this fertile part of Texas is getting harder and more dangerous....
You are walking down a quiet grocery store aisle when suddenly a voice says: “Thirsty? Buy me.” You stop in front of the soda display, but no one is next to you, and shoppers a few feet away do not seem to hear a thing. At that moment, you are standing in a cylinder of sound. Whereas a loudspeaker broadcasts sound in all directions, the way a lightbulb radiates light, a directional speaker shines a beam of waves akin to a spotlight....
