Posts

In August 2014 a rocket launched the fifth and sixth satellites of the Galileo global navigation system, the European Union’s $11-billion answer to the U.S.’s GPS. But celebration turned to disappointment when it became clear that the satellites had been dropped off at the wrong cosmic “bus stops.” Instead of being placed in circular orbits at stable altitudes, they were stranded in elliptical orbits useless for navigation. The mishap, however, offered a rare opportunity for a fundamental physics experiment....

Of all the elementary particles in the universe, neutrinos may be the strangest. Sometimes known as “ghost particles,” these mysterious little packets of energy have no electrical charge, have almost no mass and come in at least three distinct varieties. New research is bringing science closer than ever to understanding the nature of neutrinos, from their size to their fundamental properties. Neutrinos are mind-bogglingly tiny. With a mass of less than 0....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) might sound like a goofy made-up disorder, but for 1 in 10 people in the U.S., it’s maddeningly real. It’s a neurological condition characterized by an unpleasant sensation and/or an overwhelming urge to move your legs. It’s usually most noticeable when you are trying to fall asleep and can actually keep you from getting a good night’s rest....

Click sounds, such as those found in some languages in Africa, make perfectly good consonants. So why do they appear so rarely in most human speech? One culprit may be anatomy. Previous studies have suggested that in some speakers of click languages, the alveolar ridge—the rounded bump between the upper teeth and the roof of the mouth—is small or even absent. In recent research, Scott Moisik of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Dan Dediu of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, built biomechanical models that simulated clicks in vocal tracts with alveolar ridges of varying sizes....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The powerful remnants of Typhoon Merbok pounded Alaska’s western coast on Sept. 17, 2022, pushing homes off their foundations and tearing apart protective berms as water flooded communities. Storms aren’t unusual here, but Merbok built up over unusually warm water. Its waves reached 50 feet over the Bering Sea, and its storm surge sent water levels into communities at near record highs along with near hurricane-force winds....

This is the story of a treacherous border crossing, valuable cargo and tracking down a secretive smuggler whose identity has been shrouded in mystery—and controversy—for decades. The harsh border is the hard-to-penetrate membrane surrounding bacteria, which lets few things pass. But the smuggler, a bacterial protein, ferries critical raw material through this barrier to help build the organism’s protective sheath, its cell wall. Stopping the protein should weaken that cell wall—bad for the bacteria but good for patients hosting bacterial infections, because this could lead to new antibiotics....

Baculovirus is the plague of the fall armyworm, which is itself a major pest for corn farmers. The virus infects the caterpillar’s cells and hijacks them to produce the proteins it needs to thrive and spread. Scientists have appropriated this cellular machinery to produce other proteins, including hemagglutinin, the key used by the influenza virus to infiltrate human cells and make us sick. Now a vaccine produced from such insect-derived hemagglutinin has proved effective in preventing infection by several strains of human influenza, according to a new report in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association....

Small island nations are in a bind. Under assault from climate change, they need to spend big to protect their communities from rising seas and dangerous storms. But a major source of income—international tourism—has dried up due to the coronavirus pandemic. So now they’re pleading with world leaders for help and relief. “As small island developing states, we are struggling to stay afloat literally and figuratively,” said Jerome Xavier Walcott, minister for foreign affairs of Barbados....

The exorbitant cost of deciphering a person’s genome dropped sharply in 2005, from $20 million to roughly a tenth of that amount. DNA-sequencing technology using off-the-shelf equipment devised by George M. Church of Harvard Medical School and his collaborators both at Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis may help realize the federal goal of reducing that price to $1,000 by 2015, which experts say would make it practical to decode a person’s genes for routine medical purposes....

Few things are more refreshing than enjoying a cool beverage after spending a day under the hot summer sun. But gulping down a drink does not always quench thirst. Seawater, for example, may look appealing to someone stranded in the middle of the ocean, but taking a swig of it will only worsen dehydration. Scientists have now discovered that in rodents, signals from both the throat and gut control feelings of thirst....

Amid all the advance iPhone 5 hullabaloo – and no, sports fans, we’re not anywhere finished and there are still two days to go before the official announcement – it’s easy to forget that this was a family of devices “that, under the normal rules of business, should not have been invented.” The above is a partial quote from Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo who’s must-read piece recounts the long and winding road taken by Apple before it came out with the first iPhone in June 2007....

The fields of barley, rice and wheat that feed much of India are running out of water, according to a new study based on satellite data and published online in Nature today. The heartland of last century’s Green Revolution lost 109 cubic kilometers of water from its Indus River plain aquifer between August 2002 and October 2008. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) “By our estimates, the water table is declining at a rate of one foot per year averaged over the Indian states of Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, including the national capital territory of Delhi,” an area in northwestern India that covers more than 438,000 square kilometers, says NASA hydrologist Matthew Rodell, lead author of the paper....

The Trump administration’s nominee to lead NASA wants the agency to study climate change on Mars, even as he questions if it’s happening here on Earth. Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) said in a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that understanding other planets in more detail could help scientists get a better grasp on earthly processes. The assertion echoes talking points by those who question mainstream climate science....

Alcohol has been part of human existence for millennia. Alcoholic beverages are an integral part of human culture. Like the wines consumed in Jewish and Christian rituals, these drinks have ceremonial and religious uses. Until the nineteenth century, beer, brandy, rum or grog was the drink of choice for sailors in lieu of stagnant water during long voyages. Alcohol is a social lubricant, an anesthetic and an antiseptic. It is one of the most widely used drugs in the world and has been manufactured since the advent of agriculture nearly 9000 years ago....

Researchers have developed a new pathway to get one of the tiniest forms of life to make fuel. By breathing in carbon dioxide and hydrogen, an engineered version of the bacterium Ralstonia eutropha produced branched alcohols, compounds that can be blended with gasoline or serve as an energy source on their own. This could help repurpose carbon emissions in a way that can generate money. The researchers, who published their findings earlier this month in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, initially studied this bacterium because it can form polymers under stress....

Earth has endured at least five global extinction events since the first signs of life appeared. And it may be teetering on the edge of another one in the oceans. If climate change continues unabated, marine life worldwide could suffer a mass die-off, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of millions of years. That’s the dire warning in a new study published yesterday in the journal Science by Princeton researchers Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch....

Extreme weather is increasingly in the news these days. We’re accustomed to hearing about unusually strong hurricanes, tornadoes and even the polar vortex, but atmospheric events can get a lot weirder—as can the names we give them. Check out these bizarre weather phenomena and their intriguing monikers. Atmospheric River/Pineapple Express A 2019 atmospheric river drenches California with heavy rain and mountain snow, triggering flash floods and mudslides. Credit: NOAA A “river” of water vapor in the sky that can grow to 2,000 miles long, 500 miles wide and two miles deep....

By Kate Kelland The Zika virus, an infectious disease linked to severe birth defects in babies, may spread into Europe as the weather gets warmer, although the risk is low, health officials said on Wednesday. In its first assessment of the threat Zika poses to the region, the World Health Organization’s European office said the overall risk was small to moderate. It is highest in areas where Aedes mosquitoes thrive, in particular on the island of Madeira and the north-eastern coast of the Black Sea....

By Rhiannon SmithAs the first findings start to arrive from the Hubble Space Telescope since its repair last year, researchers are shedding new light on one of our nearest and most exciting supernova neighbours as they resume tracking its explosive history.Supernovae form when a massive star explodes at the end of its life. Opportunities to view the event in a nearby galaxy are scarce, but in 1987 just such an explosion was observed in one of our nearest galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud....

Jupiter’s trademark Great Red Spot may be shrinking, but it’s not going down without a fight. Amazing new maps of the Jupiter by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the Great Red Spot, a massive storm about twice the diameter of Earth, is slowing the speed at which it shrinks. The Jupiter maps, first in series of annual portraits of the outer planets, also reveal rare wave structures that scientists haven’t seen for nearly 40 years....