Posts

As the planet warms, scientists are seeing evidence of earlier springs and later autumns all over the world. Snow is melting sooner, plants are flowering earlier—and now, researchers find that birds are changing their migration patterns, too. A new study, just out this week in the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications, is the latest in a growing body of research that suggests our feathered friends may change their behavior in response to the climate....

A ten-year-old vacationing in Wales stumbles across a lump worth nearly $6,000. A 67-year-old New York native receives a candlelike rock in the mail from her 80-year-old sister and discovers she may be $18,000 richer. All because a whale had a bit of indigestion. That upset stomach creates ambergris, a rare substance that has been highly valued for thousands of years as an ingredient in perfume and pharmaceuticals. Ambergris originates in the intestines of male sperm whales after they dine on squid, whose hard, pointy beaks abrade the whales’ innards....

In an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, schools around the country have closed. We’ve experienced expected consequences: students falling behind academically, and parents who can’t get work done because of screaming kids. But there’s a scarier issue at play here. When kids are at home, they go online, and online child predators are going to take advantage of that situation. A new report from Europol noted there has been an increase in the digital activity of those seeking to sexually exploit children through the Internet....

The great Alaska earthquake lasted four minutes and 38 seconds when it struck on March 27, 1964. The outbreak it may have seeded wouldn’t strike for another 35 years. In 2013, I wrote in Scientific American about a subtropical fungus called Cryptococcus gattii that appeared unexpectedly in 1999 in the lungs of hundreds of humans, pets and porpoises in the Pacific Northwest. Although rare, it could be picked up from something as simple as a walk in the woods and prove fatal in otherwise healthy individuals....

For NASA’s Spirit rover, the days of roaming the Red Planet may now be in the past, but the observations the wheeled bot made in its travels are still paying scientific dividends. A new analysis of geologic data gathered by the rover nearly five years ago finds that a rock outcrop on Mars is rich in carbonates, which are minerals that form readily in watery, carbon-rich environments. According to the study, the finding lends more credence to the hypothesis that Mars may have once had a wetter, warmer climate thanks to a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere....

By Jeff TollefsonDiplomats from around the world will gather for the United Nations (UN) climate talks next week in Doha, Qatar, where negotiators hope to agree a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol and lay the groundwork for a new global treaty that will take force by 2020. Nature takes a look at what is expected from the 18th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 18), which runs from 26 November to 7 December....

Apple’s “very busy” fall season of product launches is in full swing. The company just sent out invites for a news event next week, where new iPads and Macs are expected. The invite says only, “We still have a lot to cover,” and has colorful leaves from the Apple logo. The press conference will take place at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, and begins at 10 a....

The climbing community is buzzing with news that Mount Everest’s notorious Hillary Step, a nearly vertical rock face just below the summit, may have collapsed. On May 17 British climber Tim Mosedale posted on social media a photograph of a rock outcropping, saying: “It’s official—The Hillary Step is no more.” This reignited chatter from last year speculating that the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which killed about 9,000 people including 19 climbers on Everest, also altered the shape of that part of the mountain....

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—In an election year dominated by a chaotic presidential race and splashy statewide ballot initiative campaigns, Californians are being asked to weigh in on the value of stem cell research—again. Proposition 14 would authorize the state to borrow $5.5 billion to keep financing the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), currently the second-largest funder of stem cell research in the world. Factoring in interest payments, the measure could cost the state roughly $7....

Which came first, the cup or the dome? Unlike the old chicken-versus-egg conundrum, this question appears to have an answer. A new study suggests that the familiar open-cup style—built by nearly three fourths of today’s passerines, or perching birds—is a modification of roofed spherical structures that just a handful of species now make. Most biologists had theorized that nest shape evolved the other way around, from bowl to dome. Researchers recently tested the hypothesis by overlaying nest-structure data on three different phylogenetic trees, thought to represent the evolutionary relations among 281 Australian passerine species....

From Nature magazine There’s more than one way for long-lived subterranean rodents to avoid cancer, and they might hold cellular clues to effective treatments in humans. Cell cultures from two species of blind mole rat, Spalax judaei and Spalax golani, behave in ways that render them impervious to the growth of tumors, according to work by Vera Gorbunova at the University of Rochester in New York and her colleagues. And the creatures seem to have evolved a different way of doing this from that observed in their better known and similarly cancer-resistant cousin, the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber)....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Pregnant women with COVID-19 are at higher risk for outcomes such as intensive care admission, invasive ventilation, being put on a heart-lung bypass machine, and death than are non-pregnant women with COVID-19, according to a large-sample study. The study, conducted by more than a dozen U....

The deaths of more than 586,000 people in the U.S. from COVID since the spring of 2020 have left many millions grieving. A sizable number of these bereaved individuals will find their anguish lasts an unusually long time, does not diminish and renders their life almost unbearable, mental health specialists say. People who sufferer this intense bereavement are frequently unable to keep their job, leave their home or care for other loved ones....

Built into permafrost on Norway’s Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic Circle, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault officially opened on February 26. Funded by the Norwegian government, the secure facility intends to house a library of seeds from all food crops from all countries as a hedge against wars, poverty and environmental disasters, including climate change. The vault sits at an altitude of 130 meters, so even if the ice caps melt, the seeds will not be inundated....

Research has been piling up over the past decade that shows training can boost everything from pitch perception to visual and motor skills. And now a new study says it may also improve language-processing abilities—a finding that lends support to the effectiveness of teaching letters and words to kids through songs, as TV programs like Sesame Street have done for years. Researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that music triggers changes in the brain stem—as well as in the cortex or outer brain layers as previously reported....

Man-made flood protections, not climate change, are the main culprit in sea-level rise in southwest Bangladesh, according to new research conducted for the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research. The report from a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University is the first part in a wide-ranging, $7.5 million analysis of environmental stress and human migration scenarios in the low-lying South Asian nation. Published this week in Nature Climate Change, the initial study finds that embankments constructed since the 1960s are primarily to blame for lower land elevations along the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Delta, with some areas experiencing more than twice the rate of the most worrisome sea-level rise projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Whenever I watch the evening news, I’m amazed by all the ads marketing prescription medications directly to consumers, suggesting that you ask your doctor whether you should be on the latest, greatest drug. Call me old-fashioned but I certainly hope that my doctor isn’t relying on me to suggest which new drugs I should be on - because I only watch the evening news once in a while....

Healthy weight management comes with many perks. Among the proven benefits: a reduced risk of diabetes, less joint pain, lower chances of certain cancers and an overall fitter cardiovascular system. Some regimens, particularly the Mediterranean diet, seem especially well suited to delivering these advantages, though, as with all diets, only to the degree that people can stick with them and avoid overeating. Now research hints that another trendy diet may offer even more extensive health benefits....

When Hurricane Michael barreled into the Florida Panhandle last October, the punishing waves whipped up by its winds blasted a 900-foot-wide gap in the sands of Cape San Blas, a narrow peninsula just a few miles east of where the storm made landfall. Much of a popular state park there was turned into an island overnight. The transformation left officials with the potentially costly dilemma of whether—and how—to bridge the gap to restore access; it also exposed a weakness in the computer models that warn coastal communities about impending storms....

A NASA spacecraft has begun its journey to a realm of the outer Solar System that has never before been visited: a set of asteroids orbiting the Sun near Jupiter. The rocks are “the last unexplored but relatively accessible population of small bodies” circling the Sun, says Vishnu Reddy, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The US$981-million Lucy mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 16 October, and will spend the next 12 years performing gravitational gymnastics to swoop past six of the asteroids, known as Trojans, to snap photos and determine their compositions....