Posts

By Natasha GilbertCrocodiles are bad long-distance swimmers. Instead, their talents lie in surfing, according to a study published June 7 in the Journal of Animal Ecology.Estuarine crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus) have the largest geographical range of any crocodile species, spanning more than 10,000 square kilometers of the southeast Pacific Ocean.That wide distribution suggests that they can cross the ocean to reach distant locales, but until now only three estuarine crocodiles had been tracked on transoceanic voyages....

The jury is still out on the culprit behind the recent increase in global methane emissions. A new study published yesterday found that fossil fuel production has emitted significantly more of the potent greenhouse gas since 2000 and could account for much of the unexplained uptick in global atmospheric methane since 2007. That is an opposite finding from other recent research, which has blamed sources like agriculture, animal husbandry and wetlands instead....

By James Mitchell Crow of Nature magazineIt might be among the hardest materials known, but place a diamond in a patch of sunlight and it will start to lose atoms, say a team of physicists in Australia. The rate of loss won’t significantly trouble tiara wearers or damage diamond rings, but the discovery could prove a boon for researchers working to tap diamond’s exceptional optical and electronic properties.Many of the newest uses of diamonds, from laser light emission to quantum communication and computing, require micro- or nano-features to be built into the surface of the diamond....

Dear EarthTalk: Are there any electric bicycles or scooters that make for a nice cheap, green-friendly commute? – Sean Foley, Nashua, NH Bicycle commuting has long been a symbol of greener living, and it is great exercise, too. But most people are probably not up to commutes much beyond five or 10 miles one-way in the interest of time and in not arriving at work too pooped (or sweaty) to pop....

Health experts are questioning the Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan state officials for their decades-long delays in cleanup of a Superfund site that is killing songbirds in yards, possibly leaving people at risk, too. After years of complaints from residents, researchers recently reported that robins and other birds are dropping dead from DDT poisoning in the mid-Michigan town of St. Louis, which was contaminated by an old chemical plant. “The more we know about DDT the more dangerous we find out it is for wildlife, yes, but humans, too,” said Dr....

How do humans and other animals find their way from A to B? This apparently simple question has no easy answer. But after decades of extensive research, a picture of how the brain encodes space and enables us to navigate through it is beginning to emerge. Earlier, neuroscientists had found that the mammalian brain contains at least three different cell types, which cooperate to encode neural representations of an animal’s location and movements....

“VIRGIN BIRTH” STEM CELLS The stem cells claimed to be extracted from the first cloned human embryo by discredited scientist Woo Suk Hwang actually owe their existence to parthenogenesis, in which egg cells give rise to embryos without being fertilized by sperm. A series of genetic markers sprinkled throughout the cells’ chromosomes shows the same pattern found in parthenogenetic mice as opposed to cloned mice. The result, published online August 2 by Cell Stem Cell, suggests that Hwang and his group were the first to achieve human parthenogenesis but failed to recognize it....

U.S. As of January 1, California retailers are prohibited from selling showerheads, toilets, faucets and appliances that do not pass new efficiency standards for reducing water use. PANAMA An eight-year-long expansion project of the Panama Canal is scheduled for completion early this year. The added width will allow larger ships to pass through and accommodate twice the volume of traffic. SWITZERLAND Roboticists in Zurich debuted an autonomous robot that lays bricks in preprogrammed structures....

Removing even a single bee species from an ecosystem has serious effects on plant reproduction, a field study has shown. Wild bee populations are declining severely in the United Kingdom and the United States, possibly because of pesticide use, yet simulations have predicted that the insects’ decreasing numbers will not have a major effect on plant reproduction until most pollinating species are gone. Wielding his butterfly net, ecologist Berry Brosi of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, set out to test these models in the field with his colleague Heather Briggs from the University of California, Santa Cruz....

By now the sight of grieving, sobbing family members, terrified children and devastated communities is all too familiar from the coverage of mass shootings such as the recent ones in Uvalde, Tex., and Buffalo, N.Y. But when the cameras are gone, the dead are laid to rest and the injured have been treated, what psychological wounds linger? What are the longer-term mental health consequences for survivors, their families and the community at large?...

Beijing has been battling an unwelcome, unrelenting and “very unhealthy” smog for many months, much of it made up of particulate nitrogen compounds suspended in the air. Nitrogen pollution in China has kept pace with the country’s rapid growth. A study published in Nature last week finds that the rate of nitrogen pollution grew by more than half in the last 30 years. Researchers from China Agricultural University analyzed data from across the country and found the amount of nitrogen expelled into its surroundings every year rose by 8 kilograms per hectare every year between 1980 and 2010....

Cut your finger, and your body starts mending the wound even before you have had time to go and find a Band-Aid. Synthetic materials are not so forgiving, but Nancy R. Sottos, Scott R. White and their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are looking to change all that. They developed a self-healing plastic that contains a three-dimensional network of microscopic capillaries filled with a liquid healing agent. When the material is cracked, the released fluid is hardened by particles of a catalyst that are also sprinkled throughout....

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution. In a September paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R....

Scientists have developed a backpack that makes “power walking” a reality. Described today in the journal Science, the novel device translates the regular up and down movement of a walker’s hips into electrical energy. The contraption could conceivably help provide power to soldiers, relief workers, scientists and others on remote trips. When out for a stroll, a person’s hips move up and down between five and seven centimeters during every step....

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Where other people see bacon, biologist Luhan Yang sees lifesaving organs — hundreds and thousands of them, pig livers and pig kidneys and diabetes-curing pancreases, and possibly hearts and lungs, all growing inside droves of pampered swine. More established scientists than Yang have dreamed of creating animal organs that are suitable for transplantation into people waiting for a human donor. But until recently, experts said it would take decades to genetically alter pig organs to make them work safely in people....

Editor’s note: The following is a text-only version. The complete version with artwork is available for purchase here (PDF). The periodic table of the elements is one of the most powerful icons in science: a single document that consolidates much of our knowledge of chemistry. A version hangs on the wall of nearly every chemical laboratory and lecture hall in the world. Indeed, nothing quite like it exists in the other disciplines of science....

The world hosts hundreds of wildly different venomous snake species, from brightly banded coral snakes to camouflaged cottonmouths. But somehow even distantly related species independently evolved specialized fangs with venom-carrying grooves—a longtime puzzle spurring new research into how this could have happened. The answer, says Flinders University herpetologist Alessandro Palci, has been hiding inside the serpents’ mouths all along. It turns out that the teeth of most snake species, Palci and his co-authors report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, have a ring of tiny indentations around their bases....

Earthquakes often precede explosive volcanic eruptions such as the devastating outburst from Mount St. Helens in 1980. But attempts to use tremors to predict the timing and force of such explosions have proved unsuccessful for decades. Now multidisciplinary teams of researchers have developed models that could help warn of disastrous eruptions hours to days before they happen. A group of scientists at the University of Leeds in England investigated the mystery of why volcanic tremors come in clusters and why they can occur at multiple depths within volcanoes....

Nine years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or “letters,” in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs....

In October 2017 Joy Bishara recounted to United Nations Security Council members her experience of being one of nearly 300 girls abducted in 2014 from a boarding school in Nigeria by the Islamist group Boko Haram. She described to a hushed audience how, after her capture, she jumped from a moving truck and ran through the bush for hours to escape. More than 100 of her classmates remain in captivity. Before the kidnapping, the girls—and their families—thought that they were in a place dedicated to learning and fun....