Posts

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped out of line in claiming that “a breach in protocol” caused an American nurse treating an Ebola victim to contract the deadly virus, the two largest U.S. nurses’ unions charged Wednesday. National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S. with around 185,000 members, said that the CDC’s assertions about a violation in hospital procedures was unwarranted because current Ebola protocols are either inadequate or nonexistent in hospitals across the country....

Edited by Dava Sobel They sent out a dove: it wobbled home, wings slicked in a rainbow of oil, a sprig of tinsel snagged in its beak, a yard of fishing-line binding its feet. Bring back, bring back the leaf. They sent out an arctic fox: it plodded the bays of the northern fringe in muddy socks and a nylon cape. Bring back, bring back the leaf. Bring back the reed and the reef, set the ice sheet back on its frozen plinth, tuck the restless watercourse into its bed, sit the glacier down on its highland throne, put the snow cap back on the mountain peak....

Some 2.7 billion years ago in what is now Omdraaisvlei farm near Prieska, South Africa, a brief storm dropped mild rain on a new layer of ash laid down by a recent volcanic eruption (not unlike ash from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland) forming tiny craters. Additional ash subsequently buried the craters and, over eons, hardened to become rock known as tuff. Closer to the present, other rainstorms eroded the overlying tuff, exposing a fossil record of raindrops from the Archean eon, and may now have revealed the density of early Earth’s atmosphere....

Ancient Pompeii, which suffered three wall collapses this month, may look to its smaller sister city Herculaneum for tips to ensure its survival. Both cities, located on Italy’s Neapolitan coast, were simultaneously destroyed and preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, but the historic site of Herculaneum is faring much better, thanks to a sustainable conservation project. Now an international research consortium is planning a similar pilot scheme for Pompeii....

Climate change will put tens of millions more people around the world at risk of exposure to flooding rivers over the next 25 years, an alarming new study reports—unless policymakers invest in significant adaptation measures. While rising sea levels can increase the risk of coastal flooding, the study focuses instead on fluvial floods, which happen when rivers overflow their banks. As global temperatures rise, storms and heavy rainfall events are expected to become more severe in many parts of the world, increasing the risk of these flooding events....

During this seemingly endless winter road crews have been in a continual battle to keep streets and highways safe. Their chief weapon: saltwater. It adheres to the pavement better than bouncing rock salt and keeps ice from forming on top of it. But on some roads this salty solution may contain other potentially harmful substances. Most state transportation departments mix this brine themselves, using either simple salt and water or natural brine extracted from underground deposits....

Whether we are home alone or at a cocktail party, electrical signals are always busy firing across our brain. When examined with electrodes, these signals appear as oscillating patterns—brain rhythms that change depending on what we are doing and thinking. Researchers have recently identified a new rhythm that appears during social interactions, offering a glimpse of the coordination that takes place within, as well as between, brains. Neuroscientists Emmanuelle Tognoli and J....

CLIMATEWIRE | Behold the beaver: master engineer, wetland dweller and a national symbol of Canada. Now add climate change specialist to the list, scientists say. According to new research, beavers are among the world’s most effective practitioners of climate adaptation and resilience, something biologists have known for years but have recently documented through field study. Experts from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and the California State University Channel Islands say that as droughts and floods become more acute with global warming, dam-building beavers are helping stave off the worst impacts by holding back essential water that otherwise would run off or dry up....

Many studies have traced the history of families with more than one autistic member, but few scientists have attempted to crack the code of sporadic autism —which arises unexpectedly in a formerly unaffected lineage and is more common than inherited autism. Now a group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory believes it has found a distinct mechanism by which autism can strike sporadically. Led by Jonathan Sebat and Michael Wigler, the team examined the entire genomes of more than 150 families with at least one autistic member....

President-elect Donald Trump’s views on technology and tech policy were not prominent campaign features on his contentious path to the White House. However, his repeated calls to dismantle the Washington, D.C., establishment provide some clues to how his first 100 days in the White House will impact the nation’s tech infrastructure and its approach to data privacy for years to come. Neutering Net neutrality Trump’s first major shift in tech policy will likely target the U....

These days, software engineers’ overlords generally don’t tolerate true, secret Easter eggs. The bosses argue that such surprises are untested, may be incompatible with the software company’s public image, and (when they feature the programmers’ names) amount to “poach me!” ads for rival companies’ headhunters. In other words, the heyday of software Easter eggs has passed. But about 15 years ago, programmers used to put their personal pawprints all over their work, buried, sometimes devilishly, as hard-to-unlock surprises....

Mohamad Hassoun, author of Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks (MIT Press, 1995) and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Wayne State University, adapts an introductory section from his book in response. Artificial neural networks are parallel computational models, comprising densely interconnected adaptive processing units. These networks are composed of many but simple processors (relative, say, to a PC, which generally has a single, powerful processor) acting in parallel to model nonlinear static or dynamic systems, where a complex relationship exists between an input and its corresponding output....

Dear EarthTalk: What are some basic guidelines about seafood consumption, especially for women and in light of all the pollution threats to our oceans and waterways? – Betsy Draper, Boston, MA Between mercury poisoning, overfishing and the environmental impacts of fish farms or “aquaculture,” some might expect to see a “Proceed with Caution” sign above seafood counters soon. Others contend that fish and shellfish are an important part of a healthy diet, providing high-quality protein and omega-3 fatty acids....

As our bodies perform strenuous exercise, we begin to breathe faster as we attempt to shuttle more oxygen to our working muscles. The body prefers to generate most of its energy using aerobic methods, meaning with oxygen. Some circumstances, however—such as evading the historical saber tooth tiger or lifting heavy weights—require energy production faster than our bodies can adequately deliver oxygen. In those cases, the working muscles generate energy anaerobically. This energy comes from glucose through a process called glycolysis, in which glucose is broken down or metabolized into a substance called pyruvate through a series of steps....

Antarctica wasn’t always a land of ice. Millions of years ago, when the continent was still part of a huge Southern Hemisphere landmass called Gondwana, trees flourished near the South Pole. Now, newfound, intricate fossils of some of these trees are revealing how the plants thrived — and what forests might look like as they march northward in today’s warming world. “Antarctica preserves an ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution,” said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee....

Childhood diarrhea can be a tricky public health issue. Not only is it an unpleasant subject to discuss, but eradicating it, especially in poorer nations, can often mean expensive infrastructure projects and bigger battles than many strapped governments can take on. It still kills some 1.5 million children under the age of five every year, according to a World Health Organization report issued last month. And it likely is responsible for more indirect deaths in that age group....

An astronaut unfortunate enough to fall into a black hole would be in for certain demise. The method of this annihilation, however, has recently become a subject of fierce debate, thanks to a new idea that is throwing the world of theoretical physics for a loop. The notion is that the “event horizon, which forms the boundary of a black hole, beyond which no light can escape, is an actual physical wall—a firewall....

The stop distance procedure is simple: A researcher moves toward a study participant. When the approaching person gets too close, the volunteer says, “Stop.” The task is straightforward. But it is also quite effective at probing the dimensions of a person’s physical comfort zone, or “personal space.” This procedure was integral to a preprint study that was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital to test changing perceptions of personal safety zones before and during the COVID-19 pandemic....

In the United States, the best place to see butterflies is also one of the places where President Donald Trump tried to build his border wall: the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. This part of Texas is also one of the most economically disadvantaged places in the country. Because of this confluence of the wealth of the natural world and the needs of the human world, we built the National Butterfly Center in the valley, hoping it would promote both the conservation of butterflies and the well-being of humans....

In March 2016, officials from Guinness World Records traveled to Haifa, Israel, to visit a retired candymaker named Israel Kristal. They came to proclaim him, at the age of 112 years and 178 days, the world’s oldest man. Kristal, who has since turned 113, has led an extraordinary life. When he was born, in 1903, life expectancy for a boy in Poland was only about 45 years. As a child, he remembers throwing candies to Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary....