When Andy Jarvis wants to explain to locals how future climate change will affect agriculture in the tropics, he uses a familiar landmark: a mountain. A 2-degree-Celsius increase in temperature – the anticipated rise from climate change in the next 40 years – is roughly equivalent to a 500-meter change in elevation, he said. Farmers growing at an elevation of 1,500 meters will need to move crops up to 2,000 meters....
If all goes according to plan, cement and concrete maker Lafarge will continue turning a limestone hill in Malaysia into a quarry. It would be business as usual for Lafarge, but bad news for Charopa lafargei, a recently discovered snail that lives only on that hill. The gastropod’s name is no coincidence. For the first time, taxonomists have named a species after the entity that could cause the creature’s extinction. Whether this guilt trip will work remains to be seen (Lafarge has said it will avoid certain areas of the hill), but there is something to be said for choosing the name of a species carefully....
Editor’s Note: This article, translated from German, originally appeared in Spektrum. We are publishing it as part of our tribute to Charles Darwin on his 200th birthday. Mr. Darwin, there is hardly any other book that has polarized society to such an extent as your On the Origin of Species. Do you think you have been given a fair treatment in the public debate? My views have often been grossly distorted, attacked with bitterness and made to sound silly....
In a highly controversial move, the Food and Drug Administration approved an especially powerful opioid painkiller despite criticism that the medicine could be a “danger” to public health. And in doing so, the agency addressed wider regulatory thinking for endorsing such a medicine amid nationwide angst about overdoses and deaths attributed to opioids. The drug is called Dsuvia, which is a tablet version of an opioid marketed for intravenous delivery, but is administered under the tongue using a specially developed, single-dose applicator....
On a clear November day outside Denver, dust filled the air as an industrial rock crusher pulverized nearly six tons of confiscated elephant ivory. Loader trucks dumped batch after batch of whole tusks, carved figurines, bracelets and other baubles into the giant blue crusher, which spat out a stream of fragments that looked like bits of seashell. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service destroyed the 25-year stash of ivory seizures—worth perhaps $12 million on the black market—to signal to the world that the U....
Yiddish literature includes numerous stories about the mythical village of Chelm, filled with people who, well, let’s put it this way: they are not likely to graduate first in their Yeshiva class. One such tale involves befuddled carpenters who could not figure out why, no matter how many times they cut additional pieces off the ends of a board, it was still too short. Oy. Now new research shows that when it comes to food, most people are honorary citizens of Chelm....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Deciding which teams to pick in your NCAA basketball pool? Then you’re faced with a classic decision problem—and here, science can help. On one hand, you want to pick good teams, the “favorites,” because those teams seem more likely to win. On the other hand, you want to pick some weaker teams, the “underdogs,” so your bracket will stand out from the rest and win the pool....
On the tropical island of Borneo, some of the most spectacular caves in the world also hold a piece of an ongoing climate puzzle. The caves of Gunung Mulu are a tourist destination and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with large, open chambers and stunning formations. Those glittering stalagmites, which have been forming for tens of thousands of years, are what provided Georgia Institute of Technology doctoral student Stacy Carolin with a way to investigate how rainfall in this region shifted when past climate changed....
DECEITFUL SELF The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves Dan Ariely HarperCollins, 2012 ($26.99) Liars: they populate our news feeds, perform evil deeds on our favorite television shows and infuse drama into our daily lives. The psychological origins of both Bernard Madoff–scale Ponzi schemes and the mundane dishonesties most of us partake in—filching office pens, padding expense reports or secretly toting a counterfeit designer purse—are the subject of Ariely’s The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty....
It’s nice to know that the great man we celebrate in this special issue had a warm sense of humor. For example, in 1943 Albert Einstein received a letter from a junior high school student who mentioned that her math class was challenging. He wrote back, “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.” Today we know that his sentiment could also have been directed at crows, which are better at math than those members of various congressional committees that deal with science who refuse to acknowledge that global temperatures keep getting higher....
A new island emerged from the ocean offshore of the city of Gwadar, Pakistan, after a strong magnitude-7.7 earthquake shook the country on the morning of September 24. The mound appears to be 20 to 40 feet (6 to 12 meters) high and 100 feet (30 m) wide, DIG Gwadar Moazzam Jah, a district police officer, told Pakistan’s Geo News. It rose out of the sea at a spot located about 350 feet (100 m) from the coast, he said....
By Daniel CresseyThe pharmaceutical industry has spent years bracing itself for the “patent cliff,” when sales are expected to plummet as a bundle of blockbuster drugs loses protection against generic competitors.Yet the dire consequences for drug research–and the scientists behind it–still took many by surprise last week. With key patents about to expire, Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company in terms of sales, unveiled plans to slash its research and development (R&D) spending by billions and cut thousands of jobs....
When a surgeon removes a tumor, some cancer cells may get left behind, threatening to seed another malignant growth. Researchers have just begun the first clinical trial of a new anticancer tool that they hope will kill these stubborn cells: a plasma scalpel. The pen-size scalpel emits a small jet of helium whose charged particles glow with a vivid lilac hue. An electrode at the scalpel’s tip splits some of the helium atoms into a plasma soup of positive ions and electrons....
Just because a scientist puts a GPS tracking collar on a wild polar bear does not mean the animal will obligingly keep it on. In fact, these humongous neckbands are purposefully girthy so that if one becomes irritating, a bear can remove it. But scientists have now found a way to use signals from the discarded devices. “These dropped collars potentially would have been considered garbage data,” says Natasha Klappstein, a polar bear researcher at the University of Alberta....
ENTANGLED BLACK HOLES The possible equivalency between general relativity’s wormholes and quantum physics’ entanglement that Juan Maldacena describes in “Black Holes, Wormholes and the Secrets of Quantum Spacetime” involves entangling a pair of black holes. To do so, he proposes creating a large number of entangled particle pairs that are separated into two sets, which are then manipulated into the two entangled black holes. But entangled quanta lose their entanglement when they interact with other quanta....
The U.S. solar and wind power industries will mark the holidays with heightened spirits after receiving multiyear extensions of their coveted renewable energy tax credits from a divided Congress. On Friday, the House and Senate agreed by significant margins to grant extensions to the 30 percent investment tax credit (ITC) for solar energy and the 2.3-cent-per-kilowatt-hour production tax credit (PTC) for wind power. Other technologies—including geothermal, marine energy and small hydropower—received one-year extensions to their 30 percent ITC under the joint spending and tax measures passed Friday and expected to be signed by President Obama this week....
Dear EarthTalk: What is “tar sands oil” and what is the controversy over possibly building a pipeline for it from Canada into the United States?—Bill Berkley, Omaha, Neb. Tar sands oil (or “tar sands”) is slang for bituminous sand, a mixture of sand, clay, water and an extremely gooey form of petroleum known as bitumen, which resembles tar in appearance. Extracting commercially viable crude oil from tar sands is especially difficult because the thick and sticky mixture won’t flow unless it is heated or diluted with other hydrocarbons....
In 2005 and 2006, 53 patients who checked into a rural South Africa hospital turned out to be infected with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB). The bacterium proved impervious to antibiotics, ultimately killing 52 of the patients. This outbreak in Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu-Natal province, was the largest ever reported for XDR TB—and the primary strain involved currently accounts for nearly 80 percent of such infections in the province. New research finally tells the full story of the deadly strain’s origin....
Last September a man in Massachusetts posted a video on Facebook showing a baby alone in a car in a gas station parking lot. As the video went viral, commenters vigorously condemned the mother, despite her returning within three minutes. According to news reports, police charged her with reckless endangerment. Such incidents—and attendant outrage—are not uncommon in the U.S., where a hodgepodge of state laws govern when parents may leave kids unattended....
As summer vacations wind down, the days get shorter and children prepare to go to school, preschool and day care, they could encounter an unwelcome classmate: COVID. Yet despite the prospect of another fall surge in cases, a remarkably low percentage of young children have been vaccinated against the disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends children get vaccinated for COVID. So why have so few parents refrained from getting their child the shot?...
