Posts

Babies born to mothers with high levels of perchlorate during their first trimester are more likely to have lower IQs later in life, according to a new study. The research is the first to link pregnant women’s perchlorate levels to their babies’ brain development. It adds to evidence that the drinking water contaminant may disrupt thyroid hormones that are crucial for proper brain development. Perchlorate, which is both naturally occurring and manmade, is used in rocket fuel, fireworks and fertilizers....

Before it became a flashpoint in an antigovernment protest, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was a place where dozens of scientists conducted research projects aimed at studying the plants, animals and ancient cultures who lived in eastern Oregon’s high desert. Despite some indication that the ordeal might soon be over, with only four militants still occupying the refuge at press time as the standoff continues into its fourth week, concern that the militia’s activities could have long-term effects on the refuge’s ecosystem and archaeological sites is growing....

Scientists have long sought to understand the biological basis of thought. In the second century A.D., physician and philosopher Claudius Galen held that the brain was a gland that secreted fluids to the body via the nerves—a view that went unchallenged for centuries. In the late 1800s clinical researchers tied specific brain areas to dedicated functions by correlating anatomical abnormalities in the brain after death with behavioral or cognitive impairments. French surgeon Pierre Paul Broca, for example, found that a region on the brain’s left side controls speech....

CATCHING A CONSPIRACY In “Inside the Echo Chamber,” Walter Quattrociocchi describes his and his colleagues’ work on researching how conspiracy theories propagate online. The article reminds me of the elements necessary for an infection to successfully spread within a population. First, an agent must exceed a certain threshold of infectivity, a property called virulence. Second, vulnerable hosts must be available to become infected. If many in a population have acquired an immunity, then even if one person catches a given infection, it will be less likely to successfully propagate....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). We can think of the history of physics as an attempt to unify the world around us: Gradually, over many centuries, we’ve come to see that seemingly unrelated phenomena are intimately connected. The physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin, received his Nobel Prize in 1979 for a major breakthrough in that quest—showing how electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are manifestations of the same underlying theory (he shared the prize with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow)....

Among the vital supplies sent to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake, some of the most important may turn out to be thousands of kids’ coloring and activity books. Created by Mercy Corps, an international relief organization based in Portland, Ore., these workbooks are designed to help traumatized kids process what happened to them. Building on recent psychological research, the workbooks aim to provide children who do not have access to professional counselors the tools to heal on their own....

Sūnya, nulla, ṣifr, zevero, zip and zilch are among the many names of the mathematical concept of nothingness. Historians, journalists and others have variously identified the symbol’s birthplace as the Andes mountains of South America, the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the surface of a calculating board in the Tang dynasty of China, a cast iron column and temple inscriptions in India, and most recently, a stone epigraphic inscription found in Cambodia....

People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore led by Sven Pettersson recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior....

The water-stressed Central American region of today experienced super-droughts centuries ago that helped bring down two civilizations, says a study. Using dendrochronology – the study of tree rings – a team from the University of Arkansas created a model using thousand-year-old Montezuma baldcypress (Taxodium mucronatum) from Barranca de Amealco in Querétaro state. The drought observed through tree rings was “more severe and prolonged than anything we’ve seen in the modern era,” said David Stahle, lead researcher of the study, to be published in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters....

If a tanker splits its hull and dumps oil into the sea, trained teams show up with specialized gear to begin the process of stanching the flow and cleaning up the spill. Today, there’s no equivalent team or tools for resolving a “spill” of genetic material into the environment, but that could soon change. Over the next four years a new program in the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to cultivate, among other things, a kind of cleanup crew for engineered genes deemed harmful to or undesirable in an ecosystem....

Scientists should be permitted to modify human embryos destined for implantation in the womb to eliminate devastating genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia or cystic fibrosis — once gene-editing techniques advance sufficiently for use in people and proper restrictions are in place. That’s the conclusion of a February 14 report from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. The 261-page document follows a 2015 National Academies summit that brought together scientists, ethicists, legal experts and patient groups from around the world....

The old saying goes where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but steam is a different story, even in the case of a nuclear power plant that suffered multiple meltdowns. Despite fresh worries about a new meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in Japan, the steam that set off this concern is merely a result of atmospheric conditions—and a reactor that is still hot from having melted down in 2011. Think of it as seeing your breath in cold weather....

The acronym “JEDI” has become a popular term for branding academic committees and labeling STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) initiatives focused on social justice issues. Used in this context, JEDI stands for “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.” In recent years, this acronym has been employed by a growing number of prominent institutions and organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. At first glance, JEDI may simply appear to be an elegant way to explicitly build “justice” into the more common formula of “DEI” (an abbreviation for “diversity, equity and inclusion”), productively shifting our ethical focus in the process....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineIn a watershed moment for chimpanzee research, the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report on December 15 declaring that “most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary” and recommending the sharp curtailing of government-funded research on humankind’s closest genetic relative. Within an hour, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds research on chimpanzees, announced that he accepted the recommendations and would move to implement them as swiftly as possible....

Today, conversations around abortion in modern Christianity tend to take as a given the longstanding moral, religious and legal prohibition of the practice. Stereotypes of medical knowledge in the ancient and medieval worlds sustain the misguided notion that abortive and contraceptive pharmaceuticals and surgeries could not have existed in the premodern past. This could not be further from the truth. While official legal and religious opinions condemned the practice, often citing the health of women, a wealth of medical treatises produced by and for wealthy Christian women across the Middle Ages betray a radically different history—one in which women had a host of pharmaceutical contraceptives, various practices for inducing miscarriages, and surgical procedures for the termination of pregnancies....

A massive galaxy similar to our own Milky Way spotted shockingly early in the universe’s history is challenging astrophysicists’ understanding of galaxy formation. Witnessed just 1.5 billion years after the big bang, when the universe was some 10 percent of its current age, the spinning disk of gas and stars is the earliest of its type ever identified. And it provides strong evidence that some of the first galaxies got off to a cold start....

General Electric Co. has ceded its position as the world’s No. 1 wind turbine manufacturer to a Chinese competitor, according to 2015 market data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co. Ltd. received orders for 7.8 gigawatts of new wind turbines in 2015, exceeding GE, which dropped to No. 3 globally with 5.9 GW of new commissioned capacity, according to BNEF. Vestas Wind Systems A/S of Denmark attracted 7....

As the new decade opens up, researchers are gathering data that will redefine weather pattern averages for the nation. The “new normals” will update the averages for temperatures, rainfall and snow. A climate normal bases itself on the weather patterns of a particular region over a 30-year period. Every decade, in accordance with international agreements, the National Climate Data Center releases new temperature and rain and snowfall normals for 10,000 regions across the country....

A solar eclipse darkens some region of Earth roughly every six months. Excitement is high for the August 21 total eclipse, which will cast a band of complete blackness across the U.S. from Oregon to South Carolina. If you live too far away to see it, don’t despair—another eclipse may be coming your way soon (see map). It may be one of several varieties, in which the moon blocks part or all of the sun (see diagrams)....

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. The chances that you will get a “breakthrough” infection with SARS-CoV-2 despite being vaccinated more than two weeks ago (with both doses in the case of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine) are “quite low, but not zero,” according to a 4/20/21 post at Dear Pandemic. The chances of this occurring are 0....