One way to kill time in New York City while waiting for a subway train is to look for rats. You can often find one or two down at track level, although I’ve also seen the occasional Rattus norvegicus up on the platform just standing around with its weary fellow mammalians. One enterprising subway rat went viral in 2015, when it was videoed dragging an entire slice of pizza down a flight of stairs....
The development of trust is an essential social tool, allowing people to form productive and meaningful relationships, both at a professional and personal level. Bonds of trust are also extremely fragile, however and a single act of betrayal—such as a marital affair—can instantly erase years of trustworthy behavior. The consequences of such breaches in confidence can be disastrous, and not only for a relationship. People who have been betrayed in the past will sometimes start avoiding future social interactions, which is a potential precursor to social phobia....
Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet. Now researchers say new evidence shows Voyager really has departed the sun’s sphere of influence and become the first man-made object to reach interstellar space. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is speeding away from us, traveling about 3....
When 21-year-old American star sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was disqualified from the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo after a positive marijuana test, it left many asking, “Should cannabis use by athletes be prohibited?” Richardson said she used marijuana to deal with the news about the death of a parent and not to boost performance. Her exclusion has become a matter of heated debate. In making this decision, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has stated that it was following the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which classifies marijuana and other cannabinoids, including synthetic versions of these compounds, as banned substances in competition....
The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior. A poignant counterargument is Mark Devries’s Speciesism: The Movie, which I saw at the premiere in September 2013. The animal advocates who filled the Los Angeles theater cheered wildly for Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer. In the film, Singer and Devries argue that some animals have the mental upper hand over certain humans, such as infants, people in comas, and the severely mentally handicapped....
Once looked to as a global model for how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, Uruguay has in recent months lost its grip on the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. It’s now one of several countries in South America struggling to control a wave of infections. Uruguayan scientists say a mix of complacency—fuelled by the country’s early success at controlling the virus—and the challenges posed by a particularly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variant are to blame....
As soon as Joe Biden was elected U.S. president, he made his priorities clear by appointing a panel of distinguished experts to advise him on the coronavirus pandemic. The panel has members who are helping the new administration organize vaccine distribution to millions of people and help millions of others who need to be protected until they can get the vaccine. These experts are weighing in on preventive strategies to minimize the likelihood of infection and advise on treatments that can reduce the severity of the disease in those who get sick....
As a medical student in Germany, Stefan Feske studied two Turkish brothers born with severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome, or SCIDS, a rare, life-threatening genetic disease characterized by a seriously debilitated immune system. Because the boys’ T cells could not take up calcium, their immune systems would not work. These siblings provided Feske and his collaborators with a unique opportunity to track down a key protein involved in this process by studying human cells in which it was already dysfunctional....
Why is oil usually found in deserts and arctic areas? —B. Sterling, Deltaville, Va. Roger N. Anderson, professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, explains: Most oil and gas fields have ended up where they are because of plate tectonics—the shifting over time of large plates on the surface of the earth. River deltas and continental margins offshore also hold reserves. Oil and gas result mostly from dead microorganisms buried quickly in anoxic environments, where oxygen is so scarce that they do not decompose....
A newly discovered car-sized asteroid just made the closest-known flyby to Earth without hitting our planet. On Sunday (Aug. 16), the asteroid, initially labeled ZTF0DxQ and now formally known to astronomers as 2020 QG, swooped by Earth at a mere 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) away. That gives 2020 QG the title of closest asteroid flyby ever recorded that didn’t end with the space rock’s demise. It’s the closest known, non-impacting asteroid, NASA officials told Space....
Thirteen of 19 smokers, including a two-pack-a-day fiend, suddenly and easily kicked the habit after they suffered stroke damage to their insulas—a part of the brain linked with emotion and feeling. The results suggest a new target for addiction therapy. Science, January 26 A nanomachine version of Maxwell’s demon, a 19th-century thought-experiment protagonist who sorts faster gas molecules from slower ones, confirms that the second law of thermodynamics holds up....
Humans are social animals. In recent years, psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have revealed the distinct parts of our brain that allow us to interact, collaborate and communicate with each other. One important way of studying the “social brain” is to look at what happens in the brain during neuro-developmental disorders associated with atypical social abilities. Two such disorders are autism and Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic disorder. The exciting new study by the psychologist Deborah Riby and Peter Hancock at Newcastle University uses cutting edge methods in eye tracking to investigate the unusual social preferences and behaviors in people with Williams syndrome and autism....
Astronomers report they have detected methane for the first time in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. The finding comes from extrasolar planet HD 189733 b, a gaseous “hot Jupiter” locked in a tight orbit around a star 63 light-years away. The observations “decisively show that methane is present in addition to water,” writes the research team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and University College London....
Editor’s Note (9/2/21): This article was originally published on December 4, 2018. We are republishing it in light of recent severe flooding in Louisiana and the U.S. Northeast. Anyone east of the Rockies will tell you this has been a wet year. It wasn’t just that Hurricanes Florence and Michael soaked parts of the South. It wasn’t just that this year’s drenching storms were numerous and tracked unusually far north (one, Alberto, made a historic appearance all the way up in Michigan)....
Montana is about as far from the sea as it gets, and has been since at least 60 million years ago. And yet when it comes to measuring the acidity of ocean water, a group from Missoula has proved to be the best at building both a cheap and durable sensor, capable of accurately measuring changes in pH, or degree of acidity/alkalinity, while plumbing depths of 3,000 meters. That’s how Sunburst Sensors came to win both of the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZEs, as announced at a gala on July 20....
Saturday was a quiet day across the Gulf of Mexico, but not one without note, because a strange record was set: It has been 1,048 days since a hurricane developed in or entered the Gulf. That is the longest streak in the past 130 years, since formal record-keeping began in 1886. The Atlantic hurricane season starts in June and lasts through the end of November. But the last storm in the Gulf was Hurricane Ingrid, which made landfall in northeastern Mexico in September 2013....
Two weeks ago it was cyberattacks on the Irish power grid. Last month it was a digital assault on U.S. energy companies, including a nuclear power plant. Back in December a Russian hack of a Vermont utility was all over the news. From the media buzz, one might conclude that power grid infrastructure is teetering on the brink of a hacker-induced meltdown. The real story is more nuanced, however. Scientific American spoke with grid cybersecurity expert Robert M....
If you had to guess the organ that has undue influence on your emotions, your mood, even your choices, what would you guess? The brain? Sure, but what else? The heart—that mythological seat of the soul? Not quite. The stomach? You’re getting warmer. Would you believe it’s the large and small intestine, collectively known as the gut? More specifically, it’s the trillions of bacteria—the microbiota—that live in your gut. Each of us carries up to four and a half pounds of bacteria around in our guts at any given time....
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter. Penguin Press, 2017 ($27; 368 pages) Confession: I can’t stop checking my e-mail. I find myself reaching for my smartphone when I am in meetings, in the car, at the gym, at the beach. This impulse is surprisingly common. Studies suggest that the average worker checks his or her e-mail 36 times every hour and that as much as 40 percent of the U....
It’s been more than a decade since her death, but the epic, years-long battle around the continued existence of Terri Schiavo so riveted the nation that it still feels recent. After she suffered a cardiac arrest in 1990, Schiavo’s brain was damaged by loss of oxygen, and she fell into a persistent vegetative state. Her husband, believing that she would never awaken and would not have wanted to keep living that way, petitioned the courts for her feeding tube be removed....
