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Dear EarthTalk: I saw an article on sugar’s effects on the environment. Has anyone compared different sweeteners (artificial or natural) for their environmental impacts?—Terri Oelrich, via e-mail The production of sugar has indeed taken a huge environmental toll. “Sugar has arguably had as great an impact on the environment as any other agricultural commodity,” reports the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), citing biodiversity loss as a result of the “wholesale conversion of habitat on tropical islands and on coastal areas” to grow sugar....

In football there are few plays more thrilling than a last-second field goal attempt: both teams line up with the clock one or two ticks from zero. The ball is snapped and the crowd roars as the kicker charges forward in an effort to drive the ball through the yellow uprights, the fate of his team hanging in the balance. Yet why do some kickers rise to the challenge whereas others choke under pressure?...

On the International Space Station, solar energy powered almost everything: navigation, life support, science experiments. The station uses eight giant solar rays that collect energy from the sun and stores it in batteries to operate all of its systems. The batteries are critical so that when you’re on the dark side of the Earth, you still have energy. And for the last 20 years, it’s worked great. After these experiences, I decided to put solar panels on my home in Colorado this year....

Solar-powered streetlights and parking meters are not hard to find, nor are photovoltaic panels that deliver energy to houses and factories. These advances beg a big question: Will we ever be able to use the sun to power our ubiquitous smartphones and other mobile gadgets instead of plugging them into the grid every night? The answer depends not only on efficiency gains in photovoltaic cell technology but also on where those cells are placed on our devices and where we store them—many of us keep our smartphones stuffed in a pocket or handbag for much of the day, out of reach of the sun’s energy....

Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose—the list of high-profile killings by police in the U.S. continues to grow.* When this story went to press in September, officers had already shot and killed 680 people in 2015, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. By its count, only 6 percent of the white suspects were unarmed, compared with 14 percent of the black victims. If the numbers reflected U....

Editor’s Note (4/19/22): This article is being republished in light of a recent ruling by Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle striking down a federal mask mandate on airplanes and public transit. The article includes information on how to find masks that protect the wearer from infection even when others are not wearing a mask. A wealth of evidence has shown that wearing a face mask helps prevent people from spreading the virus that causes COVID, SARS-CoV-2, to others and from becoming sick themselves....

You lie in bed in the morning, reluctant to swing your legs out from under the warm embrace of your blanket. After several bleary minutes, you finally rouse yourself, throw on some clothes and head to the office. Having arrived at your desk, you stare blankly as e-mail loads on your screen. When you first started this job, you derived deep satisfaction from addressing the day’s challenges efficiently and artfully. Yet the optimism that used to buoy you is long gone....

The Thinker, Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture, has become a visual cliché, a common representation of deep thought—a figure gazing down, chin on hand, completely alone. This is utterly misleading, according to the authors of The Knowledge Illusion, which carries the subtitle Why We Never Think Alone. Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown University, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, argue that our intelligence depends on the people and things that surround us and to a degree we rarely recognize....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. A recent neurology study found that the more porn a man watched, the less gray matter he had in his brain. The study made headlines the world over, prompting an anonymous listener to ask whether such sexual stimulation is indeed bad for the brain. So just what is the effect of sexual imagery on our brains–and does it affect how we see our fellow men and women?...

While an Egyptian pharaoh built majestic temples filled with sparkling treasures, the lower classes performed backbreaking work on meager diets, new evidence suggests. An analysis of more than 150 skeletons from a 3,300-year-old cemetery at the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna reveals fractures, wear and tear from heavy lifting, and rampant malnutrition amongst the city’s commoners. The discovery, detailed in the March issue of the journal Antiquity, could shed light on how the non-elites of ancient Egyptian society lived....

In April Jenny Rappaport sat down to inspect her calendar because she could not tell how many days had passed since New Jersey’s stay-at-home order took effect. Before COVID-19, her life had structure and a pace, and she knew the day of the week without giving it a second thought. The pandemic has changed all of that. “There’s nothing different between Thursday and Sunday or Monday,” she says. “The sameness feels numbing....

Subdued seasonality might be linked to the emergence of complex life on Earth around 600 million years ago. On alien worlds, extreme seasonal spikes and plunges in temperature could likewise determine whether life teems, scrapes by, or dies. Seasons arise when the axis of a planet’s spin is tilted relative to the plane of the planet’s orbit. Recent research has suggested that a loss of axial tilt and its attendant seasonality, which helps moderate global temperatures, could doom extraterrestrial creatures....

Gene expression patterns in the brains of people with autism are similar to those of people who have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, according to a large study of postmortem brain tissue. The findings appear today in Science. All three conditions show an activation of genes in star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes, and suppression of genes that function at synapses, the junctions between neurons. The autism brains also show a unique increase in the expression of genes specific to immune cells called microglia....

Ciclopirox is currently approved by the FDA as a topical antifungal cream. (Credit: Fougera) A drug commonly prescribed to treat nail fungus appears to come with a not-so-tiny side effect: killing HIV in cell cultures. In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox rid infectious HIV from cell cultures, but the virus also doesn’t bounce back when the drug is withheld. The same group of researchers had previously shown that Ciclopirox – approved by the FDA and Europe’s EMA as safe for human use to treat foot fungus – inhibits the expression of HIV genes in culture....

Ever since the philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed in the Philosophical Quarterly that the universe and everything in it might be a simulation, there has been intense public speculation and debate about the nature of reality. Such public intellectuals as Tesla leader and prolific Twitter gadfly Elon Musk have opined about the statistical inevitability of our world being little more than cascading green code. Recent papers have built on the original hypothesis to further refine the statistical bounds of the hypothesis, arguing that the chance that we live in a simulation may be 50–50....

Richard Muller’s conversion is complete. The University of California, Berkeley, physicist once doubted the existence of climate change. Now he is convinced it’s not only real but man-made, based on the latest results from his controversial review of temperature records. “Call me a converted skeptic,” Muller wrote in an op-ed published yesterday in The New York Times. According to his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, the average temperature on land has risen 1....

In order to improve care for people with multiple sclerosis (MS), we need to understand more about their disease. The way we measure the impact of MS on daily life has remained relatively unchanged for decades and is heavily reliant on clinic visits that may only occur once or twice each year. Unfortunately, this paradigm fails to capture the subtle mental and physical changes, possibly reflecting MS disease worsening, that can occur between visits....

Imagine sitting in an office located near the railroad tracks. Trains rattle by several times an hour. As you try to concentrate, the rumble of every train pulls you away from what you are doing. You need time to refocus, to collect your thoughts. Worse, just when you have settled back in, another train hurtles by. This description mirrors the conditions of a school in New Haven located next to a noisy railroad line....

A medicine administered days after infection can save monkeys from a deadly virus related to Ebola, researchers report in Science Translational Medicine. “This clearly starts to move into the realm of being a therapy, rather than a post-exposure treatment,” says virologist Gene Olinger, principal science adviser for contract-research organization MRIGlobal in Kansas City, Missouri, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a tougher point to intervene, so it’s important that they’ve demonstrated this....

A SCIENTIST REFLECTS In Search of Memory Icarus Films, 2008 http://icarusfilms.com/new2009/mem.html Despite its broad title, the documentary In Search of Memory is quite narrowly focused. In fact, the film’s subject, Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel (below), serves as both narrator and star and appears in nearly every shot. With a lead character as dynamic and charming as Kandel, however, it is easy to see why director Petra Seeger chose to build the film on his personal experiences and reflections, rather than engaging in the usual documentary-style interviews with colleagues, friends and family....