Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006 In the 1990s the inhabitants of Shishmaref, an Inupiat village on the Alaskan island of Sarichef, noticed that sea ice was forming later and melting earlier. The change meant that they could not safely hunt seal as they had traditionally and that a protective skirt of ice no longer buffered the small town from destructive storm waves....
In December 2018 thousands of holiday travelers were stranded at London’s Gatwick Airport because of reports of drones flying nearby. The airport—one of Europe’s busiest—was shut down for two days, which caused major delays and cost airlines millions of dollars. Unauthorized drones in commercial airspace have caused similar incidents in the U.S. and around the world. To stop them, researchers are now developing a detection system inspired by a different type of airborne object: a living fly....
“Sir David Brewster, who supposes the stars to be inhabited, as being ‘the hope of the Christian,’ asks, ‘is it necessary that an immortal soul be hung upon a skeleton of bone; must it see with two eyes, and rest on a duality of limbs? May it not rest in a Polyphemus with one eye ball, or an Argus with a hundred? May it not reign in the giant forms of the Titans, and direct the hundred hands of Briareus?...
Trains have long been a more fuel-efficient way to haul freight than trucks, but now the federal government’s amped up support in the alternative energy arena may help “the iron horse” go even greener with hybrid locomotives and other advances. Although large freight railway traffic (measured in carloads) is down 19 percent this year due to the recessed economy, it grew 47 percent between 1990 and 2007, and railroads have been more fuel-efficient than trucking for at least the past few decades, according to the Association of American Railroads....
Many male birds-of-paradise employ bright colors and iridescent feathers in their mating displays—but a few species also sport superblack plumage. Now researchers have teased out the structural secrets behind these feathers, which rival even the deep, velvety darkness of human-made materials designed to absorb light. Feathers, like most opaque objects, typically get their color from pigments in surface coatings (much as melanin colors skin) or from tiny surface structures that reflect light, such as those found on iridescent butterflies and beetles....
Humans are socially conditioned to view sex and gender as binary attributes. From the moment we are born—or even before—we are definitively labeled “boy” or “girl.” Yet science points to a much more ambiguous reality. Determination of biological sex is staggeringly complex, involving not only anatomy but an intricate choreography of genetic and chemical factors that unfolds over time. Intersex individuals—those for whom sexual development follows an atypical trajectory—are characterized by a diverse range of conditions, such as 5-alpha reductase deficiency (highlighted in graphic below)....
The home improvement problem started, like so many do, with a trip to Home Depot. There Richard Lindley, a 50-year-old carpenter turned general contractor who lives in Somerville, Mass., ran into a few young men he described as “earnest” and who had what he thought was a “really interesting business model.” Here’s the pitch he heard: A company, in this case SolarCity, will come to your home and install a $20,000 solar system for you....
Reprinted from Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain, by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga. Copyright © 2013, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Used with permission of the publisher The MIT Press. FUNES AND OTHER CASES OF EXTRAORDINARY MEMORY June 7, 1942, was a Sunday like any other amid the altered routine of the Second World War. The front page of the newspaper La Nación1 reported on the British onslaught, which continued with a bombing campaign over the German industrial area in the Ruhr....
Shantanu Nundy recognized the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis when his 31-year-old patient suffering from crippling hand pain checked into Mary’s Center in Washington, D.C. Instead of immediately starting treatment, though, Nundy decided first to double-check his diagnosis using a smartphone app that helps with difficult medical cases by soliciting advice from doctors worldwide. Within a day, Nundy’s hunch was confirmed. The app had used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and filter advice from several medical specialists into an overall ranking of the most likely diagnoses....
The fatal breakup and crash of Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo space plane last year was caused by a co-pilot error, as well as the failure of the spacecraft’s builders to anticipate such a catastrophic mistake, federal safety investigators say. SpaceShipTwo crashed in October when co-pilot Michael Alsbury unlocked the commercial space plane’s re-entry “feathering” system too early during a test flight over California’s Mojave Desert, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said in a hearing today (July 28)....
A driver looking to quickly charge an electric vehicle can’t necessarily plug into the closest fast-charging station. Many won’t fit the car. While automakers have agreed on uniform plug standards for slower types of charging used at home and work, they have not done so for what’s known as DC fast charging, which can fill a battery in less than 30 minutes. German and American automakers use different connection standards from Japanese and other Asian manufacturers, while Tesla Motors Inc....
Melanie Thernstrom lies motionless inside the large, noisy bore of a functional MRI scanner at Stanford University. She tries to ignore the machine’s loud whirring as she trains her attention on a screen mounted inside the scanner, right in front of her eyes. An image of a flame bobs and flickers, shifting subtly in size. To her, the flame is a representation of the searing pain in her neck and shoulder, with its fluctuations reflecting the rise and fall of her discomfort....
Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want Nicholas Epley Knopf, 2014 “Speech was given to man so that he might hide his thoughts,” wrote French novelist Stendhal. Research on how accurate we are in assessing how other people perceive us confirms his cynical assertion; the impression people give us generally corresponds poorly to their real views. In Mindwise, Epley, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, expertly reviews a wide range of work of this kind to help us understand our “real sixth sense”: our ability to make accurate inferences about what other people are thinking....
On June 13, at 6 A.M. ET, astronomers around the world descended on the Gaia Archive: the landing Web page for every last bit of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Milky Way–mapping Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics (Gaia) mission. After years of calibrating and validating the spacecraft’s measurements of the motion, speed, brightness, composition and other properties of hundreds of millions of stars, mission officials finally unveiled Data Release 3 (DR3) to the public....
Most people do not associate autism with visual problems. It’s not obvious how atypical vision might be related to core features of autism such as social and language difficulties and repetitive behaviors. Yet examining how autism affects vision holds tremendous promise for understanding this condition at a neural level. Over the past 50 years, we have learned more about the visual parts of the brain than any other areas, and we have a solid understanding of how neural activity leads to visual perception in a typical brain....
Pluto may be sharing its atmosphere with its largest moon, Charon, creating the visually striking red spot at the satellite’s north pole. New research suggests that conditions on the two worlds over the past few billion years would allow Pluto’s traveling atmosphere to freeze out on the frigid moon Charon, while radiation would quickly transform the methane and nitrogen ices to a sticky residue known as tholins. “Methane is volatile enough that it can only stick to the surface during the long, cold polar winters,” Will Grundy, lead author of the new study, told Space....
Mike Neumann lives in the tropical paradise of Fiji and scuba dives with large bull sharks all the time. In addition to having a dream job as a co-owner of a scubdiving company called Beqa Adventure Divers, Neumann likes exposing people to sharks so he can help improve the image of these misunderstood and threatened animals. “It is always inspiring to observe the awe and exhilaration, especially of the newbies once they realize that the sharks are nothing like the negative stereotypes,” he says, “but instead simply awesome and beautiful!...
DB is a 67-year-old man whose view of the world is dark from the center of his gaze leftward. He has been blind to this left part of his visual scene since age 33, when he had surgery to remove an abnormal tangle of blood vessels at the back of his brain. Unfortunately, while taking out the tangle, surgeons destroyed an important center of visual processing called the primary visual cortex, or area V1, which relays information from the eyes to higher-level brain areas dedicated to sight....
Just west of Toronto last summer, startled biologists counted more than 20,000 goldfish in a single urban stormwater pond the size of two basketball courts. And the fish, probably descended from dumped pets, were not only thriving numerically—some had grown into three-pound behemoths. Cities around North America have increasingly been building such ponds in the past 40 years to capture rain and runoff, and invasive goldfish are flourishing in thousands of them....
Excerpted from The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution, by Ian Tattersall. Palgrave Macmillan Trade, 2015. Copyright © 2015. Reprinted with permission. (Scientific American is part of Macmillan Publishers.) If I had to opt for one single year as the most momentous in the twentieth-century intellectual history of paleoanthropology, I would unhesitatingly choose 1950. Theodosius Dobzhansky had, of course, already put the Synthesis cat among the paleoanthropological pigeons back in 1944, but it was wartime, and nobody seems to have taken much immediate notice....
