Posts

Does cell phone radiation cause cancer? New studies show a correlation in lab rats, but the evidence may not resolve ongoing debates over causality or whether any effects arise in people. The ionizing radiation given off by sources such as x-ray machines and the sun boosts cancer risk by shredding molecules in the body. But the non-ionizing radio-frequency (RF) radiation that cell phones and other wireless devices emit has just one known biological effect: an ability to heat tissue by exciting its molecules....

Sights and sounds fill the world, presenting a panoply of possible foci for the brain. Yet most animals can home in on whatever sight most demands interest. Then the sounds associated with that sight–be it a loved one talking or a tasty meal skittering through the undergrowth–become all the clearer. This is attention and new research shows how an owl’s brain establishes the state. It also provides tantalizing evidence that brains from across the animal kingdom work the same way....

To win at the card game of bridge, which is played between two sets of partners, one player must somehow signal to their teammate the strength of the hand they hold. Telepathy would come in handy here. But telepathy isn’t real, right? That’s correct. For decades, however, physicists have suspected that if bridge were played using cards governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, something that looks uncannily like telepathy should be possible....

While the Americans were pursuing an atomic bomb during World War II via the Manhattan Project, Nazi Germany had a competing effort of its own dubbed the Uranium Club. The project, led by nuclear physicist Kurt Deibner, and the Allies’ high-stakes mission to foil it, take center stage in Neal Bascomb’s new book The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Superbomb. The German bomb design relied on the rare substance heavy water, which has an atypically high amount of the hydrogen isotope deuterium in it, to slow down the neutrons released by nuclear fission in order to create a chain reaction....

Thorsten Stafforst found his big break at the worst possible time. In 2012, his team at the University of Tübingen in Germany discovered that by linking enzymes to engineered strands of RNA, they could change the sequences of messenger RNA molecules in cells. In essence, they could rewrite the genome’s instructions en route to making proteins. The process could theoretically serve to treat numerous diseases, both ones with genetic underpinnings and those that would benefit from a change in the amount or type of a protein being produced....

About 13.8 billion years ago, just 400,000 years or so after the big bang, the universe abruptly went dark. Before that time, the entire visible universe was a hot, seething, roiling plasma—a dense cloud of protons, neutrons and electrons. If anyone had been there to see it, the universe would have looked like a pea soup fog, but blindingly bright. Around the 400,000-year mark, however, the expanding universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form at last—an event known as recombination....

Google’s Clips camera is a tiny sliver of a camera, the size of two Wheat Thins crackers. You can set it down anywhere or clip it to anything. Once you turn it on, you don’t have to press a button or use a self-timer to take pictures. The camera decides when to snap, based on Google’s artificial-intelligence algorithms. The Clips’s heart is in the right place. It solves some real problems for its target audience, which is parents (of kids or of pets)....

According to Greek mythology, the prophet Tiresias was harassing a pair of mating snakes when Hera decided to transform him into a woman as “punishment.” After he had lived in this form for seven years, she changed him back. Later, when asked by Hera and Zeus to settle an argument over which sex has the most pleasure in intercourse (Hera thought men; Zeus said women), Tiresias replied, Women. Definitely women. For this impertinence, Hera struck him blind....

Researchers assess the risk of species extinction with conservation models that combine factors that drive down populations—including habitat loss, hunting and overfishing—with the probability of chance disasters affecting the group. Even if human activities greatly affect a species, “all populations that go extinct [ultimately] suffer a string of unfortunate random events, such as a fire, that wipe out the last individuals,” says Brett Melbourne, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder....

They don’t call it the diabolical ironclad beetle for nothing: Phloeodes diabolicus, a rugged insect native to western North America, has an almost supernatural ability to resist compression and blunt hits. Now, 3D scans have revealed that layered structures in its interlocking wing cases make the beetle twice as hardy as some of its relatives — and could inspire engineers to create more durable designs. Phloeodes diabolicus’s toughness is thought to be unique among beetles....

Many large-scale farmers in the U.S. don’t care to hear much about climate change. Perhaps that is because agriculture—including livestock-rearing and forestry—is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas pollution. Nevertheless, American farmers, ranchers and foresters have begun to adopt practices that could cut pollution, or so says a progress report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the “Building Blocks for Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry.” Scientific American spoke with U....

“This is the decisive decade. This is the decade we must make decisions that avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” President Biden said at a virtual climate summit attended by the leaders of three dozen countries. But Biden’s plea, and his new climate plan, didn’t propel many of the world’s major contributors of greenhouse gases into action. China, the top emitter worldwide, resisted diplomatic pressure to reduce its carbon output over the next 10 years....

Climate change is a real, complex and widespread challenge that calls for a “new era of collaborative conservation.” That’s the message of a new strategic plan for dealing with the effects of global warming, released last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The blueprint is part of the U.S. Department of Interior’s overarching framework for climate change response, established by a September 2009 order from Sec. Ken Salazar....

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be split among three researchers who, over the course of the past two decades, puzzled out—at the atomic level—the function of the ribosome in piecing together proteins. The prize will be equally split between biophysicist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in England, biochemist Thomas Steitz of Yale University and molecular biologist Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, for their work in using x-ray crystallography to get a precise, atomic-scale map of the ribosome—the protein-making machine in all cells with nuclei that makes life possible....

Studies have shown that donor DNA in blood transfusion recipients persists for a number of days, sometimes longer, but its presence is unlikely to alter genetic tests significantly. Red blood cells, the primary component in transfusions, have no nucleus and no DNA. Transfused blood does, however, host a significant amount of DNA-containing white blood cells, or leukocytes—around a billion cells per unit (roughly one pint) of blood. Even blood components that have been filtered to remove donor white cells can have millions of leukocytes per unit....

When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president’s desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself—a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton—it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through…a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels,” President Johnson told Congress in February of that year....

Rising oceans bring more than high tides and nuisance flooding to coastal zones. They also carry salt water into inland aquifers where dissolved salts can spoil drinking water. A new research effort at the University of Pennsylvania aims to identify vulnerable water systems along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where rising seas pose water quality risks and develop strategies that can make utilities more resilient to saltwater intrusion. “I think when people typically consider sea-level rise, they have visions of coastal erosion or coastal roads going underwater, or maybe things like the weakening of structural supports of buildings like the Surfside condominium that collapsed in Miami,” Allison Lassiter, assistant professor of city and regional planning at Penn and the principal investigator behind the research effort, said in a telephone interview....

We all have personal reasons to be thankful this Thursday, but among them should be the fact that we exist in the first place—after all, it easily might have been otherwise. After the big bang the universe could have turned into unrelieved chaos or monotonous simplicity if just a few things had gone differently. The formation of the sun, Earth and all the species on it, especially intelligent life, required a parade of flukes....

Want to reduce your risk of dying at a young age? Try walking casually for as little as 2 minutes per hour. While it is well known that intense exercise can help you get fitter, a new study has found that even a little exercise can still go a long way. Study participants who traded time on the sofa for a total of 30 minutes of walking during the day reduced their risk of dying over a three-year period by 33 percent....

A long time ago in a galaxy far away—NGC 4993, to be exact—two neutron stars collided and created a spectacular light show. After billions of years spent slowly circling each other, in their last moments the two degenerate stars spiraled around each other thousands of times before finally smashing together at a significant fraction of light-speed, likely creating a black hole. The merger was so violent it shook the universe, emitting some 200 million suns’ worth of energy as perturbations in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves....