Posts

One of the first things that anatomy students learn is that the brain is divided down the center. In most people, one half, or hemisphere, plays a dominant role. Handedness has long been a crude measure of hemispheric dominance, because each side of the brain controls the opposite side of the body. Right-handers, for instance, are likely to have dominant left hemispheres. Today researchers are realizing that studying ambidextrous children (who have no dominant hand) could yield insights into the consequences of an unusually symmetrical brain....

SHANGHAI—For over three decades the Chinese government dismissed warnings from scientists and environmentalists that its Three Gorges Dam—the world’s largest—had the potential of becoming one of China’s biggest environmental nightmares. But last fall, denial suddenly gave way to reluctant acceptance that the naysayers were right. Chinese officials staged a sudden about-face, acknowledging for the first time that the massive hydroelectric dam, sandwiched between breathtaking cliffs on the Yangtze River in central China, may be triggering landslides, altering entire ecosystems and causing other serious environmental problems—and, by extension, endangering the millions who live in its shadow....

The EPA has started flexing its newfound powers to control chemicals in the U.S. Last week the agency announced the first 10 compounds it will evaluate for safety under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The legislation, amended last June, strengthens the agency’s authority to regulate new and existing chemicals. Its list, which includes substances such as asbestos, is just the beginning of its revamped efforts. In the coming years, the U....

The malaria parasite is one of the most widely studied disease-causing organisms, yet there is still no effective vaccine available to prevent the deadly illness. Two new experimental vaccine studies indicate some progress towards that goal, one that uses whole, live parasites in the vaccine production process, and one that stalks the parasite as it begins to spread through a patient’s blood. Research out Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine found for the first time that a vaccine targeting the malaria parasite at the blood stage, which is when the parasite is emerging from the liver into the patient’s bloodstream, could provide protection against specific strains of the disease....

The federal flood insurance program paid $1.2 billion in claims in 2020, breaking the $1 billion threshold for a record sixth consecutive year, according to an E&E News analysis of federal records. Eight counties’in Alabama, Florida and Louisiana’accounted for half of the claims payments, which arose from a series of storms that caused major but not catastrophic damage during last year’s record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season. There were a record 30 named storms from June to December including 13 hurricanes and six major hurricanes reaching Category 3 or higher....

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Adapted from How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, by Christie Wilcox. Copyright © 2016 by Christie Wilcox. I don’t know if cockroaches dream, but i imagine that if they do, jewel wasps feature prominently in their nightmares. These small, solitary tropical wasps are of little concern to us humans; after all, they don’t manipulate our minds so that they can serve us up as willing, living meals to their newborns, as they do to unsuspecting cockroaches....

In the Projectile Motion episode of NBC Learn’s “The Science of NFL Football,” you see that punted footballs travel in an arc known to mathematicians as a parabola. In any football game both teams square off against each other and against a shared opponent as well—gravity. Earth’s gravitational pull makes long-range passing a challenge and pulls down even the hardest-struck punts and placekicks. Because gravity is a constant, experienced quarterbacks and kickers can account for its effects to move the ball downfield as efficiently as possible....

Any award for the most productive observatory in history would certainly go to the Hubble Space Telescope. But the Hubble’s days are numbered—its instruments and orbit continue to degrade—and its inevitable demise will result in a significant data-collection gap for astrophysics and cosmology. Because Earth’s atmosphere filters out most ultraviolet wavelengths, they are accessible only from space, where Hubble lives. Neither of NASA’s next-generation observatories—the 6.5-meter James Webb Space Telescope and a 2....

WASHINGTON—President Trump famously called the House plan to repeal and replace Obamacare “mean”—entreating Senate Republicans to make their version of the bill more generous. Just hours before the Senate unveiled its draft legislation, he repeated that plea. “I’ve been talking about a plan with more heart. I’ve said, ‘Add some money to it,’” Trump told a crowd in Iowa Wednesday night. Now that the Senate’s plan is out, does it pass the White House test?...

While the world waits for a COVID-19 vaccine, many researchers are focused on developing effective therapeutics that can be rolled out quickly and cheaply. Monoclonal antibodies—a potentially promising laboratory-manufactured therapy modeled on antibodies extracted from the blood of recovering patients—made headlines recently when President Trump received a not-yet-approved antibody cocktail made by the company Regeneron. And pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly recently announced that its monoclonal antibody reduced the risk of hospitalization in 300 people who had mild or moderate symptoms of COVID-19, in a small clinical trial....

Go Ahead, Put it off I disagree with Trisha Gura in “I’ll Do It Tomorrow.” I don’t see procrastination as a problem to be fixed. In my corporate job, I found that the longer I procrastinated, the more likely the “need” for that activity would evaporate. Now, in my software development and musical activities, I find that in the time between procrastinating and actually getting down to it, I very often come up with a more efficient or creative idea than the way I would originally have approached the task....

Tiny robots that swim through our blood vessels attacking viruses and malignant cells have not quite crossed the line that separates science fiction from science—but there might be a way to jump-start their development. Engineering nimble robots that are smaller than blood cells is extremely challenging. Rather than design them from scratch, some scientists have been experimenting with the idea of enlisting an army of sophisticated nanobots already at our disposal: the thousands of species of bacteria swarming inside our bodies right now....

Gravity, one of the constants of life, not to mention physics, is less than constant when it comes to being measured. Various experiments over the years have come up with perplexingly different values for the strength of the force of gravity, and the latest calculation just adds to the confusion. The results of a painstaking 10-year experiment to calculate the value of “big G,” the universal gravitational constant, were published this month—and they’re incompatible with the official value of G, which itself comes from a weighted average of various other measurements that are mostly mutually incompatible and diverge by more than 10 times their estimated uncertainties....

Neighborhood Watched? Each time I read about our “loss of privacy,” such as in Daniel J. Solove’s examination of effects of social-networking sites [“The End of Privacy?”], it makes me laugh. People seem often to confuse privacy with anonymity, which we invented only a few generations ago. Earlier, most Americans lived in small towns or villages, which provide limited privacy and no anonymity. The rise of big cities gave us anonymity, which lets some of us do things we would probably not have done in the villages, where there wasn’t much crime because no one was unknown....

Key concepts: Reaction time Neuroscience Gravity Introduction Think fast! Have you ever noticed that when someone unexpectedly tosses a softball at you, you need a little time before you can move to catch it (or duck)? That’s because when your eyes see an incoming signal such as a softball, your brain needs to first process what’s happening—and then you can take action. In this activity, you can measure just how long it takes for you to react, and compare reaction times with your friends and family....

Secrets of the Whales by Brian Skerry Streaming on Disney+, starting April 22 Despite being warm-blooded, air-breathing mammals descended from land animals, whales give birth, nurse and raise their young entirely at sea. This sweeping four-part series takes a riveting view of these mysterious and mesmerizing ocean dwellers. Executive produced by James Cameron and narrated by Sigourney Weaver, the series’ chief message is that whales are more than sea creatures: they have sophisticated communication, close-knit families and even culture....

In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. elections, Russian hackers penetrated state voter-registration databases, and Russia’s Internet Research Agency targeted millions of social media users with pro-Trump propaganda posts and ads. On Election Day, voting machines malfunctioned in at least nine states. Even now, nearly a whole election cycle later, about a quarter of the states do not insist on voting equipment that generates the paper trails needed for rigorous postelection audits....

Standing eye level with oncoming lava, in a snow pit he is digging at Tolbachik volcano in Russia, Ben Edwards is hoping his world doesn’t violently explode in the next few minutes. Several years of watching lava trundle over ice and snow has taught Edwards, a volcanologist at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, that he’s probably safe — at this spot, the volcano’s incandescent rock rarely sparked the kind of blasts typically seen when lava meets water....

Sooner or later everything goes wireless. Over the decades we’ve figured out how to eliminate the cables that bring us sound, video, text, phone calls and data. Today there’s only one major cable left to eliminate: the power cord. Imagine if we could tap into power wirelessly! We’d all quit bellyaching about our phones being dead by dinnertime. Battery life would become a meaningless spec. A new era of gadgets could be thinner, sleeker, lighter and more flexible—because they wouldn’t have to devote such a huge chunk of their volume to batteries....

For those just entering the climate field or graduating soon, President-elect Donald Trump’s choices on funding and policy will set the tone for their careers. His budget decisions will dictate priorities, raising the profile of some aspects of research while chilling other areas. It’s not just a question of science policy choices. Trump’s proposals to deport immigrants, cancel certain types of visasand increase surveillance of Muslims could stem the flow of science and ideas....