After being directed for almost 30 years at substances that destroy ozone, the Montreal Protocol will for the first time target a group of greenhouse gases. Beginning today in Kigali, Rwanda, member states of the United Nations are finalizing the terms of what could be the largest commitment to reducing global warming since the Paris Agreement on climate last December. Delegates are likely to take till the meeting’s final day on Oct....
In a rare direct photo of a world beyond Earth, astronomers have spotted a planet 13 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our own solar system. The planet orbits a star called Kappa Andromedae that is 2.5 times the mass of the sun and is located 170 light-years away from Earth. As a gas giant larger than Jupiter, it’s classified as a “super-Jupiter.” The object is an interesting test case for theories of planet formation, scientists say....
Imagine if you could take living cells, load them into a printer, and squirt out a 3D tissue that could develop into a kidney or a heart. Scientists are one step closer to that reality, now that they have developed the first printer for embryonic human stem cells. In a new study, researchers from the University of Edinburgh have created a cell printer that spits out living embryonic stem cells. The printer was capable of printing uniform-size droplets of cells gently enough to keep the cells alive and maintain their ability to develop into different cell types....
In January 1982 surgeons at the University of Utah implanted the first permanent artificial heart into Barney Clark, a 61-year-old dentist from Seattle who was hours from death as he went into the operating room. He would live another 112 days. The work was a triumph for Willem Kolff, founder of the university’s Division of Artificial Organs and head of the team that developed Clark’s new heart. Yet in the weeks that followed the surgery, Kolff’s name began to be left out of the frantic media coverage....
Boosters have billed it as the cheek swab that could save football: an easy genetic test that promises to identify which young athletes are likely to suffer the most severe consequences from a concussion. The idea is to nudge those kids away from contact sports, while giving their less susceptible peers the green light to hit the gridiron. “Isn’t it just better to know than to not know?” one gene testing company asked in a Facebook ad....
Research universities have been abuzz with what some are calling the “next big thing”: convergence, the integration of the life, engineering and physical sciences. This wholesale merging of minds is being billed as critical to helping researchers answer the most profound questions: How does the brain work? What causes cancer? How can we make energy more sustainable? “The convergence revolution is a paradigm shift,” write the authors of a recent white paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
The world you see around you appears perfectly stationary, even though your eyes dart back and forth two to three times every second in little hops called saccades. For more than a century researchers have assumed that the brain must keep track of the impulses that cause these tiny motions, so as to subtract their effect from our visual awareness. Now researchers have identified a circuit in the monkey brain that seems to play this role....
Many studies show that teens who use marijuana face a greater risk of later developing schizophrenia or symptoms of it, especially if they have a genetic predisposition. For instance, one 15-year study followed more than 45,000 Swedes who initially had no psychotic symptoms. The researchers determined that subjects who smoked marijuana by age 18 were 2.4 times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than their nonsmoking peers, and this risk increased with the frequency of cannabis use....
By David Cyranoski of Nature magazineThe likely demise of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt mission has dashed China’s hopes for its first Mars orbiter, Yinghuo-1, which was piggybacking on the larger craft (see Russia gets the red planet blues'). But it is a relatively small setback for a nation that has notched up a string of high-profile space successes in recent years, including this month's heavenly kiss’ of two unmanned orbiters, Shenzhou-8 and Tiangong-1 – a milestone in the country’s effort to build a manned space station, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace'), by the end of the decade....
Editor’s Note (8/21/19): This story is being republished today in light of news that U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not plan to vaccinate families held in migrant detention centers against the flu. Less than a month after opening a new detention facility in Carrizo Springs, Tex., for migrant children who have crossed the border without a parent or legal guardian, the Department of Health and Human Services now says it has released all of the children to sponsors (usually family members, according to the agency’s Web site) or moved them to other facilities in HHS’ network....
On June 26, 2007, Wendy Chung, director of clinical genetics at Columbia University, drove to the New York City borough of Queens with a delicate request for the Croatian matriarchs of a star-crossed family. She asked the two sisters, one 82 and the other 89, if they would donate some of their skin cells for an ambitious, highly uncertain experiment that, if it succeeded, promised a double payoff. One, it might accelerate the search for treatments for the incurable disease that ran in their family....
Forests are sometimes called the lungs of the earth—they breathe in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and store it in tree trunks until the forest dies or burns. A new study, however, shows that forests devastated by drought may lose their ability to store carbon over a much longer period than previously thought, reducing their role as a buffer between humans’ carbon emissions and a changing climate. The study, published Thursday in the journal Science by a team of by researchers at the University of Utah and Princeton University, shows that the world’s forests take an average of between two and four years to return to their normal growth and carbon dioxide absorption rate following a severe drought—a finding that has significant climate implications....
While most people were doing what they could to avoid the epicenter of the new coronavirus outbreak, W. Ian Lipkin quietly flew to China to get closer. W. Ian Lipkin. Credit: Columbia University Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, also traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2012 to investigate the first cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). And he went to China in the early 2000s to study severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which killed nearly 800 people....
The hunt for gravitational waves is on again—this time assisted by the quirks of quantum mechanics. Three massive detectors—the two in the United States called LIGO and one in Italy known as Virgo—officially resumed collecting data on April 1, after a 19-month shutdown for upgrades. Thanks in part to a quantum phenomenon known as light squeezing, the machines promise not only to spot more gravitational waves—ripples in space-time that can reveal a wealth of information about the cosmos—but also to make more detailed detections....
Cybersecurity people like to say that there are two types of organizations—those that have been hit and those that do not know it yet. Recent headlines should prove that this joke is largely true. Cybercriminals stole the credit-card information and personal data of millions of people from companies that included Target, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase. Security researchers discovered fundamental flaws in Internet building blocks, such as the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library....
Some gestures can be understood almost anywhere: pointing to direct someone’s attention, for instance. New research shows that certain vocalizations can also be iconic and recognizable to people around the world—even when a speaker is not simply imitating a well-known sound. These findings, published in Scientific Reports, may help explain the rise of modern spoken language. In 2015 language researchers challenged some English speakers to make up sounds representing various basic concepts (“sleep,” “child,” “meat,” “rock,” and more)....
As far as I am aware, the FBI doesn’t usually send you a pop-up online notice, asking if you could kindly pay a fine for child pornography. Perhaps I should check with Edward Snowden to be sure. Still, 21-year-old Virginian Jay Riley was sufficiently stunned to receive a pop-up “FBI Warning” telling him to pay a fine for child pornography that he went to his local police station in Prince William County....
Stephen Elop, the outgoing CEO of Nokia and leader-to-be of Microsoft’s phone business, speaks at a press conference in Finland. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) The decision to sell Nokia’s devices and services division to Microsoft for $7.2 billion was a difficult choice, but market dynamics meant it was the only practical one, the Finnish company’s outgoing CEO Stephen Elop and interim CEO Risto Siilasmaa said Tuesday. “We need more combined muscle to truly break through with consumers,” Elop said in a press conference in Espoo, Finland, where Nokia has its headquarters....
On a Thursday in early August, psychologist Steven Kurtz is preparing one of his clients, Maria, for a therapy session. A calm, cheerful woman with long, dark hair, Maria has been in training at the Child Mind Institute in New York City with her six-year-old son, Ryan (not his real name), for months to ready him for this day. Her goal seems simple: to coax Ryan to obey a simple command....
Dear EarthTalk: Renewable-energy production in the solar and wind markets currently receives about $7 billion in government subsidies annually, but is still not competitive against fossil fuels on a large scale. To what extent should the U.S. continue to prop up these industries as they compete against dirty energy?—Jack Morgan, Richmond, Va. Given the importance of abundant amounts of energy for Americans, the federal government tends to subsidize all forms of energy development, including fossil fuels and renewables....
