As a tennis fan, I marvel at Roger Federer’s ability to gracefully execute some of the most difficult shots I’ve ever seen. Other sports have their greats: Lebron James on the basketball court, Michael Phelps in the pool and Lance Armstrong on the road. These are just a few of the athletes that continually wow us with their agility and uncanny power and strength. We know them for what they can do from the neck down....
Mr. Fusion. If you’re a fan of the Back to the Future" trilogy, you will recognize that as the name of the Cuisinart-like machine that converted beer and banana peels into nuclear power for the vaunted “flux capacitor” that allowed Dr. Emmett Brown to time travel. It is also the name—“whether we like it or not”—of a new, mobile refinery that turns kitchen waste into fuel and, ultimately, electricity, according to Jerry Warner, president of Defense Life Sciences, the company that has coordinated the research to build the first working prototype of such a machine for the U....
In the late 13th century, Native Americans living in cliff dwellings in the what is now the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest abandoned their homes en masse. They moved into river valleys, closer to the water that had become a scarce resource in the midst of one of the worst “megadroughts” to hit the western part of the continent in the last millennium. Scientists who study climate history have long been concerned that rising temperatures could help tip the already dry region into megadroughts (generally defined as droughts lasting 20 years or longer) again more easily in the future—a major worry in a rapidly growing part of the country that has already had trouble meeting water needs during nearly two decades of drought....
On the morning of March 30, fishermen casting their nets in the Burias Pass, a centrally located channel in the Philippine archipelago, got the catch—not to mention surprise—of their lives: a megamouth shark so rare that some people still consider it a “cryptid”, a creature that is seen so infrequently science can’t confirm its existence. That’s likely an overstatement when it comes to the megamouth, first spotted in 1976 in waters near the Hawaiian island of Oahu....
On a hazy day in November, Hardeep Singh received a text message from the COVID-19 testing system at Foster Farms poultry company saying that his mother had tested positive for the coronavirus. He got the alert because his mother, a 63-year-old line worker at one of the company’s meat-packing plants in California’s San Joaquin Valley, doesn’t speak English and doesn’t own a smartphone. Singh couldn’t reach her as she continued to handle chicken parts alongside her co-workers....
We are all products of our genes and environment, of nature and nurture. Thanks to research on parenting and child development, people are more aware than ever before of how varied environmental circumstances—including social and emotional experience—may help or hurt young people. But when scientists, policy makers, and ordinary citizens discuss developmental research, they often make a simple but significant mistake: they tend to assume that findings apply to all children equally....
Cells come in many different shapes and sizes. Our blood alone carries a rich assortment—from the flat, doughnut-shaped red blood cell to the more globular, foreign-particle-guzzling macrophage—one of the largest cells in the body. The field of cytometry, or cell measurement—which helps doctors diagnose problems including cancer, in which cells morph into unusual forms—has long depended on the ability to sort cells into their biological components such as DNA, RNA and proteins....
Originally posted on the Nature news blog The iconic ‘Keeling curve,’ a 56-year record of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, will continue with support from American philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt. A five-year, $500,000 grant, announced on September 3, will help ease funding pressure on the greenhouse-gas monitoring effort run by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The measurements were started at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in 1958 by Charles Keeling....
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Gale Ridge could tell something was wrong as soon as the man walked into her office at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. He was smartly dressed in a collared shirt and slacks, but his skin didn’t look right: It was bright pink, almost purple — and weirdly glassy. Without making eye contact, he sat hunched in the chair across from Ridge and began to speak. He was an internationally renowned physician and researcher....
In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, when most of lower Manhattan was a sea of darkness, New York University’s Washington Square campus shone like a beacon in the night. “The entire neighborhood was dark – everything. And then there was us,” said John Bradley, NYU’s assistant vice president of sustainability, energy and technical services. “It really was a little surreal.” Swaths of Manhattan below 36th Street were powerless after Sandy hit, due to pre-emptive shutdowns and severe flooding that knocked out a power station in the East Village....
Bones often come in complex, delicate shapes, making it hard to find matching natural replacements for them in patients suffering from injuries, diseases or birth defects. Now researchers have grown bone grafts in the exact shape of a desired bone, an advance that could help provide doctors with just what they need for face, skull and other skeletal reconstructions. Although missing bone can be replaced by titanium, “there is no better substitute for lost tissue than living tissue,” bioengineer Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University explains....
Last year scientists at drug giant Pfizer noticed something peculiar. Rats in a routine study were excreting unusually low levels of a metabolite in their urine called hippuric acid. It was a metabolic oddity that could throw off further laboratory results. So the scientists dug deeper. The rats had been reared at the same facility in Raleigh, N.C., as another group. The metabolite levels should have all been the same. But curiously, the rats in question had been bred in one particular room....
Leaders of Los Angeles, Beijing and more than two dozen other Chinese and American municipalities will announce sweeping climate change commitments today as they prepare for a landmark U.N. deal in December. The promises of 11 Chinese cities to peak greenhouse gas emissions, some by the end of this decade, will eliminate 1.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually, according to the White House. That’s about the amount of carbon pollution Japan or Brazil produces each year....
The Trump administration has spent four years consciously ignoring—and often working against—scientists’ efforts to raise the alarm about climate change. In the wake of hurricanes, floods, wildfires and extreme heat, President Trump has continually questioned the science of global warming. A deep cynicism of scientists flavored his policy decisions, such as withdrawing the U.S. from a global climate agreement and unraveling dozens of environmental regulations. Trump’s unchanging stance on climate is punctuated against the backdrop of historic disasters and momentous scientific strides that have occurred since he took office....
Upping the European Union’s emissions reduction target from 20 percent to 30 percent would reap €30.5 billion a year in health savings by 2020, according to an analysis released Tuesday by two health groups. The savings come as the air pollutants associated with transportation and power generation - soot, smog and sulfur dioxide - decrease amid efforts to improve efficiency and abandon fossil fuels, according to the analysis. If Europe were to move to a 30 percent target, the €30....
Deep inside Virginia’s Luray Caverns, a song rises above the steady drip-drip-drip of water echoing upon limestone. The tune emanates not from an cellphone ignored by a visiting tourist, but from an acoustical oddity: the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Technically, this stalacpipe organ is not an organ at all, but a percussion instrument known as a lithophone. Instead of blowing air through pipes, it operates by rhythmically striking 37 different stalactites scattered across the 3....
What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” wrote German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was the first to fathom the uncertainty inherent in quantum physics. To those who think of science as a direct path to the truth about the world, this quote must be surprising, perhaps even upsetting. Is Heisenberg saying that our scientific theories are contingent on us as observers? If he is, and we take him seriously, does this mean that what we call scientific truth is nothing but a big illusion?...
Stand at any corner along via del Babuino and it won’t be hard to tell the locals from the tourists. The guidebook holders navigate the swirling vespas and honking Fiats with a mix of hesitation and mad dashing, while the neighborhood residents cross with relative ease; assertive and calm. And it’s not just in Rome: in cities around the world local pedestrians, with a different sense of how drivers will behave, stand apart from occasional visitors....
In spring a band of brainy rodents made headlines for zipping through mazes and mastering memory tricks. Scientists credited the impressive intellectual feats to human cells transplanted into their brains shortly after birth. But the increased mental muster did not come from neurons, the lanky nerve cells that swap electrical signals and stimulate muscles. The mice benefited from human stem cells called glial progenitors, immature cells poised to become astrocytes and other glia cells, the supposed support cells of the brain....
In my August Scientific American column I wrote about the rise of two populations with a growing mistrust of one another: the technologically savvy, and the technologically inexperienced—the Knows and the Know-Nots. A problem often arises when a product is marketed to the whole world without specifying which audience it’s for. Novices struggle with the complexity; tech-heads struggle with the inflexibility. It’s not that nobody cares. Over the years the big tech companies have taken stabs at making their products accessible to both crowds—by offering an option to use a stripped-down, simplified interface....
