Posts

By 2021, electricity use in the west Los Angeles area may be in for a climate change-fighting evolution. For many years, the tradition has been that on midsummer afternoons, engineers will turn on what they call a “peaker,” a natural gas-burning power plant In Long Beach. It is needed to help the area’s other power plants meet the day’s peak electricity consumption. Thus, as air conditioners max out and people arriving home from work turn on their televisions and other appliances, the juice will be there....

Psychologists at New York University analyzed text from nearly three billion Web pages and compared how often words for person (“individual,” “people,” and so on) were associated with terms for a man (“male,” “he”) or a woman (“female,” “she”). They found that male-related words overlapped with “person” more frequently than female words did. The cultural concept of a person, from this perspective, is more often a man than a woman, according to the study, which was published on April 1 in Science Advances....

As Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, George Shultz helped negotiate the most successful global environmental treaty to date: the Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals. Those chemicals also act as potent greenhouse gases, so the agreement also makes him the negotiator of one of the most effective global climate treaties ever, despite being part of an administration that famously removed solar technology from the White House roof....

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom. —Apocyphal, often attributed to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl “We need to learn to live with it.” That, essentially, is the current response being put forward by the United States government and many state governments, as COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, continues to wreak devastation around the country....

As infrastructure talks progress on Capitol Hill, Democrats are calling for any legislative package to address climate change. That would have been unthinkable last year, when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. Indeed, when President Trump initially proposed his $1 trillion infrastructure plan last year, it sparked little discussion about global warming. And the plan ultimately failed to materialize due to disagreement over funding options. But momentum is again building for an infrastructure package to materialize by late spring....

New genetic findings suggest that early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction. The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population—an indicator of genetic diversity—of early human species back then, including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens, was about 18,500 individuals (it is thought that modern humans evolved from H. erectus), says Lynn Jorde, a human geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City....

Sixteen months after leaving the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for Google’s health sciences division, psychiatrist Tom Insel is on the move again. The former NIMH director, who left Google on May 5, is starting his own company. Insel’s group, called Mindstrong, will try to infer a person’s mental-health status by analysing the way they use smartphones. Insel stepped down as NIMH director in December 2015 in order to start a mental-health program called Verily within Google’s Life Sciences group....

Parents never want their tots to learn to fumble over words, but they need not worry about their own “uhs” and “ums”—­such filled pauses may actu­­ally improve kids’ ability to pick up language. Such vocal hesitations, called dis­fluencies, tend to occur before we use a word that is infrequent or unfamiliar in our speech. They also precede words used for the first time in a conversation. Disfluencies keep adults tuned in and help them process the real words that come next....

Climate change is back on the table in Congress—at least in the House of Representatives, where Democrats took control earlier this month. As part of an effort to focus more on combating global warming, Democrats have revived a special House committee on climate that Republicans had previously eliminated. But the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis (pdf) already faces big obstacles. The Trump administration has rolled back numerous environmental initiatives, even declaring it is pulling the U....

Learning to play a musical instrument relies on understanding concepts, such as fractions and ratios, that are important for mathematical achievement. But the precise relation between music and math—whether musical training promotes mathematical ability, or mathematical skill influences musical ability, or whether these skills simply develop in parallel—remains unclear. Previous research has linked instrumental musical training to mathematical achievement, but this link is highly debated. For example, students who are musically trained have been observed to have higher mathematics grades and standardized test scores, compared with students who have not studied music....

“I feel cold and lonely without you….” It sounds like a line out of a cheesy power ballad, but a new study suggests that social rejection literally makes us feel chilly. Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli of the University of Toronto had 65 volunteers recall a situation in which they felt either socially welcomed or excluded. Then, under the pretense that the maintenance staff wanted the information, the researchers asked the volunteers to estimate the current room temperature....

Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Available on iPad, print, and digital formats. PLANT BIOLOGY • A devastating disease could wipe out the entire U.S. citrus industry. The affliction, huanglongbing (HLB), is killing citrus trees from Florida to California, the two biggest producers of citrus fruits in the U....

Editor’s note: This story was updated on September 27, 2018, to state that Thomas Gernon studied earthquakes in Oklahoma while the new research was global in nature. When oil and gas companies drill wells on land, the technique they use to avoid unleashing earthquakes can actually create powerful tremors, according to a new study. Those tremors seem to travel even further from the well than do the types of quakes that drillers are trying to forestall....

TREND WATCH: Theoretical physicists are churning out papers at a remarkable rate as they rush to analyze tantalizing hints of a new particle in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Experimenters revealed their observations in a December 15 announcement at CERN, the European laboratory of particle physics that hosts the LHC near Geneva. Since then, 95 research manuscripts have been posted to the preprint server arXiv discussing the hypothetical particle, even though the statistical significance of the findings is low....

Despite decades of fine-tuning, the average internal combustion engine still converts only about 20 percent of its fuel into power and spews a variety of emissions harmful to people and the environment. With customers and government more interested than ever in energy efficiency and pollution, engine designers are feeling the heat. So engineers are turning to sophisticated simulation software to design and test ideas long before they build engine prototypes....

COVID vaccines have proved to be magnificent successes, dramatically decreasing the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. However, there has been uncertainty about whether vaccinated people who still get infected—perhaps with very mild symptoms, or none at all—might pass on the virus to others. Such silent spread could complicate efforts to control the pandemic. In recent months, there has been a deluge of data on the risk of transmission after vaccination....

This January a 511-pound monster of a bluefin tuna sold at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market for $175,000—by far the highest price paid for a fish in nine years. By that afternoon, customers at Kyubey, a Michelin-starred restaurant a stone’s throw from the market, were dining on the tuna’s fatty belly, or toro, the most opulent and rich cut from the most valuable fish in the world. Japanese diners could soon face much higher bills for bluefin....

CANADA Researchers at the University of Toronto announced that they have recovered the world’s oldest water. Found in a mine at a depth of nearly three kilometers, the liquid dates to at least two billion years ago. U.S. The U.S. Office of Naval Research demonstrated the latest version of its “drone” boats in the Chesapeake Bay off Virginia. The navy hopes to use the unmanned, autonomous craft—which are not yet ready for deployment—to escort ships, conduct surveillance and carry out other missions....

When he retired after 26 years as an investigator with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of the Inspector General, George Mulley thought his final report was one of his best. Mulley had spent months looking into why a pipe carrying cooling water at the Byron nuclear plant in Illinois had rusted so badly that it burst. His report cited lapses by a parade of NRC inspectors over six years and systemic weaknesses in the way the NRC monitors corrosion....

The World Bank Group announced yesterday it plans to mobilize more than $40 billion in clean energy and climate-friendly investments by 2020 and enact a variety of measures to help developing countries meet their international pledges to curb climate change. The World Bank Group’s Climate Change Action Plan, unveiled yesterday, aims to support the landmark U.N. deal struck in Paris last year by scaling up low-carbon investment and encouraging client countries to do the same while also encouraging nations to put a price on carbon....