Some things never change. Physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c, Newton’s constant of gravitation, G, and the mass of the electron, me, are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of our universe. Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values....
In the 1800s English poet William Blake famously challenged his readers to “see a world in a grain of sand.” If only he had owned a modern microscope. Thanks to increasingly powerful optical tools, we now know that beneath the skin of every leaf, inside each speck of dirt, and within our own blood and bones is a cosmos of visual delights that usually remains unseen. Stunning pictures of the planet’s smallest critters—and of the tiniest features of larger organisms—have inspired some of the greatest shifts in how we think about life on earth....
NASA has delayed the launch of its huge, highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope by another 10 months. The liftoff of James Webb, the successor to the agency’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope, has been pushed back from May 2020 to March 2021, NASA officials announced today (June 27). The project’s development cost has risen from $8 billion to $8.8 billion, and its total lifecycle price tag now stands at $9.66 billion, they added....
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the largest, most detailed map of the Milky Way, pinpointing the 3D positions of 1.1 billion stars, 400 million of which were previously unknown to science. ESA’s Gaia space observatory mapped out the catalogue. It is expected to transform what astronomers know about the Galaxy—allowing researchers to discover new extrasolar planets, examine the distribution of dark matter, and fine-tune models of how stars evolve....
Editor’s Note (10/16/19): This article has been edited after posting for inclusion in the November 2019 issue of Scientific American. A stunning 12 million people could be forced to retreat from rising seas in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta within half a century. Geographer Philip Minderhoud and his colleagues at Utrecht University in the Netherlands arrived at this conclusion after analyzing ground-based topography measurements to which outside scientists’ access was limited for years....
A novel polymer network that soaks into wood and provides artefacts with structural support while simultaneously protecting against biological degradation has been developed by scientists in the UK. The team say the polymer network could be a ‘one-stop’ material for tackling the main issues conservators face when treating and drying historical objects. Large wooden artefacts such as the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s famous flagship, are currently treated with a polyethylene glycol (PEG) spray to prevent the wood from shrinking as it dries out....
As a 16-year-old boy, Albert Einstein imagined chasing after a beam of light in the vacuum of space. He mused on that vision for years, turning it over in his mind, asking questions about the relation between himself and the beam. Those mental investigations eventually led him to his special theory of relativity. Such thought experiments, which Einstein referred to by the German term gedankenexperiment, continue to nourish the heart of physics today, especially in the field of quantum mechanics, which he helped to establish....
Behavioral and political scientists have pointed fingers at political conservatives, as opposed to liberals, when it comes to spreading fake news stories. But not all conservatives do it, and sweeping generalizations threaten to condemn everyone who subscribes to conservative values. This approach risks even more dangerous polarization. Political leanings are far from the only determinants of behavior. Personality is a crucial influence, so our research on misinformation sharing has focused on that....
THE WOODLANDS, Texas – Planetary scientists expressed their displeasure this week with President Trump’s recently proposed federal budget, despite the increase of funding it would provide their field. NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green described his program’s proposed 16 percent budget bump as “incredibly good” during a talk Monday (March 20) at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. But many researchers in the packed room focused instead on the hit taken by Earth sciences, a cut that critics have linked to the politics of global warming....
Spider courtship is a risky business. In some species females routinely decide that they would rather eat a courting male than mate with him, and researchers have struggled for decades to understand why. A recent experiment with Iberian tarantulas suggests that the reason may depend on an individual spider’s personality. “When females are attacking and killing and eating males instead of mating with them, we ask the question[s], ‘Well isn’t this costly behavior?...
DALLAS—Stockholders at Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest private-sector oil company, passed a proposal yesterday to nominate outside candidates to the board, a move that could affect the company’s decisions on climate change. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, the fiduciary for New York city’s five public pension funds, which invests about $150 billion, filed the proxy access resolution, which received 62 percent support. The nonbinding resolution is the first measure opposed by Exxon’s board to pass since 2006, according to Stringer’s office....
Only a small fraction of human history is known through texts. For the rest, archaeology is the main source. By examining ruins, artifacts and remains, archaeologists have painstakingly constructed a series of pictures showing human societies as they existed thousands and even millions of years ago. It is much more difficult, however, to determine the processes that produced and changed these societies. Researchers are still struggling to understand the long chain of cause-and-effect (and chance events) stretching from our hominid ancestors of four million years ago–small bands of upright-walking primates with no stone tools and scarcely any conversation–to the communities and cultures we see around the world today....
Ceramic cookstoves in sub-Saharan Africa are proving effective at easing some health symptoms associated with inhalation of smoke and other pollutants from traditional cooking fires. But a key metric of health in children – pneumonia burden – appears to be unaffected by the stoves’ deployment in one western Kenyan district. Those findings, from Emory University and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in the latest American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, cast doubt on the ability of some higher-efficiency cookstoves to significantly improve the health of young children, according to the researchers....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Two seemingly unrelated national policy debates are afoot, and we can’t adequately address one unless we address the other. Health care reform has been the hottest topic. What to do about America’s aging infrastructure has been less animated but may be more pressing. Yet even as cracks in America’s health system and infrastructure expand, political divides between parties and within parties have stalled efforts to develop policies and implement solutions....
Humans prize rare objects–be they paintings, coins or rare species of amphibians. This proclivity toward the hard-to-find led researchers at Paris-Sud University to hypothesize that the overexploitation of species–via trophy hunting and exotic pet collecting, for example–can lead to their extinction. (Standard economic theory predicts that extreme exploitation will not actually lead to a species’s extinction, because the cost of obtaining it will be greater than its value in hand.) The authors mention the placement of an animal or plant on a conservation organization’s watch list as a means in which the value of a dwindling species can ratchet upward....
Kaiba Gionfriddo was six weeks old when he suddenly stopped breathing and turned blue at a restaurant. Kaiba’s parents quickly rushed him to the hospital where they learned that his left bronchial tube had collapsed because of a previously undetected birth defect. During the next few weeks the life-threatening attacks recurred, increasing in number until they became everyday events. Physicians and researchers, however, used some of the most sophisticated bioengineering techniques available to 3-D print a synthetic tube to hold the baby’s airway open....
Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....
NEW YORK — In 30 years as an oncologist, Dr. Howard Fine estimates he has treated some 20,000 patients with glioblastomas, the most deadly form of brain cancer, “and almost all of them are dead.” Of the 100 new glioblastoma patients he saw last month, “five years from now, only three will be alive,” he said. During a conversation this month in his office at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, Fine rattled off more dismal stats, like the many failed clinical trials of experimental drugs for glioblastoma; like the paltry increase in life expectancy for people with glioblastoma from 12 months in 1990 to 15 today; like the stupid (in hindsight) assumptions about how glioblastomas grow and how to study them in mice....
China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has launched its first national emissions-trading scheme. Such carbon-pricing mechanisms exist in around 45 countries already, but China’s scheme, which began trading last week, is the world’s biggest. It has been plagued by delays, and researchers argue it might not be ambitious enough to enable China to meet its emissions-reduction goals, including a 2030 deadline for peak emissions and a 2060 goal of net-zero emissions....
Any Montana angler worth a double-haul cast knows that the iconic state fish, the westslope cutthroat trout, has been crowded out by the non-native rainbow trout, first introduced to these rivers by well-meaning sportsmen in the 1880s. Now those invaders are taking over the cutthroat’s gene pool, too. A new study tracks just how rapidly cross-breeding between the two species has accelerated in the past 30 years. It’s invasive hybridization driven by climate change, and it could spell extinction for the ruby-throated native fish of the Big Sky state....
