In a recent study sponsored by the Business Roundtable and the nonprofit group Change the Equation, 97 percent of the CEOs of major American companies identified a lack of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills among the national workforce as a problem for their businesses. Over the next five years these firms will need to hire approximately one million new employees with these skills and more than 600,000 with applied science backgrounds....
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....
What keeps people awake at night? For baseball players, it might be a late-breaking fastball. It looks like you could hit it right out of the park until it curves. For meteorologists, an equivalent problem is called the Madden-Julian oscillation, or the MJO. It consists of patterns identified by two scientists in 1971 that suggested a connection between far-flung weather extremes, like monsoons in India and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, and a large blob of warming water in the Indian Ocean....
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased at an unprecedented pace in the last two years, even as Trump administration officials discount the relevance of a number that many climate scientists find deeply disturbing. The CO2 measured at the Mauna Loa Baseline Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii hit 405.1 parts per million last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced. That’s an increase of 3 parts per million, which matched the record of 3 parts per million in 2015....
Ellen Heber-Katz, a scientist at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, used to study autoimmunity—that was until she noticed something strange in the mice she was using to model lupus: The small holes that she had poked in their ears to distinguish the animals from one another kept closing. At first she thought her postdoc, Lise Clark, had forgotten to make the holes in the first place. But Clark clearly remembered doing it....
The Colorado River has a long journey. It flows from mountains, runs by cities, winds through remote, rust-colored canyons and touches seven states before entering Mexico. It’s a natural wonder, but also a life source of the more than 30 million people who rely on it. But in recent years, the Colorado River has become less reliable. Since 1999, abnormally low precipitation totals and hot and dry conditions have brought reservoir water levels close to record lows....
The Ashy Storm-Petrel, a tiny, dark-gray seabird, nests on 11 rocky, isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coasts of California and Mexico. Weighing little more than a hefty greeting card and forced to contend with invasive rats, mice and cats, aggressive seagulls, oil spills and sea-level rise, it faces an outsize fight for survival. At last count, only 10,000 remained. Several other species of storm-petrels are similarly endangered....
In the early hours of July 4, Deep Impact’s 820-pound “Impactor” collided with the Comet Tempel 1, providing scientists with a celestial show that should garner new insight into the evolution of comets. “You can not help but get a big flash when objects meet at 23,000 miles per hour,” says Deep Impact investigator Pete Schultz of Brown University. The resulting debris jet from the crash shot out from the comet’s nucleus at 1,800 kilometers an hour....
Key concepts Senses Sound waves Hearing Ear anatomy Physics Biology Introduction Have you ever been puzzled by a faint noise nearby, trying to discover what it is? Maybe you turned your head or cupped your hand behind your ear, hoping to hear the sound better. What if we could make this cup huge? Some animals know the answer. Many animals with exceptional hearing have big ears. A serval (a type of African wildcat), for example, can hear a mouse wiggling its way underground....
Congress should allow U.S. EPA to proceed with plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, a coalition of public health groups said yesterday. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for protecting the public’s health from climate change, and we urge you to fully support the EPA in fulfilling its responsibilities,” reads a letter the coalition sent yesterday to Congress and the White House. “We also urge opposition to any efforts to weaken, delay or block the EPA from protecting the public’s health from these risks....
Over the last several billion years, sediments on the earth have been raised and lowered, cooled and heated, twisted and straightened. Any possible fossil traces of life from such dim reaches of time have become extremely difficult to distinguish from the surrounding rock. Indeed, all of the oldest putative signatures of life are smudged and disputed. But a new analysis claims to significantly bolster the theory that some peculiar rocks from Australia contain some of the first signs of life....
Lucy? Jane? Melissa? The next time someone’s name stays frustratingly on the tip of your tongue, don’t feel bad—your brain is just doing its job. Forgetting not only helps the brain conserve energy, it also improves our short-term memory and recall of important details, according to two recent studies. Stanford University scientists asked students to study 240 word pairs and then instructed them to memorize only a small subset of the list, requiring the students to selectively retain some pairs and mentally discard others....
According to the old quip, a practical fusion reactor will always be about 20 years away. Nowadays that feels a bit optimistic. The world’s largest plasma fusion research project, the ITER reactor in southern France, won’t begin fusion experiments until 2026 at the earliest. Engineers will need to run tests on ITER for at least a decade before they will be ready to design the follow-up to that project—an experimental prototype that could extract usable energy from the fusing plasma trapped in a magnetic bottle....
These are incredibly exciting times for space exploration. NASA currently operates more than 50 robotic spacecraft that are studying Earth and reaching throughout the solar system, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond. Another 40 unmanned NASA missions are in development, and space agencies in Europe, Russia, Japan, India and China are running or building their own robotic craft. With such an armada at our disposal, delivering a stream of scientific data from so many distant ports, you might think that researchers like me who are involved in robotic space exploration would dismiss astronaut missions as costly and unnecessary....
Long gone are the days when physicists could validate new theories by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. From the discovery of the Higgs boson to the detection of gravitational waves, recent findings in physics have required a staggering level of precision. In search of this precision, scientists are increasingly turning to space as the ultimate laboratory. The latest mystery that physicists hope to unravel beyond Earth is the neutron lifetime....
As Earth-observing satellites become more plentiful and climate models more powerful, researchers who study global warming are facing a deluge of data. Some are now turning to the latest trend in artificial intelligence (AI) to help trawl through all the information, in the hope of discovering new climate patterns and improving forecasts. “Climate is now a data problem,” says Claire Monteleoni, a computer scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC who has helped to pioneer the marriage of machine-learning techniques with climate science....
Momentum is building to speed the development of coronavirus vaccines by intentionally infecting healthy, young volunteers with the virus. A grass-roots effort has attracted nearly 1,500 potential volunteers for the controversial approach, known as a human-challenge trial. The effort, called 1Day Sooner, is not affiliated with groups or companies developing or funding coronavirus vaccines. But co-founder Josh Morrison hopes to show that there is broad support for human-challenge trials, which have the potential to deliver an effective coronavirus vaccine more quickly than standard trials....
All remaining U.S. states with COVID-related public mask requirements have recently lifted them, and in mid-April, a district judge in Florida ended a federal mask mandate on trains, planes, buses or other public transport. For the first time in about two years, consumers can shop, exercise, travel, work and lounge in public spaces without wearing a mask, despite recent surges in COVID infections. Since the onset of the pandemic, most restaurants, grocery stores and retail shops have followed state and national guidelines by requiring masks....
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., after agonizing about the Vietnam War in private, began denouncing it in public. Liberal politicians and media, including The New York Times, castigated him, telling him to stick to civil rights. In a 1967 speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, King rejected this criticism and explained how he arrived at his antiwar stance. He had realized, he said, that the U....
MAKING MAGIC MUNDANE Your article in the November/December issue on how habits of perception and brain functioning are essential for so much of the success of magic tricks [“Mind over Magic?” by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, with Sandra Blakeslee] was fascinating to me. It reminded me of an interesting observation about magic I accidentally made back in the 1970s. I was watching a television special by magician Doug Henning....
