The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is an odd-looking creature whose features combine the furry torso and wide, flat tail of a beaver with the rubbery bill and webbed feet of a duck. But its looks are not all that is strange about it. A new study indicates that the distinctive mammal’s genetic code is an eclectic brew of bird, reptile and mammal. This mix-and-match animal is more than just an oddity, though....
Chemical clues in skeletons produced by coral growing at Kiribati contain a newly discovered warning. They caution of a global climate system that’s capable of drawing decades’ worth of hoarded heat out of the Pacific Ocean, and belching it back into the atmosphere. A cryptic chemical weather log kept by Tarawa Atoll’s stony coral in the tropical Pacific archipelago has been cracked, helping scientists explain a century of peaks and troughs in global warming—and inflaming fears that a speedup will follow the recent slowdown....
In theory, using the internet or e-mail to vote for the U.S. president sounds like a good idea. It would be easier than rushing to the nearest polling station before or after work, and it might pull in notoriously apathetic younger voters already living most of their lives via screens. But in reality these online channels have proved to be terribly insecure, plagued by cyber attacks and malicious software able to penetrate supposedly well-protected financial, medical and even military systems....
Nothing ratchets up the perennial debate over media bias like a presidential election. But as Tim Groeling, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes, public discussions about media bias are often just “food fights,” with pundits and partisans throwing around anecdotes. Groeling is hoping to advance scientific (and public) knowledge beyond this mush with research he used to demonstrate selection bias in television networks’ decision to run or withhold the results of presidential approval polls....
On July 29, 2006, there was a roughly 11-billion-gallon (0.044–cubic kilometer) lake that stretched more than two square miles (5.6 square kilometers) and covered the western portion of Greenland’s massive ice sheet. In the span of 16 hours, it was gone. The reason: water pressure cracked through the more than half-mile (980-meter) thick ice, draining the lake as its water rushed through the new funnel and gathered below the giant ice sheet, raising it nearly four feet (1....
LEAVES FOR LEAVING ALONE The vast majority of grasses retain their lifeless leaves, raising the question of why they keep dead weight that could drain their productivity. To find out, scientists at the University of Buenos Aires removed dead leaves from grass in the Argentine pampas, where cattle graze. In the absence of cows, the pruning promoted grass growth, but in the presence of bovines, those grasses were grazed on more so than intact ones, resulting in less growth....
View the Siberian Prison TB Slide Show Serving jail time is no picnic in itself, but many criminals in Russia’s central Siberian region must deal with the added burden of sickness during their incarceration. Tomsk, in southwestern Siberia, is one oblast, or province, that suffers more than its fair share of imprisoned people who are infected with tuberculosis (TB). Tomsk (which is also the name of the oblast’s principal city) has a prison system that houses about 7,000 inmates—and about 1,000 of these convicts are patients at the prison hospital....
From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Ever since Darwin articulated his theory of natural selection, the question of evolutionary novelties has intrigued biologists. It’s relatively easy to understand how natural selection can reshape an existing trait — to make antlers bigger, legs longer or wings more colorful. But sometimes a fully formed trait appears seemingly out of the blue, without any apparent antecedent. Where did it come from? Part of the answer can be found in a new study appearing this week in Science that shows how the sudden emergence of just one or two new genes can profoundly transform organisms’ appearance, behavior and ecological niche....
Fourteen years ago in Bremen, Germany, astronomer Seth Shostak gave a lecture that included a wager. “I bet everybody in the audience a cup of Starbucks that we would find E.T. within two dozen years,” he told a new audience in October. You don’t have to be a Klaatu-level math whiz to calculate that Shostak has 10 years left before he’d have to shell out for a lot of tall drips....
Threats of political violence are all around us. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was viciously attacked in their San Francisco home by an assailant looking to harm his wife. This comes after the House of Representatives had already beefed up its own security in July in response to a growing number of violent threats and attacks. And we’re just a few months away from the second anniversary of the worst violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812....
For my hale and hearty father-in-law, the first sign that something was wrong occurred at 88 years of age, when his ever reliable tennis serve kept landing astray. A series of medical tests soon revealed the worst: advanced, metastatic pancreatic cancer. Treatment might buy him a little time, his doctors told him, but that prospect did not outweigh his dread of spending his final days in a toxic and debilitating haze of chemotherapy....
It has been 68 days since Hurricane Irma took down much of Puerto Rico’s aging power grid and 54 days since Hurricane Maria finished the job, leaving nearly all 3.4 million residents without electricity. The island’s state-owned utility company, the U.S. government and workers on loan from other utilities are installing new poles, lines and power distribution circuits to replace those blown away by the storms. Despite the progress that has been made, more than half of Puerto Rico continues to soldier on without some of modern life’s bare necessities—including lights, refrigeration, air-conditioning and access to computer networks....
Monique Coleman’s basement was still wet with saltwater when the rallying began. Just days after Superstorm Sandy churned into the mid-Atlantic region, pushing a record-breaking surge into the country’s most densely populated corridor, the governor of New Jersey promised to put the sand back on the beaches. The “build it back stronger” sentiment never resonated with Coleman, who lived not on the state’s iconic barrier islands but in a suburban tidal floodplain bisected by 12 lanes of interstate highway....
Our brains are exquisitely tuned to perceive, recognize and remember faces. We can easily find a friend’s face among dozens or hundreds of unfamiliar faces in a busy street. We look at one another’s facial expressions for signs of appreciation and disapproval, love and contempt. And even after we have corresponded or spoken on the phone with somebody for a long time, we are often relieved when we meet him or her in person and are able to put “a face to the name....
The human vocal system would not receive much acclaim if instrument makers placed it in a lineup of traditional orchestral instruments. Arranged by size, for example, the voice box (larynx)—and the airway it sits in—would be grouped with the piccolo, among the smallest of mechanical music makers. And yet experienced singers compete well with all man-made instruments, one on one and even paired with full orchestras. Recent investigations of how our singing voice generates a remarkable range of sounds have revealed surprising complexity in the behavior of the vocal system’s elements and in the ways they interact....
As the United States struggles to test people for COVID-19, academic laboratories that are ready and able to run diagnostics are not operating at full capacity. A Nature investigation of several university labs certified to test for the virus finds that they have been held up by regulatory, logistic and administrative obstacles, and stymied by the fragmented US health-care system. Even as testing backlogs mounted for hospitals in California, for example, clinics were turning away offers of testing from certified academic labs because they didn’t use compatible health-record software, or didn’t have existing contracts with the hospital....
The search for signs of life on Mars needs a bit of a rethink, scientists argue in a new study. A popular strategy calls for investigating spots where waterborne sediment accumulated long ago, like the ancient lake-bed environment that NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered inside Mars’ 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. Here on Earth, such ancient habitats have preserved bountiful evidence of ancient life—but that doesn’t mean the same will hold true on the Red Planet, according to the study team, which was led by Joseph Michalski, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at The University of Hong Kong....
In the late 19th century, Florence Nightingale revolutionized hospital design in what became known as Nightingale wards. The signature innovation of these wards was large windows that allowed cross-ventilation and abundant natural light. Nightingale believed that the light and air quality in a hospital’s environment play an important role in speeding patient recovery. In the decades since, numerous studies have shown that Nightingale was right: daylight is a critical determinant of human health and wellness....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media, given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines....
When Emanuel Goldman went to his local New Jersey supermarket last March, he didn’t take any chances. Reports of COVID-19 cases were popping up across the United States, so he donned gloves to avoid contaminated surfaces and wore a mask to prevent him inhaling tiny virus-laden droplets from fellow shoppers. Neither gloves nor masks were recommended at the time. Then, at the end of March, a laboratory study showed that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 can persist on plastic and stainless steel for days....
