After the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, in a haze of horror and smoke, clinicians at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan offered to check anyone who’d been in the area for exposure to toxins. Among those who came in for evaluation were 187 pregnant women. Many were in shock, and a colleague asked if I could help diagnose and monitor them....
The study of human genetics emerged from a deep curiosity of our human inheritance that was firmly rooted in white supremacy. Francis Galton, one of the fathers of human genetics, who coined the term “eugenics,” published Hereditary Genius (in which he asserted the genetic “superiority” of the upper classes) in 1869, 35 years after Great Britain ended slavery in British-held colonies and a mere four years after the United States emancipated enslaved African Americans....
The United Nations puts the current population of planet Earth at around 7.5 billion people. Seems like a large number. But there are way more spiders. By the way, now would be a good time to stop reading if you suffer from arachnophobia. The April issue of the journal The Science of Nature featured a study that tried to determine how much prey the world’s spider population puts away annually. The work was done by Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel in Switzerland and Klaus Birkhofer of Sweden’s Lund University and Germany’s Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg....
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 each other’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....
Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely Simon & Schuster/TED, 2016 ($16.99; 120 pages) Instead of writing this review, I’d rather be fussing with my phone or eating lunch. Luckily, Ariely’s book Payoff provides concrete mind-hacking strategies to achieve a state of satisfying productivity. What better way to motivate myself than by road testing its recommendations? According to Ariely, a Duke University psychology professor, real motivation—the kind that fountains up of its own accord—is all about meaning....
By Victoria Cavaliere(Reuters) - A band of severe weather that left at least three people dead in tornadoes and heavy storms in the southeastern United States pushed up the East Coast on Sunday, bringing record high temperatures to Philadelphia and New York City and ice storms to parts of New England.The eastern half of the country was getting a “plethora of winter weather” just days before the Christmas holiday, according to the National Weather Service....
By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Managers mishandled a radiation leak at a New Mexico nuclear waste dump in which 21 workers were exposed to airborne radioactive particles due in part to substandard equipment and safety systems, a U.S. investigator said on Wednesday. But the contamination from the underground salt mine in the Chihuahuan Desert - where radioactive waste from U.S. nuclear labs and weapons facilities is deposited - was unlikely to have harmed the workers’ health, inspectors said....
“Wireless” will come to signify much more than the untethering of handsets from phone and Ethernet cables in the near future. Wireless charging spots for mobile gadgets are popping up at coffee and tea shops in select locations. Similar efforts to eliminate the cables that connect computers and monitors are not far behind, bringing with them the promise of virtually tangle-free living rooms and desktops. Starbucks is putting wireless charging on the map through a pilot program to roll out wireless charging stations in its coffee and Teavana shops....
As England, Spain and huge swaths of the U.S. deal with record-shattering high temperatures, the time has come to stop looking at heat and heat waves as temporary inconveniences. As the climate warms, heat waves have become longer, more frequent and more deadly, at their worst killing thousands of people. With warnings that people are unsafe in houses without cooling systems, or that train tracks will buckle, and power and water systems will be compromised, we need to examine how well our infrastructures—the systems we’ve built to deliver critical services such as mobility, energy, water, and access to cooled space—are prepared for these new conditions....
By Valerie Volcovici and Alister Doyle WASHINGTON/MARRAKESH, Morocco (Reuters) - Donald Trump is seeking quick ways of withdrawing from a global agreement to limit climate change, a source on his transition team said, defying widening international backing for the plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Since the U.S. President-elect was chosen, governments ranging from China to small island states have reaffirmed support for the 2015 Paris Agreement at 200-nation climate talks running until Nov....
Dear EarthTalk: I was intrigued to hear that there were a number of ways one could modify or construct a roof on a house or office facility that would provide great environmental benefit. Can you enlighten? – Bill Teague, Menlo Park, CA Most buildings are designed to shed rain, and as such are built with hard, impenetrable roofing surfaces. As a result, rainwater bounces off and collects as runoff, picking up impurities—including infectious bacteria from animal waste as well as harmful pesticides and fertilizers—on the way to municipal storm sewers, which in turn eventually empty out into local bodies of water....
By Nia Williams CALGARY Alberta (Reuters) - Oil from a spill or oil well blowout in the Arctic waters of Canada’s Beaufort Sea could easily become trapped in sea ice and potentially spread more than 1,000 kilometers to the west coast of Alaska, a World Wildlife Fund study showed on Friday. The WWF contracted RPS Applied Science Associates to model 22 different oil spill scenarios and map the spread of the oil, potential impact on the water and shoreline, and interaction with sea ice, wildlife and the surrounding ecology....
The benefit of central command and control of complex systems is often obvious. Eyes and legs in communication with the brain allow us to walk in a straight line. But this type of human-made or natural system can at times suffer from acute vulnerabilities. The crippling of important areas of U.S. socioeconomic activity during the recent partial government shutdown gives a vivid example of what happens when a nation’s central control unit suddenly switches off....
Scientists have directly dated Stone Age rock paintings in southern Africa reliably for the first time. Their work reveals that early hunter-gatherer peoples created art at three sites in the region, some 5,700 years ago (A. Bonneau et al. Antiquity 91, 322–333; 2017). And the findings open the door for archaeologists and other researchers to date thousands more rock paintings in this part of Africa — and so piece together the lives and development of ancient people there....
The female biological clock—its tick-tock marking the decline of fertility that grows louder as a woman reaches middle age—is deeply ingrained in popular consciousness. Take this scene from the film Bridget Jones’s Diary: Bridget’s Uncle Geoffrey reminds her that as a career girl she “can’t put it off forever,” alluding to her declining fertility. His wife Una chimes in: “tick-tock, tick-tock,” her finger wagging like a metronome. The biological clock, although just a metaphor, refers to a real phenomenon: Women over 35 years of age are only half as likely to become pregnant in the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle than women younger than 26....
The weather outside is frightful, because it is not beginning to look a lot like Christmas. In fact, only a smattering of Americans has a shot at waking up to a fresh dusting on Friday. Temperatures leading up to and forecast for December 25 run about 10 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in the U.S. Northeast, Southeast and parts of the Midwest. In fact, this Christmas Eve is expected to register as the warmest on record in many cities along the Eastern Seaboard....
Woodpeckers spend all day hammering their head on tree trunks, using their beak to make holes and digging insects out of those holes for a meal. The birds’ distinctive drumming and drilling had led researchers to hypothesize that the bone between woodpeckers’ beak and braincase must absorb shocks to protect their brain from concussions. But a new study suggests that their head and beak act like a stiff hammer for optimal pecking performance rather than a shock-absorbing system to cushion the brain....
This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. Henry Cavendish was an odd man. He never addressed strangers directly and was petrified of women. He had a staircase built into the back of his house to avoid any encounter with the ladies he employed. When it came time for his final oral exams to complete his natural philosophy degree at Cambridge University—that’s what they called a science degree before the advent of modern science and specialized degrees—he dropped out of school all together rather than talk in public....
As the race to create clean, renewable power heats up, the solar industry is focusing on a technology in hopes of producing utility-scale energy. Concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) solar power – which marries traditional solar photovoltaic technology to large-scale concentrated solar power plants – could ramp up utility-scale solar production, advocates say, especially in niche markets. But as with all developing technologies, the effort faces significant hurdles. CPV technology involves magnifying the sun’s energy hundreds of times via lenses or mirrors and focusing it onto small, extremely efficient photovoltaic cells....
Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you’ve ever taken care of a crying baby, you know how miserable it can be when you can’t seem to console this bundle of love and what’s-supposed-to-be joy. Now, imagine those moments amplified times ten, and prolonged for hours on end…every day…for weeks or months. This is what parents of babies with colic experience....
