While most of the campaign season leading up to the re-election of Barack Obama Tuesday focused on economic policy, a continued Obama presidency will certainly affect technology as well. Based on Obama’s campaign and policies he already has begun or announced, action can be expected in the following five areas: Net neutrality Network neutrality is, at its core, the idea of an “open Internet,” with no restrictions based on the type of content....
Democrats and Republicans may often be at odds over climate change, but the U.S. military is not waiting for the debate to be settled. It is preparing for a hotter world, which is already altering geopolitical relations and could lead to armed conflict. The U.S. Department of Defense breaks the menace into two parts: a direct threat to its infrastructure (think naval bases that face rising seas) and the indirect threats posed around the world if societies become destabilized....
As climate change intensifies summer after summer, millions of people around the world are finding themselves shrouded in toxic wildfire smoke, including those in North America, Russia and the Mediterranean just this past month. I’m from Australia, where our devastating 2019–2020 bushfires and smoke caught the world’s attention. Wildfire smoke is bad for our health. It is also really distressing, but we don’t talk about that as much. During Australia’s Black Summer, choking on smoke for about three months, I found it impossible to think of anything but the unfolding crisis....
“The Destroying Monster Continues the Work of Destruction Making a Vast Graveyard of Stricken Cities.” That is how a newspaper headline from Little Rock, Ark., described a yellow fever outbreak in 1878. The mosquito-borne illness infected 120,000 individuals and killed between 13,000 and 20,000 during the spring and summer of that year in the southern U.S. What is most relevant to the current coronavirus pandemic is not how the yellow fever killed people....
The quantum world is a weird one. In theory and to some extent in practice its tenets demand that a particle can appear to be in two places at once—a paradoxical phenomenon known as superposition—and that two particles can become “entangled,” sharing information across arbitrarily large distances through some still-unknown mechanism. Perhaps the most famous example of quantum weirdness is Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935....
By Caroline Humer and Julie Steenhuysen NEW YORK/CHICAGO (Reuters) - Genetics company 23andMe announced the launch of a new consumer genetic test service on Wednesday that will show whether an individual carries genes associated with 36 different disorders, such as cystic fibrosis. The launch is a major step for the company, which in 2013 was ordered by the Food and Drug Administration to stop selling its Personal Genome Service because the regulatory agency had not approved the tests it offered....
Dear EarthTalk: I’m sure there are many good environmental reasons to build a rooftop garden. Can you enlighten? And also I’d like to know how to go about creating one and whether or not some municipalities might offer incentives to do so. – Linda, via e-mail Indeed there are many good reasons to build a rooftop garden, or a so-called “green roof”—whereby layers of soil and plants on top of homes and buildings provide a host of environmental “services” for the living space below as well as for the surrounding ecosystem....
In 1980 I subjected myself to a weeklong cleansing diet of water, cayenne pepper, lemon and honey, topped off with a 150-mile bicycle ride that left me puking on the side of the road. Neither this nor any of the other fad diets I tried in my bike-racing days to enhance performance seemed to work as well as the “see-food” diet one of my fellow cyclists was on: you see it, you eat it....
RIO DE JANEIRO, July 21 (Reuters) - Brazilian researchers on Thursday said they found signs of the Zika virus in a common mosquito that is a separate species from the insect known to be the primary means of transmission. They warned, however, that further tests are needed to determine whether the species, known as Culex quinquefasciatus, is in fact responsible for transmitting the virus to humans and, if so, to what extent....
Fifteen chemicals that disrupt our endocrine hormonal systems have been linked to earlier menopause among US women. Amber Cooper from Washington University in St Louis, US, and colleagues found women aged 45 to 55 exposed to the organic compounds were up to six times more likely to be menopausal than unexposed peers. The substances include long-banned but persistent polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pesticide residues. However, two derive from a shorter-lived phthalate plasticiser, which makes polymer products more pliable and is still in use....
Sugary soda and other sweet treats are likely not the only foods to blame for the surge in diabetes across the U.S. New research out of Harvard University supports the theory that regular red meat consumption increases the risk of getting type 2 diabetes. An average of just one 85-gram (three-ounce) serving of unprocessed red meat—such as a medium hamburger or a small pork chop—per day increased by 12 percent the chances a person would get type 2 diabetes over the course of a decade or two....
Key concepts Physics Mixture Materials science Water droplets Introduction Have you ever watched raindrops on your window as they move and run down the glass? It is fascinating to observe how some of them sit there by themselves whereas others combine to build a larger drop. Have you ever wondered what makes them move and behave in different ways? Controlling and influencing liquids spreading on surfaces, known as “wetting,” is actually important for many things—beyond simply watching the rain....
Humans have dramatically changed Earth’s surface. Satellite images show New York City’s sparkling lights at night and the Great Wall of China during the day. But we have also produced signatures in the strata beneath our feat that can’t be seen so readily, like the plastic that litters the ocean floor and a strong radiation signal produced by atomic bomb tests. For many scientists, this kind of evidence is enough to formally declare a new geologic epoch—one that will be visible in the layers of sediment millions of years from now....
The 2012 presidential election will be won by the candidate who can convince voters that he has the vision to lift the nation out of the economic doldrums. The economy is the right topic, but the discussion neglects the true driver of the country’s prosperity: scientific and technological enterprise. Half of the U.S. economic growth since World War II has come from advances in science and technology. To neglect that power—and the government’s role in priming the pump—would be foolish....
Global carbon dioxide emissions are on the rise again after three years of little to no growth, dashing hopes that they had peaked for good. According to the latest report from the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track the amount of carbon emitted by human activity, 2017 will see a 2 percent increase in the burning of fossil fuels, after nearly no growth in 2014, 2015 or 2016....
Dear EarthTalk: I saw a chart that quantified the negative impacts on our health of our reliance on coal as an energy source. It was pretty shocking as I recall. Can you summarize what we’re dealing with here? — Mitchell Baldwin, Boise, ID Coal combustion plants account for more than half of Americans’ electric power generation. According to Coal’s Assault on Human Health, a report by the non-profit Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), coal combustion releases mercury, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and other substances known to be hazardous to human health....
The Delta variant is here. First identified in India, this more transmissible form of the novel coronavirus has spread to at least 77 countries and regions and now makes up more than 20 percent of all U.S. cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified it as a “variant of concern.” If vaccination rates fail to keep pace with its spread, experts say, the variant could lead to new COVID surges in parts of the country where a substantial proportion of the population remains unvaccinated....
UNLESS YOU HAVE been deaf and blind to the world over the past decade, you know that functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI) can look inside the skull of volunteers lying still inside the claustrophobic, coffinlike confines of a loud, banging magnetic scanner. The technique relies on a fortuitous property of the blood supply to reveal regional activity. Active synapses and neurons consume power and therefore need more oxygen, which is delivered by the hemoglobin molecules inside the circulating red blood cells....
A week and a half before the midterm elections, a man broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and attacked her husband with a hammer. David DePape, charged in the attack, had posted a slew of rants that included references to a sprawling conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which claims that Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles are trying to control the world’s politics and media. Several hours before, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson interviewed right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who claimed drag queens participating in book readings were trying to “sexualize children....
When psychologists try to understand the way our mind works, they frequently come to a conclusion that may seem startling: people often make decisions without having given them much thought—or, more precisely, before they have thought about them consciously. When we decide how to vote, what to buy, where to go on vacation and myriad other things, unconscious thoughts that we are not even aware of typically play a big role....
