A while ago, a listener wrote to me asking a question that was decidedly beyond my area of expertise. It was a question about menopause. Seeing as I am neither a doctor nor a woman, I decided I needed to call in an expert to tackle this one. The question was: “I have just started the menopause and would really like to keep trim and lean and keep my muscle tone up....
Updated April 5 • The power plant has dumped about 11,000 tons of water (11 million liters) of radioactive water into the ocean to make room for storage containers holding water that is even more radioactive. • Japan reported finding radioactive fish that exceeds regulatory limits, although based on the levels found so far, you would need to eat 16 kilograms of the tainted fish meat in a year to get sick....
Besides Glenn Close, the original bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction, other Hollywood portrayals of Borderline Personality Disorder, or BPD, have included, among others, Kristen Wiig in Welcome To Me and Evan Rachel Wood in Thirteen. But each portrayal is only one view; indeed, with five of nine symptoms required for diagnosis, there are dozens of ways to have BPD (plus, put a Hollywood filter on any psychological disorder and you’ll almost always end up with the funhouse mirror version)....
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1969, technicians at the Kennedy Space Center loaded upward of 750,000 gallons of fuel into the 363-foot Saturn V rocket that would successfully propel the Apollo 11 spacecraft toward the moon. It would be one of 13 Saturn V launches between 1967 and 1973. This vehicle remains the tallest, heaviest and most powerful rocket ever in operation. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Saturn V’s famous flight, this month’s column focuses on all things Apollo 11....
In 2012 the Peruvian government announced a slew of legal decrees to defend Madre de Dios—considered the country’s biodiversity capital—against miners. Authorities conducted raids, dismantled clandestine camps, and regulated fuel and supply traffic. Despite the crackdown, the total mining area had increased by about 40 percent (to around 170,000 acres) just four years later. According to the most comprehensive analysis to date, the practice—possibly enabled by poor control of the region and greater highway access—extended into at least one of the forest’s two national reserves, protected areas where mining is prohibited....
A recent lawsuit has grabbed headlines and raised consumer concerns with its claim that Skittles, the popular many-colored candies, contain “a known toxin”: the chemical titanium dioxide. The suit, filed by a consumer in July against Skittles manufacturer Mars, notes that the European Union is banning titanium dioxide as a food additive. But in the U.S., Canada and many other countries, titanium dioxide is still deemed safe for consumption, within regulated amounts....
Bigger does not always mean better in the world of electronics—unless, of course, we’re talking about the width of a flat-screen plasma TV. The latest generation of the iPod shuffle, for example, is just a fraction of the size of the original 2004 iPod mini, yet holds just as many songs. Part of this reduction in size and increase in power for personal electronics is due to improvements in the way that batteries—specifically those that rely on lithium ions—hold and release energy....
China has put the finishing touches on the world’s biggest radio telescope, whose 1,650-foot-wide dish will scan the heavens for signs of intelligent alien life, among other tasks. On Sunday (July 3), technicians installed the last of the 4,450 panels that make up the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope’s (FAST) giant dish, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Project team members will soon begin testing and debugging FAST, after which Chinese scientists will use it for “early-stage research,” Xinhua reported....
Power on Trial In a future where people hold the perpetrators of the climate crisis to account, what has changed? Denial: A Novel by Jon Raymond Simon & Schuster, 2022 ($26) Writing science fiction is often a form of activism. The act of writing fiction generally can be said to spring from a place of hope—a celebration of what’s best in us, an attempt to imagine a less terrible reality. But most genres lack the audacity to scrap the rules of physics and technology to create worlds where the seemingly intractable problems of today can be solved or transformed so dramatically that we set aside our preconceived notions to embrace a fresh perspective....
The tale is embedded in the footprints. Along the edges of a vanished ice age lake are the fossilized tracks of people who lived among the mammoths, giant ground sloths and other Pleistocene mammals of ancient New Mexico. There were so many prehistoric pedestrians here that their feet pressed the seeds of a local plant called spiral ditch grass into their tracks, and these plant remnants are what has given archaeologists a possible time for when people lived here....
Editor’s Note (8/4/21): On August 4, 2020, the Lebanese capital Beirut experienced a massive explosion caused by more than 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate improperly stored near the city’s cargo port. It was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, which killed 218 people, injured 7,000 and displaced over 300,000. This story from August 5, 2020 is being republished on the one year anniversary of the disaster. An enormous explosion in Beirut’s seaport area this week ruined nearby buildings and caused damage and shattered windows across the city, killing scores of people and wounding thousands more....
Ever since pterosaur fossils were discovered more than two centuries ago, paleontologists have wondered how these gawky-looking reptiles launched themselves into the air. Experts have recently focused on a “quad launch” hypothesis, which envisions pterosaurs rocking back and forth on their arms to jump into the air using a pole vault–like motion, whether from land or water. Direct physical evidence of this technique has been elusive, but now a small pterosaur from the Jurassic rocks of Germany is helping solve the mystery....
A mineral that requires the presence of water to form has been discovered in a lunar meteorite, a new study reports. The find suggests that hidden caches of water ice potentially useful for human exploration might be hidden under the surface of the moon, study team members said. A team of Japanese scientists led by Masahiro Kayama from the Department of Earth and Planetary Materials Science at Tohoku University found the mineral, called moganite, in a lunar meteorite discovered in a desert in northwest Africa....
For a mission that lasted two days instead of its planned one to six weeks, the scientists behind the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Philae comet lander are surprisingly cheerful. “We’re extremely happy with how the mission went,” lander control team member Valentina Lommatsch said during an ESA press conference November 14. “Beyond words,” gushed Matt Taylor, project scientist for the Rosetta mission, which launched in 2004 and released the Philae lander on November 12....
Fracking wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region are disproportionately located in poor rural communities, which bear the brunt of associated pollution, according to a new study. The study bolsters concerns that poor people are more likely to deal with hydraulic fracturing in their community and raises concerns that such vulnerable populations will suffer the potential health impacts of air and water pollution associated with pulling gas from the ground. “This trend is not one we’re surprised by, we see this in a lot of industries,” said Mike Ewall, founder and director of Energy Justice Network, a nonprofit organization that works with U....
Calling someone a rat may be complimentary. According to a study published in the December 9, 2011, issue of Science, rats can be surprisingly selfless. University of Chicago neuroscientist Peggy Mason and psychologists Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and Jean Decety placed pairs of rats in pens. One rat was caged in the middle of the pen, whereas the other was free to run around. In this experiment, 23 of 30 rats liberated their peers by head butting the cage door or leaning against the door until it tipped over....
BRAIN PLASTICITY I was disappointed and more than a little angry to find prevention or treatment of autism listed among the uses of new discoveries in neuroplasticity in the otherwise excellent “The Power of the Infant Brain,” by Takao K. Hensch. Ironically, in his last paragraph, Hensch brings up a parallel to one of the main objections to such “cure” rhetoric: it represents a neurological change so pervasive as to violate the identity of the treated person....
A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University has set out to measure what percentage of the billions of dollars that world governments are spending on the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic might result in lasting reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources and environment at Hopkins and one of the leaders of the effort at Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), explained that the effort grew out of “frustration....
The People’s Bank of China jolted the financial world in March with a proposal for a new global monetary arrangement. The proposal initially attracted attention mostly for its signal of China’s rising global economic power, but its content also has much to commend it. A century ago almost all the world’s currencies were linked to gold and most of the rest to silver. Currencies were readily interchangeable, gold anchored exchange rates and the physical supply of gold stabilized the money supply over the long term....
MAY 5 German philosopher Karl Marx was born on this day in 1818. Although Marx is most famous for his political ideas, his philosophies also contributed indirectly to modern psychology. Embedded in Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism—the study of society, economics and history—is the idea that understanding the human mind relies not only on inward reflection but also on the historical and social context in which a person lives. For Marx, that meant a person’s work life....
