SELF-DRIVING CARS In “The Truth about ‘Self-Driving’ Cars,” Steven E. Shladover strikes a welcome note of sanity in the hype about the predicted advent of automated vehicles on our roads. Yet when he describes “bus- and truck-platoon systems” as among the kind of automated vehicles we are likely to see sooner, it brought instantly to mind systems that have long been in place and that we are all familiar with: namely, freight and passenger trains....
New flood research makes one thing clear about the deleterious effects of global warming: they are not problems developing nations will have to face alone. As Earth warms and sea levels rise, governments in vulnerable areas will have a tough choice to make. Whereas more affluent nations will likely spend millions on structural flood barriers to protect existing coastal real estate, poorer regions with more transient populations may need to encourage settlement in safer inland areas....
By Richard A. Lovett of Nature magazineNASA and a group of universities known as the READI network have begun testing an earthquake-warning system based on satellite data from the Global Positioning System (GPS). The method could have allowed Japanese officials to issue accurate warnings of the deadly March 2011 earthquake and tsunami ten times faster than they did, say scientists.The system is currently being tested using the US Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array: hundreds of GPS receivers placed along the North American coast between Northern California and British Columbia in Canada....
Arctic temperatures have finally started to cool off after yet another winter heat wave stunted sea ice growth over the weekend. The repeated bouts of warm weather this season have stunned even seasoned polar researchers, and could push the Arctic to a record low winter peak for the third year in a row. Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice set an all-time record low on Monday in a dramatic reversal from the record highs of recent years....
Movie-going Americans learned to fear sharks in 1975 after watching Jaws. Today another great white shark drama is playing out near the film’s setting off Cape Cod, Mass., but this time the fear is for science as well as swimmers, as two groups of researchers go head to head. Great whites used to be hard to find along to the U.S. North Atlantic coast, but in recent years the big fish are returning, following a resurgence of seals, one of their favorite foods....
By Janelle WeaverResearchers in Japan have made fertile mammalian sperm in a culture dish, a feat long thought to be impossible. The technique, reported March 23 in Nature, could help to reveal the molecular steps involved in sperm formation and might even lead to treatments for male infertility.Biologists have been trying to make sperm outside the body for almost a century. Failure has often struck at the stage of meiosis, a type of cell division during which paired chromosomes swap DNA and the number of chromosomes per cell is halved....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. If you go down to the shore today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Many will have witnessed the presence of a starfish or two when visiting the seashore or a public aquarium. Starfish come in an exciting range of colours and sizes, but have you ever given a thought to how this multi-armed wonder manages to exist in our oceans when it’s so unlike the other animals we know?...
Dear EarthTalk: I want to convince my high school to go green. What would it cost for a school to switch to all recycled paper products and all energy efficient lighting? – Danel Berman, via e-mail Greening your school is a great idea. It will not only benefit the environment but the student body as well. According to the “Greening America’s Schools” report, sponsored in part by the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), green buildings provide a better study and learning environment for students....
Correction appended. Congress is on the hunt for cash to offset Republicans’ planned tax cuts. One highly contentious source lawmakers are eyeing: revenue from opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. The fight over whether to open a 1.5-million-acre section of ANWR’s coastal plain has played out before and has always been divisive. This attempt — the first major one in 13 years — will be no different....
There are a number of Black inventors who have become part of our national consciousness. Polymath agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and cosmetics creator and entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker are two. There are many more who have directly influenced U.S. society and culture in major ways, but their achievements have largely been omitted from the canon of top innovators. Here are three who changed the chemical industry, the garment business and household work, and telecommunications....
We tend to trust the people around us. We trust cab drivers and doctors with our lives, we trust chefs handling our food, and we trust strangers to watch our belongings while we step away. But trust is not like candy on Halloween, we do not just give it to anyone who knocks on our door. Psychologists have long been interested in understanding what leads people to trust others, and the face has long been at the center of this research....
Editor’s Note: Our April 22 article elicited a lengthy response from Dean Ornish, which we publish here, along with a rebuttal from Melinda Wenner Moyer. Last month, an op–ed in The New York Times argued that high-protein and high-fat diets are to blame for America’s ever-growing waistline and incidence of chronic disease. The author, Dean Ornish, founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, is no newcomer to these nutrition debates....
It was May 27, 2017—another late night for Brian Sweis. The 26-year-old MD/PhD neuroscience student had been running lines of code and analyses on tens of thousands of rows of data, dating back to experiments conducted in 2012. The goal: to better understand “sunk cost,” the idea that the more you invest in something, the harder it becomes to abandon it, even in cases when it is in your best interest to do so....
New materials can change the world. There is a reason we talk about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Concrete, stainless steel and silicon made the modern era possible. Now a new class of materials, each consisting of a single layer of atoms, are emerging with far-reaching potential. Known as two-dimensional materials, this class has grown within the past few years to include lattice-like layers of carbon (graphene), boron (borophene), hexagonal boron nitride (white graphene), germanium (germanene), silicon (silicene), phosphorous (phosphorene) and tin (stanene)....
A new fossil found in France is almost a spider, but not quite. The arachnid, locked in iron carbonate for 305 million years, reveals the stepwise evolution of arachnids into spiders. Dubbed Idmonarachne brasieri after the Greek mythological figure Idmon, father of Arachne, a weaver turned into a spider by a jealous goddess, the “almost spider” lacks only the spinnerets that spiders use to turn silk into webs. “It’s not quite a spider, but it’s very close to being one,” said study researcher Russell Garwood, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom....
According to fashionistas, you are what your wear. But when did humans start decorating themselves for self-expression? Three bead-like shells from ancient Israel and Algeria suggest that such symbolic behavior occurred at least 100,000 years ago–25,000 years earlier than previously thought. The findings, reported today in Science by Marian Vanhaeren of the University College London and colleagues, challenge the notion that modern humans developed cultural symbols–a precursor to language–only after they arrived in Europe....
BlackBerry’s BBM messenger service finally hits Apple’s iOS and Android, but there’s a catch. Related stories BlackBerry wrinkles its nose at fake BBM reviews Ex-Apple CEO Sculley said to be eyeballing BlackBerry? Nokia goes big with Lumia phones, tablet BlackBerry BBM racks up 10M downloads in first 24 hours BlackBerry’s BBM slingshots to top spot on Apple’s App Store The app is set to go live in the next hour, according to BlackBerry’s blog....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Given the media coverage brain imaging studies get, you might think that they are constantly revealing important secrets about this mysterious organ. Catherine Loveday thinks otherwise. She makes the point that using brain-scanning technology to understand what a diseased brain is doing is only of academic interest. It is the study of the mind through behavior and other cognitive functions, she argues, that leads to useful insights about disorders and treatments....
From Nature magazine Protecting all the world’s threatened species will cost around US$4 billion a year, according to an estimate published today in Science. If that number is not staggering enough, the scientists behind the work also report that effectively conserving the significant areas these species live in could rack up a bill of more than $76 billion a year. Study leader Stuart Butchart, a conservation scientist at BirdLife International in Cambridge, UK, admits that the numbers seem very large....
The Omicron-driven COVID surge has caused considerable upheaval during this pandemic winter. Despite the availability and efficacy of COVID vaccines, many people with a history of suspected allergies to the first mRNA COVID vaccine dose—reactions such as hives, swelling, shortness of breath and/or low blood pressure—have not gotten their full series. Their fear is understandable. After all, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently states that there are two contraindications to the COVID vaccine: “severe allergic reaction (e....
