If there are any men left who still believe that women are the weaker sex, it is long past time for them to think again. With respect to that most essential proof of robustness—the power to stay alive—women are tougher than men from birth through to extreme old age. The average man may run a 100-meter race faster than the average woman and lift heavier weights. But nowadays women outlive men by about five to six years....
By Joanna Marchant of Nature magazineFemale athletes may not be eligible to compete as women if they have natural testosterone levels in the male range. That’s the upshot of new guidelines on female hyperandrogenism, recommended by the International Olympic Commission (IOC) on 5 April and accepted by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) on 12 April. The rules have been welcomed by experts as a reasonable compromise, but there remain some doubts over how they would work in practice....
Allie and Lauren, two sixth graders at Loyola Elementary School in Los Altos, Calif., bound into Sheena Vaidyanathan’s classroom a few minutes before the start of fifth period. The girls have a long-running competition with a couple of their classmates, William and Blake, over who can arrive the earliest at their computer programming class. The two girls take their seats at the row of new Apple desktop computers and immediately start on the assignment Vaidyanathan has provided: finding and fixing errors in a computer program....
1970 Rules of Chemical Warfare “President Nixon’s announcement concerning chemical and biological weapons renounced germ warfare and the first use of lethal and ‘incapacitating’ chemical weapons. The statement did not, however, change U.S. policy on two major weapons currently in routine use in Vietnam: tear gas and chemical defoliants. With regard to biological warfare the renunciation was unilateral and unequivocal. The President indicated that biological-warfare research would be confined to defensive measures and that the U....
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium. One of the most potentially dangerous places in the world is called Shinkolobwe, the name of a now-destroyed village in central Africa which took its name from a thorny fruit resembling an apple. After boiling, the outside of the fruit cools quickly but the inside is like a sponge. It retains hot water for a long time. Squeezing it results in a burn....
Texas’ electric grid buzzes with contradiction. It is simultaneously the dirtiest power system in the country and the leading generator of renewable power. The dueling superlatives reflect changes sweeping across the Texas prairie. The use of coal has been cut in half over the last decade, to 18% of generation, while wind surged to provide about a quarter of the state’s power. But despite that, the Texas grid carries the highest-emissions electricity in the nation....
Top representatives from vehicle manufacturers and utilities are joining forces to find ways to cut the U.S. transportation system’s energy use in half by 2050. The Alliance to Save Energy, a 40-year-old organization focused on energy efficiency policies, is announcing the new group today and calling it the “50 by 50” Commission. Co-chaired by Audi of America President Scott Keogh and National Grid U.S. President Dean Seavers, the project aims to produce a report within a year outlining recommendations for the federal government, automakers, cities and infrastructure providers to curb emissions holistically....
Demand for automobiles is rising worldwide. So is concern about greenhouse gas emissions. In response, scientists and engineers are working diligently to perfect new power plants for future vehicles, including battery and hydrogen fuel-cell electric cars. Although these and other alternatives show great promise for the long term, perhaps the single greatest way to reduce fossil-fuel consumption in the near term is to further improve today’s dominant transportation power plant: the gasoline internal-combustion (IC) engine....
Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead by David Casarett Current, 2014 “Although the science that makes resuscitation possible is amazing, its costs—financial, ethical, and emotional—can be enormous,” writes Casarett, a hospice physician. His book tells stories of miraculous returns from the brink of death, as well as sadder tales of people “saved” from dying only to linger on in a brain-dead limbo that arguably brought worse pain to the patients and their families....
When asked recently on The Today Show how he cured himself of his addiction, Two and a Half Men sitcom star Charlie Sheen replied, “I closed my eyes and made it so with the power of my mind.” Until last month, he was the highest paid actor on TV, despite his well-known bad-boy lifestyle and persistent problems with alcohol and cocaine. After the rest of his season’s shows were canceled by producers, Sheen has gone on an interview tear with many bizarre statements, including that he is on a “winning” streak....
Plant life on both poles is growing rapidly as the planet warms. A new study has found a steady growth of moss in Antarctica over the last 50 years as temperatures increased as a result of climate change. The study, published yesterday in the journal Current Biology, shows that Antarctica will be much greener in the future, said lead author Matt Amesbury, a researcher at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom....
Why was Japan’s March 11 earthquake so big? One answer is the large size of the fault rupture as well as the speed at which the Pacific Plate is continuously thrusting beneath Japan, U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) scientist Tom Brocher told KQED News. People felt shaking in cities all over Honshu, Japan’s main island. Below are some more facts and figures relating to the causes and consequences of the world’s fifth-largest earthquake since 1900....
Global efforts to address the steep, ongoing loss of biodiversity through a series of specified targets have failed, according to a dire assessment released by the United Nations today. The 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets were established under the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity at a conference in Japan in 2010. Their aim was to protect the world’s imperiled flora and fauna by 2020. Without such intervention, according to the U.N., roughly one million species could disappear within several decades, widening what scientists have coined the Holocene extinction: the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, driven by human activity....
Imagine an advanced civilization somewhere in the universe, which developed a particle accelerator that collides electrons at the Planck energy, the scale where gravity must be described quantum mechanically. This energy scale is no small feat for a collider, as it corresponds to ten quintillion (1019) times the rest mass of the proton. To reach this energy with our existing acceleration technology would require a linear collider 10,000 light-years in length....
Geoff Marcy, a leader in the field of exoplanet science, was found to have “violated campus sexual harassment policy” at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works, an investigation by the university has concluded. The investigation, conducted by the school’s Title IX office, “stemmed from a number of incidents believed to have occurred between 2001 and 2010 and involved students who have since graduated,” according to a statement from the university obtained by Space....
By Quirin SchiermeierOne of Britain’s leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich confirmed today that e-mails and documents dating from 1991 to 2009 were illegally copied and subsequently published on an anonymous Russian server.A link to the Russian server first appeared on 19 November on a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog....
About one third of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members are women, and although the organization helps both sexes recover from addiction, a new study suggests that it does so in different ways—in part because male and female alcoholics drink for different reasons. John Kelly, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleague Bettina Hoeppner analyzed data collected over the course of 15 months from 1,726 AA members about their social networks, their drinking habits and how confident they were in their ability to stay sober in various situations....
Alcoholism afflicts roughly eight million Americans. Despite significant health and social impacts from excessive drinking, few alcoholics receive any form of specialized care and few researchers have studied the relative merits of counseling, medical visits and pharmaceutical interventions. Now a major nationwide study has shown that medical visits mixed with either counseling or drug therapy–but not both–cuts down on drinking. “Medical care works and alcoholics don’t need to check into a specialty treatment program to get it,” says Robert Swift of Brown University, one of the team of doctors at 11 sites nationwide who conducted the trial....
A free AI-based scholarly search engine that aims to outdo Google Scholar is expanding its corpus of papers to cover some 10 million research articles in computer science and neuroscience, its creators announced on 11 November. Since its launch last year, it has been joined by several other AI-based academic search engines, most notably a relaunched effort from computing giant Microsoft. Semantic Scholar, from the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington, unveiled its new format at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego....
Move over, Icarus. Six newly discovered exoplanets have been discovered flying so close to their host stars that they are literally evaporating—creating a ring of debris. The discovery of the planets, published today in three separate papers in Nature Astronomy, were identified using a new technique that first looked for that ring of debris. It is thus an efficient method to find small planets orbiting extremely close to their star, which have long eluded detection....
