Mining companies use microbes to recover metals such as gold, copper and uranium. Now researchers suggest bacteria could be enlisted for “biomining” in space, to extract oxygen, nutrients and minerals from the moon and Mars for use by future colonists. More than a quarter of the world’s copper is harvested from ores using microorganisms, which separate the desired material from the rock to which it is chemically bound. Geomicrobiologists Karen Olsson-Francis and Charles S....
International expectations are high for President Obama and Congress to bring a strong U.S. negotiating position to the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen this December. But there are big questions about how much U.S. leaders might be able to deliver. “I think neither the calendar nor the economy is our friend right now,” Carlos Pascual, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said today during a Washington panel on the Copenhagen talks....
What is the most challenging aspect of climbing trees? Technical tree climbing involves a rope, saddle and other proper tree-climbing gear because you’re actually climbing on the rope rather than on branches. Getting the rope in place is usually the hardest part. For most trees in temperate forests, you can throw the first line up, but for really tall trees in tropical forests, you need to use a slingshot or a bow and arrow....
As the effects of Hurricane Harvey continue to torment southeastern Texas and parts of Louisiana, remote-controlled drone aircraft have offered a bird’s-eye view of the devastation in real time. For nearly a week YouTube users have been posting and sharing aerial footage of flooded roadways and decimated homes in and around Houston. Some of the video shows vehicles perilously plowing through deluged roadways—yet much of it is eerily absent of human activity....
Researchers who want to predict the behavior of systems governed by quantum mechanics—an electron in an atom, say, or a photon of light traveling through space—typically turn to the Schrödinger equation. Devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1925, it describes subatomic particles and how they may display wavelike properties such as interference. It contains the essence of all that appears strange and counterintuitive about the quantum world. But it seems the Schrödinger equation is not confined to that realm....
Nearly two years after he took office, US President Donald Trump has a White House science adviser in place. The Senate confirmed meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier for the job in a voice vote on 2 January. Droegemeier, an expert in extreme weather, will lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is the first non-physicist to head the office since it was established in 1976, and his confirmation ends a long drought in the White House....
Russian researchers recently announced a mind-blowing discovery: a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth carcass containing blood that resists freezing even at −17 degrees Celsius. The Siberian Times quoted team leader Semyon Grigoriev of North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk as speculating that the blood contains “a kind of natural anti-freeze.” An Agence France-Presse report, meanwhile, quotes Grigoriev as saying “this find gives us a really good chance of finding live cells,” which would be a windfall for his institution’s international project to clone a mammoth....
A fuel cell that uses microorganisms to break down organic matter could help provide additional fuel for a hydrogen economy, a new report suggests. The novel design, with energy requirements amounting to less than 5 percent of those of a cell phone, can coax pure hydrogen out of biomass that is not suitable for natural fermentation processes. For conventional fermentation to yield hydrogen, the process must use carbohydrate-based biomass. But the reaction also produces other end products, such as acetic acid and butyric acid, that bacteria cannot break down further into hydrogen....
For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time. The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning the correct information....
Today’s figure skaters are performing feats of athletic prowess that were unimaginable only a few decades ago. At the Winter Olympics in Beijing last week, U.S. skater Nathan Chen took home the gold with short program and free skate performances packed with quadruple jumps and triple Axels. And 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva became the first woman to land a quadruple jump—actually two—in Olympic competition in the mixed-gender team event. (According to news reports, Valieva has tested positive for a banned substance, the heart drug trimetazidine....
The end of the politically explosive, decadelong ethical battle over human embryonic stem cells may finally be in sight. Two groups of researchers report today that washing human skin cells in similar cocktails of four genes enabled them to reprogram the cells to resemble those harvested from embryos. The finding potentially paves the way for scores of labs to generate new stem cell lines without cloned embryos, which had long been considered the only realistic way of making human stem cells in the short run....
As spring begins, fun in the sun—even artificial sun—beckons teenagers. Many, especially girls, flock to tanning salons to acquire a base tan for the beach and get that “healthy glow” for a strapless prom dress. But whatever the reason or the season, minors should not be allowed to lie in tanning beds. These devices are skin cancer factories, and people younger than 18 have the highest risk. One fifth of girls in grades 9 through 12 have bathed in ultraviolet (UV) rays from a tanning device in the past year, and one out of 10 girls reported popping into a tanning bed at least 10 times during that period, according to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 2013....
Little snow remains in California, officials say—another sign the state could face a dry and dangerous summer. The California Department of Water Resources announced Friday that the amount of statewide snowpack had fallen to just 38 percent of the average for that date. As if to underscore the point, California officials stood on browning grass after a snow survey Friday in the South Lake Tahoe area. In that location, the only patch of snow available to measure was 2....
The “teen brain” is often ridiculed as an oxymoron—an example of biology gone wrong. Neuroscientists have explained the risky, aggressive or just plain baffling behavior of teenagers as the product of a brain that is somehow compromised. Groundbreaking research in the past 10 years, however, shows that this view is wrong. The teen brain is not defective. It is not a half-baked adult brain, either. It has been forged by evolution to function differently from that of a child or an adult....
At 85 degrees north latitude, specialist Nikolay Vokuev hung out of our helicopter’s open door, a strap tethered around his waist, and threw a burning flare onto the snow-covered ice floating on the Arctic Ocean a few meters below. The flare hit and started to smoke, darkening the pristine, crunchy white surface. We were far north, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest landmass and roughly 50 kilometers from the Akademik Fedorov, the Russian icebreaker that was our home base....
Hydrogen is flowing in pipes under the streets in Cappelle-la-Grande, helping to energize 100 homes in this northern France village. On a short side road adjacent to the town center, a new electrolyzer machine inside a small metal shed zaps water with electricity from wind and solar farms to create “renewable” hydrogen that is fed into the natural gas stream already flowing in the pipes. By displacing some of that fossil fuel, the hydrogen trims carbon emissions from the community’s furnaces, hot-water heaters and stove tops by up to 7 percent....
When you are stuck on a problem, sometimes it is best to stop thinking about it—consciously, anyway. Research has shown that taking a break or a nap can help the brain create pathways to a solution. Now a new study expands on the effect of this so-called incubation by using sound cues to focus the sleeping mind on a targeted problem. When humans sleep, parts of the brain replay certain memories, strengthening and transforming them....
Trans and gender-diverse youth across the country are scared, struggling and dying, and our duty is to address this crisis. We know that gender-affirming health care improves the health and well-being of transgender and gender-diverse youth. Despite this, several states, including Texas, Florida and Alabama are doing their best to make lifesaving gender-affirming care illegal. At the same time, the COVID pandemic has shown us that health care isn’t limited by geography; many health systems have strengthened their telehealth offerings....
HOUSTON, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Texas has launched aerial attacks on mosquitoes swarming coastal regions of the state and threatening to spread disease and hinder disaster recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes began spraying insecticides over three eastern Texas counties over the weekend and will expand to other areas over the next two weeks, officials from the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) said....
For years many educators have championed “errorless learning,” advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time. The idea is that students who make errors will remember the mistakes and will not learn the correct information (or will learn it more slowly, if at all)....
