Coal in the U.S. is like landline telephones and fax machines — it was everywhere decades ago, but tastes, technology and the market have moved on. So it was little surprise when the federal government reported this week that U.S. coal use fell 9 percent in 2016, even as Americans consumed more energy overall. The U.S. used more natural gas and renewables last year than ever before, while oil use and even nuclear power were on the rise, too....
Penguins inspire a special fascination, even among people who might not normally care about birds. Perhaps it’s their shuffling waddle, their bright, contrasting colors or their stoic, heroic huddles in the face of frigid Antarctic winds. Despite their charm, “if you annoy them, they’ll stab you in the face with their bill,” says Ron Naveen, the founder of nonprofit conservation group Oceanites. A new report issued Tuesday by the group says that although Antarctica has an abundance of these charismatic birds, some penguin populations have suffered huge losses over the past few decades....
A genetic archaeologist of sorts, Cary Fowler works to save the wild species threatened by crop domestication. Fowler is the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organization that seeks to preserve the genetic diversity of plants in seed banks. By providing a backup of wild varieties for their domesticated crop cousins, seed banks provide insurance in the case of a devastating blow to yields. Given the losses in Russia and Australia in the past year that constricted global supply and generated conflicts over rising food prices, this insurance against climate uncertainty is critical....
The editor-in-chief of one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals has said doctors and medical professionals should engage in nonviolent protests to address climate change. Richard Horton of The Lancet said in a video uploaded by Rubber Republic last week that engaging in these social protests is part of the duty of a doctor. He said that the U.K.-based General Medical Council should be fully supportive of health professionals who engage in climate protests based on its own guidelines on the duties of a doctor....
Merely touching money has the power to alter our behavior. Money makes us more selfish, less helpful, and less generous towards others. One experiment, for example, had a pedestrian drop a bus pass in front of people who had just gotten money out of a cash machine or merely walked past the machine. People who had gotten money out of the cash machine were less likely to alert the woman that she had dropped her pass....
By Richard Monastersky of Nature magazineAs soon as the shaking died down on 11 March last year, Ken-Ichi Sato stumbled back to his office and pressed the alarm button, triggering sirens throughout the city of Kesennuma in northeastern Japan. As the emergency manager of the coastal community, Sato had to alert the 64,000 people there that a tsunami might be coming.A minute later, that threat became more real when Sato received word from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) that the quake was large – magnitude 7....
“Señora, go and search for yourself.” With those words, Mexican authorities sent away the grieving mother seeking clues about her daughter’s killer. The year was 2001, after those authorities had discovered the bodies of eight young women in a cotton field near Ciudad Juárez on the Texas-Mexico border, across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El Paso. Police were unlikely to solve their cases, just like those of the hundreds of women who had been sexually abused, mutilated and killed in this lawless town, where this year alone another 60 women and girls have been murdered....
It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. Science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft considered The Colour Out of Space his best story. In this classic tale of cosmic horror, a small farming community faces unspeakable evil from the outer reaches of the universe....
Climate change is already affecting the nation’s public health, according to a new multi-agency report released by the Obama administration. It urges federal agencies to adapt their research and policies to limit future suffering. “Climate change endangers human health, affecting all sectors of society, both domestically and globally,” the report says. While much of the research into the health effects of climate shifts has focused on developing nations, the new analysis argues that the United States is already suffering the effects of rising seas, changes in patterns of flooding and drought, heat waves, shifts in the strength of hurricanes and storms and worsening air quality....
HATING “LOVE” After reading Robert Epstein’s article “How Science Can Help You Fall in Love,” I had to go back to the cover and verify that the word “scientific” was indeed part of the title of your magazine. The “Love-Building Exercises” he recommends are more appropriate to a magazine of fantasy and science fiction: “Two as One”—feeling that the two of you have merged? “A Mind-Reading Game”—wordlessly trying to communicate thoughts?...
Massachusetts remained the most energy-efficient state for the ninth year running, Maryland jumped in the efficiency rankings on the back of its new electricity savings programs, and Kentucky tumbled after regulators there slashed demand management programs for the power sector. Those are among the highlights in an annual scorecard released today by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The findings come amid a flurry of state actions to bolster energy efficiency initiatives and as the federal government has sought to roll back national energy savings efforts....
With motion sensors placed throughout the house, Rogers can see if his mom is moving around, if she’s sleeping (or not), if she forgot to lock the door and, based on a sophisticated algorithm that detects behavioral patterns, whether her activity level or eating habits have changed significantly, for instance. “It gives both of us peace of mind, particularly as she ages and wants to live at home,” said Rogers, who lives near Washington, D....
World-renowned geneticist James Watson today resigned as a top officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), in Long Island, N.Y., culminating a rapid fall from grace triggered last week by racially charged statements he made during a newspaper interview. “This morning I have conveyed to the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory my desire to retire immediately from my position as its chancellor, as well as from my position on its board, on which I have served for the past 43 years,” Watson said in a statement in which he heaped praise on the research facility to which he brought both fame and infamy....
Without hearing a word, a new study asserts, a four-month-old child can tell when speakers switch to another language, simply by observing changes in facial contortions, such as shapes made by the mouth as well as mannerisms, like the head-bobbing rhythm that varies between different tongues. It has been well documented since the late 1980s that very young children can discriminate between languages when they are spoken, but researchers wanted to determine if they could also recognize changes based on a speaker’s gestures....
In an impossible figure, seemingly real objects—or parts of objects—form geometric relations that physically cannot happen. Dutch artist M. C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams. Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle, and visual scientist Dejan Todorović of the University of Belgrade in Serbia created a golden arch that won him third prize in the 2005 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. These effects challenge our hard-earned perception that the world around us follows certain, inviolable rules....
A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind. Known only by the name ‘Master(P)’, since late December the anonymous player has beaten the world’s best at Go in a string of online games, including defeating current world number one, 19-year-old Ke Jie. Go is regarded as the most complex board game ever invented, and is famously difficult for computers to crack....
Black holes are often described as dangerous destructive entities that never give up what falls into their grasp. But what if black holes are protective—shielding us from the unpredictable effects of places where our physical understanding of the universe breaks down? This question might sound flippant, but in fact, it is at the heart of a decades-long physics puzzle known as “cosmic censorship,” one that researchers may finally be close to answering....
Throughout history, groups of people around the world have created stories about how the first stars arrived in the night sky. Some say the stars were born from their mother, the moon, or that they are the souls of animals that ventured up into the great, gaping darkness above. It’s only in recent history that humans have gained the ability to find out the real story of the very first generations of stars in the universe....
Many politicians swept into office in the last election in Congress and the state legislatures have shown little understanding of, or respect for, the enterprise of science. A number of the Republicans now in leadership positions in the House of Representatives, for instance, have expressed skepticism about climate change and are planning to use the subpoena powers of their office to put climate scientists on the defensive and portray efforts to curb carbon emissions as a job killer....
“And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years,” as the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln goes. Although we humans have never been satisfied with the biblical allotment of threescore and ten, neither do we want to extend our life span only to pass the time in a decrepit state. No, we want a longer health span. Might we be on the trail of one?...
