Posts

Cravings—we all have them. These intense desires can be triggered by a place, a smell, even a picture. For recovering drug addicts, such memory associations can increase vulnerability to relapse. Now researchers at the Florida campus of the Scripps Research Institute have found a chemical that prevents rats from recalling their drug-associated memories. The study, published online in Biological Psychiatry last fall, is also the first of its kind to disrupt memories without requiring active recollection....

House Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney said yesterday that she intends to subpoena four major oil companies and two trade organizations for documents and communications as part of her committee’s investigation into climate misinformation. The subpoenas, expected to be formally issued in the coming days, would be a major step, extending the reach of a congressional probe of the fossil fuel industry that could last well into next year. “I see no choice but to continue our committee’s investigation until we see the truth,” Maloney (D-N....

An airplane has flown the expanse of U.S. airspace powered by photons alone. The coast-to-coast journey was but a warm-up for an attempt at circumnavigating the globe. The transcontinental flight that didn’t use a drop of fuel took 105 hours and 41 minutes to cover 5,650 kilometers—and the next one will be nearly 10 times longer. The Solar Impulse HB-SIA completed its trip across North America last week, enduring bad weather and landing early due to a tear in the wing....

During this strange and scary pandemic year, a lot of people have been spending more time outdoors, admiring flowers and listening to birds they may have rushed past in the Before Times. The more you learn about nature, the more fascinating it is, and this month’s cover story on oaks may help you appreciate these majestic trees. Plant scientists Andrew L. Hipp, Paul S. Manos and Jeannine Cavender-Bares show that over the past 56 million years, oaks have evolved into 435 species with elaborate adaptations that let them thrive in habitats around the world, dominating many North American forests....

More than 44,000 radio antennas will soon link over the Internet to create one of the most ambitious radio telescopes ever built. Its job will be to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and, potentially, signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. The array is designed to monitor low-frequency radio waves. One key source of these emissions are extraordinarily feeble signals from the cold hydrogen gas that dominated the cosmos during the so-called Dark Ages of the universe....

States can claim some success in decarbonizing the power sector. As for limiting tailpipe emissions? They’ve barely managed to move the needle. That’s one reason climate advocates are concerned about EPA’s proposal to freeze fuel economy standards at 2020 levels through 2026. Where states have considerable authority to influence the power sector, by setting renewable portfolio standards or pushing for emissions reductions from power plants, they have far fewer tools to manage transportation emissions....

There is a growing market for organic foods that are supposed to be free of pesticides, hormones and synthetic chemicals before they can be labeled as such. Consumers, eager for chemical-free products, plunk down close to $14 billion annually for organic fare, according to the Organic Trade Association, a North American organization dedicated to promoting organic farming. But how do they know that the food they’re getting—and paying a premium for—is really organic?...

Earlier this year earthquakes in Nepal leveled thousands of buildings, killed upward of 8,500 people and injured hundreds of thousands more. The magnitude 7.8 and 7.3 temblors also cracked or damaged several hydropower projects, underscoring another imminent danger: dam bursts. More than 600 large dams have been built or are in some stage of construction or planning in the geologically active Himalayan Mountains, but many are probably not designed to withstand the worst earthquakes that could hit the region, according to a number of seismologists and civil engineers....

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33,594 people died by guns in 2014 (the most recent year for which U.S. figures are available), a staggering number that is orders of magnitude higher than that of comparable Western democracies. What can we do about it? National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre believes he knows: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun....

Rufus Porter lived through a remarkable technological transformation. When he was born, in 1792, Americans traveled overland by foot and horse, communicated by hand-carried letters and resorted to being bled when ill. Fifteen years later Robert Fulton’s paddle-wheel steamboat began transporting people up the Hudson from New York City to Albany. By the time Porter published the first issue of Scientific American magazine on Thursday, August 28, 1845, steam engines were driving the nation’s burgeoning factories, mines and mills, and steam-powered railroads were transporting goods and people across land at breathtaking speeds....

Even for scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding gravity, the force’s relentless downward pull is sometimes a drag. Consider, for instance, the researchers who study Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) as precise probes of fundamental physics. BECs emerge when a dilute gas of atoms is cooled close to absolute zero and begins behaving as a single, strange chunk of quantum matter—similar to how wriggling water molecules transform into a block of ice once they are chilled....

Several years ago a youth counselor told me about the dilemma he faced when dealing with violent young men. His direct impressions simply didnt match what he had been taught. He saw his violent clients as egotists with a grandiose sense of personal superiority and entitlement, but his textbooks told him that these young toughs actually suffered from low self-esteem. He and his staff decided they couldnt go against decades of research, regardless of what they had observed, and so they tried their best to boost the young men’s opinions of themselves, even though this produced no discernible reduction in their antisocial tendencies....

The Church on Spilt Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia, is like something out of a fairy tale. Perched on the edge of a frigid canal, it has a forest of onion domes that stretches toward the sky and pastel-colored mosaics that cover every square inch of the interior. This is not the type of place where paleontologists typically hang out, but I was in town to study a new dinosaur, and I insisted on taking a detour....

Physical ailments are not as divorced from mental processes as we often think. Studies are turning up more and more instances in which treating the mind relieves physical symptoms or treating the body can inadvertently skew our thoughts and feelings. Gastritis and Anxiety People with gastritis—a blanket term for stomach and intestinal discomfort, including heartburn, nausea and abdominal pain—are nearly twice as likely as the general population to suffer from anxiety and mood disorders, according to a study published in the January Journal of Psychiatric Research....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. “Tired” is a slippery word. There’s physically tired: heavy limbs, moving through metaphorical mud, or drowsy eyes. But there’s also emotionally tired: lack of motivation, feeling unable to deal, and the most common: “I just don’t feel like it.” Fatigue can be a medical issue stemming from anemia, thyroid issues, pregnancy, cardiovascular problems, or other culprits....

Have you joined the Twitterverse? All over the world millions of people are posting their 140-or-­fewer-character tweets online via Twitter. As a confirmed Twitterer, I wondered what it might have been like if Twitter, and all its users, had been around for, oh, the past few thousand years. PythyinGreece Had amazing insight into right triangles. Add squares of sides = square of hypo. Could be useful. Euclidmenot Working on something (book series called Elements) to drive 10th graders nuts 4 thousands of years....

A 45,000-year-old leg bone from Siberia has yielded the oldest genome sequence for Homo sapiens on record — revealing a mysterious population that may once have spanned northern Asia. The DNA sequence from a male hunter-gatherer also offers tanta­li­zing clues about modern humans’ journey from Africa to Europe, Asia and beyond, as well as their sexual encounters with Neanderthals. His kind might have remained unknown were it not for Nikolai Peristov, a Russian artist who carves jewellery from ancient mammoth tusks....

By Krista Mahr and Gopal Sharma JURE, Nepal, May 13 (Reuters) - Areas of Nepal remain perilously unstable following last month’s devastating earthquake, and, as Tuesday’s tremor showed, landslides pose an ongoing menace that will only increase when seasonal monsoon rains begin to fall in the coming weeks. Geologists are rushing to identify the valleys, villages and towns most at risk from rock and mud falls, but resources are stretched as the country recovers from an April 25 quake that killed 8,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless....

ZAGREB, Nov 29 (Reuters) - The wartime commander of Bosnian Croat forces, Slobodan Praljak, died after he drank poison seconds after United Nations judges turned down his appeal against a 20-year sentence for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims, Croatian state television reported. The broadcaster quoted sources close to Praljak as saying he had died in a hospital in The Hague on Wednesday. Appeals judges at the U.N.’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal upheld the convictions of six Bosnian Croats found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1990s, in the court’s last verdict before it closes next month....

A funny thing happened as the U.S. prepared to launch an experiment to protect the nation’s future electric grids. It turned into a real-world test. Rising amounts of renewable energy will reduce greenhouse gases, but engineers worry about restoring wind- and solar-rich grids after blackouts. So in August, Dan Brouillette, then the secretary of Energy, visited the department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., to mark the pending launch of an experiment....