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Researchers have developed a wind turbine blade that costs less and appears to be recyclable, two attributes that could accelerate the rapid growth of both onshore and offshore wind around the world. The innovation may also reduce rising transportation costs because blades for taller turbines can now be as long as 262 feet, almost the length of a football field. It may take years of further testing to make certain the recyclable blades can endure the outdoor elements for 30 years, which is the standard goal for the wind power industry, according to researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory....

Most sports involve some level of physical risk, and Olympic contests are no exception. Although the injury rate is lower than that for some professional sports such as American football and soccer, about 10 percent of Olympians get hurt during their days at the games, either while training on site or in actual competition. A total of 1,055 injuries were reported during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, according to a thorough study of injury reports by Lars Engebretsen of the University of Oslo in Norway....

As California moves forward with the first open-source digital textbook program in the nation this fall, the best content seems a lot less like Wikipedia and a lot more like traditional publishing. Bulky, hefty and downright expensive, conventional school textbooks may rank as the most outdated part of our nation’s public education system. Many observers, including Chris Anderson, author of Free, have speculated that crowd sourcing could help bring down the cost of textbooks and improve their quality–but chipping away at the publishing industry’s last profit center has proven more challenging in practice....

Are you a media multitasker? We know you’re reading a blog, but what else are you doing right now? Take a quick inventory: Are you also listening to music? Monitoring the progress of a sports game on TV? Emailing your co-worker? Texting your friend? On hold with tech support? If your inventory has revealed a multitasking lifestyle, you are not alone. Media multitasking is increasingly common, to the extent that some have dubbed today’s teens “Generation M....

By the time he was seven years old, Arkin Rai, a child living in Singapore, drew dinosaurs with exquisite realism. At age three his dinosaurs were simple and schematic. A year and some months later, however, he created a complex drawing in which dinosaurs were layered one on top of the other, an image that bears an uncanny resemblance to a drawing of horses and a bull by the adult Pablo Picasso....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Many early-stage breast cancer patients don’t get the recommended short course of radiation after surgery, even though it’s considered just as good as prolonged treatment, a new study finds. “Only a third of women are getting a shorter course of radiation that has been found to be effective and no more toxic," said lead author Dr. Justin Bekelman, of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia....

Excerpted from Creation: How Science Is Reinventing Life Itself, by Adam Rutherford. Published by Current/Penguin. Copyright © Adam Rutherford, 2013. Used with permission. In the 150 years since the Origin of Species was published, millions of scientists have poked and pulled at the theory of evolution; unpicked, tweaked, and yanked at it in every conceivable way. They have observed countless species from aardvarks (or anteaters) to zebras to study their behavior....

By stimulating dead brain tissue, neuroscientists have concluded that a specific receptor found in the outer layer of neurons functions differently in schizophrenic brains. Schizophrenia, a disorder affecting about 1 percent of Americans, stems partly from genetic factors. Current treatments alleviate only a small fraction of the symptoms, which may include hallucinations, paranoia and disorganized behavior. The N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor is one of several which bind to glutamate, a key neurotransmitter....

Key concepts Physics Free fall Forces Gravity Mass Inertia Introduction Have you ever wondered how fast a heavy object falls compared with a lighter one? Imagine if you dropped both of them at the same time. Which would hit the ground first? Would it be the heavier one because it weighs more? Or would they hit the ground at the same time? In the late 1500s in Italy the famous scientist Galileo was asking some of these same questions....

The Southwest became the center of U.S. climate action yesterday, as New Mexico lawmakers voted to decarbonize their state’s electric grid and Nevada’s governor announced his support for bills to expand renewable energy and enshrine carbon reduction targets in law. The developments represented a striking shift for American climate efforts. Climate policy, long dominated at the state level by California and a handful of Northeastern states, had stagnated in Nevada and New Mexico until recently....

Twenty years after the birth of Dolly the sheep, cloning remains controversial and little-used. But now a new study, started in the lab that made Dolly famous, may reduce some of that controversy by showing that cloned sheep that make it through early life healthy will likely remain that way indefinitely. The study followed into late middle age four Dolly clones—Debbie, Denise, Dianna and Daisy, all derived from frozen cells from the same mammary gland as Dolly was—and nine sheep of other species....

SAN FRANCISCO—The Himalaya Mountain region is warming up three to five times faster than the global trends—or about half a degree Celsius per decade—and many of its glaciers are rapidly losing mass. Greenhouse gases alone cannot explain this warming, however, and several new studies are pointing to an old form of pollution: soot. A thick cloud of soot covers most of India, produced in part by millions of small cooking stoves, which typically burn wood....

On Christmas morning of 2021, astronomers watched their new, greatest tool successfully blast off into space. Now the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is fully deployed and has arrived at its deep-space destination, a quiet locale 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth. Massimo Stiavelli heads the JWST Mission Office at the institute that allocates research time on the telescope. According to Stiavelli, “every area of science is covered” in the proposals his group has approved, from the search for potentially habitable exoplanets to studies of the earliest stars....

In December 2020, a week before cardiologist Stuart Katz was scheduled to receive his first COVID-19 vaccine, he came down with a fever. He spent the next two weeks wracked with a cough, body aches and chills. After months of helping others to weather the pandemic, Katz, who works at New York University, was having his own first-hand experience of COVID-19. On Christmas Day, Katz’s acute illness finally subsided. But many symptoms lingered, including some related to the organ he’s built his career around: the heart....

We live in a lopsided universe: That has been a lesson that cosmologists have learned from examining the detailed structure of the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Now, two cosmologists show that the data are consistent with a Universe that is curved slightly, similarly to a saddle. If their model is correct, it would overturn the long-held belief that the cosmos is flat. On a large scale, precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe provided the first hints of an asymmetry in 2004....

More than 100 years ago Ivan Pavlov famously observed that a dog salivated not only when fed but also on hearing a stimulus it associated with food. Since then, scientists have discovered many other seemingly autonomous processes that can be trained with sensory stimuli—including, most recently, our immune system. Researchers have long been able to train an animal’s immune system to respond to a nonpathogen stimulus. Pavlov’s students even did so in the early 20th century, but the famous dogs overshadowed their work....

The flat, glistening, white expanse of the Greenland Ice Sheet, stretching out across hundreds of thousands of square miles, appears placid, unchanging … boring even. But this tranquil surface belies the turmoil taking place below, at the base of the ice sheet. There, scientists have discovered sections of ice up to a kilometer thick and tens of kilometers long where meltwater has refrozen to the base of the ice sheet, setting off a dynamic process that causes the layers of ice to build up over the eons and contort into sinuous folds....

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ark. — Hospital pharmacist Mandy Langston remembers when Lulabelle Berry arrived at Stone County Medical Center’s emergency department last year. Berry couldn’t talk. Her face was drooping on one side. Her eyes couldn’t focus. “She was basically unresponsive,” Langston recalls. Berry, 78, was having a severe ischemic stroke. Each passing second made brain damage more likely. So, Langston reached for the clot-busting drug Activase, which must be given within a few hours to work....

When it rains in Georgia, you may want to buy your peaches in a can. Researchers at the University of Georgia in Athens (U.G.A.) have found that rain ups the risk of salmonella in rivers and streams—and, in turn, in products nourished by and washed in tainted runoff waters. The scientists report in Applied and Environmental Microbiology that 79 percent of water samples from rivers and streams in southern Georgia collected and tested over a year contained the rod-shaped bacteria; concentrations were highest in specimens gathered in the summer months and right after it rained....

Human babies enter the world utterly dependent on caregivers to tend to their every need. Although newborns of other primate species rely on caregivers, too, human infants are especially helpless because their brains are comparatively underdeveloped. Indeed, by one estimation, a human fetus would have to undergo a gestation period of 18 to 21 months instead of the usual nine to be born at a neurological and cognitive development stage comparable to that of a chimpanzee newborn....