“If you had to choose a moment in time to be born, any time in human history, and you didn’t know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status might be,” what time would you choose? Paleolithic? Neolithic? Ancient Greece or Rome? Medieval times? Elizabethan England? Colonial America? The 1950s? “You’d choose today,” answered the man who posed this question in an April 2016 speech, President Barack Obama....
Around the globe, stem cell research has met with reactions varying from enthusiasm (as in the UK) to suspicion and distaste. Despite increasingly permissive international laws, no consensus on supporting the research has emerged, even among the selection of “stem cell progressive” countries considered here. The US government, for example, provides an enormous sum ($550m) for stem cell investigations by global standards, but the portion for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) studies ($24m) is only slightly above the spending by countries with much smaller budgets where investments go farther....
Recently, Apple released three new features designed to keep children safe. One of them, labeled “Communication safety in Messages,” will scan the iMessages of people under 13 to identify and blur sexually explicit images, and alert parents if their child opens or sends a message containing such an image. At first, this might sound like a good way to mitigate the risk of young people being exploited by adult predators. But it may cause more harm than good....
China’s space station Tiangong is almost complete. The third and final module is scheduled to launch into low Earth orbit on Monday. The station, only the second laboratory in orbit, is expected to host more than 1,000 scientific experiments over its lifetime of at least 10 years. These include studying the effects of microgravity on living tissues and the behaviour of fires. Building a space station is a massive achievement, says Paulo de Souza, who develops space technologies at Griffith University in the Gold Coast, Australia....
By Laura Zuckerman July 10 (Reuters) - Conservationists on Friday protested a U.S. decision not to prosecute a Utah hunter who mistakenly shot and killed a gray wolf that had gained an international following for being the first of its kind seen at the Grand Canyon in 70 years. The wandering wolf, a radio-collared female from Wyoming nicknamed “Echo,” was celebrated last fall after being spotted in and around the national park in Arizona before a Utah coyote hunter reported in December that he had shot and killed the wolf after mistaking it for a coyote....
Using personal stories from seven different countries—El Salvador, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Malawi, Bolivia and the Philippines—Christian Aid’s report, “Taken by Storm: Responding to the Impacts of Climate Change,” focuses on the devastating impacts of climate change on several of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities. “They’re not really visible to us, particularly in the wealthy countries,” said report author Alison Doig in a telephone interview. “There are so many millions of people that are affected by climate change in different ways, and that’s what we wanted to show in the report....
Climate change and habitat loss are two huge threats to animal and plant survival, but a new study shows how managing both factors could help prevent extinctions. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions and protecting more tropical land could reduce the probability of species blinking out, called extinction risk, by more than half, the research found. Scientists had not previously calculated the combined benefits that limiting climate change and saving swaths of land could have for so many species, says co-author Patrick Roehrdanz, a researcher with the nonprofit organization Conservation International....
On January 15, 1919, just as Martin Clougherty was waking from a nap, a towering wall of syrup slammed into his bedroom and swept him into the middle of the street. Battered but conscious, he managed to stand in the chest-deep mire flowing past him and wipe great globs of gunk from his eyes. Here and there the splintered remains of his house drifted on a sea of thick, amber fluid....
You may think the fine art of conversation is all about the words you speak. But research suggests your eyes have something to say, too, letting others know when it’s their turn to pipe up. Turn taking in conversation is a topic of high interest to scientists because it happens so quickly—much faster than our brain is thought to be able to comprehend the words being spoken. Studies stretching back to the 1960s hint that we use eye gaze as a possible turn-taking signal....
Even the king of the jungle can’t escape getting his picture taken these days. In June the Kenya-based Lion Guardians launched the Lion Identification Network of Collaborators (LINC). The database of lion profiles was built with the first facial-recognition software specifically designed to analyze the mugs of these big cats and distinguish them from one another. With LINC, the conservation organization and other wildlife researchers will have an easier way to monitor the beasts’ whereabouts....
As coyotes take over their ranges in North America, red fox populations are plummeting, and researchers have found one surprising result: The drop is fueling the spread of Lyme disease. Lyme disease cases have increased enormously in recent years: From 1997 to 2007, the number of cases increased by 380 percent in Minnesota, 280 percent in Wisconsin and 1,300 percent in Virginia. Researchers used to think the increases were due to increasing deer populations, since deer are an important host to the disease-causing bacteria....
Researchers have found the first evidence of past water on the moon: trace water molecules trapped in glassy, volcanic pebbles brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and early 1970s. The pebbles, known as lunar volcanic glasses, were formed more than three billion years ago when molten underground rock (magma) erupted from the lunar surface in fiery sprays and solidified. Using a highly sensitive type of mass spectrometry, which sorts particles by size and charge, researchers scanned the lunar samples for elements and molecules that boil at low temperatures, referred to as volatiles....
Quantum mechanical simulations of the famous Miller experiment, in which simple molecules are exposed to an electrical discharge to produce amino acids, as may have happened on the early Earth as a precursor to life, suggest that a previously unseen intermediate, formamide, may play a key role in the chemical pathways. The researchers, A Marco Saitta of UPMC in Paris, France, and Franz Saija of the Institute for Chemical and Physical Processes in Messina, Italy, also suggest that localized electrical fields on the surface of minerals may have had a bigger part in prebiotic chemistry than has been appreciated....
As the carnage of the Eastern Front raged around him, a German lieutenant in World War I digested Albert Einstein’s new theory. Less than two months after Einstein published his general theory of relativity, Karl Schwarzschild, who had enlisted despite being older than 40 and a physicist, found a way to use it to describe the spacetime of a spherical, nonrotating mass such as a stationary star or planet. Hidden inside Schwarzschild’s work was an implication that hinted at the ultimate warpers of spacetime: black holes....
Dear EarthTalk: How far along are we at developing algae-based and other higher yield sources of biofuels?—Jason McCabe, Tullahoma, Tenn. A few years ago biofuels were all the rage. Environmental advocates to national security hawks alike were extolling the virtues of ethanol and biodiesel as a carbon-neutral bridge to our energy future. But the bubble burst when it became apparent that there wasn’t enough agricultural land in the U.S. or elsewhere to grow sufficient amounts of corn, palm and other crops to feed both people and their engines....
Psychologists have long known that situations can shape behavior—for example, when time pressure turns would-be Good Samaritans into callous passersby. More recently, studies have shown that even cues as subtle as a mild scent can trigger changes in participants’ thoughts and actions. But can environmental signals influence important decisions in the real world? A new study of election voting suggests they can. Investigators at the Stanford Graduate School of Business analyzed data from Arizona’s 2000 general election, looking for a link between where voters cast their ballots and whether they backed a school-funding initiative....
Hepatitis B infects millions of people annually and nearly 1 million die each year worldwide, despite the existence of safe and effective injectable vaccines. Vaccines that can be administered orally, such as the one for polio, stand a better chance of being successful in poorer countries that have high death rates from treatable maladies. To that end, results from human trials of edible vaccines delivered in potatoes offer new encouragement....
A sun-like star in our solar system’s backyard may host five planets, including one perhaps capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study reports. Astronomers have detected five possible alien planets circling the star Tau Ceti, which is less than 12 light-years from Earth — a mere stone’s throw in the cosmic scheme of things. One of the newfound worlds appears to orbit in Tau Ceti’s habitable zone, a range of distances from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface....
By Paul Sandle and Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - The world’s top medical technology companies are turning to robots to help with complex knee surgery, promising quicker procedures and better results in operations that often leave patients dissatisfied. Demand for artificial replacement joints is growing fast, as baby boomers’ knees and hips wear out, but for the past 15 years rival firms have failed to deliver a technological advance to gain them significant market share....
Scientists have improved their ability to detect underground nuclear explosions set off by rogue nations, a development sure to be of interest as the Nuclear Security Summit kicks off its 2016 meeting in Washington D.C. today. A team led by Charles R. Carrigan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) used field experiments to build a new, complex model that predicts isotopic ratios of noble gases that would be released from such explosions (Sci....
