The shapes of skulls from around the world may have opened a new window onto the exodus of the first humans from Africa. According to a new report, groups of skulls from local populations are less diverse the farther those populations settled from the ancestral continent. The result supports the popular scientific theory that modern humans swept “out of Africa” some 50,000 years ago and supplanted earlier species such as Neandertals....
Small may be beautiful for the nuclear power industry So argue a host of would-be builders of novel nuclear reactors. While the U.S. government has not given up on investing in large units that boast conventional designs, the Department of Energy has also announced the availability of $450 million in funds to support engineering and licensing of so-called “small modular reactors.” “The Obama Administration and the Energy Department are committed to an all-of-the-above energy strategy that develops every source of American energy, including nuclear power,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in a statement announcing the funding, which aims to get such modular reactors hooked into the grid by 2022....
Editor’s Note (7/29/16): An earlier version of this story contained several biographical inaccuracies and did not give Jim Papadopoulos a chance to respond to the comment about his ability to finish things. Michael Papadopoulos moved his family to the United States more than a decade before taking a job at Oregon, not in 1967. Jim Papadopoulos spent a whole academic year at Oregon before starting at MIT. He did not write to bike companies asking for work until the 1990s....
Fire crews are making an unheard-of scramble as a huge number of lightning-sparked wildfires continue to burn across drought-parched regions of Oregon and Washington. One fire in north-central Washington has already caused severe damage, destroying an estimated 150 homes. According to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, there were 13 large, uncontained fires burning in Oregon as of yesterday, consuming over 494,000 acres. In Washington, seven fires have burned close to 319,000 acres....
Some global crises, such as climate change, are too big to overcome through individual action or even through government-level policy change. To survive this century, we are also going to need some huge science and engineering breakthroughs—especially in areas such as energy and transportation. Unfortunately, the systems we have built to encourage innovation are in a dismal state. Federal investment in R&D as a share of the overall economy is lower than at any point in the past 60 years....
June 1963 Intro to Exoplanets “A planet-sized ‘dark companion’ has been discovered revolving around a dim star some six light-years distant in the direction of the constellation of Ophiuchus. The ‘sun’ of this solar system is Barnard’s star, otherwise known chiefly for having the largest motion across the sky of any star. The planet is 50 percent more massive than Jupiter; it has been named Barnard’s star B by its discoverer, Peter van de Kamp of Swarthmore College....
How does solar power work? A. Paul Alivisatos, deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leader of the Helios solar energy research project there, shines some light on the matter: When the sun strikes a solar panel, the energy of the sunlight liberates electrons in the solar cells, producing an electric current that we can harness to power pocket calculators, homes, even science stations on Mars. In a traditional crystalline silicon cell, the atoms in the silicon crystal are bound by shared electrons....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As you bite down into a delicious piece of fish, you probably don’t think about what the fish itself ate – but perhaps you should. Over 50 species of fish have been found to consume plastic trash at sea. This is bad news, not only for fish but potentially for humans who rely on fish for sustenance....
Anesthetics may instigate the same molecular changes in the brain that have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. After surgery or other procedures requiring anesthesia, some mentally sharp seniors suffer a steep cognitive decline, says Pravat K. Mandal of the University of Pittsburgh. “Nobody knows how it happens.” Now he is unraveling exactly how some anesthetics might interact with small proteins or peptides in the brain to cause cognitive problems. Although Alzheimer’s disease is still not entirely understood, it involves the formation of fibrous protein structures called amyloid plaques in the brain....
Peer into the sky through a powerful telescope, and beyond the glare of the Milky Way, you can make out the faint glow of distant galaxies. These galaxies clump together in dense clusters joined by wispy filaments and separated by enormous voids hundreds of millions of light-years across. Since the 1980s, scientists have observed millions of galaxies to map this “cosmic web” in ever greater detail in their quest to understand our universe’s history....
The experimental drug has startling powers: It can turn down a mutant gene in a patient’s body, stopping the production of proteins that cause a terribly painful rare disease. A crucial, late-stage clinical trial showed that the drug works—and that it’s safe. And now the biotech company behind it, Alnylam, is poised to bring this first-of-its-kind therapy to market. The news has thrilled both patients and scientists, who have been working for decades on the technology to mute misbehaving genes, known as RNA interference, or RNAi....
Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that the loss of the world’s peatlands is a major factor in the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If so, what can be done about it? – Larissa S., Las Vegas, NV Peatlands are wetland ecosystems that accumulate plant material to form layers of peat soil up to 60 feet thick. They can store, on average, 10 times more carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas, than other ecosystems....
The Head Lines section of Scientific American Mind’s July/August issue mentioned the following articles in brief. Click on the links to learn more about them. Women who develop gestational diabetes during pregnancy are more likely to have a child with autism. Scientists used electrical stimulation to make sleeping mice associate a certain location with positive feelings. When the mice woke up, they chose to spend more time there. Most kids with ADHD get medication without behavioral therapy, despite expert recommendations to do both together....
When it comes to information and connection, we rarely want for anything these days. And that’s a problem, argues journalist Michael Harris in his new book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection (Current, August 2014). Harris suggests that modern technology, especially the smartphone, has taken certain kinds of absence from our lives—it has eliminated our time for solitude and daydreaming, and filled even short moments of quiet with interruptions and distractions....
Overall, U.S. broadband speeds place a dismal 14th among the country’s international peers, but broken down by state and district, a rosier picture emerges. In fact, Washington, D.C., has the third-highest speed in the world, behind only one other city, Hong Kong, and one country, South Korea. A new report from The Connectivist, an online magazine created in partnership with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, shows that D.C. plus 9 U....
More than 80% of cancer patients turn to local healthcare facilities for care. But those small-town centers many times don’t have access to the latest innovations found in the leading academic and research institutions. To take on this geographic inequality, the COE — winner of the 2019 Catalyst for Care Award — is bringing top-tier multidisciplinary cancer care to community hospitals across the country. The program is patient-focused; COE director Leah Fine describes it as all about hugs, not handshakes....
On a dark stretch of the chilly Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko the lander Philae has begun a lonely and silent vigil. After it landed awkwardly and bounced across the comet’s surface on November 12, 2014, Philae operated for just under three days—its planned primary mission length—before running out of energy and falling into hibernation. As the comet approached the sun in 2015 and the solar-powered spacecraft was able to warm up and recharge its batteries, the European Space Agency (ESA) reestablished contact on June 13, but messages were sporadic and the craft went silent on July 9....
Lacey Williams was using a drone to follow a great white shark in South Africa’s Plettenberg Bay when she saw something very strange. As the predator passed a school of meaty leerfish, they did not turn tail and flee. Instead they actively pursued the shark—and began rubbing their bodies against its tail as though it were an exfoliating pumice stone. “All of a sudden, the fish start chafing on the shark,” says Williams, a marine biology graduate student at the University of Miami....
Pain is an unpleasant but necessary sensation. The few people born without the ability to feel it must approach day-to-day tasks with extra caution. Without the ability to sense the effects of a broken bone or burned skin, it’s difficult to avoid harm. On the other hand, too much pain can be debilitating. Individuals with chronic pain often experience a host of additional negative effects on mental and physical health. Despite recent advances in uncovering the underlying mechanisms of pain perception in the brain, scientists are still debating the questions of where and how pain is processed....
Newton was wrong. Einstein was wrong. Black holes do not exist. The big bang never happened. Dark energy and dark matter are unsubstantiated conjectures. Stars are electrically charged plasma masses. Venus was once a comet. The massive Valles Marineris canyon on Mars was carved out in a few minutes by a giant electric arc sweeping across the Red Planet. The “thunderbolt” icons found in ancient art and petroglyphs are not the iconography of imagined gods but realistic representations of spectacular electrical activity in space....
