Posts

Strokes cripple more people in the U.S. than any other disease. Modern drugs can unblock clogged arteries if patients get to care facilities in time. But the longer the trip to the hospital, the more nerve cells die from lack of blood. Better ways to avert brain damage could dramatically improve patients’ quality of life. Recently a team of neuroscientists stumbled on a very low tech way to completely prevent stroke damage in rats: tickle their whiskers....

How long would you be willing to wait for a drop of the black stuff in Dublin? After 69 years, one of the longest-running laboratory investigations in the world has finally captured the fall of a drop of tar pitch on camera for the first time. A similar, better-known and older experiment in Australia missed filming its latest drop in 2000 because the camera was offline at the time. The Dublin pitch-drop experiment was set up in 1944 at Trinity College Dublin to demonstrate the high viscosity or low fluidity of pitch — also known as bitumen or asphalt — a material that appears to be solid at room temperature, but is in fact flowing, albeit extremely slowly....

What is the fastest event that can be measured? —R. MITCHELL, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Scott A. Diddams and Thomas R. O’Brian of the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology offer an explanation: The answer depends on how one interprets the word “measured.” Both the accurate measurement of fleeting events and the recording or inference of such occurrences are of interest. So we suggest rephrasing the original query into two new ones: “What are the shortest time spans that can be measured with a particular accuracy?...

In some respects, making a solar system might seem childishly simple. A cloud of gas and dust collapses under its own gravity, forming a whirling “protoplanetary” disk of debris that has a star at its center. Despite its name, though, a protoplanetary disk is a challenging environment in which to form worlds—at least, according to theorists who model the process. Now, however, new observations are revealing surprising details of how planets emerge from disks: the first worlds to form can give rise to whirlpool-like vortices, which create subsequent generations of planets....

Babies whose moms lived within a mile of crops treated with widely used pesticides were more likely to develop autism, according to new research. The study of 970 children, born in farm-rich areas of Northern California, is part of the largest project to date that is exploring links between autism and environmental exposures. The University of California, Davis research – which used women’s addresses to determine their proximity to insecticide-treated fields – is the third project to link prenatal pesticide exposures to autism and related disorders....

Top pick: America in Space: NASA’s First Fifty Years foreword by Neil Armstrong. 480 photographs. Published in collaboration with NASA to launch the celebration of its 50th anniversary. Abrams, 2007 Beautifully reproduced on heavy matte paper in an exuberantly sized book (roughly 11 x 15 inches), these are not your usual space photos. Many have never been published, and all seem chosen for a sense of fun, novelty, and joy of life....

Tweets and status updates have been buzzing for weeks about DARPA’s Network Challenge, even though the event does not officially kick off until 10 A.M. Eastern time Saturday when hundreds of technophiles will compete in an effort to be the first to track down the locations of 10 large red weather balloons positioned across the U.S. throughout the day (pdf). Commemorating the 40th anniversary of ARPANET (the Internet’s predecessor), the event has already met one of its main goals in demonstrating the effectiveness of social networking....

The U.S. has more guns per person than any other country, a ranking that is unlikely to drop even in the wake of the latest high-casualty mass shootings. Why are guns so pervasive here when they take so many lives (more than 36,000 in 2015)? Which Americans are the most strongly tied to their guns—and why? Baylor University sociologists F. Carson Mencken and Paul Froese tackled these questions in a study published last month in Social Problems....

The moon, our nearest celestial neighbor, still carries its share of mysteries, especially when it comes to the role of water in its past and present. Just last year a surprising series of studies indicated that the lunar surface is dusted with water molecules; another much-heralded experiment showed that at least some polar craters on the moon appear to be lined with water ice. Those stores of ice would be valuable resources to future moon visitors, who could count on a local source of water for an extended stay on the lunar surface....

There in the mud, just waiting to be scooped up, is a natural resource deposit potentially worth billions and billions of dollars. It contains chemical elements needed by automakers, by manufacturers of consumer electronics and by green technology developers—elements for which China currently holds a global near monopoly. The catch? The mud, which is enriched in the technologically crucial metals known as the rare earth elements, is beneath thousands of meters of water in the Pacific Ocean....

Political pundits, commentators and average citizens continue to have trouble accounting for the rise of populist authoritarian leaders across the globe. The common question batted around continues to be how leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Nicolás Maduro, Recep Erdogan could become the standard-bearers of democracy for countries like the US, Hungary, Philippines, Venenzuela and Turkey. Much of the writing has concentrated on the west, and specifically the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president....

Large numbers of infants and toddlers have died from lead poisoning in Nigerian villages where their parents process gold ore inside their family compounds, according to a report published Tuesday by an international team of researchers. In two Nigerian communities, 118 children under the age of 5 died in a single year – 25 percent of the children in that age group. For the first time, the researchers uncovered strong evidence that points to lead as the likely cause for nearly all of those deaths....

Reprinted from Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life among the Stars, by Lee Billings. With permission of Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Lee Billings, 2013. On a hillside near Santa Cruz, California, a split-level ranch house sat in a stand of coast redwoods, the same color as the trees. Three small climate-controlled greenhouses nestled alongside the house next to a diminutive citrus grove, and a satellite dish was turned to the heavens from the manicured back lawn....

As a dentist, Thomas Nabors was attentive to his own mouth and he took good care of his teeth. But he was also acutely aware of the role that bacteria plays in oral health, and he had seen numerous studies linking gum disease to heart problems. So even though he didn’t have other cardiovascular risk factors—he wasn’t overweight and never smoked—he decided to undergo testing. It may have saved his life: he discovered that his carotid arteries were clogged, restricting blood flow, and the vessel walls were inflamed....

A spectrograph splits light into its component wavelengths. First, light travels from a telescope through a small opening in the spectrograph to a collimating mirror that lines up all entering rays of light parallel to one another before they reach a finely scored plate of glass known as a diffraction grating. When light passes through or bounces off this glass grating, its many constituent wavelengths each change speed and direction according to their spectral color....

A meteorite from a fireball that lit up the night sky over Northern California last week hit the roof of a Novato house and landed in the backyard, scientists say. Homeowner Lisa Webber, a nurse at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, found the space rock Saturday (Oct. 20), after reading an article about the dazzling Oct. 17 fireball in the San Francisco Chronicle. She recalled hearing a sound on her roof the night the meteor was reported and went searching behind her house, where she found a 2....

Women in India are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Research published in the October 2018 issue of the Lancet Public Health reveals that in 2016 they accounted for more than 36 percent of female suicide deaths globally, despite making up less than 18 percent of the world’s female population. Suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian women ages 15 to 29, responsible for about 26 to 33 deaths per 100,000 women in that range....

By Lisa Maria Garza DALLAS (Reuters) - A North Texas family, who discovered the skeleton of a 20,000- to 40,000-year-old mammoth while mining through sediment on their farm, is preparing to turn over the remains to a local museum. In May, Wayne McEwen and his family were gathering material from a gravel pit on their property, south of Dallas, when his son struck a 6-foot (1.8 meter) tusk while operating an excavator....

Growing a human being is no small feat—just ask any newly pregnant woman. Her hormones surge as her body undergoes a massive physical transformation, and the changes don’t end there. A study published Monday in Nature Neuroscience reveals that during pregnancy women undergo significant brain remodeling that persists for at least two years after birth. The study also offers preliminary evidence that this remodeling may play a role in helping women transition into motherhood....

In my medical practice, where I treat people with high-risk pregnancies, I recently treated a young woman with pulmonary hypertension. Unfortunately, this diagnosis was made late into her second trimester, well after most states allow pregnancy termination. We had to have the difficult conversation that, despite all modern medical advances, as many as one in three women with this condition will die during pregnancy. Based on that information, who should decide what level of pregnancy risk is acceptable for her?...