Posts

PROBLEM OF NUCLEAR WASTE In “Stop Dithering on Nuclear Waste” [Science Agenda], the editors argue that the U.S. needs to create a deep repository for nuclear waste and should revisit its decision to close the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. I agree that Yucca Mountain should be revisited. I think a series of town hall–type meetings could be set up to inform the public about the issue. I also think that all presidential candidates should be asked what they would do about nuclear waste handling....

Astronomers have spotted signs of water spraying off comet 2I/Borisov, which is flying towards the Sun on a journey from interstellar space. It is the first time scientists have seen water in our Solar System that originated somewhere else. “There’s water—that’s cool, that’s great,” says Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. The discovery isn’t surprising, he says, because most comets contain a lot of water....

In one way or another, Thomas Gooch has spent more than 30 years struggling with illegal drugs. The 52-year-old Nashville, Tenn., native grew up in extreme poverty. He was first incarcerated in 1988 and spent the next 15 years in and out of jail for using and selling narcotics. “Until 2003,” Gooch says. “That was the first time I went to treatment and the last time I used.” Since then, for most of 19 years, Gooch has been trying to get others into recovery or just keep them alive....

Many of the symptoms experienced by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 involve the nervous system. Patients complain of headaches, muscle and joint pain, fatigue and “brain fog,” or loss of taste and smell—all of which can last from weeks to months after infection. In severe cases, COVID-19 can also lead to encephalitis or stroke. The virus has undeniable neurological effects. But the way it actually affects nerve cells still remains a bit of a mystery....

In his latest gaffe, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lamented the fact that airplane windows don’t roll down. Romney’s wife Ann’s plane had to make an emergency landing Friday (Sept. 21) because of an electrical malfunction. Discussing the incident at a fundraiser the next day, he said: “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open....

A satellite that will be the first to comprehensively monitor wind around the globe is finally ready to fly. After nearly two decades in the planning, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Aeolus mission is slated to launch from Kourou, French Guiana, on 21 August. Meteorologists think that its data will significantly improve weather forecasts, because the lack of detailed wind measurements is one of the biggest gaps in the global Earth-observing system....

A poliolike condition that left more than 100 children in the U.S. at least partially paralyzed in 2014 is back, and not much more is known this time around, officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say. The CDC is not ruling out any possible triggers—from infections to toxins, autoimmune reactions to bug bites. “We have not been able to find a cause for the majority of these” cases, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said Wednesday at a news conference....

The aughts were an inconvenient time for environmentalism. President George W. Bush declared the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty meant to address climate change, dead. Environmentalists charged widespread political interference in climate change science conducted at federal agencies. Most people had not heard of global warming. Then former Vice President Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” landed with a thud on the public’s consciousness. It grossed $24 million, won two Academy Awards and earned Gore the Nobel Peace Prize....

After weeks of delays, I’d finally reached the wild. I was in the Samarga River basin, a mountainous, roadless corner of the Russian Far East inhabited by indigenous Udege hunters, Amur tigers and—most importantly for me—Blakiston’s fish owls. These were the largest owls in the world; endangered giants that hunt for salmon in rivers and nest in enormous trees. Joined by Sergey Avdeyuk, an experienced woodsman, I was dipping my toe into my first year of fish owl fieldwork, the first of many....

By Maggie Lu YueyangSYDNEY (Reuters) - A rescue effort to remove 52 passengers on board a research ship that had been trapped in Antarctica ice for nine days was successful, and they were evacuated safely by helicopter, the expedition leader said on Thursday.A helicopter from the Chinese icebreaker Snow Dragon ferried the passengers in small groups several times from the ice-bound ship, Akademik Shokalskiy, and transferred them to an Australian Antarctic supply ship, the Aurora Australis....

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called them a ‘game changer’. Antibody tests have captured the world’s attention for their potential to help life return to normal by revealing who has been exposed, and might now be immune, to the new coronavirus. Dozens of biotech companies and research laboratories have rushed to produce the blood tests. And governments around the world have bought millions of kits, in the hope that they could guide decisions on when to relax social-distancing measures and get people back to work....

Dear EarthTalk: Instances of people with thyroid problems seems to be on the rise. Is there an environmental connection?—Dora Light, Waukesha, Wis. The American Cancer Society reports that thyroid cancer is one of the few cancers that have been on the rise in recent decades, with cases increasing six percent annually since 1997. Many researchers, however, attribute these increases to our having simply gotten better at detection. Regardless, exposures to stress, radiation and pollutants have been known to increase a person’s risk of developing thyroid problems....

Here in this isolated corner of the Milky Way, our Earth-bound human lives might seem tiny and parochial on a galactic scale. But the universe—vast, deep and presumably infinite—can always be counted on to deliver the unexpected. Within the bounty of information from the Kepler space telescope, a now-retired exoplanet-hunting observatory, astronomers have spotted a peculiar star whose characteristics defy many of their preconceived notions. After staring at the data about it for more than a year, the team who discovered the strange object, named HD 139139, still does not know what to make of it....

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neuromuscular disease that affects about 130,000 people worldwide a year. The vast majority of patients are isolated cases with no known family history of the disease. They usually start developing symptoms of the loss of motor neurons in middle age and die within five years of diagnosis. Researchers know very little about what causes ALS. Now a recent study in Nature Biotechnology suggests that the neuron death associated with the disease may be caused by astrocytes, a type of brain cell that normally helps neurons....

Fat purple clouds had been gathering all day above Cubará, kicking up a dusty wind and cloaking the forested hills in shadow and mist. When the rain finally came, it came as a torrent, hammering metal roofs, overflowing ditches and transforming roads into rivers. A team of biologists, freshly arrived from Bogotá, could do little besides huddle on a porch in anticipation of their mission: find and document as many bird species as possible....

Editor’s Note (12/5/17): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published October 30, 2017, in light of President Trump’s announcement on Monday that he will significantly reduce the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two national monuments located in Utah. This past spring Pres. Donald Trump ordered a review of more than two dozen national monuments, calling the protected status of these lands an “egregious abuse of federal power....

Giraffes’ long necks are perfectly suited to harvesting tender leaves beyond the reach of other herbivores. Pondering the genesis of this phenomenon, two giants of modern biology, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin, arrived at remarkably different hypotheses. Lamarck believed that constant stretching of the neck somehow stimulated its growth. The giraffe would then pass along this new trait to its offspring. In effect, this newer, longer neck was a direct result of a giraffe’s interaction with its environment....

Four out of five Americans between the ages of 12 and 24 develop acne on their skin, but scientists still struggle to explain its cause. Although clinicians have long assumed that bacteria play an important role, the latest evidence suggests that key genetic differences among the bacterial strains that live in your pores make the difference between picture-perfect skin and unsightly pimples. A team of scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, The Genome Institute at Washington University in Saint Louis and the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute has conducted the most exhaustive study of acne-associated bacteria yet....

A study has tallied up the costs to a major US research funder of misconduct that lead to retractions, and the price scientists involved paid for their dishonesty. There are significant indirect costs not covered by this figure, however, and the system itself may be encouraging misconduct, according to the senior author. Papers retracted due to misconduct accounted for approximately $58 million in direct funding by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1992 and 2012, far less than 1% of the total budget over this time, the study found....

The Department of Energy has begun to sort out the nation’s next big recycling problem: what to do with batteries used by electric cars. Yesterday, it awarded 15 checks in the amount of $67,000 to the winners of a contest that’s focused on making sure the batteries don’t end up in a landfill. They got the prizes for finding ways to collect used electric vehicle batteries, to efficiently extract valuable materials from them or to find “second life uses” for batteries that can still store electricity....