It makes me nervous to write this. I’m a science writer, after all. I rely on data and interviews with researchers. I’m no expert on race, gender and social issues, but—like many other Asian American women these last few weeks since a gunman killed eight people in the Atlanta area on March 16—I suddenly found myself as an educator of sorts, a designated spokeswoman for the Asian woman experience in America....
In Australia, they called it “robo debt”: an automated debt-recovery system that generated fear, anxiety, anger and shame among those who rely on, or who have relied on, social support. In 2016 the country’s Department of Human Services introduced a new way of calculating the annual earnings of welfare beneficiaries and began dispatching automated debt-collection letters to those identified as having been overpaid. The new accounting method meant that fortnightly income could be averaged to estimate the income for an entire year—a problem for those with contract, part-time or precarious work....
The stamp-sized chip with two wires protruding from it doesn’t look like much. But appearances can be deceptive. This sandwich of a conventional silicon-based solar cell and an obscure mineral called perovskite has the potential to revolutionise solar electricity. Already these experimental cells are able to convert more than 26 per cent of the sun’s rays into electricity, which is around the theoretical upper efficiency limit of conventional silicon solar cells....
As U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban immediately rushed in, and it recently took over the country’s major cities in just a few days. The end of the two-decade American occupation has not only produced a fraught political situation; it has also created an environmental one. Some of the military bases the U.S. handed over to the Afghan national security forces—which this month stood down rather than continuing to contest a seemingly inevitable Taliban victory—hold toxic detritus that may never get a full cleanup....
The snow drought across the U.S. so far this winter has raised questions about impacts on water supply, ski resorts and agriculture. Only 22 percent of the nation was covered by snow on Jan. 4, 2012. A snow depth analysis on Jan. 4 from 2004-2012 reveals the smallest area of the U.S. is covered by snow this year. The year 2007 ranks as the second smallest area of the U.S. with snowcover of about 27 percent....
As President Trump today pulls the first strings in unraveling President Obama’s signature climate change regulation, he will claim he’s saving Americans from skyrocketing electricity bills and putting coal miners back to work. In truth, that’s hard to show. Experts say it’s difficult to get more than a rough estimate of how the Clean Power Plan would influence power costs, since natural gas and renewable energy prices play a role, as do state choices about trading systems....
For decades, there was only one way to get insulin into the body: injection under the skin. Insulin pens and pumps offered some measure of discretion and flexibility, but people uncomfortable with needles and catheters have been, in a word, stuck. Not for long. Scientists are developing a range of new ways to deliver insulin to the body. Some of these ideas are still in the prototype stage, including a patch that administers insulin through the skin just as a nicotine patch administers nicotine....
Key Concepts Physics Pressure Bernoulli’s principle Airflow Introduction Have you ever seen pictures or videos of a roof being blown off a house during a hurricane or tornado? You might be surprised to hear that the roof is actually not blown off by the strong winds but instead by the air inside the house! This can be explained by Bernoulli’s principle, which states that fast-moving fluids or air, such as strong winds, have lower pressure than slow-moving air....
You are visiting your elderly aunt, and you notice her speech begin to slur. She seems to be having trouble staying upright in her seat, and she looks confused. You recognize the signs of a stroke. You shout for your uncle to call 911 as you help your aunt lie down in a comfortable position. You run your fingers gently over her lips, face and fingertips as you sing into her ear and continue talking to her....
With increasingly complex science matters looming today, from the possibility of a Zika virus outbreak and concerns tied to planetary sustainability to questions around GMOs and still-lingering doubts about childhood immunization, journalists share a responsibility to cut through political rhetoric and misinformation to identify and communicate weighty issues rooted in sound science. For many of society’s most pressing issues, a news headline is a first step toward raising public awareness and summoning innovative solutions....
Pursued by poets and artists alike, beauty is ever elusive. We seek it in nature, art and philosophy but also in our phones and furniture. We value it beyond reason, look to surround ourselves with it and will even lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it. As philosopher George Santayana observed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty, there is within us “a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it....
Akiyoshi Kitaoka of the Ritsumeikan University in Japan, inventor of countless brain-crushing misperceptions, straddles the realms of visual science and art perhaps more than any other illusion creator today. His newest discovery combines additive and subtractive chromatic schemes to represent opposite ends of an illumination spectrum, bringing new understanding to how we perceive color and brightness. Kitaoka’s breakthrough arose from his realization that he could use vivid colors to create both the dark and bright extremes of the luminance scale....
NASA is launching a robot today that scientists hope will provide more data at a cheaper cost about the behavior of the Greenland ice sheet in a rapidly warming region. The 6-foot-tall, 800-pound Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, or Greenland Rover or GROVER, resembles a moving house on wheels with its tilted solar panels. It is the first such unit from NASA, and one of the few attempts to assess ice sheet dynamics by radar on a robot in the Arctic, said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center and science adviser on the project....
By Environment Correspondent Deborah ZabarenkoWASHINGTON (Reuters) - In another move to address the impact of climate change, President Barack Obama ordered a bipartisan task force on Friday to help U.S. communities brace for longer heat waves, heavier downpours, more severe wildfires and worse droughts.Friday’s executive order set up a panel of governors, mayors, county officials and tribal leaders to advise the White House on how the federal government can respond to communities hit by the effects of a changing climate....
By Marti Maguire RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - North Carolina state officials defended their oversight of coal ash ponds on Wednesday, a day after a second leak was found to be threatening a river already tainted by toxic sludge from a spill earlier this month. The state ordered Duke Energy Corp on Tuesday to plug the second leak of arsenic-laced wastewater into the Dan River from its decommissioned Eden power plant, this time through a 36-inch stormwater pipe....
Many decades of research have shown that people cannot learn new information during sleep and then retrieve it once awake. Yet a growing body of work finds that unconscious associations made during sleep can affect waking behaviors. One new study found that pairing the smell of cigarettes with unpleasant odors made people smoke less during the following week. Neurobiologist Anat Arzi and her colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, recruited 66 smokers who wanted to quit and asked them to keep a smoking journal for a week before and a week after spending one night in the laboratory....
Simon Levin, an ecologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, is the winner of the 2014 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, a $200,000 award handed out by a panel of researchers. In his 50-year career, he has worked on mathematical descriptions of ecosystems, and on the commonalities between the network structures of ecological and socioeconomic systems. What motivated you to take your particular career path? I went to graduate school in mathematics, but I decided early on that I wanted to apply those skills to addressing the problems of the world....
The cheetah crouches in the undergrowth. When a young antelope strays a little too far from the herd, the cheetah explodes out of the bush — and, with a burst of speed unrivalled in the natural world, brings down its next meal. Or so we have assumed. But the first study to collect data on the animal’s movements in the wild reveals that, contrary to popular opinion, a cheetah’s sheer speed is not its only weapon when it comes to hunting....
Swordfish are toothless hunters with eyes that can grow as big as softballs. The prized sport fish brandishes a sharp, flat bill up to half the length of the rest of its body, and it has a reputation as the fastest fish in the ocean that often leaps spectacularly when hooked. Now the discovery of a lubricating gland behind the bill could show how swordfish manage to slice through the water so fast—and could serve as an inspiration for biomimetic low-friction surfaces....
In its first case confronting global warming, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are air pollutants that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate. As a consequence, experts agree that greenhouse emissions from automobiles and possibly power plants will face regulations. The debate now will focus on how strict—or lax—those rules will be.The EPA had long claimed to have no authority in regulating these gases because they were not air pollutants under the Clean Air Act....
