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Key Concepts Physics Geology Earthquakes Engineering Materials Introduction Have you ever thought about what type of ground buildings are constructed on? Rock, gravel, sand, soil and many others—there are lots of different types of “ground.” And this issue becomes especially important in areas that are likely to get earthquakes. In this activity you will build a sweet building on a homemade shake table and find out how an earthquake impacts buildings constructed on sand....

Call it natural geoengineering. Scientists report in a new study this week that glacial melt may be funneling significant amounts of reactive iron into the ocean, where it may counter some of the negative effects of climate change by boosting algal blooms that capture carbon. The paper, published in Nature Communications, adds to a body of research suggesting that melting ice at both poles may have widespread consequences beyond rising sea levels....

How to calculate percentages can be easier than you may realize. Keep reading for some simple tricks. Long time math fans may remember our first foray into the world of percentages way back in the 12th and 13th episodes of the podcast. In those shows we learned what percentages are, how they’re related to fractions, how to use percentages to easily calculate tips at restaurants, and how to use percentages to easily calculate sales prices when shopping....

With declining rates of new infections and the rollout of vaccines, some are beginning to speak of an end to COVID-19. But that rhetoric, in my opinion, is ill-considered and premature. Based on what we know now of SARS-CoV-2, it may no longer be a question of months before an end to the pandemic but a question of years, if not decades. We should plan for it. Viruses exist to thrive....

Last week a senior National Football League official acknowledged for the first time the link between head injuries in professional football and a degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The admission—which has been compared with Big Tobacco’s 1997 disclosure that smoking causes cancer—comes at a time when the dangers of less severe traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), including concussions, have also been making headlines. Scientists do not yet understand the biological mechanisms underlying the detrimental effects of TBI—and as a result, effective treatments remain elusive....

Ten years ago this week Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans. The long, high, earthen levees and concrete floodwalls that were meant to protect neighborhoods inside and outside the city washed away, even though they were supposed to be able to withstand a category 3 hurricane like Katrina. More than 1,800 people died. Damages surpassed $100 billion. After the tragedy the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had built most of the levees and floodwalls, began an extensive campaign to repair them....

Meteorologists have long struggled to forecast storms and flooding at the level of streets and neighborhoods, but they may soon make headway thanks to the spread of mobile-phone networks. This strategy relies on the physics of how water scatters and absorbs microwaves. In 2006, researchers demonstrated that they could estimate how much precipitation was falling in an area by comparing changes in the signal strength between communication towers1. Accessing the commercial signals of mobile-phone companies was a major stumbling block for researchers, however, and the field progressed slowly....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Neuralink – which is “developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers” – is probably a bad idea. If you understand the science behind it, and that’s what you wanted to hear, you can stop reading. But this is an absurdly simple narrative to spin about Neuralink and an unhelpful attitude to have when it comes to understanding the role of technology in the world around us, and what we might do about it....

More bad news for the world’s oceans: Dead zones—areas of bottom waters too oxygen depleted to support most ocean life—are spreading, dotting nearly the entire east and south coasts of the U.S. as well as several west coast river outlets. According to a new study in Science, the rest of the world fares no better—there are now 405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s—and the world’s largest dead zone remains the Baltic Sea, whose bottom waters now lack oxygen year-round....

On Sept. 1, officials in Florida reported that mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus had been found in Miami Beach. The Florida Department of Health reports 49 non-travel related cases of Zika. There are almost 2,700 cases of travel-associated cases in the continental U.S. Things are worse in the U.S. territories, where more than 14,000 locally acquired cases have been reported. So, how is the U.S. responding to Zika? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is doing what it can to support efforts to halt disease transmission and support state and local government....

Bacteria are sticky—so sticky that we schedule regular appointments with professionals to scrape them off our teeth. Dental plaque may be the best-known example of a biofilm, but these slimy aggregates of bacteria also play major roles in such chronic infections as those in the urinary tract or in the lungs in cystic fibrosis patients. The problem? Antibiotics often can’t penetrate the slime to get at (and destroy) the pathogenic bacteria cocooned within....

Most of us will laugh at a good joke, but we also laugh when we are not actually amused. Fake chuckles are common in social situations—such as during an important interview or a promising first date. “Laughter is really interesting because we observe it across all human cultures and in other species,” says Carolyn McGettigan, a cognitive neuroscientist at Royal Holloway, University of London. “It’s an incredibly important social signal.” In a 2013 study, McGettigan, then a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, and her colleagues scanned the brains of 21 participants while they passively listened to clips of laughter elicited by funny YouTube videos or produced on command (with instructions to sound as natural as possible)....

The 2015 science research that set the Internet abuzz included a super antibiotic, plastics pollution in the ocean, climate change, and species extinction, according to Altmetric, a start-up that analyzes online activity surrounding academic papers. Research never rests: every year thousands of scientific articles are published across dozens of journals and disciplines. Some studies capture the media’s attention and get coverage in numerous news stories; others speak to a more niche audience and take off in passionate social media discussions....

Rising seas, storm surges and coastal flooding are displacing communities from Alaska to Louisiana to Maryland. It’s time for Congress to get serious about helping them find higher ground, federal auditors say in a blunt assessment of the government’s scattershot approach to what could become the largest U.S. migration since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In a61-page reportissued yesterday, the Government Accountability Office said Congress should consider a pilot program “to identify and provide assistance to climate migration projects for communities that express affirmative interest in relocation as a resilience strategy....

By Ben Garside and Valerie Volcovici LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this month hopes to reinvigorate the years-long effort to forge a global climate deal, even as concerns grow over whether the final pact will be rigorous enough to address threats to the environment. Ban wants heads of state at a Sept. 23 gathering in New York to outline how their countries will contribute to a mutual goal to contain rising temperatures, said Selwin Hart, the Barbadian diplomat helping to spearhead the conference....

The solution to traffic-clogged cities has long been thought to be more mass transit. For the past few years, however, engineers at General Motors have been looking at the problem of urban sprawl through a different lens, one that takes advantage of advances in electric-vehicle technology and wireless connectivity to enable a more personal mode of transportation that is faster and safer than a bicycle yet smaller and more environmentally friendly than an automobile....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

Ten thousand feet up, it’s possible to see the whole North Fork Valley from Dan Stucker’s plane. As the aircraft glides over sloping mesas with snow-dusted mountains, the land below resembles a vintage pioneer landscape. If President Trump has his way, a new feature could arrive on this vista: oil and gas pumps. His administration is opening vast stretches of public land to energy companies, and among the forests and fields under Stucker’s plane, up to 95 percent of the valley could be available to drillers....

The F-150 notwithstanding, Americans are choosing more efficient cars. George Will has been described as an “intellectual,” as “erudite,” “brilliant,”even “brainy.” If you’ve ever heard him on television, you’d have to admit that his opinion of his own intellect seems to be quite high. And yet for such an erudite and brainy fellow, it’s amazing how often he gets it wrong when it comes to things environmental. (No comment on his other positions....

Scientists did not invent the vast majority of visual illusions. Rather they are the products of artists who have used their insights into the workings of the human eyes and brain to create illusions in their artwork. Long before visual science existed as a formal discipline, artists had devised techniques to “trick” the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional or that a series of brushstrokes in a still life was in fact a bowl of luscious fruit....