Posts

One day after nursing her six-month-old baby, Colleen Abel developed an itchy red rash on her right breast. The cause was a mystery. Abel speculated that scratches left by her son while he fed might have gotten infected, or that bedbugs might have bitten her. The 36-year-old writer from Illinois opened her laptop and investigated her symptoms on Google. What she found shocked her. The first result blared inflammatory breast cancer, “and that scared me out of my mind,” Abel says....

An overwhelming number of emergency managers in the U.S. are white, and the profession must diversify to reverse decades of disaster response policies that have shunned minority communities and perpetuated racial discrimination, a state emergency manager told Congress yesterday. Curtis Brown, the emergency management coordinator for Virginia, delivered a blistering statement to a House committee and called for broad changes in emergency management policy and personnel to make minority and other disadvantaged communities a priority....

Implantation of stents–mesh cylinders that widen clogged arteries–is growing so fast that some doctors say the procedure is overused. Yet the inserts have been evolving for 20 years, proponents note, and represent an alternative to more invasive open surgery. For decades, coronary patients whose arteries had been narrowed by accumulated plaque underwent open-heart surgery; a section of healthy artery or vein was sewn in as a bypass around the compromised vessel....

Especially now, with society’s deepest depravities freely available online, youngsters seem to grow up quickly: barreling toward adulthood, iPhone in hand, while they Snap Chat racy photos along the way. But new research suggests otherwise. An analysis by researchers at San Diego State University and Bryn Mawr College reports that today’s teenagers are less likely to engage in adult activities like having sex and drinking alcohol than teens from older generations....

The mass of Stein 2051 B, a white dwarf star located about 18 light-years from Earth, has been a subject of some controversy for over a century. Now, a group of astronomers has finally made a precise measurement of the star’s mass and settled a 100-year-old debate, using a cosmic phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein. The researchers calculated the star’s mass using carefully timed observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope, which studied Stein 2051 B when it eclipsed another, more distant star, as seen from Earth....

Illustrations by Joan M.K. Tycko Here’s the plan: I’m going to give you a backpack filled with Ziploc bags—some will be filled with fresh mint leaves and others with juicy habanero chili peppers. You’ll also get a clipboard, a pencil, a spare pair of socks, and a roundtheworld airplane ticket. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to travel around the world and visit all sorts of places, from the biggest cities to the most remote jungle encampments....

In late September, a New York Supreme Court judge ordered a judicial inquiry into the death of Eric Garner. In 2014, Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” caught on tape, became a national rally cry for criminal justice reform in the United States. Those same words have been spoken by many Black men during their last moments of life while interacting with the police. It has been known for centuries that black men are more likely to die in police custody than men of other races....

In 2007, scientist Richard Feely of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory set out on a research cruise off the Pacific Coast. Feely and other scientists were trying to understand how the ocean was changing – becoming more acidic – as a result of climate change. The results, Feely said, were “truly astonishing” (ClimateWire, May 28, 2008). The ocean, which has absorbed about a quarter of the 2 trillion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning, was changing its chemistry far more rapidly than anyone had imagined....

The global spread of bird flu and the number of viral strains currently circulating and causing infections have reached unprecedented levels, raising the risk of a potential human outbreak, according to disease experts. Multiple outbreaks have been reported in poultry farms and wild flocks across Europe, Africa and Asia in the past three months. While most involve strains that are currently low risk for human health, the sheer number of different types, and their presence in so many parts of the world at the same time, increases the risk of viruses mixing and mutating - and possibly jumping to people....

Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of nearly every electric vehicle, laptop and smartphone, and they are essential to storing renewable energy in the face of the climate emergency. But all of the world’s current mining operations cannot extract enough lithium and other key minerals to meet skyrocketing demand for these batteries. Establishing new mines is an expensive, years-long effort. And mining also creates a host of environmental headaches—such as depleting local water resources and polluting the nearby region with runoff debris—that have led to protests against new mines....

Science is often thought of as a serious subject. But even though it tackles hugely important issues—many with life-or-death consequences—it also has a fun side. This year Scientific American has covered some stories that ranged from “Huh, that’s weird” to “Ew, gross” to “So. Cool.” Below, we’ve rounded up a few of our favorites (seriously, do not sleep on the potty-trained cows). We hope you enjoy them and learn more about the amazing and odd aspects of the world—and come back to see what astounding and wild discoveries 2022 has in store....

Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking by Rachel Love Nuwer. Da Capo Press, 2018 ($28). From the swampy wilderness of southern Vietnam, where hunters pursue threatened pangolins, to a bustling wholesale traditional medicine market in Guangzhou, China, where the pinecone-resembling mammal’s scales are sold, journalist Nuwer brings the reader along on her globe-trotting mission to understand the complex, thriving world of the illegal wildlife trade. She interviews hunters who capture endangered species, practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine who ingest rhino horn powder for unproved benefits and the conservationists trying to stem the slaughter of dozens of dwindling species....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Along a lush river delta in what is now northeastern Spain, a herd of dinosaurs munched on ferns and conifers similar to modern-day cypresses 125 million years ago. These creatures stood out from the others in this Cretaceous Period landscape by virtue of the unusual sail-like structure on their backs, and experts today can only hypothesize about its function. Scientists announced on Wednesday the discovery near the town of Morella in Spain’s Castellón Province of the fossil remains of a medium-sized dinosaur they named Morelladon, a four-legged herbivore that measured 6 metres (20 feet) long....

The explosion that opened the atomic age more than 70 years ago is helping scientists better understand another dramatic event: the formation of the moon. On July 16, 1945, the U.S. Army detonated the first-ever nuclear bomb, conducting the event at the Trinity test site in southern New Mexico. The extreme heat of the blast melted the surrounding sandy soil’s top layer into a green, radioactive glass known as trinitite for about 1,150 feet (350 meters) in all directions from ground zero....

Scientists scanning the human brain can now tell whom a person is thinking of, the first time researchers have been able to identify what people are imagining from imaging technologies. Work to visualize thought is starting to pile up successes. Recently, scientists have used brain scans to decode imagery directly from the brain, such as what number people have just seen and what memory a person is recalling. They can now even reconstruct videos of what a person has watched based on their brain activity alone....

More than 30 years after the Chernobyl nuclear plant’s meltdown, an 18-mile radius around the site remains almost entirely devoid of human activity—creating a haven for wildlife. But scientists disagree over lingering radiation’s effects on animal populations in this region, called the Exclusion Zone. A new analysis, based on estimating the actual doses animals receive in various parts of the zone, supports the hypothesis that areas with the most radiation have the fewest mammals....

Donald Trump stood very closely behind Hillary Clinton at times during the second presidential debate, held in St. Louis Sunday, prompting some to argue that he was invading her personal space. While scientists have long known that personal space exists—and that an invasion of personal space can make people feel uncomfortable—it’s only recently that scientists have started to understand what’s going on in the brain when someone stands too close. It turns out that it’s a very basic function of the brain to maintain a sense of what’s going on in the space around you, said Dr....

A global deal to combat climate change lurches toward reality in Lima, Peru, this week—and yet any politically feasible agreement will be insufficient to restrain continued warming of global average temperatures, perhaps uncomfortably high. Although recent pledges by China, the 28 countries of the European Union and the U.S. are the first signs of the possibility of restraining the endless growth of greenhouse gas pollution on a long-term basis, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have crossed the threshold of 400 parts per million—and will reach 450 ppm in less than two decades at present growth rates....

Vast reservoirs of heat are locked in the earth’s interior, untapped. The ground underneath our feet holds so much heat that tapping only 2 percent of it could satisfy current annual U.S. energy use 2,000-fold for each and every year of the foreseeable future, according to an analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fracking, the same technology used to drill for natural gas, may provide an economical way to get at that geothermal energy....

The body’s constellation of gut bacteria has been linked with various aging-associated illnesses, including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Now a study has found that aging itself is associated with microbiome changes, and that these alterations are distinct from those connected to diseases or medication use. The findings raise the possibility that shifts in gut bacteria help drive the aging process—and that protecting these microbes could help people lead longer, healthier lives....