On Thanksgiving Day, I saw a bird get stuffed. The bird was a great blue heron, Ardea herodias, at the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Boynton Beach, Fla. Just after noon, the heron fired its beak into floating vegetation in a canal. He came up with a face full of foliage in the midst of which was a honking big catfish. The avian epicure thus grabbed both the salad and the sushi courses in one swell swoop....
Wet sand or soft clay is how the Huygens spacecraft portrayed Titan’s surface when it successfully landed on the Saturnian moon on January 14. Cassini-Huygens homepage: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm Retinal recordings explain why swordfish have a heating organ in the muscle to keep their eyes 10 to 15 degrees warmer than ambient temperatures: the warmth enables the fish to process visual information 10 times faster, improving the ability to spot prey. Current Biology, January 11...
With our supersized brains and shrunken teeth and guts, we humans are bizarre primates. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University has long argued that these and other peculiar traits of our kind arose as humans turned to cooking to improve food quality—making it softer and easier to digest and thus a richer source of energy. Humans, unlike any other animal, cannot survive on raw food in the wild, he observes. “We need to have our food cooked....
Momentum is building among planetary scientists to send a major mission to Uranus or Neptune—the most distant and least explored planets in the Solar System. Huge gaps remain in scientists’ knowledge of the blueish planets, known as the ice giants, which have been visited only once by a spacecraft. But the pressure is on to organize a mission in the next decade, because scientists want to take advantage of an approaching planetary alignment that would significantly cut travel time....
From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off. But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics....
○ 1 The virus was engineered in a laboratory in China. Because the pathogen first emerged in Wuhan, China, President Donald Trump and others have claimed, without evidence, that it started in a lab there, and some conspiracy theorists believe it was engineered as a bioweapon. Why It’s False: U.S. intelligence agencies have categorically denied the possibility that the virus was engineered in a lab, stating that “the Intelligence Community … concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified....
In the closing seconds of a tied soccer game two opposing players sprint into the penalty box in pursuit of a loose ball and collide, limbs flailing as they both fall to the turf. Instantly, all eyes are on the head referee, tasked with the unenviable job of making a game-changing decision without the benefit of a slow-motion replay. Recent research suggests, however, that elite soccer referees have something working in their favor—enhanced perceptual and cognitive skills that help them make the right call....
The air around us is teeming with microscopic life. With every breath we take, we inhale thousands of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Scientists have known for almost 150 years that some of these airborne microbes cause disease in plants, domestic animals and people. More recently, we have learned that microorganisms may also affect the weather by allowing water to freeze at warmer temperatures and triggering the onset of precipitation. Astonishingly, a few of these microbes drift on large currents of air to cross oceans and continents....
Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In the last episode, we learned an amazing trick that you can use to quickly add up all the integers from 1 to 100. And that really was no small feat since we turned the herculean task of performing 100 addition problems—that is adding up 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … + 100—into a cute fuzzy kitten of a single multiplication problem....
By Robbie and Ward TUPELO, Mississippi (Reuters) - A storm system that killed more than 20 people continued its march across a large swath of the U.S. Southeast on Tuesday, packing baseball-sized hail, damaging winds and the threat of more tornados, meteorologists said. Reports of the death toll varied, but CNN has put it at 29 lives across six states, and scores of people have been injured. The threat of tornadoes could last for several days as the strong weather system with a large area of unstable air lashed the southern and central United States....
At a talk in mid-November hosted by Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, astrophysicists Rebecca Oppenheimer and Natalie Batalha speculated on the chances that life exists on exoplanets somewhere in our galaxy. Most likely, Oppenheimer said, life is ubiquitous in the universe, but it might not take the form that we imagine. Of the thousands of exoplanets already detected, our telescopic abilities limit the level of detail we can make out, even in the nearest planetary systems....
To feel the earth move under your feet, visit New Zealand. Every year the sides of the island nation’s Alpine Fault shift past one another about 30 millimeters—a blistering speed for strike-slip faults, which typically slip at rates closer to one or two millimeters a year. “What is particularly interesting about the Alpine Fault is that it has maintained this high slip rate for almost its entire history,” says Simon Lamb, a geologist at the Victoria University of Wellington....
Vaccines remain the strongest protection against severe illness and death from COVID, even as the Omicron variant runs like wildfire through the U.S. population. In fact, as Ewen Callaway reports, a booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine is holding strong against serious cases of the disease according to early reports (see “Omicron Is Likely to Weaken COVID Vaccine Protection—but Boosters Could Restore It”). Vaccines are also the best bet for protecting children and help to reduce transmission (see “The Benefits of Vaccinating Kids against COVID Far Outweigh the Risks of Myocarditis”)....
The Sunshine Project, a gargantuan petrochemical complex planned on 2,500 acres along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge, La., will be one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in America when it becomes fully operational in 2029. Earlier this month, Louisiana regulators approved an air quality permit that will allow the facility to pump 13.6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That’s equivalent to adding 2....
Here’s how I distinguish science from philosophy. Science addresses questions that can be answered, potentially, through empirical investigation. Examples: What’s the best way to defeat COVID-19? What causes schizophrenia, and how should it be treated? Can nuclear power help us overcome climate change? What are the causes of war, and how can we end it? Philosophy addresses questions that probably can’t be solved, now or ever. Examples (and these are of course debatable, some philosophers and scientists insist that science can answer all questions worth asking): Why is there something rather than nothing?...
Although we are what we eat, we are by no means only what we eat. Some people, for instance, can consume all the fatty foods they want—meat, cheese, butter, ice cream—but somehow manage to stay rail-thin and enjoy low blood triglyceride levels, whereas others living on the same rich fare would soon develop potbellies and clogged arteries. The significant genetic and metabolic variation among individuals makes it almost impossible for experts to prescribe detailed nutritional recommendations that work optimally for everybody....
That is the amount of money the U.S. spent over a 10-year period from 2004 through 2013 promoting abstinence before marriage as a way of preventing HIV in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, according to the most comprehensive independent study conducted to date of the effort, the money was more or less wasted. A rigorous comparison of national data from countries that received abstinence funding under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with those that got none of the funding showed no difference in the age of first sexual experience or in the number of sexual partners or teenage pregnancies—all aspects of behaviors that have been linked to a higher risk of becoming infected with HIV....
He was a Muslim man with a long beard, a desire to kill, and no plans to survive his attack. He rapidly approached his target: a military building. There was yelling and running and an attempt to stop him, but it happened too fast. Minutes later four service members lay dead, along with the suicide attacker. A fifth victim would succumb to his injuries and perish two days later. But what if this recent shooting had not occurred in Chattanooga, Tennessee?...
If you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight, don’t be surprised if you find it full of celebrating conservationists. An international meeting that takes place every three years to regulate trade in endangered animals and plants has bolstered protection for multiple species. Besides clamping down on trade in ivory and rhino horn, states party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) made the unprecedented step of granting protection to sharks and various species of tropical timber in final voting today....
Thanks to a series of social media movements organized by Black researchers and nature lovers, science and academia are finally waking up to some of the ways they have pushed out Black people. From May 31 to June 5, #BlackBirdersWeek helped change the narrative that Black individuals don’t participate in outdoor activities—after the racist incident at New York City’s Central Park in which a white dog owner called the police on a Black birder....
