Posts

For nearly 40 years, I have been working on fighting cancer from an unusual angle. Trained initially as an engineer, I see tumors in part as a physics challenge and ask: How do their structural features promote their growth and keep cancer-fighting drugs from working effectively? More than two decades ago, for instance, my co-workers and I, then at Carnegie Mellon University, revealed that structural abnormalities in tumor blood vessels interfere with drug delivery to malignant cells in a mass....

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them....

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dove between Saturn and its rings yesterday (April 26), snapping the closest-ever views of Saturn’s atmosphere. The raw images, which began to stream back early this morning, indicating the probe had survived its journey, show intricate structures and a dark, swirling storm-like feature (which NASA called a “giant hurricane”). The spacecraft came within about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) of Saturn’s cloud tops and within 200 miles (300 km) of the rings’ innermost visible edge during the plunge, NASA officials said in a statement....

Climate change is putting pressure on one of science’s earliest fields of discovery: archaeology. Drought in the Colorado River basin is re-exposing centuries-old artifacts as lakes and rivers become mudflats. And where droughts aren’t happening, floods are—sometimes in quick succession with drought. Consider the Mississippi River basin. Two and a half years ago, the basin experienced record-high flooding that devastated riverbanks and adjacent land loaded with artifacts dating to Mississippian civilization....

The centennial of the National Park Service is inspiring an impressive amount of soul-searching about the agency and the lands for which it is responsible. This is timely and appropriate, as the NPS faces serious challenges that affect the preservation of these precious lands. We both study the history of conservation efforts in the United States, and have also worked as rangers at national park sites in Utah, Arizona and California....

Porter Johnson, a physics professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, explains. In professional baseball, the bat must be made from a single solid piece of wood thus the use of corked bats during games is illegal. Still, corked bats have turned up several times in major league play, most recently by Sammy Sosa. A definite advantage to this strategy is that lighter bats allow a quicker response by the batter....

Some plant-eating dinosaurs grew new teeth every couple of months, with some of the largest herbivores developing a replacement tooth every 35 days, to keep their chompers from getting too worn down on all that vegetation, new research finds. A team of scientists studied the Diplodocus and Camarasaurus, two different types of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs, or sauropods, to determine if their diets may have influenced how often they developed new teeth....

It’s a heavy metal. It’s linked to learning problems in school children. And every child is exposed. Sounds like lead? It’s cadmium. Signs are emerging that cadmium – a widespread contaminant that gets little attention from health experts and regulators – could be the new lead. Children with higher cadmium levels are three times more likely to have learning disabilities and participate in special education, according to a new study led by Harvard University researchers....

Latin America has become the new epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic. At a media briefing on June 9 Carissa Etienne, head of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), offered a clinical but dire assessment by moving through a chillingly long list that encompasses countries from Mexico to Chile. “In Mesoamerica, case counts are rising in Mexico, Panama — and in Costa Rica, where we are seeing increased transmission around the Nicaraguan border,” she said....

Join us below at 12:30 P.M. EST on Wednesday, November 28, for a live 30-minute online chat with editor and tech maven Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and MAKE magazine, who will discuss what you might do with a 3-D printer, a machine that can copy the specs from a digital computer file to fabricate a solid object, layer by layer. Frauenfelder will answer questions about whether 3-D printers will become a revolutionary new technology, like the personal computer or smartphone, or remain a toy for hobbyists....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Space agencies and private companies already have advanced plans to send humans to Mars in the next few years –ultimately colonising it. And with a growing number of discoveries of Earth-like planets around nearby stars, long-distance space travel has never seemed more exciting. However, it isn’t easy for humans to survive in space for sustained periods of time....

Have you ever wondered just what it is that makes you, you? If all your memories were to fade away, would your identity dissolve along with them? Would friends and family no longer perceive you to be the same person as before? For the 5.3 million Americans experiencing memory loss due to Alzheimer’s disease, these frightening questions are more than just theoretical. Fortunately, science appears to suggest that being robbed of one’s memory does not equate with being robbed of one’s identity....

Physicists should be ecstatic right now. Taken at face value, the surprisingly strong magnetism of the elementary particles called muons, revealed by an experiment this month, suggests that the established theory of fundamental particles is incomplete. If the discrepancy pans out, it would be the first time that the theory has failed to account for observations since its inception five decades ago—and there is nothing physicists love more than proving a theory wrong....

Money may not buy love, but it can buy happiness… The catch is: you have to spend it on someone else. Researchers at the University of British Columbia (U.B.C.) and Harvard Business School report in Science that people who lavish gifts on others and give to charity are happier than their peers. As part of the study, U.B.C. psychologists gave volunteers a wad of cash to spend; half of them were told to splurge on themselves and the other half to spend it on others....

Electrostatic interactions induced by short, positively charged, hydrophobic peptides are all it takes to attach RNA to vesicle membranes. The discovery provides new insight into how RNA and membranes could have come together to form protocells – precursors to life – 4 billion years ago on Earth. RNA is assumed to be the ancestral nucleic acid in early cells because it can store genetic information and also catalyse chemical reactions. Membranes are also thought to have played an important role in prebiotic chemistry, not only trapping nucleic acids inside vesicles but also promoting a variety of processes by co-localising reactants on their surface....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens. Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid....

With the death of biologist E. O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas and how these ideas came to define our understanding of the world. After a long clinical career as a registered nurse, I became a laboratory-trained scientist as researchers mapped the first draft of the human genome. It was during this time that I intimately familiarized myself with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior....

When a male African savanna elephant folds his ears while simultaneously waving them, he’s ready for a fight. When a female folds her ears and accompanies the action with an ear flap, that means she’s also issuing a serious threat. But when elephants come together and fold their ears while also rapidly flapping them, the animals are expressing a warm, affiliative greeting that is part of their bonding ceremonies. Elephants possess an incredibly rich repertoire of communication techniques, including hundreds of calls and gestures that convey specific meanings and can change depending on the context....

“It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.” —Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) We moderns take it for granted that consciousness is intimately tied up with the brain. But this assumption did not always hold. For much of recorded history, the heart was considered the seat of reason, emotion, valor and mind. Indeed, the first step in mummification in ancient Egypt was to scoop out the brain through the nostrils and discard it, whereas the heart, the liver and other internal organs were carefully extracted and preserved....

Like an examiner for the National Transportation Safety Board analyzing a plane crash, I’m trying to identify the factors that led to a recent calamity at the Milwaukee Art Museum. First, in retrospect, it’s probably a bad idea to use an art museum for any kind of all-you-can-drink event. When the event is dubbed Martinifest–unlimited martinis for $30–the idea becomes even more questionable. Next, add a suspicious martini recipe, which included vodka and “drink mix,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel....