In the summer of 2015 Governor Greg Abbott gave the Texas State Guard an unusual order: keep an eye on the Jade Helm 15 exercise, just in case the online rumors are true. In reality, Jade Helm 15 was a routine eight-week military exercise conducted in Texas and six other states. In the online echo chamber, however, it was something more sinister: the beginning of a coup ordered by President Barack Obama....
Expressive writing is known to help assuage psychological trauma and improve mood. Now studies suggest that such writing, characterized by descriptions of one’s deepest thoughts and feelings, also benefits physical health. Researchers in New Zealand investigated whether expressive writing could help older adults heal faster after a medically necessary biopsy. In the study, 49 healthy adults aged 64 to 97 years wrote about either upsetting events or daily activities for 20 minutes, three days in a row....
Nothing puts the horror into a horror film like an idyllic setting. That is how the 1956 science-fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers begins. The inhabitants of the bucolic hamlet of Santa Mira, Calif., delight in their neighborly friendships and rarely have more than the most mundane concerns. But when town doctor Miles Bennell returns home after a short trip, he learns that one of his patients thinks her uncle is not really himself....
Driven by science, data and public health priorities, President Biden’s National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness is a hugely welcome step forward. However, in order to respond nimbly to the continuingly unpredictable nature of this devastating virus, enormous challenges still remain in management and implementation, raising questions of whether the plan is sufficiently bold to repair damage already wrought. As an epidemiologist on the front lines of the COVID catastrophe from the start, I’ve witnessed the public health system buckling and failing in multiple ways....
From Nature magazine It sounds like a conspiracy theory: ‘cosmic rays’ from deep space might be creating clouds in Earth’s atmosphere and changing the climate. Yet an experiment at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is finding tentative evidence for just that. The findings, published today in Nature, are preliminary, but they are stoking a long-running argument over the role of radiation from distant stars in altering the climate....
It’s time to update the list of ingredients in Martian air. In late 2012 NASA’s Curiosity rover drew air into its onboard laboratory and analyzed Mars’s atmospheric composition with a pair of spectrometers. The results of the investigation, published July 19 in Science, revise decades-old data on the makeup of Red Planet air and paint a broad picture of how the atmosphere has changed since the planet’s formation. The diaphanous layer of gas enveloping Mars, where the atmospheric pressure is only about 1 percent of Earth’s at sea level, is predominantly carbon dioxide, with much smaller contributions from nitrogen and argon....
With the help of a NASA Mars orbiter, scientists have identified deposits of an exotic material known as “impact glass” on Mars. On Earth this same material has been shown to preserve evidence of ancient life, so impact glass on Mars could provide key insights into the past habitability—or even past inhabitants—of the Red Planet. Kevin Cannon and John Mustard, of Brown University, reported the glass discovery on June 5 in Geology....
Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. is making a major jump into renewable energy with a $600 million investment in algae-based biofuels. Exxon is joining a biotech company, Synthetic Genomics Inc., to research and develop next-generation biofuels produced from sunlight, water and waste carbon dioxide by photosynthetic pond scum. “The world faces a significant challenge to supply the energy required for economic development and improved standards of living while managing greenhouse gas emissions and the risks of climate change,” said Emil Jacobs, vice president of research and development at Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Co....
“Desserts” spelled backward is “stressed.”Isn’t life like that? Even the good things in life—fine wine, rich food, sex—can stress you out. There is just no escaping stress, and some experts even suggest that a little stress is good for you. In my view, that idea is flawed—the misleading result of averaging data across many individuals. Yes, high levels of stress are harmful to most people, adversely affecting health, mood and productivity....
Meet Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua—healthy newborn monkeys and the first primate clones produced via the same method that made Dolly the sheep two decades ago. The advance at a lab in China edges scientists closer to a future in which they could create large numbers of genetically identical monkeys to serve as models for human diseases and other conditions. This could help researchers unravel complex questions, including how environmental factors may fuel common human cancers....
To wrangle a ride on their honeybee hosts, wingless parasitic flies need a truly phenomenal grasp. Now a new study reveals how Braula coeca manages to walk around on a flying bee while exhibiting what researchers say is the highest attachment force per body weight of any land-based insect ever measured. This force relies on the parasite’s highly adapted feet, called tarsi, which are equipped with toothed claws. Each foot has a total of 28 teeth, or claw tips, which let the parasite lock onto sparse honeybee hairs during flight....
Scientists have long wondered whether there is a limit to the number of protons and neutrons that can be clustered together to form the nucleus of an atom. A new study comes closer than ever to finding the answer by estimating the total number of nucleus variations that can exist. The periodic table of elements includes 118 known species of atoms, and each of these exists (either naturally or synthetically) in several versions with differing numbers of neutrons, giving rise to a total of about 3,000 different atomic nuclei....
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, surround-sound music looked like the next big thing, but in the intervening decade and a half, precious little rock, jazz, or world music has been recorded in surround. True, in the early days of SACD and DVD-Audio formats there were hundreds of remixes of older stereo recordings, and some were recycled on Blu-ray, but the number of newly recorded 5.1 titles remains paltry....
At the end of last year, Chinese geneticist He Jiankui shocked the world by announcing that he had successfully altered the genes of twin baby girls to prevent them from ever contracting HIV. The research community’s response was quick and harsh: he had flouted the ethical guidelines for manipulating the genomes of embryos, it said, and seemed unaware of the Pandora’s box he had pried open. While this one rogue scientist’s activities (if found to be true) have the potential to bruise public opinion of new, powerful medical technology, the promise of the technique, CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing, is undeniable: the potential to block diseases with an underlying genetic basis before they begin, literally editing them out of the human genome for generations to come....
The prescription drug underneath that childproof cap is often the culmination of myriad complex chemical reactions choreographed in huge industrial facilities on several continents, across many months of time. The future, however, could look very different. Patients could, one day, potentially obtain pills from a machine that is able to take raw materials and synthesize them into drugs in a matter of hours. What’s more, the products would not be one size fits all but a drug dose calibrated to each person’s needs based on factors like age, body weight and genetic variations that affect how one metabolizes and clears the drug as well as takes into account potential interactions with other medicines....
By Jon Cartwright Physicists in the United States have demonstrated the optical analogue of an aerofoil–a “lightfoil” that generates lift when passing through laser light.The demonstration, which comes more than a century after the development of the first airplanes, suggests that lightfoils could one day be used to maneuver objects in the vacuum of outer space using only the Sun’s rays. “It’s almost like the first stages of what the Wright brothers did,” says lead author Grover Swartzlander, a physicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, whose study appeared December 5 in Nature Photonics....
If you catch a train heading north from New York City, you’re bound to enjoy a view of the Tappan Zee Bridge spanning the mighty Hudson River’s second-widest point. The cantilever bridge exemplifies one of the most popular structural styles from the 1950s and 60s, America’s most fervent bridge-building days. Seeing the span from a riverside viewing platform, the Tappan Zee’s aged, slanting beams bolster one another in a thick steel grid....
Antarctic glaciers may be capable of shrinking at much faster rates than scientists previously imagined — raising new concerns about the future of the ice sheet. New evidence suggests that parts of the ice sheet retreated by as much as 6 miles a year at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago. That’s about 10 times as fast as the fastest-melting glaciers are retreating today. It’s an ominous reminder that previous warm periods have driven monumental environmental changes — and it’s possible it could happen again....
A SOCIAL MALADY The article “Why We Cheat,” by Ferric C. Fang and Arturo Casadevall, attempts to link cheating and deception to the natural sciences. In my opinion, this topic of study is much better suited to the social sciences. Fish, mammals and bacteria cannot cheat, although they may employ various creative tactics that resemble “dishonesty” to get what they want, such as food or a mate. These behaviors are only “wrong” once there is a social determination that the tactics being used allow for some kind of undue advantage....
The Arctic’s increased vulnerability to climate change is not limited to higher temperatures and melting permafrost. New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans are particularly susceptible to acidification, with potentially dire consequences to Alaska’s rich crab and salmon fisheries. “Everything is acting in unison on the environment - it’s not just the ice loss or the warming or the acidification,” said UAF chemical oceanographer Jeremy Mathis. “The Arctic is taking a multilateral hit....
