Posts

“Alt-science” is finding a home in Washington. In the age of “alternative facts” and the declaration of news as “fake” if it challenges previously held political beliefs, fringe and industry science that bucks years of federal research is gaining newfound prominence. Now, conclusions not published in any of the world’s premier science journals could soon be influencing federal policy, backed by Trump administration officials, congressional Republicans, conservative think tanks and a billionaire investor....

The race is on to build the world’s first meaningful quantum computer—one that can deliver the technology’s long-promised ability to help scientists do things like develop miraculous new materials, encrypt data with near-perfect security and accurately predict how Earth’s climate will change. Such a machine is likely more than a decade away, but IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel and other tech heavyweights breathlessly tout each tiny, incremental step along the way. Most of these milestones involve packing ever more quantum bits, or qubits—the basic unit of information in a quantum computer—onto a processor chip....

Adapted from Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, by Lisa Margonelli, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US). Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Margonelli. All rights reserved. After I came back from Australia, I wondered about a large bauxite mine that I’d heard of, where termites had rehabilitated the land. I wondered if there was more to the story than the fact that they fertilized the soil and recycled the grasses....

Adolescence is a dangerous time. Some of the most life-threatening risks that people take—drunk driving, binge drinking, smoking, having unprotected sex—are especially common during the teenage years. The following statistics illustrate the enormous toll in human suffering caused by adolescent risk taking: Both males and females between the ages of 16 and 20 are at least twice as likely to be in car accidents than drivers between the ages of 20 and 50 are....

Type ‘depression’ into the Apple App Store and a list of at least a hundred programs will pop up on the screen. There are apps that diagnose depression (Depression Test), track moods (Optimism) and help people to “think more positive” (Affirmations!). There’s Depression Cure Hypnosis (“The #1 Depression Cure Hypnosis App in the App Store”), Gratitude Journal (“the easiest and most effective way to rewire your brain in just five minutes a day”), and dozens more....

More doctors are reporting encounters with parents refusing to vaccinate their kids than a decade ago, but parents’ reasons for skipping immunizations have shifted in the past decade. A new survey published in Pediatrics on Monday reports that 87 percent of pediatricians in the United States say they encountered parents refusing to vaccinate their children in 2013. A decade earlier, 75 percent of doctors reported they had experienced vaccine refusals. The most common reason parents gave, according to doctors?...

Mark Zuckerberg did not invent Facebook because he wanted to find a new way of connecting millions of people all over the world. Nor did he found his multibillion-dollar company solely for the money, judging by his trademark jeans and hoodie sweatshirt. He did it, author Ben Mezrich implies in The Accidental Billionaires, because he wanted to show up a girl who dumped him and the guys in Harvard’s most elitist social club....

Events Shipwreck! Pirates and Treasure. Museum of Science, Boston. Opens September 23. Experience hurricane-force winds, spy gold and silver treasure, and pick up artifacts with a robotic arm. www.mos.org The Great Insect Fair. Pennsylvania State University. Held on September 29. Sample wax moth larvae at the Insect Deli, visit the Insect Zoo and ask the Bug Doctor your questions. Meteor showers. Watch the sky after midnight in September, and you are likely to see a sporadic meteor—a meteor not associated with a particular shower—according to the American Meteor Society....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). It felt like the Apollo control room seconds before the moon landing. For the approximately 60 physicists crowded into a conference room at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, on June 14, this was the moment of truth. After nearly a decade of work, the result of their painstaking search for one of the rarest radioactive decay processes in the universe — if it exists — was about to be revealed....

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its commercial satellite payload were destroyed by an explosion at their launch pad in Florida early Thursday (Sept. 1) during typically routine test. The explosion occurred shortly after 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), as SpaceX was preparing to launch the Amos 6 communications satellite for the Israeli company Spacecom on Saturday, Sept. 3. At the time, SpaceX was conducting a static fire engine test on the Falcon 9....

Global spam levels have dropped to their lowest point in three years, and now make up just 70.5 percent of all emails, according to Symantec’s new Intelligence Report. This is a significant decline from July 2010, when Symantec detected 230 billion spam messages in daily circulation, a number that accounted for 90 percent of all global email. It is the lowest recorded spam level since November 2008, when spam made up 68 percent of all emails, Symantec said in its report....

As a boy, I was a rock hound, and I learned how to identify minerals with the Mohs hardness test, named after the mineralogist who invented it. You take a known specimen, like quartz, and scratch an unknown specimen with it. If the quartz scratches the mystery specimen, you know it’s softer than quartz. It could be calcite or pyrite. If the quartz can’t scratch the specimen, it might be beryl or corundum, which are harder than quartz....

The identity of one of California’s most notorious serial killers had been a mystery for decades—until this week, when law enforcement arrested a suspect. Investigators revealed on Thursday that they made the breakthrough using a remarkable tool: a genealogy website. The unusual manner in which the Golden State Killer case was cracked has sparked wonderment—as well as privacy concerns about how law enforcement can and does use the genetic information that consumers give up to genetic testing companies....

A major new report on safety in academic chemical research is calling on US universities to adopt a ‘culture of safety’ actively supported at all levels, from university presidents and chancellors to student researchers. The report, issued by the US National Research Council (NRC) in response to recent serious accidents in some university research laboratories indicates that previous approaches to reduce laboratory accidents, which usually involve introducing new regulations, have not been successful enough....

I like video games because they give me choices that I don’t have in real life. When I want to feel like a princess, I choose Peach in Mario Kart. If I want to fight like Bruce Lee, I can choose Marshall Law in Tekken. When picking out which character to play in a game, players factor in an avatar’s strengths and weaknesses, and even their appearance. But players also make their choices based on attributes that aren’t apparent during gameplay and have no influence on the game, such as a character’s sexuality....

How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs? Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission, but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party? These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects. After all, this is not how medicine works. But a new mental health treatment, set to be licensed next year, poses just this sort of problem....

Have you ever been out in public and seen someone do something outrageous? Maybe you witnessed someone yelling a racial slur at a stranger or physically abusing a young child in their care. All of us probably remember a time when someone’s behavior violated our standards of moral decency, but only some of us can say we actively intervened. What separates those who speak up from those who stay silent? On the one hand, you might hypothesize that people who are more aggressive or hostile by nature are more likely to openly challenge a stranger....

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....

Psychologists at Northwestern University showed that each time you recall an event, your brain alters the memory by integrating new information—perhaps drawing on your current mood, activity or location, among other things. The moment of recall can also impair a memory, according to work at Iowa State University. Study participants watched an episode of the television show 24, in which a terrorist used a needle during an attack. Some subjects were quizzed on the plot before they all listened to a recap that incorrectly said the weapon was a stun gun....

If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it. The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of The Matrix, but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Researchers pondered the controversial notion at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate in April 2016 at the American Museum of Natural History....