Posts

On the heels of its successful Halo 3 video game launch, Microsoft pitched its vision of tomorrow’s media-saturated home last week at the DigitalLife technology expo in New York City. Microsoft’s big picture: every television in a household connected wirelessly to a central PC running Windows Media Center on the Vista operating system, allowing families to access high-definition cable television, digital photos, pay-per-view movies and other media on any of their TV sets....

Just how extraordinary has this winter been in Europe? The Danube river has frozen, for one. Europeans have been shivering under a blanket of cold air that has sent temperatures plummeting and snows drifting. Across the continent, hundreds have died from exposure to the cold. The Danube’s freezing is just one of many severe winter events in the continent this year. Heavy snowfall has blocked roads and stranded towns in central Italy....

When I began training as a surgeon about two decades ago, I was eager to treat tumors, gallbladder stones, hernias and all other conditions within reach of a scalpel. Surgery seemed like a direct solution to some serious problems. Type 2 diabetes was not one of them. Operations focus on single body parts, but doctors knew diabetes damaged multiple organs at the same time and involved a widespread failure to make efficient use of a blood glucose–regulating hormone, insulin....

LONDON – One of the most oft-repeated arguments of the anti-wind lobby is that turbines produce electricity only intermittently, when there is enough wind to turn them. This, the wind critics argue, means that so much gas has to be burnt to provide a reliable back-up supply of electricity that wind power’s overall benefit to the environment is erased. But extensive research in Spain means this claim can now definitively be declared a myth....

The wreck of the British warship HMS Warrior—the “last shipwreck” from the Battle of Jutland during World War I—has been discovered near Norway. The marine exploration team that found the shipwreck also recently located the wreck of a World War II-era British submarine in the same region. The HMS Warrior is the last of the Jutland wrecks to be located, out of 14 British and 11 German warships that were sunk on May 31 and June 1, 1916, as the Imperial German High Seas Fleet tried to break out from the Royal Navy blockade of the North Sea....

The language we use to talk about a pregnant person’s right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy is full of false binaries: pro-choice versus pro-life, bodily autonomy versus fetal personhood, moral versus immoral. These dualities unnecessarily divide us and prevent deeper conversations about the unique status of pregnancy within our society. An either-or mentality creates a situation of separate but unequal laws for pregnant people that violate both the human right to bodily autonomy and the guarantee of equal protection under the law....

After an outcry, the Trump administration has rolled back a proposed gutting of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, instead asking for relatively small trims to the office and largely preserving two main grant programs. President Trump’s 2018 budget—released Tuesday—is just a proposal; Congress actually allocates government spending. Still, the budget outlines the administration’s priorities, and an email leaked earlier this month showed that Trump was considering cutting the office’s $364 million budget by 95 percent....

Why does my cell phone screech when it is near my computer? David Grier, chair of the physics department at New York University, dials up some possible answers to this mystery: It sounds like a case of electromagnetic interference, or EMI: radio waves emitted by one device causing undesirable behavior in another. Virtually every piece of electrically powered equipment acts as a radio transmitter, whether it is supposed to or not; the changing electric currents running through these devices naturally radiate electromagnetic waves....

Today we know the brains power comes from components so miniaturized they are invisible. But even though technology now allows us to see individual neurons, our models of how they function en masse are still inadequate. We like to think of each cell as a microprocessor linked to billions of others. But how sure can we be that this analogy is accurate? Are we held captive by our analogies just as tightly as the scientists who preceded us were bound by their own now obsolete ideas?...

It was called the sunshine cure, and in the early 20th century, before the era of antibiotics, it was the only effective therapy for tuberculosis known. No one knew why it worked, just that TB patients sent to rest in sunny locales were often restored to health. The same “treatment” had been discovered in 1822 for another historic scourge, rickets—a deforming childhood condition caused by an inability to make hardened bone....

This summer scientists published the first study that comprehensively explored the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the U.S. The report was not encouraging. Three decades’ worth of data seemed to point to a future where global warming lowers wind speeds enough to handicap the nascent wind industry. But the real story, like so much in climate science, is far more complex. The study of decreased wind speeds came from a team led by Sara Pryor, professor and chair of the atmospheric science program at Indiana University....

By Kerri SmithThe Greenland ice sheet melted much more rapidly as a result of warmer temperatures in the recent past than previously estimated, a team of international scientists has revealed. They warn that future warming could have more dramatic effects on the ice than researchers have assumed.Between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago, Earth went through an unusually warm period. But puzzlingly, unlike data from many other spots in the Northern Hemisphere, measurements of isotopes in ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice sheet (GIS) hasn’t reflected that temperature change....

Nearly 40 percent of Americans belong to a racial or ethnic minority, but the patients who participate in clinical trials for new drugs skew heavily white—in some cases, 80 to 90 percent. Yet nonwhite patients will ultimately take the drugs that come out of clinical studies, and that leads to a real problem. The symptoms of conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as well as the contributing factors, vary across lines of ethnicity, as they do between the sexes....

The cosmic impact that ended the age of dinosaurs killed many living creatures on land and in the sea, but scientists have found, puzzlingly, that life in freshwater largely escaped this fate. Now new research, detailed online July 11 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, suggests freshwater life survived extinction because they were better adapted to withstand rapid changes in their surroundings, which helped them outlast the crises in the wake of the catastrophe....

Necessity is the mother of invention, and 2020 pushed the world like never before to find creative solutions to a litany of challenges, first and foremost in the medical field. From drug discovery to vaccine manufacturing to care delivery, COVID has animated clinicians, researchers, entrepreneurs and policy makers to radically rethink every facet of the health care ecosystem. While COVID is prima facie a physical malady, the disease has placed a massive burden on already strained mental health systems around the world....

The New Guinea singing dog is arguably the rarest Canis species in the world, more endangered than any other wild dog, jackal, coyote or wolf. The dogs’ distinctive vocalizations—imagine a wolf howl crossed with whale song—can occasionally be heard echoing down from their homes in the rugged mountain ranges of the island of New Guinea, but the shy, agile animals have eluded many efforts to find them. They have been photographed in the wild only twice—once by Australian mammalogist Tim Flannery in 1989 and again by wildlife tour guide Tom Hewitt in August 2012....

Frantic parents call 911 to report a child has wandered away from a state forest campsite. An unexpected storm strands hunters deep in a wilderness preserve. The U.S. National Park Service documented almost 3,500 search and rescue missions in 2017 alone. And speed is essential when someone goes missing, so search coordinators tend to throw in every tool at their disposal: volunteers, scent-trained dogs, horses and vehicles of all kinds often pour into the area....

Have you ever taken a long-haul flight? If so, you know that the timepiece in your head sometimes ignores the one on your wrist. If you leave Boston in the evening and, seven hours later, arrive in Paris at breakfast time, your body screams, “Why am I getting up? It’s the middle of the night!” Croissants or no, your internal clock persists in its own rhythm, and it can take several days to synchronize your sleeping patterns with your new surroundings....

In just 10 months Taiwanese optical disk manufacturer CMC Magnetics added a new product to its line: thin-film solar cells. The company’s subsidiary, Sunwell, now churns out about 10,000 solar panels a month—feeding a surging global demand for the clean electricity source—thanks to technology courtesy of Swiss solar newcomer Oerlikon. “We’re taking … an Intel-inside type of approach,” says Chris O’Brien, Oerlikon’s marketing chief in North America. “We’re able to sell customers a turnkey [assembly] line with guaranteed module performance and throughput at a fixed price....

No gene variant is a bigger risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease than one called APOE4. But exactly how the gene spurs brain damage has been a mystery. A study has now linked APOE4 with faulty cholesterol processing in the brain, which in turn leads to defects in the insulating sheaths that surround nerve fibres and facilitate their electrical activity. Preliminary results hint that these changes could cause memory and learning deficits....