Posts

Meanwhile, though, companies, environmentalists and consumers find themselves struggling with a new question: How do you measure the carbon footprint of a “cloud”? First there is the murky business of understanding exactly what cloud computing is. IT professionals use the term broadly to describe data processing operations that are outsourced to server farms, instead of being powered on-site (in the server room of an office, for example). For businesses, this could include websites or networks that are hosted remotely....

Japan’s asteroid mission Hayabusa2 has become the first to land moving rovers on the surface of an asteroid. On 22 September, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) tweeted that it had confirmed the mission’s twin rovers, called MINERVA-II 1A and 1B, had landed safely on the space rock Ryugu, and were moving on the surface. The Hayabusa2 mothership deployed the small probes late last week as it dropped to just 55 metres above the surface, later pulling up to a higher orbit....

After a two-decade wait that included a long struggle for funding and a move halfway across a continent, a rebooted experiment on the muon—a particle similar to the electron but heavier and unstable—is about to unveil its results. Physicists have high hopes that its latest measurement of the muon’s magnetism, scheduled to be released on 7 April, will uphold earlier findings that could lead to the discovery of new particles. The Muon g – 2 experiment, now based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, first ran between 1997 and 2001 at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York....

NEW YORK – Most Manhattan office buildings are designed for paper pushers, but there is a new factory running at the end of a long dim corridor on the fifth floor of the Empire State Building. Here machines are whirring, a furnace is roaring, and dozens of blue-collar workers are bustling about. They are setting up to dismantle the building’s 6,514 double-hung window frames, to reuse the glass and make them anew....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In a New Era of Discovery by Ann Finkbeiner (on sale August 17 from Free Press). The book chronicles the development of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an influential astronomical survey that has charted the position of hundreds of thousands of galaxies and turned up large numbers of distant quasars....

MANILA (Reuters)—The Philippines ordered a probe on Monday into the immunization of more than 730,000 children with a vaccine for dengue that has been suspended following an announcement by French drug company Sanofi (SASY.PA) that it could worsen the disease in some cases. Amid mounting public concern, Sanofi explained its “new findings” at a news conference in Manila, but it did not say why action was not taken after a World Health Organization (WHO) report in mid-2016 that identified the risk it was now flagging....

Pounding heart, rapid breath, racing thoughts—is it anxiety or excitement? New studies at Harvard University found that by interpreting these sensations as excitement instead of anxiety, people performed better in three types of stressful situations: singing in front of strangers, speaking in public and solving difficult math problems. In the experiments, some participants were told to either try to calm down or try to get excited before the task; others were given no such instructions....

On August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene crashed into North Carolina, eviscerating the Outer Banks. The storm dumped rain shin-high and hurled three-meter storm surges against the barrier island shores that faced the mainland, destroying roads and 1,100 homes. After the storm, a young ecologist then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill named Rachel K. Gittman decided to survey the affected areas. Gittman had worked as an environmental consultant for the U....

My grade school in Spain had a color-coded system for test scores: “A” was red, “B” was blue, “C” was green and “F” was brown. So the color distribution in your academic chart revealed at a glance how well you were doing in your various classes. One result of this system was that red and brown became, respectively, my favorite and least favorite colors as a child. This story is one of many examples of how an essentially neutral visual stimulus (the color red in this case) may become associated with a reward value (a good grade)....

One would think that, after years of exhortations, most people would know better than to use “password” or “12345” to protect their most sensitive data. Evidence suggests, however, that bad passwords are as popular now as they ever were, and the top 25 are trivially easy to guess. An annual study has exposed 2015’s worst passwords, and if you’re using any of them for your accounts, now is as good a time as any to change it to something a little harder to guess....

More than a dozen state attorneys general are asking Pres. Donald Trump to throw out recent federal rules regulating the environment for endangered or threatened plants and animals. The states claim the rules, which enlarge the definition of species habitat, give the federal government excessive power over state and private lands. The rules govern implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and were made a year ago by Pres. Barack Obama’s administration....

On a projection screen in front of a packed room in a coastal Maine town, computer-animated salmon swim energetically through a massive oval tank. A narrator’s voice soothingly points out water currents that promote fish exercise and ideal meat texture, along with vertical mesh screens that “optimize fish densities and tank volume.” The screens also make dead fish easy to remove, the narrator cheerily adds. The video is part of a pitch made earlier this year for an ambitious $500-million salmon farm that Norway-based firm, Nordic Aquafarms, plans to build in Belfast, Maine, complete with what Nordic says will be among the world’s largest aquaculture tanks....

There’s no question about it: the new law sounds just great. President Donald Trump, who knows a thing or two about marketing, gushed about its name when he signed the “Right to Try” bill into law on May 30. He was surrounded by patients with incurable diseases, including a second grader with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, who got up from his small wheelchair to hug the president. The law aims to give such patients easier access to experimental drugs by bypassing the Food and Drug Administration....

Geordi La Forge, the chief engineer of the USS Enterprise-D, could perceive a large swath of electromagnetic spectrum with his wraparound VISOR prosthetic. Now a few rats have received real-life prototypes of these Star Trek props. Researchers in the lab of brain–machine interface ace Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center have outfitted rodents with prosthetics that enable them to “see” and respond to otherwise invisible infrared light. The experiment points toward the prospect, for the moment still a futurist’s overheated fantasy, of enhancing humans with a sixth or seventh sense or, perhaps, like a VISOR, an ability to detect a full-spectrum of electromagnetic emanations....

My March Scientific American column explores the USB Type-C, a new connector that can replace the power, data, video and headphone jacks on phones, tablets and laptops. It’s a fantastically successful design—there’s no wrong way to plug it in, for example, and it works the same on every brand and model. But it’s also a new idea, and something that will take getting used to. So here, for your educational pleasure, is a Frequently Asked Questions document about USB-C....

Dear EarthTalk: Which are the greenest American cities, and why?— D. Hansen, Wichita, Kans. Which American city is the greenest depends on who you ask. Every year dozens of publications and websites release their own assessments of which cities have the most environmentally conscious citizenry, the highest percentage of recycling or the lowest carbon footprint per capita. Portland, Oregon, Seattle and San Francisco are often top contenders, but some of the other leading choices may be a surprise....

OCTOBER 1956 WASTED RADIATION—“At present, nuclear power offers the most promising alternative to fossil fuels. However, progress in this field so far scarcely touches the heart of the problem. We speak of nuclear ‘power,’ but what we are really working on is nuclear heat. We are proposing to hook up the nuclear reactor to the steam turbine, an only modestly efficient invention of the 19th century, and to throw away three quarters of the energy of the nuclear reaction....

This month, in my Scientific American column, I wrote about the new age of hearing aids that’s about to dawn. Thanks to a new law, an audiologist consultation will no longer be required to buy hearing aids—and as a result, companies like Apple, Samsung, and Bose are free to enter the market. The hope is that all kinds of interesting new ear-based innovation might result. As part of a story for “CBS Sunday Morning,” I interviewed Achin Bhowmik....

“You may feel their presence, you may see their scrapes, but you seldom get to see them,” says Koustubh Sharma, senior regional ecologist with the Snow Leopard Trust. “That’s the reason why they are called the ghost of the mountains.” In an effort organized by the Seattle-based trust, along with the Nature Conservation Foundation in Mysore and the State of Himachal Pradesh’s forest department, dozens of remote-sensor cameras set amid the rocky, high-altitude desert of India’s Spiti Valley have captured more than 3,200 images of the elusive and endangered snow leopards (Panthera uncial) across 1,500 square kilometers....

The novel coronavirus outbreak that apparently started in China’s massive city of Wuhan has now spread to other parts of that nation and several countries beyond it, including the U.S. As of late this week, health officials said the virus had infected more than 1,000 people, causing at least 41 deaths in China. Chinese authorities have responded by shutting down all travel into and out of Wuhan and about a dozen other cities, restricting the movements of around 35 million people....