Men are often advised to stand out from the crowd to attract women—there can be only one alpha male. Women, on the other hand, are told not to be too weird. This advice has sunk in: a 2006 study found that when in a mating mind-set, men become less conformist and women become more so. A paper in the June issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, however, reports that we have it all wrong....
By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Officials in Washington, D.C.’s public health laboratory had to repeat Zika tests for nearly 300 pregnant women, including two women who were mistakenly told they tested negative for the mosquito-borne virus that has been shown to cause birth defects. A routine check of lab practices in December revealed that all of the lab’s Zika tests were coming back negative, raising concerns about their accuracy, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday....
Nuclear power faces a wobbly future 10 years after an earthquake and tsunami triggered a triple reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. But the industry’s unstable footing has less to do with the Fukushima accident—and more to do with how a natural gas glut and the rise of renewable power have transformed the global energy landscape. Fukushima has certainly left its mark on the nuclear industry. When the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami occurred on March 11, 2011, there were 54 nuclear reactors in Japan....
The U.S. is shrinking—physically. It has lost nearly 20 meters of beach from its East Coast during the 20th century. The oceans have risen by roughly 17 centimeters since 1900 through expansion (warmer water taking up more space) and the ongoing meltdown of polar ice. That increase, however, is a small fraction compared with what’s to come. “Plan for one meter by the end of this century,” says glaciologist Robert Bindschadler, an emeritus scientist at NASA....
The number of deaths and hospitalizations caused by prescription drugs has risen precipitously in the past decade, with overdoses of pain medications, in particular opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers, more than doubling between 1999 and 2006, according to a new study. In fact, by 2006, overdoses of opioid analgesics alone (a class of pain relievers that includes morphine and methadone) were already causing more deaths than overdoses of cocaine and heroin combined....
The kilogram is shrinking. The official object that defines the mass of a kilogram is a tiny, 139-year-old cylinder of platinum and iridium that resides in a triple-locked vault near Paris. Because it is so important, scientists almost never take it out; instead they use copies called working standards. But the last time they did inspect the real kilogram, they found it is roughly five parts in 100 million heavier than all the working standards, which have been leaving behind a few atoms of metal every time they are put on scales....
LONDON – Just as rich nations have passed the responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions to the developing nations, so the rich provinces of China have exported the problem to the poorest regions, according to new research. The world’s biggest single emitter of the greenhouse gas – 10 billion tons in 2011 – has undertaken to reduce the “carbon intensity” of its economy. But, according to Klaus Hubacek of the University of Maryland and colleagues, the richest and most sophisticated regions of China – those with the most stringent and specific pollution abatement targets – are buying manufactured goods from places like Inner Mongolia, a poorer region where targets are less constraining....
WARSAW, Poland – The U.S. State Department pledged $25 million today as part of a major new $280 million funding initiative aimed at slowing deforestation and stemming its effect on world carbon emissions. Announced on the sidelines of annual U.N. climate change negotiations here, the United States joined Norway, the United Kingdom and the World Bank in launching the “BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes.” The fund will provide incentives to developing countries that are taking steps to limit the chopping and razing of trees under the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program, or REDD+....
FINALIST YEAR: 1948 FINALIST PROJECT: Creating new aromatic compounds using silicon instead of carbon WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Ronald Breslow grew up in Rahway, N.J.—home of the pharmaceutical company Merck. His physician father treated many Merck scientists. One of them, Max Tishler, who later won the National Medal of Science, gave Breslow a college organic chemistry textbook when the boy was in seventh grade. “That got me rolling,” he says....
Norm Thurston is a “free-market guy”—a conservative health economist in Republican-run Utah who rarely sees the government’s involvement in anything as beneficial. But in a twist, the state lawmaker is now pushing for Utah to flex its muscle to spur federal action on ever-climbing prescription drug prices. “This is something that a red state like Utah could do. I don’t think this is a partisan issue,” Thurston said. “Those outrageous cost increases are not the result of the free market....
The mystery at the heart of the Milky Way has finally been solved. This morning, at simultaneous press conferences around the world, the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) revealed the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It’s not the first picture of a black hole this collaboration has given us—that was the iconic image of M87*, which they revealed on April 10, 2019....
You’re given a choice: Would you rather spend your day feeling happy, versus happy interspersed with some moments of sadness, frustration and anxiety? Most of us would choose the first option in a heartbeat. Psychologists, too, long championed the importance of cultivating positive emotions as one path toward optimizing well-being, resilience to stressors and salutary physical health outcomes. Not surprisingly, when people are asked what emotions they want to feel, they place a heavy emphasis on wanting to feel primarily positive emotions....
Years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) often finds itself the butt of jokes. From satirical Webcomics to more scathing criticism, the flagship project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency is an easy target. Yet many would argue that those delays and budget concerns are simply indicative of the telescope’s unprecedented scope and soaring ambitions. When it hopefully launches on October 31, it will be, by far, the largest and most sophisticated observatory ever sent into space....
In 1860 a naturalist named William Brewer set out to conduct the first geologic survey of the infant state of California. When Brewer arrived in the tiny adobe village of Los Angeles on December 2, he noted in his diary that “all that is wanted naturally to make it a paradise is water, more water.” Three weeks later a raging torrent of water—the worst rainstorm in 11 years—destroyed many of the adobes....
Up until a few months ago Kathleen Mandt had never spent much time on Reddit. Mandt, an Earth and planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, had heard of the social news site, but only because her teenage son “mostly lives on Reddit.” She received a crash course, however, when a press release summarizing a recent paper she’d published was submitted to r/science, a thriving Reddit community (aka subreddit) that boasts more than six million subscribers....
As 177 nations gather in Bangkok this week to deliberate trade restrictions on potentially endangered animals, new research reveals how important these deliberations are to the long-term survival of five species of sharks. A study published March 1 in Marine Policy reported new, higher estimates for the numbers of sharks killed yearly: approximately 100 million sharks. Meanwhile another study published February 20 in PLoS ONE, describing the migratory patterns of the highly threatened oceanic whitetip shark, reveals why international cooperation may be the last option available to preventing this shark’s extinction....
Editor’s Note (1/18/22): AT&T and Verizon will delay the debut of 5G cellular service near some airports. The decision follows concerns from U.S. airlines that the rollout, set to start on Wednesday, would interfere with aircraft equipment. This story is being republished to provide information on what to expect from the fifth-generation wireless technology. You’re probably used to the periodic upgrades in our cell-phone networks. There was 2G, which came along in 1991, replaced with 3G in 2001, followed by 4G in 2009....
CLIMATEWIRE | A record-breaking heat wave that’s been gripping India and Pakistan for weeks is expected to keep dragging on, meteorologists say. After an intense weekend, some of the worst heat could be slightly subsiding — but more extreme temperatures may be in store in the coming days. The region has suffered above-average temperatures for weeks now, affecting hundreds of millions of people. The punishing extremes reached dangerous new levels in the past week....
Rather than just an X-Y pair, the duck-billed platypus requires five chromosomal pairs to determine sex. One pair has avian similarity, suggesting that the sex-determining systems of birds and mammals may be linked. Nature online, October 24, 2004; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, November 16, 2004 Selling aspirin and acetaminophen in smaller doses reduced the suicide rate from these drugs by nearly 25 percent and the need for liver transplants from related damage by 30 percent in the U....
Excerpted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (www.wiley.com), from False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear. Copyright ©2005 by Marc Siegel. In early 2004 my daughter, Rebecca, was taking a bath. She was almost three years old. When the tubs Jacuzzi device turned on, she became petried. I raced to her side, to find her standing straight up, bright red from crying. For months afterward, she abhorred baths....
