Posts

North Korea has always talked the talk, and now it seems to be walking the walk as never before. The nuclear-armed rogue nation appears to be making progress on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which could conceivably allow the Hermit Kingdom to make good on its oft-repeated threat to turn major American cities into “seas of fire,” experts say. “They’ve probably reached the point where they’re going to need to start testing the missiles themselves — the whole system,” said Joel Wit, senior fellow at the U....

Astronomers have just found the best evidence yet of an entire ocean in an exceedingly unlikely place—the dwarf planet Pluto, in the dark hinterlands of the solar system. There, nitrogen and other “volatile” gases freeze solid in the cryogenic conditions, and water turns to rock-hard ice. For decades scientists have theorized how that ice might act as an insulator, preserving vestiges of warmth and moisture deep within Pluto and other objects so far from the sun....

BOSTON — Two Northeastern Republican governors are calling on the Trump administration to stay in the Paris climate agreement. In a letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Massachusetts Gov. Charles Baker and Vermont Gov. Phil Scott call the United States’ goal of 26-28 percent carbon reduction “achievable” and argued their states are already feeling the brunt of a changing climate. “We have seen the impacts of rising sea levels, increasingly severe flooding, heat waves, droughts, and decline in snow cover,” the governors wrote....

Around 27 million tons of the stuff gets dissolved in water and washed down the rivers into the oceans each year. Black carbon or biochar has been hailed as one possible way of limiting greenhouse gas emissions, by taking carbon out of circulation. But this study, according to a report in the journal Science, “closes a major gap in the global charcoal budget and provides critical information in the context of geo-engineering....

Editor’s Note: Winston Churchill remains perhaps the most admired statesman of modern times. Yet the politician who spearheaded the Allies’ fight against the Nazis demonstrated a profound disdain for the well-being of denizens of Britain’s largest colony, and his government’s policy of neglect led directly to a famine in South Asia in the 1940s that killed millions. Former Scientific American editor Madhusree Mukerjee has just published a historical investigation of Churchill’s policies in India, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and Ravaging of India During World War II ....

Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats are an iconic setting for car commercials and feature films. Land speed records have been made and broken on its lunarlike surface for more than a century. Now the sprawling salt pan, about 185 kilometers west of Salt Lake City, is in trouble. This year its normally rock-hard crust looked like gray, gritty soup. Without a firm track, organizers were forced to cancel Bonneville Speed Week, a major racing tournament, for the second consecutive year....

Most adults have bad breath occasionally, particularly when their mouth dries out after, say, a full night’s sleep or a long, dehydrating plane flight. About 25 percent of people worldwide, however, have chronic foul breath. Researchers around the world figured out years ago that gas-emitting bacteria on the tongue and below the gum line are largely responsible for rotten breath. But determining how best to eradicate these microbes’ tenacious odors has been difficult....

In 1957, when Sputnik took the world by storm, the Ford Foundation was several years into a project for talented students based on early college entrance. An evaluation of that program from the Fund for the Advancement of Education read: “There are those who argue that it is psychologically unsound and politically undemocratic for one child to proceed faster or to have a richer academic diet than another…. But what is too often ignored is the greatest risk of all—the risk of adhering stubbornly to a clearly imperfect set of practices which are frustrating the development of young talent at a time in history when this nation urgently needs to develop its human resources to the full....

Even desert plants have their limits. As dryland ecosystems experience stronger heat waves and droughts, scientists have wondered how climate change might affect the hardy plants that thrive in harsh deserts or dry mountains. With about 40% of the world covered in dry land, the question carries enormous weight for conservation policy: Will the natural toughness of those plants prepare them for even more extreme conditions? Or have they already reached the limits of what they can endure?...

I am being challenged daily. As a frontline doctor, I find that the COVID-19 pandemic has not only tested my clinical abilities but also strained my capacity to bear witness to grievous suffering. This suffering extends well beyond the physical distress of hospitalized patients battling the virus. The pandemic has also spawned a mental health crisis beyond anything I have seen in 25 years of caring for patients. The statistics are overwhelming: CDC research indicates that 31 percent of Americans have reported anxiety and depression during the pandemic, and 11 percent have considered suicide....

When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things – airplanes that fly, radios that reach millions of listeners. When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities – such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions....

As the novel coronavirus continues to spread widely in China and around the world, scientists are racing to understand how infectious the disease is and to project how many more people could be sickened in the coming weeks or months. For disease outbreaks, epidemiologists have a term for describing the average number of people an infected individual will spread an illness to in a susceptible population: it is known as the basic reproduction number, or R0 (pronounced “R-naught”)....

For decades scientists have noted that mature humans physically resemble immature chimps—we, too, have small jaws, flat faces and sparse body hair. The retention of juvenile features, called neoteny in evolutionary biology, is especially apparent in domesticated animals—thanks to human preferences, many dog breeds have puppy features such as floppy ears, short snouts and large eyes. Now genetic evidence suggests that neoteny could help explain why humans are so radically different from chimpanzees, even though both species share most of the same genes and split apart only about six million years ago, a short time in evolutionary terms....

The insight comes as scientists measure levels of iron dissolved in the Atlantic ocean and trace the metal back to its source. Tim Conway and Seth John of the University of South Carolina report in the journal Nature that they devised a way to sample large volumes of seawater to identify the content of dissolved iron in the water, and then to distinguish the ratio between different isotopes of that iron....

Nonfiction Tending Our Musical Planet What do we lose when the diversity of Earth’s noise is drowned out by humans? Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction David George Haskell Viking, 2022 ($29) In the beginning was silence. The big bang made not a whimper, let alone a bang. That is because the universe was born in a sea of nothingness without the space and time where sound can exist....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) – - People who eat more whole grains live longer and are less likely to die of heart disease, according to an analysis of two large studies. Earlier studies had linked whole grains to a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, the researchers say. “Reading the ingredients of food labels, consumers will know whether the food contains any whole grain contents,” said senior author Dr....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Children and teens with access to tablets and smartphones at night don’t get enough sleep and are sleepier during the day, whether or not they use the devices, according to a new review. The review of 20 previous studies found kids using portable media devices around bedtime were more than twice as likely as kids who didn’t use them to have short sleep times, but so were kids who had access to such devices at night but didn’t use them....

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a futuristic new approach to treating cancer, clearing a Novartis therapy that has produced unprecedented results in patients with a rare and deadly cancer. The treatment, called a CAR-T, is made by harvesting patients’ white blood cells and rewiring them to home in on tumors. Novartis’s product is the first CAR-T therapy to come before the FDA, leading a pack of novel treatments that promise to change the standard of care for certain aggressive blood cancers....

Astronomers have captured what may be the first-ever direct photograph of an alien planet in the process of forming around a nearby star. The picture, which captured a giant alien planet as it is coming together, was snapped by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. It shows a faint blob embedded in a thick disk of gas and dust around the young star HD 100546. The object appears to be a baby gas giant planet, similar to Jupiter, forming from the disk’s material, scientists say....

A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say—if the finding holds up. Attila Krasznahorkay at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’s Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, and his colleagues reported their surprising result in 2015 on the arXiv preprint server, and this January in the journal Physical Review Letters. But the report – which posited the existence of a new, light boson only 34 times heavier than the electron—was largely overlooked....