Posts

Kids do not need school to learn about cause and effect; they believe in causal laws well before kindergarten. When cognitive scientists Laura E. Schulz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jessica Sommerville of the University of Washington tested preschoolers, they discovered that the kids were thoroughgoing “causal determinists.” The children assumed that everything happens for a reason. Schulz and Sommerville showed the kids toy lights and switches that either worked all the time or only some of the time....

Schizophrenia hides its heritability well. Although fewer than 1 percent of the general population will be diagnosed as schizophrenic based on symptoms such as hallucination and disorganized thought, for children of a schizophrenic parent, those odds jump to about one in 10. And yet the condition’s genetic underpinnings have stubbornly resisted discovery. In the latest attempt, three crack teams of investigators pooled genomic data from 8,000 schizophrenics of European ancestry but could lay claim to only a handful of weak genetic risk markers....

Last August, driven by the instinct to establish his own territory and find a mate, P-32, one of only a handful of male mountain lions left in the Santa Monica Mountains, navigated three freeways before being struck and killed by a vehicle, the 13th lion to die on a highway in the area since 2002. There’s only around a dozen lions left in the Santa Monica Mountains, the range running from the Pacific Ocean through Los Angeles, America’s second-largest metropolis....

Orbiting satellites can warn us of bad weather and help us navigate to that new taco joint. Scientists are also using data satellites to solve a worldwide problem: predicting cholera outbreaks. Cholera infects millions of people each year, leading to thousands of deaths. Often communities do not realize an epidemic is underway until infected individuals swarm hospitals. Advanced warning for impending epidemics could help health workers prepare for the onslaught—stockpiling rehydration supplies, medicines and vaccines—which can save lives and quell the disease’s spread....

Ever since Lake Lahontan dried up thousands of years ago, the Black Rock Desert in Nevada has been a forbidding habitat. The flat terrain is covered with a white alkaline powder, and dust storms are frequent. That has not deterred revelers at the annual Burning Man festival, however. This year they have come bearing water fleas, tardigrades and other creatures that would have been more at home in the Pleistocene lake....

Every few seconds a wave of electrical activity travels through the brain, like a large swell moving through the ocean. Scientists first detected these ultraslow undulations decades ago in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people and other animals at rest—but the phenomenon was thought to be either electrical “noise” or the sum of much faster brain signals and was largely ignored. Now a study that measured these “infraslow” (less than 0....

Economic development has become a generalized global phenomenon, except in sub-Saharan Africa and a few other poverty hot spots. Even those impoverished areas will probably achieve economic takeoff with a little international help and the application of “best option” technologies. The world’s total economic throughput every year, adjusted for differences in countries’ purchasing power and measured as the gross world product (GWP), now stands at approximately $60 trillion. Over the past century, the GWP has grown roughly 18-fold in price-adjusted terms....

The smallest conceivable length of time might be no larger than a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. That’s according to a new theory describing the implications of the universe having a fundamental clock-like property whose ticks would interact with our best atomic timepieces. Such an idea could help scientists get closer to doing experiments that would illuminate a theory of everything, an overarching framework that would reconcile the two pillars of 20th-century physics—quantum mechanics, which looks at the smallest objects in existence, and Albert Einstein’s relativity, which describes the most massive ones....

When it comes to cost and global warming emissions, electric vehicles in the United States lead double lives, according to a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). An all-electric Nissan Leaf in Buffalo, N.Y., emits relatively few greenhouse gases, equal to the amount produced by a gasoline-powered car getting 86 mpg. But in Denver, the same Leaf is equivalent to only a 33-mpg vehicle, such as a subcompact Ford Fiesta....

Key concepts Physics Weight Pressure Force Center of mass Introduction While watching the Winter Olympics or other winter sporting events you might have wondered why skis are so long. The skis used by professionals are of top-notch quality. Researchers tinker with every detail, from the materials they are made of to the shape into which they are cut. The equipment is tested carefully because even the smallest detail can give an athlete the leading edge on the slope....

High temperatures and below-average precipitation that have spread drought across the western United States are likely to continue for another year, according to new estimates from the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Forecasts reaching to December 2022 show above-average temperatures across the southern United States and below-normal precipitation in California and Nevada, which have been parched by drought all year. “We’re in the midst of a historical drought,” climate researcher John Abatzoglou said yesterday at a virtual NOAA conference on drought conditions in California and Nevada....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In a recent RAC survey, 26% of UK 1,700 motorists reported using a handheld mobile phone while driving, despite it being illegal. In response, road safety charity Brake, argued that society’s phone “addiction” can have very serious consequences. A quick online search throws up many articles suggesting that people are “glued” to their smartphones and therefore miss important and enriching experiences and interactions going on around them....

Colorado’s Marshall Fire, which incinerated over a half-billion dollars’ worth of homes near Boulder in December, is likely to become the most investigated wildfire in U.S. history. One reason for that is the blaze hit close to home for fire experts. As many as 100 scientists studying wildfires, smoke, air pollution and climate change lived in or near Louisville and Superior, the two towns where over 1,000 homes were destroyed. Many of the scientists work for five national laboratories in the Boulder area run by NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research....

Wildfire season has gotten an early start this year. A stubborn blaze burning northeast of Los Angeles, now into its fourth day, has forced more than 1,000 people from their homes in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Investigators have yet to determine the cause, but the region has been hit with unseasonable heat and low humidity, which officials say makes it tough to contain fires once they start. See Reuters’s video of the dramatic, 500-acre-plus blaze....

In fall of 2018, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca launched the YOUR Cancer program. The program connects the company’s history of cancer science with the reality that the best cancer care requires more than therapeutics alone. It requires a community. YOUR Cancer aims to convene, engage and highlight the full breadth and depth of the oncology community and recognize those making a difference in the lives of cancer patients and their families....

An experiment at CERN has demonstrated a new way of accelerating electrons to high energies—one that could dramatically shrink the size of future particle accelerators and lower their costs. The technique is the latest entrant in a hot race to develop a technology called plasma wakefield acceleration. The method uses waves in plasma, a soup of ionized atoms, to push electrons to ever-higher energies over distances much shorter than those required in today’s particle accelerators....

On this past Christmas Day, NASA scientists and engineers cheered and breathed a cautious sigh of relief for the first time in, likely, years. The James Webb Space Telescope launch had gone off successfully, after years of delay, budget overages and technical challenges. In the ensuing weeks, the anxiety has kept up a steady hum while the telescope performed crucial early mission tasks to get itself situated to start collecting data—namely, unfurling its sunshield and mirrors....

A broad coalition of activists are charging that as much as a third of all Kyoto Protocol carbon offset credits ever sold to banks and governments could be illegitimate because they were generated by firms manipulating the marketplace. Companies, the activists allege, are deliberately generating greenhouse gas pollution in order to snag millions of dollars worth of carbon credits when they then mitigate the emissions. Many chemical manufacturers also seem to be tweaking their systems to generate as much emissions as possible, only reverting to normal pollution levels once they’ve hit their maximum annual offset credit allowance....

[Editor’s note: This excerpt from The Quants, by Scott Patterson (Crown Business, 2010), describes the 2006 Wall Street Poker Night Tournament, which featured professional poker players T. J. Cloutier and Clonie Gowen. It also featured several powerful money managers representing a new kind of Wall Streeter, the math-savvy investors known as “quants.” The quants in attendance that night in 2006 included Peter Muller of Morgan Stanley, Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, Boaz Weinstein of Deutsche Bank and Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies....

In a striking example of how two unrelated creatures can evolve similar traits, researchers have discovered that a rain—forest katydid has ears remarkably like those of humans and other mammals-even though its hearing organ is tucked into the crook of its front legs. The insect, a yellow-orange-faced katydid (Copiphora gorgonensis) from Gorgona Island in Colombia, has ear structures that are similar to the human eardrum and cochlea. As sound waves approach the katydid’s legs, they rock a thin membrane akin to a human eardrum....