We now look back with pity on old computer printers, with their glacial bizz-buzz and annoying perforated-edge paper. A decade from now people will surely look back in pity on the things we call printers today. Three-dimensional printers, capable of producing entire objects, are already coming down in price, and new types of printers can output electronic circuit boards or even entire functional circuits. Now researchers have a printer that outputs silicon chips....
Take a close look at the athletes competing in this year’s Summer Olympic Games in London—their musculature will tell you a lot about how they achieved their elite status. Endless hours of training and commitment to their sport played a big role in building the bodies that got them to the world’s premier athletic competition. Take an even closer look—this one requires microscopy—and you’ll see something else, something embedded in the genetic blueprints of these young men and women that’s just as important to their success....
Long-dead birds gathering dust in museums are helping scientists to better understand climate change. By examining soot on the feathers of bird specimens collected by museums over the last 150 years, scientists are getting a rare glimpse into the history of U.S. carbon emissions. Their findings, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could also aid in predictions of future climate change. The researchers—biologist Shane DuBay and photography expert Carl Fuldner, both of the University of Chicago—examined more than 1,300 birds collected between 1880 and 2015 from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, the region historically most heavily involved in manufacturing and coal burning....
The disaster relief bill that President Trump is expected to sign is missing one significant component: money for the Disaster Relief Fund. The bill passed by the House of Representatives on Monday contains $19.1 billion for more than 25 federal agencies but not a cent for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the fund and leads the federal response to natural disasters. The omission makes some sense. The Disaster Relief Fund has a $29 billion surplus and is projected to end the fiscal year $18....
Approximately 12,500 Ebola virus capsules can fit side by side through a hole the size of a pinprick in a piece of clothing, and because exposure to just a few of the capsules can cause infection, protective barriers are a must for those who come into contact with patients. Lakeland Industries, a global manufacturer of protective clothing based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., is one of a few companies that sews the plastic ChemMAX and MicroMAX suits that health care workers wear as shields....
An outbreak of the Ebola virus in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that has been raging since 2018 has officially ended. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the DRC government announced the end on 25 June—42 days after the last case—but it comes as a fresh Ebola outbreak spreads in the country’s northwest. “We are extremely proud to have emerged victorious over an epidemic that has lasted a long time and caused a lot of damage to our population,” said Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, a co-discoverer of Ebola and the director of the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, at a press briefing....
A recently conducted study in mice may someday help doctors develop new treatments for breast cancer. The results, which were published in Science Translational Medicine earlier this month, suggest that it may be possible to stop some abnormal growths from going on to becoming potentially life-threatening tumors. About 25 percent of newly diagnosed cases of breast cancer in the U.S. consist of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which has long been thought of as the earliest stage of cancer....
Several years ago scientists at Elan, an Ireland-based drug company, and at U.S.-based Wyeth Pharmaceuticals developed a vaccine that showed promise in slowing the advance of Alzheimer’s disease. The approach was to expose patients to a tiny amount of beta amyloid—the rogue protein thought to trigger the sticky plaques that accumulate in the brain. The exposure would prompt the body’s immune system to raise its own disease-fighting antibodies to destroy the protein....
Since antibiotic drugs were first used in farm animals in the mid-1940s, a debate has raged about the prudence of this practice. A study published last December in Ecology Letters adds a new wrinkle: Farmers often use manure to build up soil carbon and increase nutrient availability for plants, but the study showed that dung from dairy cows given two types of routine antibiotics also altered the composition of soil bacteria and fungi....
By Jennifer Dobner SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Utah will hold its first ever crow hunt this fall as authorities try to contain the noise and mess from a population of the big, black birds that officials say has tripled over the last 12 years. The state’s Wildlife Board voted 3-2 on Thursday to let hunters cull up to 10 crows each per day in September, and then again between Dec....
Dizziness—a deficit in spatial perception that leaves people feeling lightheaded, unbalanced or disoriented—is one of the most common side effects of prescription drugs. Some of the most popular medications, including those that control high blood pressure or alter the neurochemistry of the brain, can intensify or cause dizziness in up to 30 percent of patients who take them, experts estimate. “As we age, we are already dealing with changes to our physiology and our brain that make us more prone to dizziness,” says Ann Tucker Gleason, director of the Vestibular and Balance Center at the University of Virginia....
There are many reports based on scientific research that talk about the long-term impacts of climate change—such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, temperatures and sea levels—by the year 2100. The Paris Agreement, for example, requires us to limit warming to under 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Every few years since 1990, we have evaluated our progress through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) scientific assessment reports and related special reports....
At the end of a long day, I flop down on the couch and close my eyes. I burrow my face into a pillow and enjoy a few moments of silence. Yet one thought creeps into my consciousness. Go to the gym. Find your running shoes. It won’t kill you. This is a familiar battle, one that I wage almost daily. When I do make it to the gym, I anoint myself a hero....
A second phase of offshore wind development is about to get underway in the U.S., starting in Maine, a state that sees its energy future built on a new type of wind turbine. It is one that can float in deeper waters and that may be built more cheaply than existing wind turbines being constructed or planned along most of the U.S. East Coast. One of the main beneficiaries of what are called “floaters”—turbines that are held by mooring lines attached to anchors in waters deeper than 160 feet—will likely be the U....
Carlos Sluzki’s cat died a while ago now, but he still sometimes visits. Now more of a shadow cat, the former pet seems to lurk at the edges of Sluzki’s vision, as a misinterpreted movement amid the everyday chaos of domestic life. All the same, the shadow cat is beginning to slink away and Sluzki notes that as the grief fades his erstwhile friend is “erasing himself from the world of the present and receding into the bittersweet world of the memories of the loved ones....
A bicycle lane inspired in Van Gogh’s Starry Night can be found in the Netherlands. It was built using phosphorescent tiles, so at night passersby see where they are going without the need of electricity-consuming lighting. But despite the beauty of the scene, only a handful of constructions worldwide have this kind of lighting, because the microscopic structure of common building materials—such as cement, concrete or brick—prohibits adding this property. But this could soon change....
As Black Lives Matter protests continue across the U.S., police have deployed various “less lethal” weapons to disperse participants. Tear gas, rubber bullets, flash bang grenades and long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) are designed to control crowds. But they are sometimes used in situations where people have nowhere to run. So some protesters have been gearing up to protect themselves from such weapons and suspected surveillance technology—not to mention the novel coronavirus....
APPROXIMATELY TWO BILLION YEARS AGO a pair of single-celled organisms made a terrible mistake—they had sex. We’re still living with the consequences. Sexual reproduction is the preferred method for an overwhelming portion of the planet’s species, and yet from the standpoint of evolution it leaves much to be desired. Finding and wooing a prospective mate takes time and energy that could be better spent directly on one’s offspring. And having sex is not necessarily the best way for a species to attain Darwinian fitness....
In April the editors took delicious advantage of the day that celebrates a uniquely human capacity–humor. In the spirit of the adage “Many truths are spoken in jest,” they modestly proposed in SA Perspectives to be fair and balanced–to henceforth cover all explanations of natural phenomena. The voluminous and emotional responses ranged from kudos to condemnation. Some admitted they fell for the mock-serious announcement before reading the last sentence that stated this new policy would start on April Fools’ Day....
Whenever the fictional character Popeye the Sailor Man managed to down a can of spinach, the results were almost instantaneous: he gained superhuman strength. Devouring any solid object similarly did the trick for one of the X-Men. As we age and begin to struggle with memory problems, many of us would love to reach for an edible mental fix. Sadly, such supernatural effects remain fantastical. Yet making the right food choices may well yield more modest gains....
