Posts

The Biden administration has dubbed the Build Back Better framework “the largest effort to combat climate change in American history.” Part of the legislation is a series of rebates, tax credits and grants for people to make their homes and cars more energy efficient. If the legislation passes (it has to pass!), program administrators will have the tough job of convincing people to invest in these upgrades, because financial incentives won’t be enough....

BALTIMORE—Ninth grade science at the Academy for Career and College Education began the usual way last fall. Victoria Matthew’s students learned the difference between biotic and abiotic characteristics, then progressed to the basics of scientific method. By Thanksgiving, they were ready for climate change. That’s when Matthew braced herself. “Initially, I thought I was going to get a lot of pushback from the kids, said Matthew, a teacher at the inner-city charter school for grades six through 12....

If someone showed you a single character from an unfamiliar alphabet and asked you to copy it onto a sheet of paper, you could probably do it. A computer, though, would be stumped—even if it were equipped with state-of-the-art deep-learning algorithms such as those that Google uses to categorize photographs. These machine-learning systems require training on enormous sets of data to make even rudimentary distinctions between images. That may be fine for machines in the post office that sort letters by zip code....

By Natalie Grover The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said on Thursday it had temporarily categorized a synthetic opioid nicknamed “pink” as a dangerous drug, after receiving at least 46 reports of deaths associated with its use. The abuse of opioids—a class of drugs that includes heroin and prescription painkillers—has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 78 Americans die every day from opioid overdose....

The final nail in the coffin may have been dealt to the idea that neutrino particles can travel faster than light. The same lab that first reported the shocking results last September, which could have upended much of modern physics, has now reported that the subatomic particles called neutrinos “respect the cosmic speed limit.” Physicist Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab, presented the results today (June 8) at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan....

When the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced in 2014 that it would send a mission to Mars by the country’s 50th birthday in December 2021, it looked like a bet with astronomically tough odds. At the time, the nation had no space agency and no planetary scientists, and had only recently launched its first satellite. The rapidly assembled team of engineers, with an average age of 27, frequently heard the same jibe....

Adapted from Do Fathers Matter? What Science Is Telling Us about the Parent We’ve Overlooked, by Paul Raeburn, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Paul Raeburn. All rights reserved. In 2011 administrators at Frayser High School in Memphis, Tenn., came to a disturbing realization. About one in five of its female students was either pregnant or had recently given birth. City officials disputed the exact figures, but they admitted that Frayser had a problem....

Vaccines may soon make their film debut. Led by pharmaceutics expert Maria A. Croyle, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a thin sheet that preserves vaccines and other biological medicines for long periods without refrigeration. This means the carefully cooled vials now used to ship vaccines could potentially be replaced by lightweight, peelable films that can be mailed in an envelope and stored on a shelf. Croyle’s laboratory began developing the technology in 2007....

Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and director of the Autism Research Center, replies: Your mother is correct that the scientific evidence points to the brain of people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome as being different but not necessarily “disordered.” Studies have shown that the brain in autism develops differently, in terms of both structure and function, compared with more typical patterns of development, and that certain parts of the brain are larger or smaller in people who have autism compared with those who have a more typical brain....

Scientists are keeping tabs on the warming planet with more than one thermometer, so to speak. Ground-based sensors, ocean buoys and different types of satellite measurements have all helped show how fast the Earth is heating up. The bad news: Global warming is still steadily proceeding. But the good news is that all of these methods broadly agree with one another, despite being collected in very different ways. That means there’s high confidence that the estimates are accurate....

Join us below at 12:30 P.M. EST on Wednesday, January 2, for a live 30-minute online chat with Edward Phillips, a physician who specializes in lifestyle health at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions. He will discuss how he helps patients meet their weight management and other related health goals. Phillips will answer questions about the most effective changes–large and small–that people can make to lose weight, keep it off and stay healthy....

The sequencing of a 10,600-year-old genome has settled a lengthy legal dispute over who should own the oldest mummy in North America—and given scientists a rare insight into early inhabitants of the Americas. The controversy centred on the ‘Spirit Cave Mummy’, a human skeleton unearthed in 1940 in northwest Nevada. The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe has long argued that it should be given the remains for reburial, whereas the US government opposed repatriation....

Mercury contamination found in a quarter of U.S. freshwater fish exceeds federal safe levels for human consumption, according to a study released today by the U.S. Geological Survey. The agency examined mercury in fish, sediment and water drawn from 291 rivers and streams between 1998 and 2005, finding 25 percent carried mercury at levels above the safe standard for human consumption (0.3 parts per million wet weight), while all of the fish had detectable mercury levels....

Bats are known for using high-frequency acoustic signals to deftly snatch flying insects from the air at night, even amid dense forests. But more than 40 percent of insectivorous bat species hunt by plucking prey resting on leaves or other surfaces. Because the sound waves bats emit reflect off vegetation at all angles, the returning jumble of echoes should render a leaf-bound insect virtually imperceptible—so scientists have long suspected that bats use clues from vision, smells or prey-generated sounds to help find a motionless meal....

The next time you find yourself seated in a roomful of strangers, take a close look at your nearest neighbor. Does he or she resemble you in subtle ways? The answer is most likely yes, according to a recent study published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Although psychologists have long known that humans tend to associate by race, sex and other broad-brush categories, the latest work is the first to suggest that the impulse runs even to the picayune....

Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism. Functioning with 473 genes, the cell is a milestone in his team’s 20-year quest to reduce life to its bare essentials and, by extension, to design life from scratch. Venter, who has co-founded a company that seeks to harness synthetic cells for making industrial products, says that the feat heralds the creation of customized cells to make drugs, fuels and other products....

Long before the passionate debates over cigarettes, DDT, asbestos or the ozone hole, most Americans had heard of only one environmental health controversy: fluoridation. Starting in the 1950s, hundreds of communities across the U.S. became embroiled in heated battles over whether fluorides—ionic compounds containing the element fluorine—should be added to their water systems. On one side was a broad coalition of scientists from government and industry who argued that adding fluoride to drinking water would protect teeth against decay; on the other side were activists who contended that the risks of fluoridation were inadequately studied and that the practice amounted to compulsory medication and thus was a violation of civil liberties....

The climate is changing faster than many species can adapt, forcing them to move to new habitats and drastically altering their range, according to new research. Shifting weather patterns and rising temperatures are rapidly outpacing biological adaptations in certain organisms. Two studies that emerged last week highlight how this has happened in the past and may play out in the future in cold- and warm-blooded animals. At Indiana University, scientists found that rattlesnakes must move more quickly to remain in favorable environments than they have ever migrated in the past....

Sex differences lie at the core of biology. They are the driving force of evolution, and in many cases they are fundamental in health and medicine. The study of sex differences is important work, and more of it should be done. But a new National Institutes of Health policy intended to drive research in sex differences is a major step in the wrong direction. The policy, which requires NIH-funded scientists to use equal numbers of male and female animals and cells in their studies, is about politics, not science....

When I was a student in the 1960s, almost all scientists believed we are alone in the universe. The search for intelligent life beyond Earth was ridiculed; one might as well have professed an interest in looking for fairies. The focus of skepticism concerned the origin of life, which was widely assumed to have been a chemical fluke of such incredibly low probability it would never have happened twice. “The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle” was the way Francis Crick described it, “so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going....