Posts

Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is the youngest known supernova remnant in our galaxy. It exploded some 325 years ago and astronomers thought it was quietly fading away. But new results from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that Cas A is not going gently into that good night. Instead the data indicate that as recently as 50 years ago the remnant sent a blast of energy rocketing through space that energized interstellar dust across 75 light-years....

February 1964 Danger from Tobacco “‘Cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking far outweighs all other factors.’ This unqualified statement in the report issued January 11 by the Public Health Service answered a question that had been debated for more than a decade. The first large-scale statistical studies showing the harmfulness of cigarettes were published in 1954. In the nine years since these studies were reported, more than 300,000 Americans have died of lung cancer....

Think of the dead grandparents and everything they’ll miss. All the milestones, the middle school graduations and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. All the victories, on soccer fields or piano recital halls. All the ordinary shared moments, dancing to “Baby Beluga,” or making banana bread, building extravagant Lego towers, watching The Wizard of Oz and cuddling at the flying monkeys part. And the grandchildren, now bereft and sorrowful—think of everything they’ll miss, too....

Scientists have successfully grown miniature stomachs in the lab from human stem cells, guiding them through the stages of development seen in an embryo. The lumps of living tissue, which are no bigger than a sesame seed, have a gland structure that is similar to human stomachs and can even harbour gut bacteria. The feat, reported in this week’s Nature, offers a window to how cells in human embryos morph into organs....

Get your pinhole cameras—and laptops—ready. This Friday, August 1, a total solar eclipse will occur as the moon passes directly between the sun and Earth for the first time in more than two years. For a few minutes, the moon will blot out the sun, casting its dark shadow over a narrow, moving strip of land and revealing the sun’s corona. View a slide show of the eclipse Sadly, this eerie, awe-inspiring event—known as totality—will be visible only from remote parts of the Northern Hemisphere: Starting in northern Canada, the moon’s shadow, or umbra, will glide across the Arctic into central Asia....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Almost daily, it seems, there are new and credible reports about the senseless slaughter of elephants, rhinos or other endangered species by sophisticated wildlife-trafficking networks. Just this spring, news filtered in about a slaughter of forest elephants in the Central African Republic. We have video confirmation of nearly 30 elephants being killed and more wounded. It is clear that poaching is epidemic and is threatening some of the world’s most iconic and endearing species....

On Wednesday, May 16, I spent several hours on a hot bus in a neon desert called Las Vegas with a merry band of British conspiracists during their journey around the Southwest in search of UFOs, aliens, Area 51 and government cover-ups, all for a BBC documentary. One woman regaled me with a tale about orange balls of energy hovering around her car on Interstate 405 in California, which were subsequently chased away by black ops helicopters....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Inca empire controlled four climate zones and, consequently, their agricultural produce was diverse. Ancient Andean people were largely vegetarian, supplementing their diet with camelid meat and seafood if they could. The Incas developed a huge farming apparatus where crops and herds were commandeered from conquered peoples and the people themselves were periodically required to work on state-owned farms....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The majority of great Renaissance works of art were produced in large and busy workshops run by a successful master artist and his team of assistants and apprentices. Here, too, more mundane art was produced in larger quantities to meet the demand from clients with a more modest budget than possessed by rulers and popes....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Mayan religious text, the Popol Vuh (known by many names, among them, The Light That Came From Beside The Sea) is the Quiche Maya story of creation translated into Spanish in the early 18th century CE by the missionary Francisco Ximenez from much older tales. As most of the books of the Maya were burned by the Bishop of the Yucatan, Diego de Landa, in July of 1562 CE, this text is all the more important in understanding Mayan culture and religious beliefs even though information is available elsewhere through glyphs, stele, assorted art work, and the three famous Mayan books (known as the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid Codices after the cities where they were taken) which survived Landa’s auto-de-fe....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. English medieval knights wore metal armour of iron or steel to protect themselves from archers and the long swords of opponents. From the 9th century CE, chain mail suits gave protection and freedom of movement until solid plate armour became more common in the 14th century CE. A crested helmet, shield with a striking coat of arms, and a liveried horse completed a costly outfit which was designed to both protect and intimidate....

Scientists have two theories for how dogs became man’s best friend. One holds that people captured wolf pups and tamed them for their hunting and guarding abilities. The other, more popular explanation proposes that the advent of agriculture and the attendant development of human settlements in the Middle East around 10,000 years ago created scavenging opportunities for animals bold enough to exploit them and that wolves themselves thus initiated domestication. The new findings, published online January 23 in Nature, support this latter view and offer insights into how canine ancestors were able to take advantage of this novel resource....

When they are ready to snuggle up at the tops of trees, great apes make themselves cozy “nests” in which to rest for the night. New studies of these one-night nests reveal their incredible complexity. “They are almost as complex as a man-made shelter you might make,” study researcher A. Roland Ennos of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. “They know how the wood is going to break, and they have a feel for how strong they have to make it [the nest]....

Garrett Rue grew up fly fishing in central Colorado, often surrounded by mountains stained amber and maroon, and hiking along streams that seemed to borrow those colors. Sometimes he would cast for native trout and come back with nothing—because there was nothing to catch. Then he started hearing stories about people in nearby mountain communities who couldn’t drink their own water. He began to wonder: “These streams have problems supporting ecosystems, and they’re not usable for drinking....

When will oil production peak and begin to decline? Scientists, engineers and economists have debated the point for years, on the assumption that emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will decline when less oil is burned. Not so, says Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, Calif. That assumes society switches to low-carbon fuel. But there’s a good chance society will jump to the most abundant fuel around: Coal, which emits 25 to 50 percent more carbon dioxide per energy unit than petroleum, according to the Energy Information Administration....

Even without ears, oysters are “clamming up” when they hear too much noise in the ocean. In response to sounds similar to cargo ships, oysters slam their shells closed, seemingly to protect their soft bodies, according to a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. Oysters are filter feeders, so noise pollution in the ocean may stunt growth and reduce water quality, the scientists argue. Ocean noise pollution is a known problem for many marine mammals, which use their hearing for survival tasks like navigation and finding food....

Researchers announced last week that they had slowed down faint pulses of laser light and retrieved an image from that light after speeding it back up. In principle such “slow-light” technology might be used to build a kind of traffic stop for light signals, called an optical buffer, that would be cheaper, more powerful and faster than converting light beams into electrical signals. That is why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defense, asked a group at the University of Rochester to explore the technology, says group leader, quantum optics researcher John Howell....

Dana Small, a neuroscientist at the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven, Conn., and the Yale School of Medicine, sniffs out an answer. In a classic experiment, French researchers colored a white wine red with an odorless dye and asked a panel of wine experts to describe its taste. The connoisseurs described the wine using typical red wine descriptors rather than terms they would use to evaluate white wine, suggesting that the color played a significant role in the way they perceived the drink....

But dominant individuals can have shortcomings as well. Such leaders sometimes insist their way is the only way, or they intimidate others rather than taking steps to discuss, debate or consult with colleagues. And that has serious downsides for the companies, organizations and nations that they lead. In our recent research, we examined some of the unintentional negative consequences of a dominant leadership style. Across eight studies, we explored how such leaders can inadvertently reduce cooperation among their employees by fostering a competitive climate....

Supplying desperately needed medicines to the developing world would be a lot easier if Big Pharma would bring its considerable resources to bear on the problems of global health. But even when public health groups can convince firms to supply their drugs at reduced cost, another problem remains: the countries in need can be unpredictable in their buying habits. Consider that malaria affects more than 500 million people worldwide, and yet this past summer the Financial Times reported that French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis faced half the demand it had expected for its anti-malaria compound artesunate....