A new species of giant tortoise has been discovered hiding in plain sight on Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. A population of about 250 animals living in an arid inland area of Santa Cruz island turns out to be so genetically distinct from the rest of the island’s tortoises that researchers have determined that it represents a separate species: Chelonoidis donfaustoi. The designation may lead to more intense protection of the new species....
There will be no balloons or noisemakers to celebrate the event. Researchers who monitor greenhouse gases will regard it more as a disturbing marker of humanity’s power to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and by extension, the climate of the planet. At 400 p.p.m., nations will have a difficult time keeping global warming in check, says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who says that the impact “is getting very dangerously close to reaching the 2 °C target that governments around the world have pledged not to exceed”....
Imagine the following scenario: You have a big presentation at work tomorrow and know you need a good night’s sleep tonight so you don’t look tired or forget your lines. You get to bed at a reasonable hour but can’t turn off your anxiety and begin mentally berating yourself about your inability to fall asleep, which only prolongs your wakefulness. Eventually, you get frustrated and hit the medicine cabinet so you can finally get some much-needed shuteye....
BOSTON—Score one for the little guys. After years of obscurity in the corners of distant planetary systems smaller exoplanets are finally shuffling into the spotlight. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, built to seek out planets in orbit around faraway stars, has since 2009 been monitoring a vast field of stars to see what kind of planets might be found there. Earlier this year scientists working on the mission announced that they had confirmed 15 exoplanets in Kepler’s field of view and identified an astounding 1,200 or so additional planetary candidates, which are probable planets that await independent validation....
In the middle of Los Angeles’s endless sprawl sits an unusual-looking gas station made of recycled materials and sustainably harvested wood. Its roof is an abstract assembly of polygons topped with solar panels. The owner, petroleum giant BP, calls it Helios House and touts it as America’s first “green” gas station, because it is certified according to the standards of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the most commonly used rating system for sustainable architecture....
Inside a lithium-ion battery, you might not want to keep everything neat and tidy; a little bit of disorder may improve its performance, according to new research. Engineers meticulously arrange materials in rigid patterns in typical lithium-ion cathodes and anodes, the idea being that a more structured arrangement yields a more efficient battery. In the pursuit of greater energy densities, better performance and longevity, designers are seeking ways to structure battery components more rigorously and at smaller scales....
Elephant ivory appears quite smooth to the naked eye, but zoom in with a microscope and you will see that it is riddled with tiny pores. Those holes soak up fingerprints like a sponge, quickly obscuring evidential marks from even the most meticulous forensic expert. Criminals who handle illegal ivory might soon need to start wearing gloves, however. Two newly developed powders—commercially available for several years but previously untested on ivory—can reveal prints left on elephant tusks for up to four weeks, according to findings published in Science & Justice....
Before there was IMAX, before there was the Discovery Channel and even before there were color movies, there were dioramas. These lifelike, still-life scenes, when rendered accurately, can still overwhelm the viewer—and teach about habitat, anatomy and behavior. The 43 dioramas in the Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City are considered to be among the best in the world....
By late afternoon, Mangía and a handful of his neighbors – contracted by the company and wearing only ordinary clothing – were up to their necks in oily water, searching for a leak in the pipe. Villagers, who depend on fish for subsistence and income, estimated that they had seen between two and seven tons of dead fish floating in lagoons and littering the landscape. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve seen in my life – the amount of oil, the huge number of dead fish and my Kukama brothers working without the necessary protection,” said Ander Ordóñez Mozombite, an environmental monitor for an indigenous community group called Acodecospat who visited the site a few days later....
Rust, or at least one of its constituents, could bring relief to the 60 million people in Bangladesh. They reportedly face the risk of delirium, stomach pains, hyperkeratosis and death as a result of arsenic in their drinking water, which comes from wells in the Ganges River basin. People once thought that cleaning the water would demand an extensive and expensive process involving pumps and a lot of electricity. Researchers at Rice University have now developed a small-scale, cheap and energy-free process to clean well water, which they report in tomorrow’s issue of Science....
Physicists have found a way to detect faint radio waves and convert them directly into signals that can be transmitted by fiber optics. The discovery could improve the sensitivity of detectors used in magnetic resonance imaging and radio astronomy, and help to connect future quantum computers into a network. Radio-wave receivers use antennas to pick up radiation. The incoming waves resonate with the antenna and induce a changing electrical signal, which is then transmitted down a wire....
An astrophotographer who has snapped images of the cosmos from a driveway in Connecticut is taking center stage in a Brooklyn space art exhibit. Robert Gendler has loved snapping pictures of the night sky for years. What started off as a vague childhood interest in the cosmos has become a hobby that Gendler has carried with him through most of his adult life. “I picked it up as a hobby in Connecticut and started taking pictures,” Gendler said....
Federal court had just been dismissed in Harrisburg, Pa., on September 26, 2005, the first day of the Dover intelligent design trial. Commentators dubbed it Scopes II or III, depending on how many previous evolution education cases they knew of. The defendants, members of the Dover, Pa., school board, had required that a statement denigrating evolutionary theory be read to ninth-grade biology students and recommended so-called intelligent design be considered a viable and intellectually adequate alternative....
You are diagnosed with a crippling illness. You lose your job. Someone close to you suddenly dies. Some people recover rapidly from life’s calamities and disappointments, whereas others are devastated by minor setbacks, becoming depressed and even suicidal. The roots of such emotional differences have fascinated psychologists and nonspecialists alike. Environmental factors, such as a person’s upbringing, exert a tremendous influence on his or her resilience in the face of misfortune or failure....
Zoe Glenn is a 13-year-old girl from Fort Collins, Colorado, who was born without a left arm. She wears a prosthetic, which allows her to do things like carry her lunch tray and indulge her passion for woodworking. But Glenn has had a hard time tolerating her prosthetics. “Throughout elementary school, her prosthetic, which she calls Lefty, would get too hot, too heavy, too uncomfortable,” says her mother Kristin Glenn. “So she’d take it off and leave it wherever she was—in art class, at lunch, in the sandbox at recess....
Wind turbines on land and offshore could readily provide more than four times the power that the world as a whole currently uses. Throw in kites or robot aircraft generating electricity from sky-high winds and the world could physically extract roughly 100 times more power than presently employed—and the climatic consequences remain minimal. Two new computer-model analyses suggest there are few limits to the wind’s potential. Although “there are physical limits to the amount of power that can be harvested from winds, these limits are well above total global energy demand,” explains climate-modeler Kate Marvel of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who led the analysis published September 9 in Nature Climate Change....
VIRTUALLY all of us experience the loss of a loved one at some point in our life. So it is surprising that the serious study of grief is not much more than 30 years old. Yet in that time, we have made significant discoveries that have deepened our understanding of this phenomenon—and challenged widely held assumptions. In this column, we confront two common misconceptions about grief. The first is that the bereaved inevitably experience intense symptoms of distress and depression....
Microsoft’s Xbox One will have very little functionality out of the box when it launches later this month. Speaking to Engadget in an interview published on Friday, Microsoft’s senior director of product management, Albert Penello, said that owners of the Xbox One “will be able to do very little without taking the day one update.” When pressed on what users could do with the Xbox One before the update is added to the console, Penello said “nothing....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Socrates’ execution at Athens in 399 BCE had a profound effect on his student Plato (428-348 BCE) who was inspired by his teacher to abandon his literary ambitions as playwright and devote himself to philosophy. Although Socrates is often referred to as ’the father of western philosophy’, this title is more correctly applied to Plato....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Driven by their desire for trade and the acquisition of such commodities as silver from Spain, gold from Africa, and tin from the Scilly Isles, the Phoenicians sailed far and wide, even beyond the Mediterranean’s traditional safe limits of the Pillars of Hercules and into the Atlantic. They were credited with many important nautical inventions and firmly established a reputation as the greatest mariners in the ancient world....
