Posts

For more than 70 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have known that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance–not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Dubbed dark matter, the mysterious stuff has eluded detection through any means other than its gravitational impact, leading some to propose that Einstein’s general relativity fails to adequately describe how gravity actually works on galactic scales....

The U.S. Congress has long been a slow and irresolute institution, especially when it comes to science issues. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority that came to power in the 2006 midterm election has so far done little to change that reputation. Nearly a year after the Democrats took over the legislative branch, America continues to escalate its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are slowly roasting the globe. Furthermore, although Congress has proposed funding increases for many scientific agencies and national laboratories, researchers still have no reassurance that Uncle Sam will actually deliver its promised grants and budgets....

Imagine driving to work along the same route you take each day. Your mind wanders from one thing to the next: the staff meeting in the afternoon, plans for the weekend, a gift you need to buy for a friend. Suddenly, a car cuts you off, and these thoughts immediately vanish—all of your attention focuses on maneuvering the steering wheel to avoid a collision. Although momentarily flustered, you—and your thoughts—return to the same wandering pattern a minute or two later....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. July 30 marks the United Nations’ World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, a day focused on ending the criminal exploitation of children, women and men for forced labor or sex work. Between 27 and 45.8 million individuals worldwide are trapped in some form of modern-day slavery. The victims are forced into slavery as sex workers, beggars and child soldiers, or as domestic workers, factory workers and laborers in manufacturing, construction, mining, commercial fishing and other industries....

Developed nations today are so dependent on fossil fuels that it is easy to forget that energy sources have changed throughout history. We first started by burning wood and other organic matter, then added in whale oil. During the Industrial Revolution, we embraced coal and petroleum in a big way. Fossil fuels now sustain much of the global economy, but at a high cost to the environment and climate. The push is on to find energy sources less harmful to life on Earth....

People with an uncommon form of cystic fibrosis started gaining weight and were better able to breathe than their untreated counterparts after just two weeks on an experimental drug, according to a study published November 2 in The New England Journal of Medicine. If approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the drug, once known as VX-770 and now called ivacaftor, would be the first medication to target the underlying protein defect that causes the disease....

Her finalist year: 2000 Her finalist project: Developing a new way to control weeds What led to the project: Helen Wiersma grew up in the 1980s and ’90s in Okeechobee County, Fla., where her family owned a cattle ranch. One day she was out in the pasture riding around with her grandfather when she saw him take out his shovel to dig up a noxious weed called the tropical soda apple....

It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient’s death, the numbers come out worse. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous “To Err Is Human” report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials 2014 and quoted ubiquitously in the media....

That’s because most of the best deals reside online. You probably knew that. But what you probably didn’t know is that you can get a cash rebate on nearly everything you buy, making online shopping an even better deal. The secret is using a cashback service, which works much like a Discover card: Buy a product, then get back a percentage of that purchase. (Double smart-shopper bonus if you actually use your Discover card to make that purchase, as you’ll get even more money back....

Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people. The key is new low-carbon technology, not simply energy efficiency....

By Hugh BronsteinBUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentina’s key resource, its agricultural soils, are being depleted by lack of crop rotation as soy farming encroaches on areas once used for corn, wheat and cattle grazing, according to local experts and a government source.The loss of fertility is a slow-burning threat to crop yields at a time when importers are counting on the world’s No. 3 corn and soybean supplier to increase output to help meet the boom in demand expected over the decades ahead....

The famed Halley’s Comet made its last pass through the inner solar system in 1986 and is not due back until the summer of 2061. But each time Halley sweeps around the sun, it leaves behind a dusty trail — call it “cosmic litter” — that is responsible for two meteor showers on Earth each year. The first of those “shooting stars” displays, the Eta Aquarid meteor shower, will peak on Sunday....

Governments across the world are massively undercounting the amount of methane that energy production is releasing into the environment, according to a report this morning from the International Energy Agency. The agency’s annual Global Methane Tracker said emissions from the energy sector are about 70 percent greater than the amount national governments have officially reported. The discrepancies highlight the need for better monitoring and tougher efforts to crack down on emissions, IEA said....

A possible future for NASA’s forays into deep space can be found at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, at the bottom of what looks like an indoor swimming pool. There, bathed in the electric-blue light of the nuclear High Flux Isotope Reactor, aluminum tubes packed with small, silvery cylinders of the radioactive element neptunium-237 are being bombarded with neutrons. It is modern-day alchemy; the neutrons are transmuting the neptunium into something that, at least to NASA’s mission planners, is more precious than gold: plutonium-238 (Pu-238), one of the rarest and most fleeting materials in the universe....

Since testing positive for COVID on December 10, 2020, 47-year-old Sherry Flynn of Goldsboro, N.C., has been plagued by a long list of ailments, including severe fatigue, blood clots, chronic headaches, rapid heart rate, general body pain, trouble with thinking and remembering, and type 2 diabetes. And she has accumulated a shelf filled with prescription medicines. About two months post-diagnosis, Flynn’s primary care physician referred her to a recently opened facility: the COVID Recovery Clinic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) School of Medicine....

A Japanese woman in her 70s is the world’s first recipient of cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, a technology that has created great expectations since it could offer the same advantages as embryo-derived cells but without some of the controversial aspects and safety concerns. In a two-hour procedure starting at 14:20 local time today, a team of three eye specialists lead by Yasuo Kurimoto of the Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital, transplanted a 1....

Cosmic dust is crucial to the birth of stars and rocky planets, and provides the elemental ingredients for life. But its origin is obscure. Many astrophysicists think that dust is forged during the explosive supernova deaths of massive, short-lived stars, yet some observations of supernovas near our galaxy indicate that they produce too little material to account for the copious amounts of dust present in the young Universe. In Nature today, astronomers lift the veil on the mystery, documenting the formation of dust in a supernova from just a few weeks after the explosion to almost 2....

As Earth’s atmosphere warms, so does the ocean. Scientists have demonstrated how rising ocean temperatures and carbon dioxide levels can stress marine organisms. But a new model developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reveals a surprising conclusion: If global temperature trends continue, by the end of this century half the population of phytoplankton that existed in any given ocean at the beginning of the century will have disappeared and been replaced by entirely new plankton species....

Most of us live in a society where our life is predominantly sedentary. A society where exercise is simply the 30 to 90 minutes per day that we set aside for some formal, predetermined amount of movement. Well, more and more research is showing that this approach isn’t working for us. We need to think outside the gym. And what better place to start than with the daily commute? From a financial standpoint, having gotten rid of my car means that I don’t have any car payments, no insurance companies are gouging me for more and more money, I am only peripherally aware of the rising gas prices, and I never have to pay for parking....

Deep in the heart of the Milky Way, strange things happen. This is a place where stars slingshot around apparently empty space at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Scientists have long thought that only a supermassive black hole could explain the stars’ movements, but until this year, they hesitated to say that outright. For example, when astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez shared a portion of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, their citation specified that they were awarded for “the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy,” not the revelation of a “black hole....