Posts

Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space Lynn Sherr Simon & Schuster, 2014 Based on exclusive interviews with Sally Ride’s friends and family, including her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, this biography tells the fullest life story yet of America’s first female astronaut. Sherr, a longtime journalist who covered the space shuttle program for ABC News, was also a close friend of Ride’s. Sherr admits, however, that parts of the astronaut’s history—including her long-term relationship with O’Shaughnessy—came as a surprise after Ride’s death because Ride was fiercely private, keeping even friends “from knowing her completely....

For the Xhosa in South Africa, a boy’s coming of age is often marked by an elaborate and lengthy set of rituals. One of the ordeals is circumcision, which is traditionally performed by a healer and occasionally leads to an ineffective cut, infection or even death. The young men who emerge from the ceremony healthy, however, achieve not only new social status but are also much less likely to become infected with HIV....

Historically, carbon-fiber composites have beefed up airplane and space shuttle wings, formed rocket nose cones, and sliced through the waves in the America’s Cup. Known for their stronger-than-steel sturdiness, the materials weren’t originally developed with high art in mind. But instruments made from these materials offer many advantages: they’re durable, lighter than wood, and insensitive to changes in temperature or humidity. These qualities, as well as the even tone of his fiberglass Hobie Cat as it cut through the water, inspired amateur sailor and professional cellist Luis Leguia to experiment with new materials that might make fragile concert instruments lighter and more durable without compromising sound....

A blood-red moon will hang close in the sky with the Red Planet Monday night, thanks to the chance coincidence of two rare astronomical phenomena. The moon is due to fall under Earth’s shadow that night (actually the early hours of Tuesday morning) in a total lunar eclipse, one of two such eclipses in 2014. By fluke, Monday is also the date of Mars’s closest approach to Earth, when our neighboring planet should appear larger and brighter than usual....

BILLINGS, Mont.—The emissions are unhealthy, the noise insufferable. But it’s the wait that can be life-threatening. Every day, 20 freight trains rumble through downtown Billings. Five of those are coal trains - 120 cars stretching a half-mile and carrying 17,000 tons of coal west. The trains bisect the town, cutting affluent north from poorer and predominantly minority south. The city’s only two hospitals sit on the northern half of town, and residents fear that one day a long wait - or a train wreck - could leave a large chunk of the city isolated from medical care....

I once walked through an old graveyard near Philadelphia and noticed the years of births and deaths carved on the headstones. It reminded me that up until the early 1900s, most people died before their 50th birthday. The primary causes of these deaths were infectious diseases such as smallpox, influenza and pneumonia. Today contagious illnesses kill more rarely in developed nations, where improvements in sanitation, nutrition and vaccines and the introduction of antibiotics have virtually eliminated premature deaths from such afflictions....

Dear EarthTalk: Is there any environmental risk from all that Japanese tsunami debris that is starting to wash up on the U.S. west coast?— Bailey Thigerson, Seattle The Japanese government estimates that some 1.5 million tons of debris is afloat in the Pacific Ocean as a result of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. No one knows exactly how much of this debris will wash up on American shores or end up absorbed by the water column or trapped in mid-ocean gyres, but state coastal authorities from California to Alaska are readying response plans....

Spaceflight, despite its origins in cold war saber-rattling, is often portrayed as a purely beneficial endeavor that somehow helps all of humanity: Satellites provide invaluable planet-scale situational awareness and connectivity. Space telescopes and interplanetary probes deliver transformative discoveries about our place in the universe. Astronautical missions help satisfy our species’ innate exploratory urges while also inspiring new generations of scientists and engineers. And they all begin in the same way, riding rockets through the sky....

The use of a deadly chemical agent in Syria this summer underscores the continuing threat that such horrific weapons pose. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has led the international charge to ban chemical weapons, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2013 to the organization for its extensive efforts. Perhaps ironically, another Nobel laureate is considered by some historians to be the father of chemical warfare: Fritz Haber, who not only revolutionized agriculture with a chemical process for making fertilizer (his Nobel-honored work), but also created and deployed chlorine gas and other chemical agents during World War I....

One of the top worries for parents of kids with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the long-term consequences of this condition. “Families want to know, ‘So what does this mean?’” says Alice Charach, head of the neuropsychiatry team at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Two recent, large reviews of previous studies reveal one disquieting answer: Getting an ADHD diagnosis in childhood is associated with nicotine and alcohol dependence in adulthood....

A growing number of leaders are openly acknowledging that a 2015 international agreement to avert catastrophic global warming will surely fall short of what’s needed to achieve that goal. But another consensus is also forming among top U.S. experts: that shortfall is OK, as long as the deal puts all major climate polluters on a serious, upward and transparent path to cutting greenhouse gases. “The big question the public is going to ask is: Are all the major emitters participating?...

Kobus Steenkamp’s farm sprawls along a dirt road in South Africa’s central plains, where the sky makes everything seem small. Steenkamp woke up here one morning after the rains in 2010 to find something strange happening with his sheep. “You could see there’s blood at their backs,” he recalls. All his pregnant ewes were losing their lambs. It was every farmer’s nightmare: his herd had been infected by Rift Valley fever, a mosquito-borne virus that causes abortion and death in livestock and wildlife and can be transmitted to humans....

Every autumn the Arctic undergoes a radical metamorphosis. As the sun dips below the horizon one last time—not to rise again until spring—the icy seascape darkens, the temperatures plummet, and the sea ice swells into a brutal fortress, so thick that no icebreaker can penetrate it. Research vessels flee south, desperate to avoid getting trapped during the fearsome season. But this year scientists—and a few lucky journalists, including me—will dare to do just the opposite....

The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art by Anjan Chatterjee Oxford University Press, 2013 Why do we covet beauty? Why does art, which seems to serve little practical purpose, feel fundamental to our lives? Such questions have long fascinated philosophers and artists. Now neuroscientists are weighing in as well. The Aesthetic Brain explores the field of neuroaesthetics, the science of how our brain experiences and responds to art, music and objects of beauty....

From the outside, the main diesel engines on the U.S. Coast Guard cutter vessel Spencer looked normal. But a newly developed sensor system indicated that a bank of heaters, used to warm up the engines before they rumble into action, had failed. When the crew members removed the heaters’ metal cover, they found smoking, corroded wires. Not only were the heaters incapacitated, “their electrical insulation was starting to fray and crack, on the verge of starting a fire,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Steven Leeb, who was senior author of a study published in March in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics describing the new system....

More than 10 million people have watched a YouTube video of an iPhone being pulverized in a blender. It’s actually a commercial for Blendtec — a company most viewers had probably never heard of. But with the viral clip, Blendtec let social networking spread its name and message rather than paying for a mass advertising campaign. And it worked like a charm. “Viral-produced movies” are the new holy grail of advertising, but they’re tough to pull off....

WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The investigation into Washington subway smoke that killed a woman and sent 84 people to local hospitals could take from six to 12 months, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday. The preliminary cause of the smoke that filled six subway cars in a tunnel on Monday was electrical arcing involving the charged third rail about 1,100 feet (335 meters) ahead of the train, NTSB’s spokesman Peter Knudson said....

Sandy is already the largest hurricane to ever hit the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions. How does it compare with Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, and is considered the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history? And what about Irene, which came ashore on North Carolina on Aug. 27, 2011, and caused record flooding across eastern New York and Vermont after several subsequent landfalls as a tropical storm?...

If you want to strengthen your abdominal muscles, you can do sit-ups. Tone your upper body? Push-ups. To flex your intellectual muscles, however, or boost your children’s academic performance, the answer is less clear. An exercise to stretch memory, tighten attention and increase intelligence could improve children’s chances of coasting comfortably through life—and give adults a leg up as well. The very notion flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most people presume that no matter how hard they work, they are not going to get any smarter....

CLIMATEWIRE | A blockbuster new study has inspired days of dire headlines about the rising risk of catastrophic “megafloods” in California. Published Friday, it warns of events that could pummel the state with weeks of heavy rain and snow, flood vast tracts of land and cause at least $1 trillion in damages. According to the researchers, the last megaflood — which struck the state in 1862 — temporarily turned the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a “vast inland sea, nearly 300 miles in length....