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Copper surfaces kill microbes that come into contact with them in a matter of hours. A new technique makes the familiar metal even deadlier—by zapping it with lasers. Bacteria “are becoming more aggressive and resistant to therapeutics; it’s the same thing for viruses,” says Rahim Rahimi, a materials engineer at Purdue University and senior author of a paper on the new process, published in April in Advanced Materials Interfaces. “There is a lot of interest in how to create surfaces that actually, on contact with the bacterium or the virus, immediately kill the pathogen” because this “eliminates the spread of that pathogen into the environment....

Charlotte Owens spoke with the Springer Nature Black Employee Network about her career path in biomedicine. She is now a vice president at the pharmaceutical company Takeda and head of its R&D Center for Health Equity and Patient Affairs, as well as an adjunct assistant professor at Morehouse School of Medicine. She was previously therapeutic area lead for women’s health at the pharmaceutical company AbbVie. Owens is all too aware of the lack of Black representation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and is optimistic that we are moving in the right direction....

From Nature magazine In the 1930s, the pioneering geneticist J. B. S. Haldane noticed a peculiar inheritance pattern in families with long histories of haemophilia. The faulty mutation responsible for the blood-clotting disorder tended to arise on the X chromosomes that fathers passed to their daughters, rather than on those that mothers passed down. Haldane subsequently proposed1 that children inherit more mutations from their fathers than their mothers, although he acknowledged that “it is difficult to see how this could be proved or disproved for many years to come”....

he busiest part of the Atlantic hurricane season will get underway in just a few weeks, and it is supposed to be an active one, with the possibility of three to five Category 3 or greater hurricanes. There was a bit of good news accompanying the outlook, which updated May’s forecast (E&ENews PM, May 23) and was released yesterday by the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Due to a lack of a La Niña and cooling in the Atlantic, the number of major hurricanes was scaled back some....

Has someone assembled a more or less complete example of the next iPhone – or at least the outside of it – from leaked parts? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But that’s the story accompanying a photo of the alleged build, which is making the rounds of the gadget and tech blogs today. Related stories iPhone 5 will launch with 19-pin Dock connector, report says Apple’s Cook hints at upcoming iPhone 5… or something iPhone 5 leak?...

The other day I needed a ride to the San Francisco airport. My driver was a cheerful soccer mom, 40 years old, in a spotless Honda CR-V. When I got in, she smiled and offered me bottled water. She saw that I had an iPhone and handed me a charging cable. The fare for that trip is usually $50, but this time I paid $32. And no tip was expected or given....

Human: The Science behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Ecco/HarperCollins, 2008 “I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor say, ‘Be well, do good work, and keep in touch,’ ” Gazzaniga writes. In that one sentence, “Keillor captures humanness.” In his own easy-to-read, conversational style, Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of a slew of popular books, takes off in search of what set humans apart from their predecessors....

By Adrian Croft BRUSSELS, April 14 (Reuters) - Military jets which fly over Europe without identifying themselves pose a high risk to civilian aircraft, aviation safety officials said in a report published on Tuesday, after a spate of near-collisions involving Russian warplanes. The European Commission asked the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to investigate after recent reports of the near-misses between commercial airliners and Russian military planes flying without electronic identification....

Over the past several years, scientific journals have been abuzz with reports of the chemical constituents of Chinese herbs used in traditional medicine. Think ginseng, Ginkgo biloba and ginger, to name a few. A group of researchers at King’s College London decided to use a computer screening to construct a single database both to catalogue the chemical makeup of 240 species of herb and to indicate which target enzymes and receptors implicated in diseases—such as HIV/AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—those components may be able to regulate....

THAT RAUCOUS RITE OF SUMMER—the fireworks display—may have started as a scholarly tradition in ancient China. Before the Chinese got around to inventing paper in the second century A.D., scribes, using a stylus, would etch ideograms on the rounded surface of green bamboo stalks. The medium served as a way for recording transactions and stories. As the stalks dried over the fire, air pockets in the wood would often burst with a loud cracking noise....

For five days in 2021, gas on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. stopped flowing. People began to panic-buy at the pumps and cancel trips. A Russian criminal group with suspected ties to its government had hacked into Colonial Pipeline and demanded a $5 million payment. Weeks later, the Biden administration made clear it would not tolerate such attacks, giving Russia a list of 16 critical U.S. infrastructure sectors that the administration declared off-limits, including the energy sector....

NASA Earth Observatory just published a map that uses data collected between July 2002 and April 2015 to give an unparalleled view of the world’s cloudy (and sunny) spots. On the flip side, the Sahara, Atacama, Arabian and their fellow deserts (including Antarctica) are basically cloud free. Australia and the western U.S. are also light on cloud cover. Aside from giving a sense of the globe’s overall cloudiness, the map also reveals key features of the climate system....

Mari Reeves has several deformed frogs living on her dining room table in Anchorage, Alaska. One of them, named Skinny by her literally minded six-year-old son, has a leg that bends back on itself, making it hard for him to compete for food. Another, Skillson, is a skilled jumper, but one of his limbs appears slightly shrunken. The appearance of a third frog, Limpy, isn’t as dramatic: he just has a leg that doesn’t look quite the way it should....

The practice of adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth’s rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world’s foremost metrology body has decided. The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks....

A new study says the wider use of heat pumps for heating and cooling homes and buildings could sharply reduce global fossil fuel emissions, but the solution has received relatively little policy support from governments, and its advantages are poorly understood by consumers. The study, led by researchers from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, suggests that further innovation with heat pumps combined with regulatory measures such as a carbon tax could eliminate 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions from the heating and cooling sectors....

William A. Whitelaw, a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Calgary, explains. If a person gets hiccups and wants to know what has set them off, there is a long list of medical or physiological disorders that are associated with hiccups and seem to cause them. The most common by far is distension or expansion of the stomach and movement of stomach acid into the esophagus. After that, a disease or irritation in the thorax could be to blame....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ancient and medieval Celtic cultures produced many forms of jewellery, and one distinctive category is their brooches, fibulae, and pins. Without zips and buttons, brooches were used to close items of clothing, to create a pleasing or fashionable arrangement of folds, were worn as amulets, or simply displayed as a pleasing decoration by both men and women....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The vacillating nature of Ancient Egypt’s associations with the Kingdom of Kerma may be described as one of expansion and contraction; a virtual tug-of-war between rival cultures. Structural changes in Egypt’s administration led to alternating policies with Lower Nubia, whilst the increasing complexity of Kushite culture provided a serious counterweight to Egyptian dominance....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha are the non-canonical writings of Judaism and Christianity ranging from the 5th century BCE to the 9th century CE. Pseudepigrapha comes from a Greek noun denoting writings with a false superscription or name; however, in modern dialogue surrounding early Christianity and Judaism, it has come to denote non-canonical writings (i....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Slavery was an ever-present feature of the Roman world. Slaves served in households, agriculture, mines, the military, workshops, construction and many services. As many as 1 in 3 of the population in Italy or 1 in 5 across the empire were slaves and upon this foundation of forced labour was built the entire edifice of the Roman state....