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Toward the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy began mapping an area of northern Alaska extending south from the Arctic Sea across the North Slope and down to the forested valleys south of the Brooks Range. In an effort lasting a number of years, surveyors flew low in a small plane, snapping thousands of photographs with a large-format K-18 camera pointed out the craft’s open door. About 10 years ago, Matthew Sturm of the U....

The clean energy sector faces a major stumbling block. The power it produces may be renewable, but the infrastructure it uses is far from it. Over the past decade, advances in composite materials have allowed the construction of enormous turbine blades. Some are now longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. As blades have increased, so have the costs to transport them. When wind farms need to replace aging blades, it is now often cheaper to leave them lying on the ground....

Wall Street’s wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a bell curve—would predict that such extreme dips and rises would be exceedingly rare and not prone to following one after the other on succeeding days. Gaussian functions might be able to describe the distribution of grades in a big college class, with most students getting, say, B–/C+, and enable you to predict how many students will get A’s or fail....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog NASA has launched its first probe dedicated to mapping the distribution of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the agency announced today. The US$465-million Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 lifted off just before 3 AM local time (11 AM British Summer Time) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, after a 1-day delay caused by technical issues with the launchpad. That is a relief for the US space agency, which tried — and failed — to launch a nearly identical CO2-monitoring probe, the original Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), in 2009....

A sharp cry pierces the air. Soon a worried mother deer approaches the source of the sound, expecting to find her fawn. But the sound is coming from a speaker system, and the call isn’t that of a baby deer at all. It’s an infant fur seal’s. Because deer and seals do not live in the same habitats, mother deer should not know how baby seal screams sound, reasoned biologists Susan Lingle of the University of Winnipeg and Tobias Riede of Midwestern University, who were running the acoustic experiment....

Federal officials today announced the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the U.S. The male patient was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas and placed in strict isolation on September 28 after flying from Liberia to visit family in north Texas. The patient left Liberia on September 19, arrived in the U.S. on September 20 and started showing signs of illness on Sept. 24. Because Ebola can be transmitted only after a person becomes sick, health authorities said, the man could not have infected nearby passengers....

Even as biomedical researchers generate and dig through mountains of gene sequence data, physicians proceed in the clinic as they always have. They design preventive care, plan treatments and select drugs by assessing patient type—frequently with race and ethnicity central. Molecular biologists often look to these categories, too, as a means to sort out the ways in which gene variants influence patient response to drugs and disease. And if they get federal funding, investigators must divide the groups they study by race....

A U.S. Forest Service scientist who was scheduled to talk about the role that climate change plays in wildfire conditions was denied approval to attend the conference featuring fire experts from around the country. William Jolly, a research ecologist with the agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont., was supposed to give a 30-minute presentation titled “Climate-Induced Variations in Global Severe Fire Weather Conditions” at the International Fire Congress in Orlando, Fla....

By Ewen CallawayAn age-old mixture of four herbs could spare patients with cancer some of the side effects of chemotherapy.The cocktail comprises Chinese peonies, Chinese liquorice, the fruit of the Chinese date tree and flowers of the Chinese skullcap plant. In China, they call it ‘Huang Qin Tang’ and have used it to treat gastrointestinal problems for about 1,800 years.A start-up pharmaceutical company called PhytoCeutica has dubbed its proprietary pill of the blend ‘PHY906’, and shown in early clinical trials that the mix can combat the severe diarrhoea caused by many chemotherapy drugs, which destroy fast-dividing gut cells in addition to tumour cells....

Carrie Aulenbacher grew up painfully lonely in rural Pennsylvania. Despite having a loving husband and friends, the 39-year-old administrative assistant and writer in Erie still battles her sense of aloneness. In high school, she had feared approaching a group of girls. She felt she would not know what to say—and maybe they would turn on her. She constantly questions and judges herself. “Am I purposely making myself lonely by projecting things I don’t realize?...

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazinePhysicists have replicated the finding that the subatomic particles called neutrinos seem to travel faster than light. It is a remarkable confirmation of a stunning result, yet most in the field remain sceptical that the ultimate cosmic speed limit has truly been broken.The collaboration behind the experiment, called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus), made headlines in September with its claim that a beam of neutrinos made the 730-kilometer journey from CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland, to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, Italy, faster than the speed of light....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. After handing them their suicide capsules, Norwegian Royal Army Colonel Leif Tronstad informed his soldiers, “I cannot tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway’s memory for a hundred years.” These commandos did know, however, that an earlier attempt at the same mission by British soldiers had been a complete failure....

Some doctors say they care for more hospitalized patients than they can handle, which may compromise patient safety, a new study finds. The study surveyed about 500 hospitalists, physicians who manage patients’ care in hospitals. Forty percent of respondents said that, at least once a month, they took on more patients than they could safely handle. And, often, this occurred more frequently. About a quarter of doctors said their high workload prevented them from fully discussing treatment options with patients, and 22 percent said they sometimes ordered unnecessary tests because they didn’t have enough time to examine the patients’ cases....

In the mid-1700s frontiersmen uncovered mastodon bones in present-day Kentucky. In this unique and fascinating book, Thomson, a professor emeritus of natural history at the University of Oxford, takes us from the mastodon bones through finds of many unsuspected kinds of animals—tiny ancestors of horses and camels, birds with teeth, cattlelike creatures with claws and, of course, dinosaurs. All this is fascinating, but what makes the book unique is that Thomson links the emergence of the new nation to the discovery of its fossils....

Homes shaped like a cocoon, a mound and a Y now stand in a park adjacent to the National Mall, looking for a ray of sunshine. Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the loan to solar-module manufacturer Solyndra, the latest “solar decathlon” competition begins today, September 23, in Washington, D.C.—leading to a cohort of 20 innovative solar homes standing in West Potomac Park. Since 2002 the U.S. Department of Energy has put on such a competition every couple of years, aiming to train students in the art of solar building....

Physicists sometimes say that a beam of light traveling through space is like a “great smoky dragon.” One can know much about where the light comes from (the dragon’s tail) and where it is seen (the dragon’s head), yet still know precious little about the journey in between (the dragon’s mysterious, nebulous body). As light travels from source to detection, it can behave as either a particle or a wave—or, paradoxically, both states or neither state....

Viruses are some of the most insidious creations in nature. They travel light: equipped with just their genetic material packed tightly inside a crystalline case of protein, they latch onto cells, insert their genes, and co-opt the cells’ energy-producing, gene-copying and protein-making machinery, using them to make thousands of copies of themselves. Once formed, the new viruses percolate to the cell surface, pinch off inside minuscule bubbles of cell membrane and drift away, or else they continue reproducing until the cell finally bursts....

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Plug-in electric cars could destabilize the distribution of power, a utility executive cautioned at a conference here this week. Ed Kjaer, director of Southern California Edison’s electric transportation advancement program, said plug-in manufacturers, designers and component makers are poised to capitalize on a “perfect storm” that could push electric cars into the mainstream. Kjaer noted that 10 to 12 carmakers are ready to launch plug-in models between 2010 and 2012, creating a sense of “incredible excitement” around a sector that has seen its fair share of false starts....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In Europe, in the 19th century CE, an interesting device began appearing in graveyards and cemeteries: the mortsafe. This was an iron cage erected over a grave to keep the body of the deceased safe from ‘resurrectionists’ - better known as body-snatchers. These men would dig up freshly interred corpses and deliver them, for cash, to doctors wishing to study anatomy....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. NOTE: This article has now become the definition of Caracalla. Even though it is now a duplicate entry we’re keeping it for all those who have linked to it. The emperor Caracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus on the 4 of April, 188, in Lugdunum (Lyon), where his father Septimius Severus was serving as the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis during the last years of the emperor Commodus....