Posts

In 2005, at the age of 32, then Los Angeles Angel Bartolo Colón won the American League Cy Young Award for best pitcher, one of professional baseball’s top honors. He stumbled through subsequent seasons, however, after a series of rips and strains in the tendons and ligaments of his throwing arm, shoulder and back. In 2009 he all but quit baseball. Desperate to reclaim his career, Colón flew home to the Dominican Republic in 2010 for an experimental procedure not vetted or approved by the U....

People have long claimed that animals can predict the weather, for example by curtailing their activity when rain threatens. Such theories have had little evidence to support them, but now, a team of scientists has found a concrete example: insects shy away from sex in response to the drop in atmospheric pressure that presages rain. Researchers in the lab of José Bento, an entomologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, first got the idea of looking at the effect of atmospheric pressure on behavior when they noticed something strange about their experiments with insects....

A pregnant woman knows she is shaping her child’s future from the moment of conception. But she might not realize that the baby is already talking back. Mother and child are engaged in a silent chemical conversation throughout pregnancy, with bits of genetic material and cells passing not only from mother to child but also from child to mother. Scientists increasingly think these silent signals from the fetus may influence a mother’s risk of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases, even decades after she has given birth....

“Prior analyses made an accounting error,” says one study’s lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. “There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels.” Growing plants store carbon in their roots, shoots and leaves. As a result, the world’s plants and the soil in which they grow contain nearly three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere....

On October 8, Martin Chalfie, chairman of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, got the call that every scientist wants to receive—only he slept right through it. The Nobel Foundation was ringing him at about 6 A.M. (in New York City) to let him know they had just awarded him, along Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on green fluorescent protein (GFP). A few minutes after the phone stopped ringing, Chalfie logged onto the Nobel Foundation’s Web site to see who they had honored this year, only to find himself in the winner’s circle for a tool he had helped develop to let scientists illuminate and study living cells in real time....

Electronics engineers have long dreamed of ubiquitous connectivity—wireless data delivery for everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. And they have made significant strides toward their goal: more than two billion people today have cell phones, and hundreds of millions send and receive messages and files via laptops, handhelds and other digital devices using Wi-Fi, the radio-frequency-based wireless local-area network (“hot spot”) technology.In addition, more and more Wi-Fi users enjoy the convenience of employing wireless mobile devices anywhere indoors....

KAMPALA, Uganda—Power Africa, the Obama administration’s effort to infuse billions of energy investment dollars across sub-Saharan Africa, is entering its third year focused on completing up to 30,000 megawatts of new generation projects while adding 60 million new grid connections across the world’s least-electrified continent. Yet for all its ambition, the $7 billion program, rolled out in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2013 and likely to be touted by Obama on his upcoming trip to East Africa this month, has gained relatively little media attention or public notoriety compared with other major energy initiatives happening here....

When antibiotics first became available, farmers used them indiscriminately—dribbling streptomycin into chicken feed to boost growth and doling out low doses to fatten pigs. Now scientists know that the overuse of antibiotics in livestock can foster drug-resistant bacteria that are dangerous to human health. Amid debates over what kinds of restrictions should be put in place, figuring out how antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolve and make their way to humans remains an area of intense interest....

Low vaccination rates are likely responsible for the large measles outbreak that began at Disneyland in California last December, a new analysis suggests. The researchers estimated that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination rate among the people who were exposed to measles in that outbreak may be as low as 50 percent, and is likely no higher than 86 percent. Since the beginning of this year, 127 cases of measles in the United Stateshave been linked to the Disneyland outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)....

More and more in recent years, cancer biologists are pointing their fingers at viruses. Human papillomavirus, they found, causes cervical cancer; hepatitis B induces liver cancer; and Epstein-Barr virus has been implicated in lymphoma. Most recently, scientists discovered that malignant brain tumors called glioblastoma multiforme, the late-stage version of the cancer that has afflicted Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, are almost always teeming with cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common, typically harmless herpesvirus....

A trolley is hurtling down a track, and if nobody intervenes it will hit and kill five people. Psychologists use variations on this hypothetical situation to gauge people’s gut reactions about morality. Here are three scenarios: The driver could switch the train to another track, on which one man stands. Should the driver reroute the trolley? Now suppose the trolley is driverless and you are a bystander. Should you hit a switch to divert the trolley so it hits the lone man?...

In the aftermath of traumatic events like the Newtown massacre, Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, children need to heal, just as adults do. But in turning to research to find out what approaches work best for young people, one finds little guidance, according to a research review published February 11 in Pediatrics. The study focused on non-interpersonal trauma, such as natural disasters, terrorism and community violence, and excluded sexual abuse and domestic violence....

SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - The U.S. Forest Service said on Wednesday it would sell thousands of trees burned in last year’s devastating wildfire around Yosemite National Park to loggers in an effort to reduce fuel for future blazes and stimulate the regional economy. In a draft decision, the agency said it planned to allow logging on about 33,000 acres near the park, less than initially proposed but more than environmentalists wanted....

CANCUN, Mexico – There are several deadlocks still to be broken in the final 24 hours of U.N. climate talks, but one that matters most: the future of the Kyoto Protocol. As negotiators from nearly 200 countries greeted Friday’s dawn, still stuck on a range of issues, an impasse over whether Japan, Russia and Canada will commit to new emission targets after 2012 appears to be bringing the U.N. process to the edge of a cliff....

LAS VEGAS—On the eve of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a wide-ranging, if unspectacular, keynote, updating (rather than announcing new) endeavors in the areas of entertainment, automotive and search technology. The address Wednesday evening was a sign of the times for Microsoft, and for the CES, as the company has reserved its biggest news of the past year for other trade shows—for example unveiling its Bing search engine at the All Things Digital conference in May while introducing its Project Natal Xbox 360 controller-free technology at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June....

Greenland’s massive ice sheet is melting at a record pace this summer. By Aug. 8, this year’s summer melt had shattered the record set in 2010, according to a new analysis of satellite data by glaciologist Marco Tedesco of the City University of New York. With four weeks to go before the end of Greenland’s melt season, Tedesco said this year could end up being “a goliath,” far outranking any other in the 30-year satellite record....

1969 Heat Pollution “In the U.S. it appears that the use of river, lake and estuarine waters for industrial cooling purposes may become so extensive in future decades as to pose a considerable threat to fish and to aquatic life in general. The discharge of waste heat into the natural waters is coming to be called thermal pollution. What has aroused ecologists is the ninefold expansion of electric-power production that is in prospect for the coming years with the increasing construction of large generating plants fueled by nuclear energy....

It is always a relief to arrive at Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. After a bumpy 11-hour drive southeast from Novosibirsk, across the steppe and through the foothills of the Altai Mountains, the field camp suddenly appears around a bend in the dirt road, and all thought of the long journey evaporates. Steep-sided valleys, swift-running rivers and the traditional wood houses of the local Altai people dominate the landscape; golden eagles soar overhead....

For the past five years the Quantum Shorts initiative from the Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore has inspired artists and writers from around the world to try their hand at a unique kind of scientific storytelling. The contest alternates each year between calls for films or short stories that explore the ramifications of quantum mechanics. The key requirement? Each entry must take no more than five minutes to watch or read....

As consumers start worrying more about climate change, big businesses are increasingly looking to forests to assuage their greenhouse gas guilt. The concept, called forest carbon offsets, is fairly straightforward—a company pays to plant trees, sometimes even buying land to do so, and the carbon taken in by the forest cancels out emissions the company produces in other places. But Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC (RB), a major U.K.-based company behind well-known household products like Lysol, Woolite and Durex condoms, is learning that acquiring forest carbon offsets sometimes means the acquisition of new neighbors—neighbors that aren’t necessarily happy with what’s being done with the land....