Imagine you are almost dozing in a lounge chair outside, with a magazine on your lap. Suddenly, a fly lands on your arm. You grab the magazine and swat at the insect. What was going on in your brain after the fly landed? And what was going on just before? Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood....
What goes up must come down—including, sadly enough, the International Space Station. For precisely 20 years now, the massive orbiting laboratory has constantly been home to humans, the lucky handful of Earthlings who at any given time venture into the topsy-turvy world of microgravity. But like the rest of us, the International Space Station is aging. And it can’t stay in orbit on its own indefinitely—it needs a regular boost or fuel injection from visiting spacecraft....
In his most recent weekly address, President Trump praised NASA’s “mission of exploration and discovery” and its ability to allow mankind to “look to the heavens with wonder and curiosity.” But left out of his statements was the work NASA does to peer back at our home planet and unravel its many remaining mysteries—a mission targeted for cuts in his administration’s budget outline released earlier this month. In a budget otherwise scant on specifics, four climate-related NASA satellite missions were proposed for termination, including one already in orbit....
A giant star-spangled pavilion sits outside the formal negotiating area for the U.N. climate meeting in Bonn, Germany, which began this Monday. American-accented English dominates the potpourri of languages there, and power-suited representatives from U.S. cities, states and businesses mingle with their foreign counterparts. Above it all hangs a giant banner with a hashtagged slogan: #We Are Still In. The “We” is Americans, and what they are still “In” is the 2015 Paris climate agreement....
Electron microscopes with nanometer resolution are widely used, but they cost millions of dollars, and preparing a sample for viewing is painstaking. This state of affairs is fine for the lab but impractical for industrial applications—say, for rapidly scanning product samples to look for embedded microscopic watermarks. A new form of holographic microscopy developed by David Grier, a physicist at New York University, and his colleagues could provide a solution. They started with an off-the-shelf Zeiss microscope and replaced its incandescent light source with a laser....
Astronomers have recreated two cataclysmic collisions that sculpted the interior of the giant asteroid Vesta, revealing that the so-called protoplanet may actually have a crust far thicker than expected. The new model is based on computer simulations of separate collisions between the asteroid Vesta and a pair of 20-mile-long (32 kilometers) rocks within the last billion years. The results suggest that the cosmic impacts caused Vesta’s crust to melt and then re-form, making its crust thicker than can be explained by typical rock layering, scientists said....
The 6TB helium-filled Ultrastar He6 from Western Digital subsidiary HGST.(Credit:Western Digital)There’s a new use in town for helium besides supercooling electromagnets at the Large Hadron Collider and making your voice sound freakishly high-pitched: improving the capacity and efficiency of hard drives.Western Digital on Monday announced that its HGST subsidiary has begun shipping the new 6-terabyte Ultrastar He6 hard drive, a model that seals the spinning disk platters inside a hermetic chamber filled with helium instead of air....
The biggest breakthroughs in how we make things lie not in the technology to manipulate materials but in the materials themselves. Such is the thinking behind “4-D printing,” an experimental approach to manufacturing that expands on much-hyped 3-D printing processes. Instead of building static three-dimensional items from layers of plastics or metals, 4-D printing employs dynamic materials that continue to evolve in response to their environment. This new wrinkle in the maker movement comes courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Self-Assembly Lab, where director Skylar Tibbits and his team are experimenting with so-called “programmable materials....
By Philip BallRemember the Mozart effect? Thanks to a suggestion in 1993 that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, there has been a flood of compilation CDs filled with classical tunes that will allegedly boost your baby’s brain power.Yet there’s no evidence for this claim, and indeed the original “Mozart effect” paper did not make it. It reported a slight, short-term performance enhancement in some spatial tasks when preceded by listening to Mozart as opposed to sitting in silence....
By Laila Kearney(Reuters) - A wildfire that erupted in a scenic stretch of California’s central coastline late Sunday night has destroyed at least 15 homes and forced many residents to evacuate, county and fire officials said.The fire in Big Sur - the stunning, mountainous region south of the Monterey Peninsula that reaches into the Los Padres National Forest - grew to 550 acres by late Monday afternoon.No injuries have been reported in the blaze, which started near the Big Sur Lodge and was fueled by dry brush and high winds, U....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Athens is mostly associated with its ancient past rather than its modern turbulent state of the latest two hundred years. While walking the centre of the luminous city, the visitor can easily observe both ends of Hellenic culture. The city offers plenty of ancient examples in every corner, the visitor must only roam aimlessly in the narrow alleys of the old town, and they will stumble upon these details that paint the picture of a thriving ancient Metropolis....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. George Blaurock (l. c. 1491-1529) was one of the three founders of the Swiss Brethren (known by their opponents as Anabaptists) along with Conrad Grebel (l. c. 1498-1526) and Felix Manz (l. c. 1498-1527). His Origin of the Anabaptists is an account of how the sect began as well as its persecution by the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli (l....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The pirates of the ancient Mediterranean were not, for the most part, the outsiders who knew no country’s allegiance and were the enemies of civilization as they are frequently depicted in novels and other media. They were often employed (or at least encouraged) by one government against the interests of another and were relied upon for slaves by wealthy private citizens and governmental agencies....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Shamanism was widely practised in Korea from prehistoric times right up to the modern era. It is a belief system which originated in north-east Asian and Arctic cultures, and although the term shamanism has since acquired a wider meaning across many different cultures, in ancient Korea it kept its original form where self-appointed practitioners promised to contact and influence the spirit world in order to assist the living....
Every year some 1.7 million people in the U.S. who are admitted to hospitals hoping to get well instead end up getting sicker after picking up infections during their stays, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). About 100,000 of them die every year as a result of the hospital bugs—more deaths than all the U.S. casualties in the Vietnam War—and it costs an estimated $20 billion annually to treat these infections....
By Will Boggs MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adolescents with a history of childhood trauma show different neural responses to subjective anxiety and craving, researchers report. “I think the finding of increased activation of insula, anterior cingulate, and prefrontal cortex in response to stress cues in the high- relative to low-trauma group, while arguably not necessarily unexpected, is important as it suggests that youth exposed to higher levels of trauma may experience different brain responses to similar stressors,” Dr....
A furry, beaverlike mammal that survived the apocalyptic dinosaur-killing space rock that crashed to Earth 66 million years ago hid out in what is now New Mexico, grinding up leafy meals with its enormous molars. Though small, the mammal is an exciting find, the researchers said. It belongs to a group of rodentlike mammals called multituberculates, named for the numerous cusps, or tubercles, found on their teeth. Multituberculates lived alongside dinosaurs, but managed to survive the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period....
NASA’s prolific Kepler spacecraft is back in action, a year after being sidelined by an equipment failure. The space agency has approved a new mission called K2 for Kepler. The telescope’s original exoplanet hunt was derailed in May 2013 when the second of the spacecraft’s four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, robbing it of its precision pointing ability. “The approval provides two years of funding for the K2 mission to continue exoplanet discovery, and introduces new scientific observation opportunities to observe notable star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies, and supernovae,” Kepler Deputy Project Manager Charlie Sobeck, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, wrote in an update today (May 16)....
Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide may not be as helpful to crops as previously thought, according to a new study. As global temperatures rise, soil moisture levels fall. Laboratory experiments suggested that the crop losses resulting from this loss of moisture would be offset by a boost in fertilization from rising levels of carbon dioxide. Now field studies show that carbon dioxide’s beneficial effects are not nearly as strong in real crop-growing environments....
The number of people killed in South Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Joaquin climbed to nine yesterday. Five people drowned, and the other four deaths were traffic-related, officials said. By yesterday afternoon, after record rains fell on already water-soaked soil, floodwaters had breached at least eight dams statewide, according to the South Carolina Emergency Management Division. Coffins floated out of their gravesites in South Carolina over the weekend, and residents abandoned their cars for higher ground, awash in shoulder-high depths....
