Maxims typically date back many years, but “feed a cold, starve a fever” may beat them all. This saying has been traced to a 1574 dictionary by John Withals, which noted that “fasting is a great remedy of fever.” The belief is that eating food may help the body generate warmth during a “cold” and that avoiding food may help it cool down when overheated. But recent medical science says the old saw is wrong....
By Steve Quinn JUNEAU Alaska (Reuters) - More than 100 tourists and workers have been airlifted out of a private lodge in Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve after floods washed out portions of a road and left them stranded, a National Park Service spokeswoman said on Friday. The group was evacuated late on Thursday by four fixed-wing airplanes and two helicopters after rainfall on Wednesday and Thursday morning caused two nearby shallow creeks to swell, said park spokeswoman Kris Fister....
When the soccer video game FIFA 14 went on sale this week, it boasted a ball that, at long last, could sail smartly through the air. In earlier versions of the game, unless the ball was kicked long distance, it became undeniably “floaty,” soaring at an unrealistically linear path. A year ago, a team of engineers and animators at EA Sports (a division of Electronic Arts, Inc.) set out to get to the bottom of the problem....
By Michael SzaboWarsaw (Reuters) - Governments want to launch a platform at United Nations climate talks to help set common standards and accounting rules and tie together national and regional emissions trading schemes, but developing countries and green groups warned that talk of a global carbon market is premature.Almost 200 nations are in Poland for a November 11-22 meeting to plan a 2015 U.N. deal in Paris that would start to tackle climate change in 2021....
What is the difference between a magician and a man who obscures the truth about global warming for the fossil-fuel industry? Magicians are “moral liars,” according to the illuminating new documentary Merchants of Doubt, by director Robert Kenner. That’s because their magic acts use expertise in the art of deception and misdirection to entertain. Shills for the fossil fuel-industry, such as Steve Milloy, Marc Morano and others examined and accused in this film, use their expertise to fool people about matters of life and death....
By Barbara Liston (Reuters) - Hurricane Gonzalo caused between $200 million and $400 million in insured losses over the weekend on Bermuda, according to an estimate by AIR Worldwide, a Boston-based catastrophe modeling company. The large eye of the storm containing calm air passed directly over the tiny island chain of 65,000 inhabitants on Friday, reducing the time the British territory was exposed to hurricane-force winds and limiting potential damage, AIR said in its estimate, which was released late Wednesday....
By Dan Whitcomb LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The leading U.S. pediatrician group on Friday urged parents, schools and communities to vaccinate children against measles in the face of an outbreak that began at Disneyland in California in December and has spread to more than 50 people. The American Academy of Pediatrics said all children should get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine between the ages of 12 and 15 months old and again between 4 and 6 years old....
A few years ago in central Florida, John Santarpia had an idea. He was the president and CEO of a credit union and felt he needed to do something to improve its image. “We’re a medium-sized credit union and there’s a lot of competition,” Santarpia said. “We wanted to stand out.” He and his colleagues had found a lot in Lakeland, a city of about 100,000 residents, with an ice cream shop on it....
Life seems tough at hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean: crushing pressures, high temperatures and a steady flow of acidic chemicals. But life thrives. Scientists have discovered a slew of bacteria and other microbes that bask in 120-degree Celsius water. Yet, in an environment where pH levels can dip as low as 3 (acidic), scientists had not cultivated acid-loving microorganisms–until now. Biologist Anna-Louise Reysenbach of Portland State University and her colleagues collected samples from several vent sites off the Pacific coast of South America and isolated a microorganism that seemed to persist near areas of elemental sulfur deposits....
Logic That Feels the Noise As microchips shrink, the inescapable electronic buzz that emerges from thermal fluctuations, cross talk between wires and other sources can endanger their proper function. A way around that problem could be stochastic resonance, a phenomenon in which noise can boost a weak signal and improve a system’s performance. Certain kinds of structures, such as a sensory nerve, will output a signal only when background noise is sufficiently high....
Hydrogen is currently used to upgrade crude oil and synthesize ammonia, a critical building block of the fertilizers applied in modern agriculture. It also could be valuable as a feedstock for generating green electricity and as an ingredient in environmentally friendly fuel cells to power cars and trucks. But hydrogen is commonly produced from natural gas heated by steam, which results in greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental problems. Thus, scientists have been working to replace this process with one that taps a renewable energy source—and just such a breakthrough was announced in a paper recently published in Nature Energy....
By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Even as life expectancy is rising in many places across the U.S., there are some places where lifespans are getting shorter and geographical inequalities are becoming more pronounced, a new study suggests. Nationwide in 2014, the average life expectancy was about 79.1 years, up 5.3 years from 1980, the study found. For men, life expectancy climbed from 70 years to 76.7 years, while for women it increased from 77....
Did James Bond order an asteroid? Because researchers have one he might approve of: Tiny pebbles on the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa show signs of being repeatedly shaken. Researchers report that millimeter- to pea-size rocks have pooled in three troughs on the asteroid’s surface, suggesting that the grains flowed downhill like potato chip crumbs falling to the bottom of the bag. Although the true cause of the pooling is unclear, repeated shaking can make smaller rocks slide by allowing them to work their way around larger ones....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. It has always been recognized that women in the ancient world were considered only a little higher in value than the man’s cattle or plow and, sometimes, not even accorded that kind of respect. Examples of misogynistic attitudes toward women can be seen in certain works from Mesopotamia or Egypt but, in these cultures, women were generally respected and even enjoyed a degree of equal rights....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. On 20 April 1792, King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) stood before the Legislative Assembly and, with a faltering voice, read a declaration of war against Austria, to the ecstatic delight of the gathered deputies. This declaration sealed his own fate, the fates of the Girondins who pushed for it, and catapulted Europe into 23 years of perpetual, bloody warfare....
Difficulties associated with the Nobel Prize started even before the world’s most prestigious award was first given out in 1901. See our list below of favorite tales and factoids, some offered up by the laureates themselves Mincing words. Laureates can’t speak off the cuff during the awards ceremony banquet, according to 2013 Nobelist Randy Schekman who won for his research into cellular transport. He says the text for that speech must be turned in to the Nobel Foundation more than 24 hours in advance to allow for translation into Swedish....
Above the frozen ocean, Antarctica can be eerily quiet. Gusts of wind are often all one hears. Below, though, the Southern Ocean is a living soundscape dominated by Weddell seals. These pinnipeds typically emit high-pitched pings that sound like laser guns in a science-fiction movie. But that is not their entire repertoire. Research now reveals that a significant portion of their calls are at ultrasonic frequencies, high pitches well beyond the 20-kilohertz limit of most human hearing....
A crisis at NASA forces a new president to take action. A panel issues a report. The president gives a speech. He directs NASA to find a better way to get astronauts into orbit and to encourage private companies to enter the space taxi business. The plan promises to be the biggest shake-up of the space program since the glory days of the moon landings. Some embrace it; others take a dislike....
Editor’s Note (11/13/12): This article was edited after original publication in the print edition to include several corrections and clarifications. The past three winters in parts of North America and Europe were unusual. First, during the winters of 2009–2011, the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and western and northern Europe endured a series of exceptionally cold and snowy storms—including the February 2010 “snowmageddon” storm in Washington, D.C., that shut down the federal government for nearly a week....
Ancient teeth of old-world monkeys, which are most closely related to humans, have now been unearthed, fossils 3 million years older than previous remains found to date, researchers say. The old-world monkeys are native to Africa and Asia today, and include many familiar primates, such as baboons and macaques. Unlike the new-world monkeys of the Americas, tails of old-world monkeys are never prehensile, or able to grasp things. The modern old-world monkeys emerged during the Miocene epoch, which lasted about 5 million to 23 million years ago and saw the first appearance of wide expanses of grasslands....
