Posts

One hundred years ago this month, a laboratory experiment at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany set the stage for the Green Revolution. Chemist Fritz Haber placed a sheet of osmium in a steel chamber, pumped in a mix of nitrogen and hydrogen gases, and cranked up the heat and pressure. Then, out flowed ammonia, the elusive raw material for producing synthetic fertilizer. It was the eureka moment scientists had been pursuing for a decade: Haber managed to create the necessary conditions to transform nitrogen gas, abundant in the atmosphere but useless for life, into a digestible form....

The northern lights erupted in a stunning display Monday night (Sept. 3) after a recent solar storm, amazing skywatchers around the world. On Friday (Aug. 31), the sun unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME), sending a huge cloud of charged particles streaking into space at more than 3.2 million mph (5.1 million kph), NASA researchers said. The CME delivered a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetosphere, putting on quite a show for stargazers at high latitudes....

The world has never had better medicine, more knowledgeable doctors or stronger data on disease. But these benefits are not equally shared. To take one conspicuous example: two years of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Black, Hispanic and Native American people are significantly more likely to be hospitalized and die from COVID than white people in the U.S. Health inequity includes the lack of access to appropriate care, the failure to address social factors that influence health, and the dangerous conditions that people in some neighborhoods endure....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every year around the middle of October, reporters start contacting me wanting to talk about rumors of contaminated Halloween treats. That’s because I track media coverage of reported incidents of trick-or-treaters receiving razor blades in apples or pins and poison in candy bars. My data goes back to 1958, and my principal finding is simple: I can’t find any evidence that any child has ever been killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating....

As Friendster, MySpace and many other social-networking sites have discovered, a successful business finds a niche that draws in a large number of users and offers intriguing, easy-to-use services that keep those users interested. Whereas Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have excelled at this formula, Google’s efforts in this area—Buzz (2010), Wave (2009) and Orkut (2004)—have faltered. The search-engine giant hopes its search is over with this week’s introduction of the new Google+ (Google Plus) network....

Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), a biotechnology company based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, has long flirted with fame—and bankruptcy. The company is running the only Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved clinical trials of embryonic stem (ES)-cell therapies. Later this month, ACT plans to report preliminary results from three trials to test the safety of its treatment for two different forms of vision loss. If all goes well, it could be the first clinical demonstration of the safety—and perhaps also the therapeutic potential—of ES cells....

Astronomers have had a solid handle on the orbits of our solar system’s planets since at least the 17th century, when Johannes Kepler formulated his laws of planetary motion. But the fine details of those orbits are not always obvious, especially for the more distant outer planets, owing to the great distances separating Earth from those worlds and the limited number of spacecraft that have flown in their vicinities. As recently as 10 or 15 years ago, the locations of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn were known only to within hundreds of kilometers....

The robberies were a fitting end to a terrible year. On the Monday after Christmas, thieves in New York City held up five different banks in just over six hours, the near-final entries in the city’s 444 bank robbery cases in 2008—a 54 percent increase over 2007. “It makes me think that the recession is making people go to extreme measures,” one bystander told the New York Times, summing up the commonly held viewpoint that as the economy contracts, crime will swell to fill the void....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE concluded the Second Macedonian War (200-197 BCE) and consolidated Rome’s power in the Mediterranean, finally resulting in Greece becoming a province of Rome in 146 BCE. This engagement is sometimes cited as the birth of the Roman Empire in that it proved the superiority of the legions of the Roman army over the Macedonian-Greek phalanx in battle, placed Greece in a subordinate position to Rome, and encouraged further expansion in the region through military conquest which would eventually elevate Rome to the preeminent power in the world of its day....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Anne Hutchinson (l. 1591-1643 CE) was a religious dissident who was brought to trial by John Winthrop (l. c. 1588-1649 CE) and the other magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 CE for spreading “erroneous opinions” regarding religious belief and practice. She is known as the central figure in the Antinomian Controversy....

By Heidi Ledford"It’s super cool, but it’s never going to work," genomics guru Eric Schadt responded when a wary investor asked for his opinion about a new DNA-sequencing technology in 2003. A company was creating a machine that it claimed could revolutionize the field by reading over the shoulder of an enzyme as it copied DNA molecules.Despite his initial skepticism, Schadt touted the method’s success last weekend at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in Marco Island, Fla....

Carol Aldrich first noticed a slight tremor in her right hand when she was in her early 50s. Working for an optometrist in Port Townsend, Wash., a picturesque town on the Olympic Peninsula, Aldrich routinely performed delicate work with her fingers—replacing broken eyeglass lenses and repairing frames. At least initially, her tremor would come and go, leaving her sometimes unable to manage tiny screws and fragile settings. “I just thought I had had too much coffee,” the mother of three recalls....

Nearly 50% of cancer deaths worldwide are caused by preventable risk factors, such as smoking and drinking alcohol, according to the largest study of the link between cancer burden and risk factors. Using estimates of cancer cases and deaths from more than 200 countries, researchers found that avoidable risk factors were responsible for nearly 4.5 million cancer deaths in 2019 (see ‘Global cancer deaths’). That represents more than 44% of global cancer deaths that year....

Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Key information from this month’s issue: • EDUCATION To attract and retain well trained science and math teachers, the U.S. needs to revamp its attitude about the profession. By improving education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the U....

The forest on Guam is silent. Sometime after World War II the brown tree snake arrived as a stowaway on this U.S. Pacific island territory 6,100 kilometers west of Hawaii. It has since extirpated 10 of the island’s 12 native forest bird species. The remaining forest birds have been relegated to small populations on military bases, where the snakes are kept in check. In the first study of its kind, a rugby-playing researcher named Haldre Rogers is documenting how the forest itself is changing....

In 1935 scientists at Cornell University made an extraordinary discovery. By placing rats on a very low calorie diet, Clive M. McCay and his colleagues extended the outer limit of the animals’ life span by 33 percent, from three years to four. They subsequently found that rats on low-calorie diets stayed youthful longer and suffered fewer late-life diseases than did their normally fed counterparts.Since the 1930s, calorie restriction has been the only intervention shown convincingly to slow aging in rodents (which are mammals, like us) and in creatures ranging from single-celled protozoans to roundworms, fruit flies and fish....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineA field trial for a novel UK geoengineering experiment has been cancelled amid questions about a pre-existing patent application for some of the technology involved.The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project is a collaboration among several UK universities and Cambridge-based Marshall Aerospace to investigate the possibility of spraying particles into the stratosphere to mitigate global warming. Such particles could mimic the cooling produced by large volcanic eruptions, by reflecting sunlight before it reaches the Earth’s surface....

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will make a close flyby of Earth before shooting out toward the asteroid Bennu, and skywatchers will have the opportunity to wave goodbye to the probe as it passes overhead. The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission launched on Sept. 8, 2016, to study and collect a sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. On Sept. 22, the spacecraft will make its closest approach to Earth, offering one last opportunity to see and photograph the probe until it returns to Earth in 2023....

You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further, that it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. So each Friday, we’ll round up the week’s most GIF-able science. Enjoy and loop on. The Little Robot That Wouldn’t Die Credit: Yichuan Wu, Zhichun Shao and Junwen Zhong This may be the only situation in which being compared to a cockroach is a compliment....

When the Bethlehem Steel mill in Lackawanna, N.Y., finally shut its doors for good eight years ago, it took away thousands of jobs and left behind a polluted and unsightly mess. But in 2006, while the idle grain elevators and coke ovens sat rusting on the banks of Lake Erie, something unexpected happened. Wind turbines began springing up on a 30-acres section of the former Superfund site in this Buffalo suburb....