Posts

While the search for survivors of the nightmarish Joplin, Mo., tornado is still far from over, AccuWeather.com meteorologists are forecasting that another round of deadly storms is about to occur today. As of Tuesday afternoon, the death toll had already raised to 118, ranking the event among the top 10 deadliest U.S. tornadoes of all time. So why has the weather been so active? According to AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Henry Margusity, one of the theories is the strong La Nina that occurred....

As the year 2011 comes to a close, some might wonder what is looming sky-wise for 2012? What celestial events might we look forward to seeing? I’ve selected what I consider to be the top 12 “skylights” for this coming year, and list them here in chronological order. Not all these events will be visible from any one locality … for the eclipses, for instance, you’ll probably have to do some traveling … but many can be observed from the comfort of your backyard....

August 1964 Liquid Crystals “Although their existence has been known for more than 70 years, substances that exhibit the liquid-crystal phase have until recently been regarded more as laboratory curiosities than as potentially useful or theoretically important objects of study. In the past few years, however, several investigators in this country and abroad have undertaken to reexamine the liquid-crystal phase. The first results of these new studies have helped to clarify the unusual molecular architecture of liquid crystals....

Here is something that will put a spring in your step: a backpack that bounces up and down on bungee cords instead of pounding the shoulders and back. The bag’s designer envisions his creation as just what the doctor ordered to relieve the spines of schoolchildren as well as military and emergency personnel–all who risk injury from carrying heavy loads. When people walk their hips move up and down by as much as seven centimeters, which normally causes a backpack to bob up and down, too....

An extraordinarily powerful “hypernova” a whopping 10.5 billion light-years from Earth is the most distant star explosion ever observed, a new study reports. The Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, which means that light from the hypernova, or superluminous supernova (SLSN), has been streaking through space for about three-quarters of the universe’s existence. Astronomers first spotted hypernovas just a decade or so ago. As the name suggests, these objects are extreme versions of “normal” supernovas....

Humpback whales and killer whales are losing up to 94 percent and 97 percent, respectively, of their communication space in the busiest areas of the ocean off the British Columbia coast, according to a new study. Although this simplified summary represents a somewhat pessimistic interpretation of 10,000 hours of underwater noise levels in various sites off the coast that yielded highly variable results, researchers say the finding is helpful because it demonstrates a method that tries to interpret what those noise levels might mean to fish or whales....

California Democrats have clinched a two-thirds supermajority in the state Legislature, a win that’s expected to breathe new life into the drive to bolster a landmark climate program. Democrats secured a two-thirds margin in the Senate last week when final vote counts showed Democrat Josh Newman defeated Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang (R) in a district located mostly in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. The party had nabbed the supermajority in the Assembly a week earlier....

BEIJING (Reuters) - A project operated by China’s largest coal miner, Shenhua Group, has reduced groundwater levels in a region of Inner Mongolia and discharged high levels of toxic wastewater, environmental campaign group Greenpeace said on Tuesday.The report, the first by Greenpeace to single out and publicly challenge one of China’s powerful state-owned companies, comes as the country’s new leadership steps up its focus on pollution amid growing protests over environmental degradation....

There may be an upside for migraine sufferers. New research indicates that women with a history of the blinding headaches may be as much as 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than their headache-free friends. One possible glitch: the data doesn’t rule out that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) such as ibuprofin – and not the migraines – deserve the credit. “It may be the treatments used for migraines that are responsible for this risk reduction rather than the migraine itself,” says study co-author Christopher Li, a cancer epidemiologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle....

From Quanta (Find original story here). On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they had discovered features in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that are consistent with gravitational waves from the universe’s first moments. The results agreed with predictions from the decades-old theory of inflation, said panelist Chao-Lin Kuo of Stanford University, providing the first direct evidence that for an infinitesimal instant after the Big Bang, our universe expanded faster than the speed of light....

Cancer results from cells gone wild. Proliferating out of control, the cells spawn malignant growths that can travel throughout the human body, spreading the disease. Some patients’ immune systems are able to recognize such tumors and begin to attack them, and research has shown that boosting the patients’ levels of such tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes can help defeat deadly cancer. Now scientists have transformed immune cells into cancer fighters outside the body–and prompted complete remission in two subjects when those cells were reintroduced....

In medieval European cathedrals, the glass sometimes looks odd. Some panes are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top. The seemingly solid glass appears to have melted. This is evidence, say tour guides, Internet rumors and even high school chemistry teachers, that glass is actually a liquid. And, because glass is hard, it must be a supercooled liquid. Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid....

Roughly 252 million years ago, life on the earth nearly ceased to exist–as much as 90 percent of marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life died out. At around the same time, a vast up swelling of magma covered between one million and four million cubic kilometers of what is now Siberia. The eruption continued off and on for about a million years, with basalt lava and poisonous gases seeping up through cracks in Siberia’s mantle....

By Paul Lienert DETROIT, May 15 (Reuters) - Google Inc will begin testing self-driving cars of its own design on public roads this summer, but they will have steering wheels and brakes, which is not what the company described a year ago. Engineers will operate 25 prototype vehicles, which use the same software as Google’s self-driving Lexus RX450h sport utility vehicles that have been in operation for several years, the company said on Friday....

What if you could ask a job applicant a few questions that would allow you to accurately predict whether he or she would be a good employee? Is this person likely to be absent frequently, falsify expense reports and claim credit for work done by other team members? Or, on the plus side, will he or she cheerfully volunteer for extra assignments, deal patiently with difficult clients, mentor junior associates and be a good leader?...

By Reuters Staff NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If a headache is a kid’s only symptom after minor blunt head trauma, it poses little risk of a clinically important brain injury, according to a new post-hoc analysis published online February 2 in Pediatrics. “This strongly suggests that (computed tomography scans) CTs are not indicated in most children with headaches and no other signs or symptoms of (traumatic brain injury) after blunt head trauma, and a period of observation may be warranted before CT decision-making,” Dr....

TOKYO (Reuters) - The operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant said on Monday that contaminated ground water had likely been flowing into the sea, acknowledging such a leakage for the first time.Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, made the announcement a day after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner scored a decisive victory in elections to the upper house, cementing his grip on power....

More than 80 percent of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections are transmitted via sexual intercourse. And researchers may have discovered at least one reason why. According to a new study published in Cell, a component of human semen may facilitate the spread of the virus by targeting immune system cells, in some cases making the pathogen up to 100,000 times more virulent. The team of German scientists had initially set out to determine if semen contained factors that inhibit the HIV infection....

Less than a year after Hurricane Matthew raked the East Coast, killing 34 people and causing $10 billion in damage in the U.S. alone, coastal areas are once again preparing for the onset of the Atlantic hurricane season. This year, forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are expecting to see above-average storm numbers in the Atlantic, despite the uncertainty of whether an El Niño will develop over the summer....

The world’s oceans could face a massive reshuffling by the end of the century—the likes of which hasn’t been seen in as many as 3 million years—due to warming waters. Changes are already afoot in the oceans. Roughly 93 percent of the heat trapped by human greenhouse gas emissions is ending up in the world’s seas and already contributing to changes from slowing plankton growth to recent incursions of tuna near Alaska, thousands of miles from their normal range....