A massive winter storm that is expected to bring snow and ice to the eastern United States in the next 24 hours dwarfs the central part of the country in a new satellite image. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-West satellite spotted this cloudy view of the large storm near the Gulf Coast yesterday (Jan. 21) at 10 a.m. EST. (The satellite photo also spied a separate storm swirling over the Pacific Ocean....
California resident Mark Brown knows too well the danger that climate change poses to the West. A former fire team chief, Brown in 2018 responded to the Camp Fire blaze, California’s deadliest wildfire. At least 85 people were killed in the multibillion-dollar disaster, including four victims who died in their cars trying to escape and a fifth person who perished in a desperate run for safety. Brown’s now working to ensure that horror doesn’t repeat itself....
The world’s oceans reached their hottest levels on record in 2021. It’s the third year in a row it’s happened, and it’s driven almost entirely by human-caused climate change, scientists announced yesterday. The findings are presented in a paper published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. As excess heat accumulates in the atmosphere, caused by continued greenhouse gas emissions, the oceans soak some of it in. The study analyzes data from scientific sensors attached to floats scattered throughout the oceans, from the balmy Mediterranean to the icy waters surrounding Antarctica....
An innocuous gene-bearing virus injected into the midbrains of a dozen patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease improved the subjects’ motor function while causing no adverse effects, says a new study. This is the first time gene therapy has been tested to fight Parkinson’s, which affects an estimated 500,000 Americans. The promising findings, published this week in The Lancet, opens the door to a new treatment option for the neurodegenerative disease. “The safety and effectiveness clearly indicate that this is something worth pursuing,” says lead study author Michael Kaplitt, a neurological surgeon and director of movement disorders at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center....
A chip off the old block, a kid inherits a multitude of his or her parents’ traits, such as eye and hair color. But new evidence suggests that parents may also pass on a common virus to their offspring hereditarily. Researchers estimate that one of every 116 newborns may have human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) infections that originated when the virus inserted its genetic material into that of their parents’ DNA. HHV-6 is the virus responsible for roseola—a mild childhood infection resulting in high fevers and occasionally associated with a rash....
Television shows such as CSI dramatize the work of forensic investigators and glamorize their high-tech toys that help catch criminals. Now real-life criminologists might soon be adding a new weapon to their crime-fighting arsenal: a visualization technique for spotting fingerprints that uses x-ray vision. Results of early tests of the novel approach will be unveiled this week at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society meeting in San Diego....
N AN IMPOSSIBLE FIGURE, seemingly real objects—or parts of objects—form geometric relations that physically cannot happen. Dutch artist M. C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams. Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle, and visual scientist Dejan Todorovi of the University of Belgrade in Serbia created a golden arch that won him third prize in the 2005 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. These effects challenge our hard-earned perception that the world around us follows certain, inviolable rules....
Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people. Economists often talk as though putting a price on carbon emissions—through tradable permits or a carbon tax—will be enough to deliver the needed reductions in those emissions....
Ten years ago today, President Bill Clinton announced a national goal to develop an AIDS vaccine within a decade. At that time, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) virus that causes AIDS had infected some 25 million people worldwide. Clinton established a research center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and pledged to enlist other nations in the effort. “There are no guarantees,” he said in a speech delivered at Morgan State University in Baltimore announcing the initiative....
Comet NEOWISE has been entertaining space enthusiasts across the Northern Hemisphere. Although its official name is C/2020 F3, the comet has been dubbed NEOWISE after the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope that first noticed it earlier this year. This “icy snowball” with a gassy tail made its closest approach to the sun on July 3 and is now heading back from whence it came: the far reaches of the outer solar system....
Last November, Californians elected an action hero to fix their broken budget and simultaneously agreed to borrow billions for a massive taxpayer bet on long-shot research into embryonic stem cell therapies. This is clearly not a state for the risk averse. But by rushing in where Congress feared to tread, Californians initiated a policy experiment–or a political end run–with national repercussions. Even as many stem cell biologists revel at their good fortune, some worry that this seismic shift in policy could fragment the field, delay scientific progress and raise unrealistic expectations among the public....
Last week Intel and IBM both announced that they had figured out a way to further shrink the size of transistors, the tiny on-off switches that power computers. The trick, according to Intel, is introducing the metal hafnium into the mix—an addition that marks the first major change in transistor materials in four decades. Hafnium-based computer circuits would likely be denser, faster and consume less power than existing microprocessors. “It’s a very, very significant event,” says electrical engineer Carlton Osburn of North Carolina State University, member of a research team that studied hafnium and other advanced transistor materials....
The discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of macaques about ten years ago sent shockwaves through the neuroscience community. Mirror neurons are cells that fire both when a monkey performs a certain task and when it observes another individual performing that same task. With the identification of networks of similarly-behaving cells in humans, there was much speculation over the role such neurons might play in phenomena such as imitation, language acquisition, observational learning, empathy, and theory of mind....
The fading sun beat down on our backs after an already long day in the field. Exhausted, we toiled over shovels and dug with our bare hands to clear away the sand. We were in the heart of dinosaur country on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, working in the middle of the Navajo Nation to determine the ages of two skeletons of Dilophosaurus wetherilli that had been unearthed there previously....
A few dozen New Yorkers experienced their city at a new pace earlier this month. “Even the concrete we’re standing on is changing,” said artist Elizabeth Ellsworth, gesturing at the pockmarked floor of Studio-X in Lower Manhattan. “Everything in the city is a dynamic force.” Ellsworth and her collaborator, Jamie Kruse, were there to celebrate the launch of their new book. Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York (smudge studio, 2011) highlights 20 urban sites where humans interact with the region’s complex geologic cycles....
Drugs useful in the long-term management of cardiac arrhythmia, which occurs when electrical impulses in the heart become irregular and put patients at risk of sudden death, have eluded researchers for decades. Despite best efforts, most of the medications developed to calm abnormally fast heartbeats, a type of arrhythmia known as tachyarrhythmia, have faltered. Several clinical trials, including the seminal 1986 Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST), even showed that the use of certain drugs designed to correct tachyarrhythmia—encainide and flecainide, in particular—actually increased the risk of death....
A small government safety organization tasked with protecting the workers who construct America’s nuclear arsenal and with preventing radioactive disasters in the communities where they live is under new siege in Washington. The Trump administration, acting in an open partnership with the profit-making contractors that control the industrial sites where U.S. nuclear bombs are made and stored, has enacted new rules that limit the authority and reach of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, created by Congress in 1988 amid broad public concerns over civil and military nuclear safety lapses....
Clues to the source of the chemical poison that U.S. officials say killed more than 1,400 people in Syria last month may come from the weapon casing, not the material itself. The source question boils down to who made the substance, thought to be sarin—the government or another actor. Secretary of State John Kerry today told Senators that he is “certain” none of the opposition has the weapons or capacity to make a strike of this scale, but distinguishing purified military grade sarin from sarin brewed up at home by studying traces left at an attack site, is not easy....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When you need to remember a phone number, a shopping list or a set of instructions, you rely on what psychologists and neuroscientists refer to as working memory. It’s the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind, over brief intervals. It’s for things that are important to you in the present moment, but not 20 years from now....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Schooldays (c. 2000 BCE) is a Sumerian poem describing the daily life of a young scribe in the schools of Mesopotamia. The work takes the form of a first-person narration and dialogue in relating the challenges the student faces and how he resolves them by having his father bribe his teacher with expensive gifts....
