Posts

A new computerized scan of the biomedical research literature has turned up tens of thousands of articles in which entire passages appear to have been lifted from other papers. Based on the study, researchers estimate that there may be as many as 200,000 duplicates among some 17 million papers in leading research database Medline. The finding has already led one publication to retract a paper for being too similar to a prior article by another author....

Health care officials and aid workers attempting to trace the progression of the Ebola virus disease outbreak that has claimed more than 2,800 lives so far (pdf) have come to rely heavily on a handful of disease-monitoring Web sites that act as pivotal hubs for processing information. Different sites serve slightly different functions, but for the most part they exist to manage the data glut created by countless news articles, social media feeds, medical reports and e-mailed on-scene accounts....

The Minamata Convention, a United Nations pact launched Thursday, is designed to limit mercury use and emissions internationally. Finalized after four years of negotiations and signed by delegates of about 140 nations, the treaty includes many exemptions. (See below for news about the U.S. delegation.) Here is what the treaty does – and doesn’t do. Coal-fired plants, boilers and smelters Nations must require best available emission-control technologies on new power plants, boilers and smelters, but they do not have to require them on older plants....

Blanching at the stench of urine, I stumble up pitch-black, uneven steps to the top floor, which seems to be a rooftop on which someone has constructed shacks out of brick, asbestos and plastic. A shaft of light from a street lamp falls past tenuous bamboo railings onto a figure in a glittering white sari. She crouches on the bare brick floor by the roof’s edge, holding a mirror in one hand and a lipstick in another, using the light to make up....

People with depression or other mental illnesses often report trouble sleeping, daytime drowsiness and other sleep-related issues. Now a growing body of research is showing that treating sleep problems can dramatically improve psychiatric symptoms in many patients. Much of the latest work illustrates how sleep apnea, a common chronic condition in which a person repeatedly stops breathing during sleep, may cause or aggravate psychiatric symptoms. In past years sleep apnea has been linked to depression in small studies and limited populations....

NEW YORK–It’s something no one alive today will likely ever see again: The planet Venus crossing the sun—a small, black dot moving across the fiery face of our nearest star. The transit of Venus across the sun is one of the rarest celestial sights visible from Earth, one that wowed scientists and amateur observers around the world Tuesday (June 5). The event, arguably the most anticipated skywatching display of the year, marked the last time Venus will cross the sun (as seen from Earth) for 105 years....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE) was the first great Persian political entity in Western and Central Asia which stretched, at its peak, from Asia Minor to the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia through Egypt. It was founded by Cyrus II (the Great, r. c. 550-530 BCE) whose vision of a vast, all-inclusive Persian Empire was, more or less, maintained by his successors....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Although John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood are consistently credited with the discovery' of the Maya Civilization, there were many who preceded them who sparked their interest in making their famous travels through Mesoamerica. The first non-Maya to explore the sites were Catholic priests who, many years after the Spanish Conquest of the region in the 16th century, visited the empty cities and told others about them....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Viking raids and subsequent settlements define the period known as the Viking Age in Britain which had profound consequences on the development of the culture and language. The raids started in June of 793 CE when three ships docked at the shore by the abbey of Lindisfarne....

When people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or oratory. Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight—Romeo likening Juliet to the rising sun or poet Robert Burns comparing his love to a red rose. But there is more to metaphor than this. Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience....

All is fair in love and war, but some animals take it to the extreme by temporarily turning themselves into something they’re not. Findings published today in the journal Nature provide two new examples of how these mimics can get ahead. The mating scene for giant Australian cuttlefish (Sepia apama) is rife with fighting and deception. Small males often scoop their much larger counterparts by pretending to be female themselves, which allows the runts to get closer to females of reproductive age....

The tweet, posted on September 1, 2011, by @qikipedia, read in its entirety: “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of cling film.” Some detective work revealed that the statement originated with mechanical engineering professor James Hone of Columbia University, who said in 2008, “Our research establishes graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel....

Fuel efficiency of new vehicles could improve by 50 percent in the next two decades and put the world on track to curb global warming if policies are implemented to spur the adoption of automotive technologies that already exist, according to a set of reports released yesterday by the International Energy Agency (IEA). “We cannot afford to wait for an expected electric and/or hydrogen solution,” said Richard Jones, IEA’s deputy executive director....

A magazine news story on the unification of physics usually begins by saying that Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory are irreconcilable. The one handles the force of gravity, the other takes care of electromagnetic and nuclear forces, but neither covers all, so physicists are left with a big jagged crack running down the middle of their theoretical world. It’s a nice story line, except it’s not true. “Everyone says quantum mechanics and gravity don’t get along—they’re incompatible,” says John F....

Zika burst into the international news this year, along with travel alerts, heartbreaking images of children with birth defects and a link to an autoimmune disease that can cause paralysis. The virus first surfaced in this country back in 2007, when an American medical volunteer contracted the disease during an outbreak in Micronesia and then became sick with it back in Alaska. Since then, more than 50 cases have been identified in the U....

MICROBIAL COMPUTING Scientists have made a DNA computer that puts bacteria to work solving a sorting problem (namely, one that involves flipping pancakes golden side up). The researchers modeled a simple two-pancake-flip problem using two DNA segments—one large and one short—and inserted them into the bacteria in random order and orientation. With the help of an enzyme, the segments would have a certain amount of time to flip to the correct position....

U.S. AND CANADA The number of breeding North American birds has plummeted by approximately 1.5 billion over the past 40 years, according to a new report. Forty-six species have lost at least half their populations—primarily through urbanization and habitat degradation. SOUTH AFRICA Representatives from more than 100 countries signed an agreement in Johannesburg to forbid international trade in pangolins. The armored mammal’s scales are used in traditional Chinese remedies, and researchers estimate that at least one million have been illegally traded since 2000 despite previous scattershot laws....

By Krishna N Das NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India is commissioning a plant to produce up to 5,000 tonnes of rare earths a year, a state company official told Reuters, which could help it contribute about 5 percent to the global supply of the metals used in cameras, cars, iPhones and wind turbines. India’s emergence as a supplier, albeit a small one, would be good news for countries like Japan, which up to now have had to rely mostly on China for rare earths production....

Astronomers have detected a long-predicted polarization signal in the ripples of the Big Bang. The signal, known as B-mode polarization, is caused by the gravitational tug of matter on microwave photons left over from the Big Bang. Its detection, posted this week to the arXiv preprint server and made by a microwave telescope at the South Pole, raises hopes that the signal can be used to map out the matter content of the Universe and determine the masses of the three types of neutrinos — in effect, using astronomy to achieve a key goal of particle physics....

Wildfires are still raging across southern California, marking the end of a destructive year of extreme weather events around the world. In the U.S. alone historic floods hit Missouri and Arkansas in May, drought parched the Dakotas and Montana from spring through fall and autumn hurricanes ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast, Florida and the Caribbean. Scientists have long predicted such extreme events (pdf) would become more frequent or intense, and sometimes both, due to human-influenced climate change....