President Trump mixed political sloganeering with a warning to take shelter for Northeasterners caught in a deadly winter storm that dumped 2 feet of snow in some places earlier this month. He tweeted on Jan. 20, “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” Extreme winter weather often prompts a fresh wave of public skepticism from those who doubt the existence or severity of human-caused climate change....
Is there life on Mars? The answer may be blowing in the wind. NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected fluctuating traces of methane – a possible sign of life – in the thin, cold air of the Martian atmosphere, researchers announced today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Across Mars and within Gale Crater, where Curiosity is slowly climbing a spire of sedimentary rock called Mount Sharp, the methane exists at a background concentration of slightly less than one part per billion by volume in the atmosphere (ppb)....
In a landmark decision, the National Institutes of Health announced today that it will drastically scale back its research on chimpanzees, humans’ closest living relatives. The agency expects to retire about 310 chimps out of a population of 360 that it owns and has available for research. The decision follows recommendations from an NIH advisory panel that said in January that the agency should curb research on chimps and instead “emphasize the development and refinement of other approaches, especially alternative animal models,” and move all but approximately 50 of the chimps to sanctuaries....
Earlier this month visual effects artist Todd Vaziri put forth the idea that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump likely shares his Twitter account with campaign ghostwriters. The assumption was based on the curious differences in tone and message of @realDonaldTrump on the social media platform. According to Vaziri, Trump most likely used his Samsung Galaxy Android smartphone to tap out the most inflammatory microblog messages whereas the more toned-down tweets came from his staff using their iPhones....
Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to do a newspaper crossword puzzle later in the day? Me neither. But according to Rupert Sheldrake, it is because the collective successes of the morning resonate through the cultural morphic field. In Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, similar forms (morphs, or “fields of information”) reverberate and exchange information within a universal life force. “Natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind, however far away they were and however long ago they existed,” Sheldrake writes in his 1988 book, Presence of the Past (Park Street Press)....
When most people think of coral reefs, they think of sunlit shallow shelves, teeming with sea creatures and iridescent tropical fish that almost anyone with a snorkel and a swimsuit can see. But much deeper in the ocean, 100 feet down and below, exists another type of coral reef. These deepwater reefs, many of which are unmapped and unexplored, need protection, several marine scientists wrote in a commentary published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change....
“Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret,” wrote 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in his political novel, Coningsby. Hyperbole aside, he may have mixed things up a bit. The latest research suggests that young people tend to fixate on their regrets, whereas older adults generally learn not to waste time wallowing in remorse about past circumstances they cannot change. A new study demonstrates that these cognitive differences manifest themselves in brain scans and physiological responses, revealing that, unlike healthy adults, both depressed adults and young people treat missed opportunities and genuine losses as equally regretful events—even if they were not directly responsible....
The human brain is unique: Our remarkable cognitive capacity has allowed us to invent the wheel, build the pyramids and land on the moon. In fact, scientists sometimes refer to the human brain as the “crowning achievement of evolution.” But what, exactly, makes our brains so special? Some leading arguments have been that our brains have more neurons and expend more energy than would be expected for our size, and that our cerebral cortex, which is responsible for higher cognition, is disproportionately large—accounting for over 80 percent of our total brain mass....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Herodotus (484 BCE – c. 425 BCE) has been called the Father of History since he was the first historian known to collect his materials in detail, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative. The Histories — his masterpiece and the only work he is known to have produced — is a record of his inquiry....
Exoplanet hunters have been busy. Since 2011 astronomers have discovered, on average, about three exoplanets every week—a precious few of which lie in the “habitable zone,” where water could take liquid form. This chart maps the known cosmic neighborhood of 861 planets. Click on the options under “Select layout” to map the planets based on their location in the sky, or on their distance from the Sun. (Since the Kepler planet-hunting satellite aims at a single spot in the Northern Hemisphere, a huge group of planets can be found near the 18-hour mark....
A growing number of researchers and tech companies are beginning to mine social media for warning signs of suicidal thoughts. Their efforts build on emerging evidence that the language patterns of a person’s social-media posts, as well as the subconscious ways they interact with their smartphone can hint at psychiatric trouble. Businesses are just starting to test programs to automatically detect such signals. Mindstrong, for instance, an app developer in Palo Alto, California, is developing and testing machine-learning algorithms to correlate the language that people use and their behaviour—such as scrolling speed on smartphones—with symptoms of depression and other mental disorders....
Paris–The signs of global climate change are clear: melting glaciers, earlier blooms and rising temperatures. In fact, 11 of the past 12 years rank among the hottest ever recorded. After some debate, the scientists and diplomats of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their long-anticipated summary report in February. The summary describes the existence of global warming as “unequivocal” but leaves out a reference to an accelerated trend in this warming....
As you may be aware, we are celebrating a Decade of Diva this year as the Nutrition Diva podcast approaches its tenth anniversary. You might think that after ten years of weekly podcasts, I’ve said just about everything that can be said about nutrition. No danger of that! Our understanding of how food affects our bodies is constantly expanding and evolving. Sometimes, that means modifying or even reversing our positions in light of newer evidence....
The breakthrough came at around 3 a.m. on 30 May in Brussels, after a marathon negotiating session: the European Union (EU) finally agreed to end overfishing in its troubled waters. Fisheries scientists say that the deal, which is expected to be approved before the end of the year, could allow fish stocks to recover to their previous bountiful levels, after being driven down by years of overfishing. But short-term restrictions are likely to bring unemployment to some fishermen....
If you have your parents’ sense of fairness, it may not just be their influence. It may also be due to the DNA they passed on to you, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stockholm School of Economics and Karolinska Institute (also in Stockholm) discovered this confluence of nature and nurture by having 324 pairs of identical twins, who share the same genetic makeup, and fraternal twins, who do not, participate in an exercise known as “the ultimatum game....
Humans have it easy. For ferns, reproduction is much more involved. In many animals, the sex of offspring is, biologically speaking, decided between the parents. But for Japanese climbing ferns (Lygodium japonicum), it depends on the entire community communicating across generations, researchers report in Science. Older fernlings secrete pheromones that determine the sex of the younger ones — maintaining a balanced ratio so that they can all reproduce faster, the study shows....
Predators need prey. So, theoretically, brown trout (Salmo tutta) should thrive in lakes teeming with arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus), a potential meal. Yet, brown trout, depleted by overfishing, remained scarce in northern Norway’s Lake Takvatn even though fishing was halted and there were plenty of char for them to eat. Only when scientists removed 660,000 of the char (between 1984 and 1989) did brown trout once again rule the waters.Ecologist Lennart Persson of Umeå University in Sweden and colleagues tracked the two fish populations through 2005 to determine how culling prey affects predators....
A 2.8-million-year-old battered jawbone from Ethiopia may represent the earliest ancient human fossil ever discovered—pushing back the known origins of humankind by 500,000 years. The remains, alongside a digital reconstruction of a damaged fossil from a key early-human species, point to an evolutionary explosion at the dawn of our genus, Homo. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the latest link in a chain of ancestry that stretches back 5 to 7 million years to a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, humanity’s two closest living relatives....
From cell phones and computers to bicycle helmets and hospital IV bags, plastic has molded society in many ways that make life both easier and safer. But the synthetic material also has left harmful imprints on the environment and perhaps human health, according to a new compilation of articles authored by scientists from around the world. More than 60 scientists contributed to the new report, which aims to present the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health, and offer possible solutions....
Researchers have long suspected that the altered perception, kaleidoscopic visions and mood changes produced by psychedelic drugs reflect a jump in brain activity. Not so, say neuroscientists at Imperial College London and elsewhere. They used functional MRI to peek at the brains of 30 participants experiencing a “trip” induced by intravenously delivered psilocybin, a psychedelic found in magic mushrooms. As they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA online in January, investigators saw psilocybin-related dips in brain activity, particularly in control centers such as the thalamus, the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, and the medial prefrontal cortex....
