Just seven months ago, the global food crisis had reached a flash point. Prices of staples such as corn and rice had more than doubled over a year, and, by April, riots had broken out in Haiti, Bangladesh and Egypt. On May 1, Pres. George W. Bush pledged $770 million in new food aid for the 2009 fiscal year, an amount on top of the $200 million worth of emergency food he promised through the U....
Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of wind power? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? The largest purely technical obstacles are in the area of the supply chain infrastructure and in transmission. Prior to the recent economic slowdown the supply of wind turbine components was the constraint on growth....
Climate change is changing the odds of some extreme weather events, according to new research by government scientists in the United States and Britain. Back-to-back La Niña cycles helped create the scorching heat wave that drove Texas’ record-breaking drought last year, but climate change also played a role, the researchers report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That type of severe heat wave is 20 times more likely to occur during a La Niña today than it was during a La Niña in the 1960s, say researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U....
Between 230 million and 66 million years ago, dinosaurs plodded across the supercontinent Pangea, and migrated from Europe to other parts of the world. Now, by gathering and comparing all the data about their fossils, paleontologists have been able to visually map the dinosaurs’ migration during the time they ruled the Earth. The researchers used “network theory” in a new way to see how different dinosaur fossils were connected. “A network is just as you imagine it being; it’s a series of points which are your entities that you want to investigate,” said study lead author Alex Dunhill, a paleobiologist at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom....
Peter Ubel is professor of medicine and psychology at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, Free Market Madness (Harvard Business, 2008), which investigates the irrational tics that lead people to overbid on eBay, eat too much ice cream and take out mortgages they can’t afford. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Ubel about his research....
U.S. EPA released a proposed finding today that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, a move that is expected ultimately to trigger broad regulation of those heat-trapping industrial emissions. EPA released the 133-page proposed “endangerment finding” [pdf] in response to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that ordered the agency to reconsider whether greenhouse gases are pollutants subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. “This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations,” Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement....
An independent panel of experts is poised to scrutinize one of the Trump administration’s most consequential environmental rollbacks. EPA’s Science Advisory Board voted last week to review the science behind the proposed overhaul of Obama-era clean car standards. The 45-member board, which is tasked with advising EPA on a range of scientific matters, will zero in on the technical analysis underpinning the proposal (E&E News PM, June 6). Critics of the Trump EPA say the review stands to highlight errors in that analysis that could inform future lawsuits against the administration....
WITHIN JUST A FEW BLOCKS from my office, street vendors will sell me a Versace T-shirt or a silk tie from Prada, cheap. Or I could get a deal on a Rolex watch or a chic pair of Ray-Ban shades. These are not authentic brand-name products, of course. They are inexpensive replicas. But they make me look and feel good, and I doubt any of my friends can tell the difference....
Midwestern Farmers have relied on the High Plains Aquifer System since they first discovered the solution to their drought woes nearly six decades ago. The massive underground water source has turned a vast dry swath of the Great Plains from North Dakota to Texas into arable farmland. But in recent years reliance on the aquifer has skyrocketed—leading scientists to project that, barring a change in current irrigation trends, nearly 70 percent of the resource could be depleted in the next half century....
In one of the deadliest nightclub fires in American history, 100 people died at a rock concert in Rhode Island nearly a decade ago. But the biggest killer wasn’t the flames; it was lethal gases released from burning sound-insulation foam and other plastics. In a fatal bit of irony, attempts to snuff fires like this catastrophic one could be making some fires even more deadly. New research suggests that chemicals – brominated and chlorinated flame retardants – that are added to upholstered furniture and other household items to stop the spread of flames increase emissions of two poisonous gases....
A 21-meter-wide hole in the ground opened up behind two homes last month in Dunedin, Fla., swallowing a swimming pool, a boat and eventually both houses. Days later, geologist Clint Kromhout found himself on the phone with a woman who lived nearby. She was upset, and ready to sell her house and leave the state. Kromhout, who works with the Florida Geological Survey in Tallahassee, gave her his usual speech: anyone here should get used to sinkholes....
Massachusetts plans to phase out sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, speeding down the same road as California. While many climate hawks have their eyes trained on the federal government, the proposal last week from Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) heralds significant climate action at the state level. “I’m really excited to see Gov. Baker moving forward to address global warming pollution from cars and get more zero-emission vehicles on the road,” said Morgan Folger, director of the Zero Carbon Campaign at Environment America....
To find out more about your local water situation, check in with your local water authority, a few of which are listed below: Alameda County Water District http://www.acwd.org Greater Augusta Utility District http://www.augustawater.org Austin Water Utility http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/water Baltimore Bureau of Water & Wastewater http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/dpw/water.html Bangor Water District http://www.bangorwater.org Benbrook Water Authority http://www.bwsa.org Boston Water and Sewer Commission http://www.bwsc.org Broward County Water and Wastewater Services http://www.broward.org/waterservices/ Carmichael Water District http://www.carmichaelwd.org Castaic Lake Water Agency http://www....
A hacking campaign has gained access to private information from a number of government and industry organizations, including the U.S. Departments of Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security. The cyberattacks, which were first reported this past weekend, were carried out by compromising a software platform produced by a vendor called SolarWinds. “We are aware of a potential vulnerability which, if present, is currently believed to be related to updates which were released between March and June 2020 to our Orion monitoring products,” Kevin Thompson, president and CEO of SolarWinds, explained in a prepared statement shared via e-mail....
For the first few decades of its existence, the National Security Agency was a quiet department with one primary job: keeping an eye on the Soviet Union. Its enemy was well defined and monolithic. Its principal tools were phone taps, spy planes and hidden microphones. After the attacks of September 11, all of that changed. The nsa’s chief enemy became a diffuse network of individual terrorists. Anyone in the world could be a legitimate target for spying....
When the twin Voyager spacecraft blasted off in 1977, each carried a phonograph record containing sounds and images intended to represent life on Earth to any alien civilization that might find them (pictured above). In an approachable narrative, music writer Scott tells the story of the astronomers, writers, artists and musicologists who, led by Carl Sagan, compiled the interstellar playlist, which in the end included “Johnny B. Goode,” the Brandenburg Concerto No....
Hummingbirds took just 22 million years to diversify from a single common ancestor into 338 tiny, colorful species. And they have not finished yet. Evolutionary biologist Jim McGuire of the University of California, Berkeley, and his collaborators have found that although some hummingbird groups have saturated the available space in their environments, others are still developing into new species at an extraordinary rate. By comparing their rates of speciation and extinction, McGuire’s team calculated that the number of hummingbird species could double before reaching an equilibrium in the next several million years....
The COVID crisis has led many scientists to take up arms (or at least keyboards) to defend their enterprise—and to be sure, science needs defenders these days. But in their zeal to fight back against vaccine rejection and other forms of science denial, some scientists say things that just aren’t true—and you can’t build trust if the things you are saying are not trustworthy. One popular move is to insist that science is right—full stop—and that once we discover the truth about the world, we are done....
President Obama’s top climate diplomat acknowledged today that Capitol Hill delays over global warming legislation will likely push international negotiations to work beyond a December summit in Copenhagen on a new treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. “I think that we’ll shape the thing to get as much done as can be done, and there are some pieces that need to get completed,” Todd Stern, the State Department’s climate envoy, told reporters....
If you ever feel cynical about human beings, a good antidote is to talk to artificial-intelligence researchers. You might expect them to be triumphalist now that AI systems match or beat humans at recognizing faces, translating languages, playing board and arcade games, and remembering to use the turn signal. To the contrary, they’re always talking about how marvelous the human brain is, how adaptable, how efficient, how infinite in faculty. Machines still lack these qualities....
