Posts

Tesla Motors Inc.’s unveiling of its new electric vehicle yesterday had the marks of an iPhone release—long lines of enthusiastic consumers, a glossy product and a CEO presenting in a simple black shirt. Little new information came out about the Model 3, but with the car’s comparably more affordable $35,000 price tag and 215-mile range, Tesla is making a bid to become a mass-market auto manufacturer. Worldwide preorders for the car reached 115,000 and kept climbing last night, more than the total number of electric vehicles sold in the United States last year....

Every month, Lishan Su receives a small test tube on ice from a company in California. In it is a piece of liver from a human fetus aborted at between 14 and 19 weeks of pregnancy. Su and his staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill carefully grind the liver, centrifuge it and then extract and purify liver- and blood-forming stem cells. They inject the cells into the livers of newborn mice, and allow those mice to mature....

Recent summer temperatures in parts of Australia were high enough to melt asphalt. As global warming cranks up the heat and climatic events intensify, many plants may be unable to cope. But at least one species of eucalyptus tree can withstand extreme heat by continuing to “sweat” when other essential processes taper off, a new study finds. As plants convert sunlight into food, or photosynthesize, they absorb carbon dioxide through pores on their leaves....

In an idealized version of human existence, wealth lifts all boats, gender equality prevails and everyone behaves freely as the individuals they are. Such a gender-equal fictional utopia starts from a premise that equal access to wealth and opportunity will erase the divide between men and women. But what if the utopian predictions are wrong? What if women and men, when all other things are largely equal, express more, not less, of a gender-based perspective?...

Nate Kornell would like to see a big step forward in the methods students use to prepare for tests. Kornell is a professor of psychology at Williams College whose research focuses on effective learning strategies. Teachers and students often do not employ such scientifically supported strategies, he notes—in part because superficial tests do not make them necessary. He offers two examples of instructional practices that could come into wider use if tests themselves made more rigorous demands....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Five people have been confirmed dead, 18 have been rescued and are injured, some seriously, and several remain unaccounted for after a sudden volcanic eruption on Whakaari/White Island off the east coast of New Zealand. The island is a tourist destination and around 50 people were on it when it erupted on Monday afternoon....

Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain. The study, published in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the exercise, they were told to repeat an expletive of their choice or to chant a neutral word. The 67 volunteers who cursed reported less pain and endured the iciness for about 40 seconds longer on average....

The brain is voracious: compared with other organs, it consumes 10 times more oxygen and nutrients, receiving them by way of dense networks of blood vessels. Scientists know how these networks initially grow, but a surprising new study suggests that they are stabilized in early life by stem cells in the brain called radial glia. The finding could have significant implications for our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, a condition characterized in part by brainwide vascular problems....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Co-authored by Steven Umbrello and Tina Forsee It is very common to hear in both academic circles, as well as more close-knit Stoic circles, Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 CE) being referred to as the philosopher king. This is not an idea that is heavily under contention. Marcus Aurelius was definitely an amazing individual....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The literature of ancient Egypt is as rich and varied as any other culture. From the inscriptions of the Old Kingdom of Egypt (c. 2613-2181 BCE) through the Love Poems of the New Kingdom (c. 1570 - c. 1069 BCE) the Egyptian scribes produced an impressive body of work....

If your idea of a good time is locking yourself in a room with half a dozen other people hell-bent on solving puzzles in order to get out, look no further than the growing worldwide phenomena of “escape rooms.” These games challenge players holed up in tight quarters to use logic and creativity to solve “crimes,” defuse “explosive devices” or, in one case, flee a hungry “zombie” chained to the wall....

Archaeologists and physicists both covet ancient Roman lead—for very different reasons. Old lead is pure, dense and much less radioactive than the newly mined metal, so it makes ideal shielding for sensitive physics experiments. But it also has historical significance—and many archaeologists object to melting down 2,000-year-old ingots. “Are these experiments important enough to destroy parts of our past, to discover something about our future?” asks Elena Perez-Alvaro, an archaeology graduate student at the University of Birmingham in England, who wrote a paper on the dilemmas involved in the journal Rosetta....

Credit: Robert Lisak Exosomes are a sensational biological discovery. These minute lipid sacs—among the smallest of biological particles known as nanovesicles—are produced and then secreted by all cell types in all animal species. Bacteria produce very similar nanovesicles. Exosomes are present in all body fluids and seem to be involved in nearly all biological processes. The main function of exosomes is to enter cells, either nearby in the tissues or systemically after transiting through the bloodstream, to deliver the genetic information that they carry....

In a tour de force of biological chemistry, scientists have pieced together an entire protein hormone from scratch, and demonstrated that it works just as well in mice as the natural version. If verified, the complete synthesis of erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, would mark a new stage in the production and study of biological therapeutics. No one is more pleased with the achievement—a decade in the making—than Samuel Danishefsky, a biological chemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who led the team....

Carbon cages floating in the space between the stars have been confirmed as the cause of cosmic-light features that have puzzled astronomers for almost 100 years. In 1919, Mary Lea Heger, a graduate student at the University of California’s Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, saw that particular wavelengths of light were dimmed in the emissions from certain stars, in a way that seemed unrelated to the stars themselves. As astronomers spotted more such features, they attributed them to molecules in the interstellar gas that absorb wavelengths of light on their way to Earth, and called them diffuse interstellar bands (DIB)....

Most of us know it is unwise to use the same unwashed utensils on raw then cooked chicken or eat raw cookie dough (although we may cheerfully ignore the latter suggestion) because of the salmonella risk, but we aren’t used to thinking of candy and nuts as potential pathogen sources. Yet chocolate can indeed pose a health risk due to contamination by the stomach-churning, usually nonfatal pathogen. The last salmonella outbreak traced to chocolate was in 2006 in the U....

To the lay ear, the term “spin-bath” may sound like an ordeal fit for dirty laundry, but to a physicist, it is the sound of quantum clarity—a clutch of subatomic particles interacting cleanly enough to reveal quantum fluctuations spreading like ripples on a still pond. At a meeting last week of the American Physical Society, researchers described a test run of the most sensitive spin-bath yet, a type of artificial molecule embedded in a small film of synthetic diamond at room temperature....

Next to a national wildlife refuge, Indiana’s Gibson Lake provides a prime fishery for bass and an attractive rest spot for hundreds of species of birds, including endangered least terns. But the manmade lake, built by one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants to hold its wastewater, contains high levels of selenium that jeopardize the birds and rendered fish unsafe to eat. Selenium is an essential nutrient, but in wildlife and people excess amounts can be dangerous....

Complex organic molecules have been discovered for the first time coming from the depths of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, a new study reported. Spacecraft scheduled to launch soon could explore what this new discovery says about the chances of life within icy moons like Enceladus, the study’s researchers said. The sixth largest of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus is only about 314 miles (505 kilometers) in diameter. This makes the moon small enough to fit inside the borders of Arizona....

An experiment is gearing up in Texas to take on one of the universe’s biggest mysteries by compiling a three-dimensional map of the early cosmos. The hope is that the survey will help inform astronomers and cosmologists about the nature of dark energy, a mysterious and hypothetical agent thought to constitute nearly three quarters of the universe’s mass. Dark energy is the term used by cosmologists to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing due to gravitation....