Posts

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these technologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation....

FUJI, THE DOLPHIN Winter’s not the first dolphin to receive a prosthesis—that distinction goes to Fuji, who had the end of her tail amputated after contracting a mysterious necrotic disease. Fuji, who lives in an aquarium in Japan, lost a much smaller portion of her tail—just her back fin—than Winter did, but she also struggled to adapt to her new body. So volunteers at tire-manufacturer Bridgestone came to the rescue, reportedly spending $83,000 to build Fuji a prosthetic fin made of rubber and carbon fiber....

One of the first things U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen (D–Wisc.) did when he took office last year was to nix his congressional health care coverage. The move stunned a human resources staffer, who, the lawmaker says, looked at him as though he were insane. “I’ll respectfully decline until you can make that same offer for all of my constituents,” he says he told her, explaining his decision to turn down what many say is the Cadillac of U....

Once, while visiting Brooklyn, I got a call from a fellow Bronxite, back on the mainland. When I revealed my location, he said, “Brooklyn?! What time is it there?” Despite the interborough bafflement, Brooklyn has been a genuine part of the land of the free since day one, that is, July 4, 1776. So when Lena Horne was born there in 1917, she automatically became a U.S. citizen. About 25 years later Horne was asked to give two concerts at Camp Robinson in Alabama, one to white servicemen, the second to black GIs....

The Peripheral by William Gibson G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2014 (($28.95)) Famed speculative-fiction author Gibson writes of a noir reality where technology dominates a society possessing mind-controlled smartphones, an advanced Web that permits time travel, and robots that appear human but are actually mentally remote-controlled by people. In this dark, Big Brother–esque world, the main characters live in near and distant futures connected by a wireless device called “the server.” An unknown employer hires the story’s heroine, Flynne, to beta-test a virtual game....

(Reuters) - Costco Wholesale Corp will pay a $335,000 fine and spend about $2 million over three years to fix refrigerant leaks and make other improvements at 274 stores to settle allegations that the warehouse club operator violated the federal Clean Air Act. The U.S. Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said Costco failed from 2004 to 2007 to promptly repair leaks from its refrigeration equipment of the refrigerant R-22, an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas with roughly 1,800 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide....

In this world of Photoshop and online scams, it pays to have a hearty dose of skepticism at reports of something strange—including an albino fetal shark with one eye smack in the middle of its nose like a Cyclops. But the Cyclops shark, sliced from the belly of a pregnant mama dusky shark caught by a commercial fisherman in the Gulf of California earlier this summer, is by all reports the real thing....

Leaping through the air with ease and spinning in place like tops, ballet dancers are visions of the human body in action at its most spectacular and controlled. Their brains, too, appear to be special, able to evade the dizziness that normally would result from rapid pirouettes. When compared with ordinary people’s brains, researchers found in a study published early this year, parts of dancers’ brains involved in the perception of spinning seem less sensitive, which may help them resist vertigo....

By Erika Check Hayden of Nature magazineUntil last week, scrutinizing a fetus’s DNA for indications of genetic abnormalities meant tapping into the mother’s womb with a needle. Now there’s a test that can do it using a small sample of the mother’s blood. MaterniT21, a Down’s syndrome test that Sequenom of San Diego, California, launched in major centers across the United States on 17 October, is the first of several such tests expected on the market in the next year....

Scientists have created a mystery material that seems to conduct electricity without any resistance at temperatures of up to about 15 °C. That’s a new record for superconductivity, a phenomenon usually associated with very cold temperatures. The material itself is poorly understood, but it shows the potential of a class of superconductors discovered in 2015. The superconductor has one serious limitation, however: it survives only under extremely high pressures, approaching those at the centre of Earth, meaning that it will not have any immediate practical applications....

Mike Webster played for 17 seasons in the National Football League (NFL). He was instrumental to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ four Super Bowl victories during his career. In 2002 he died of heart failure in the coronary care unit of Allegheny General Hospital at age 50. His medical history included serious neuropsychiatric problems beginning around the time he left the NFL. After Webster retired at age 38, his family watched him disintegrate into a tormented, wandering soul living out of his Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck....

Excerpted from Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg. Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2014. When it came to water, New York was the new Rome. In 1917 Edward Hagaman Hall of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, founded in 1895 to protect natural scenery and landmarks, observed that even “[t]he greatest of the famous Roman aqueducts was only half as long as this one, and in technical difficulty was, in comparison, like building houses with children’s ‘blocks....

When science revises its stance, the field itself follows established protocol to adapt, but public opinion can be slow to catch up. Rather than wiping the slate clean, last month’s retraction of a key paper proposing a link between childhood vaccines and autism seem only to have widened the societal divide on the issue. And the rising rate of retractions—roughly ninefold between 1990 and 2008—suggest that there could be more cases in which public opinion carries on long after science has reversed course....

New Mega Prime Numbers The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a volunteer-powered distributed-computing group, formally announced in September the discovery of the two largest known prime numbers—those divisible only by 1 and themselves. The bigger of the two, 243,112,609 – 1 in shorthand, has nearly 13 million digits and came out of the machine of Edson Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles. GIMPS is set to claim the $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the first 10-million-plus-digit prime....

There is perhaps no mammal that is less often in the mood for sex than the female giant panda. Each spring, female pandas enter estrous (aka “heat”) for only 24 to 72 hours. If male pandas do not make their move during that brief window of time, they miss their chance to mate. Although researchers initially struggled to breed pandas in captivity, they achieved recent success by closely studying the females’ reproductive behaviors....

May 10 (Reuters) - Oil leaked into the Hudson River on Sunday after a transformer fire and explosion a day earlier at the Indian Point nuclear plant north of New York City, and Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was concerned about environmental damage. Cuomo visited the plant for a briefing on Sunday. The governor, who in the past has called for the plant to be shut down because of its proximity to densely populated New York City, also visited the plant on Saturday....

There used to be a time when the philosophy was that contact had to be done before civilization eventually reached indigenous tribes and they all died. Isn’t protecting isolated tribes just a way to postpone the inevitable assimilation and subsequent extinction? I don’t know if it is inevitable. Those things happen because of a desire from us civilized peoples to go there and make contact, whatever the reason: to conquer land, grow soybeans, build a road....

In the 1990s the Garden of Eden was destroyed. The fertile wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were diked and drained, turning most of 15,000 square kilometers of marsh to desert. By the year 2000, less than 10 percent of that swampland–nearly twice as big as Florida’s Everglades–remained. But reflooding of some areas since 2003 has produced what some scientists are calling the “miracle of the Mesopotamian marshes”–a return of plants, aquatic life and even rare birds to their ancestral home....

TOOLS Water Smarts You know your carbon footprint, but how about your water footprint? Find out how much water you use just to eat a roast beef sandwich every day for lunch. www.waterfootprint.org Offset the Dog Discover ways to green your pets: how to keep ticks off naturally, where to find eco-friendly pet products and how to offset Fido’s carbon emissions. http://planetgreen.discovery.com/go-green/green-pets ONLINE GAMES Green Your Brain See how much eco-trivia you know—and add some of your own for other players....

Key concepts Chemistry Solubility Water Temperature Introduction Have you ever mixed sand and salt together and wondered how you could separate them again? If you had to separate them, would you have nightmares of tiny tweezers, a magnifying glass and hours spent picking grains of salt and sand apart? Don’t be afraid, there is another way! Using the differences in solubility between salt and sand, you can find the simple “solution” to this problem....