Dieters and exercise buffs might feel better about their progress if they tracked their weight loss in daltons. Even a short jog can help you shed a few septillion daltons, a unit of mass often used in biochemistry that is equivalent to the atomic mass unit. (Of course, no weight-conscious individual would want to know their full weight in this unit—the average American male weighs approximately 5 X 1028 daltons.)...
Anna Fisher was leading an undergraduate seminar on the subject of attention and distractibility in young children when she noticed that the walls of her classroom were bare. That got her thinking about kindergarten classrooms, which are typically decorated with cheerful posters, multicolored maps, charts and artwork. What effect, she wondered, does all that visual stimulation have on children, who are far more susceptible to distraction than her students at Carnegie Mellon University?...
(Refiles to add dropped paragraph 12) By Ed Stoddard PRETORIA, Jan 22 (Reuters) - South Africa said on Thursday that it had moved around 100 rhinos to unspecified neighbouring states as part of efforts to stem the illicit slaughter of the animals for their horns. Home to around 80 percent of the global rhino population, South Africa is at the epicentre of a poaching crisis. Government figures released on Thursday show the country lost a record 1,215 rhinos last year, about a 20 percent increase on the 2013 toll, with 49 slain so far this year....
Hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean typically start as thunderstorms that blow off the western coast of Africa. With the right environmental conditions, these tropical depressions gather strength from warm ocean waters and spin up to hurricane force with the help of spiraling winds. But it is only roughly one out of 10 such storms that complete this evolution and scientists do not have a clear understanding of what makes for a future tropical cyclone....
Culture influences the songs we sing, the steps we dance and the words we write. It also shapes our brains. Scientists have long known that neuroplasticity allows individual events to sculpt the brain’s form and function. Now there is evidence that life experience as intangible as culture can also reorganize our neural pathways. Recent research has found that culture influences the way a person’s brain perceives visual stimuli such as scenes and colors....
We all roll our eyes at happiness clichés: “Live, laugh, love.” “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” “Dance like nobody’s watching.” Even if there’s some truth in inspirational sayings, anything you’ve ever seen crocheted on a pillow or framed on Michael Scott’s wall is automatically suspect. This week, to celebrate the 200th episode of Savvy Psychologist, we’ll look at the science behind 5 happiness clichés and find new, fresh ways to put them into action....
When neuroscientist George Koob proposed creating a vaccine for addiction 25 years ago, his colleagues thought he was wasting his time. The immune system evolved to prevent infections, not highs from illegal drugs. Prevailing wisdom holds that treating addiction requires months or years of psychotherapy to help addicts change their thought patterns, a difficult process that does not consistently work. But Koob, then at the Scripps Research Institute, wanted addicts to be able to see their doctor for a shot that could keep them from getting high when their motivation to stay clean waned....
A newfound stellar remnant some 17,000 light-years away is not your everyday pulsar. For starters, the hyperdense, swiftly pirouetting object appears to belong to a rare class known as disrupted recycled pulsars. Pulsars are so known because they rotate rapidly—this one spins more than 40 times a second—and give off a beam of radio waves that sweeps across the sky, much like a lighthouse. To an outside observer the radiation appears to pulse each time the beam points in the observer’s direction....
Radiation Redux NASA has worried that cosmic rays could undermine a human voyage to Mars. New simulations and calculations, though, suggest that such lengthy exposure to space radiation may pose only half the health risk that NASA had expected. The best U.S. space radiation simulations take place at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Booster accelerator, where a facility for space research opened in 2003. The device sends beams of protons, iron and other cosmic elements down a 100-meter-long tunnel to strike human cells, mice and rats....
[Editor’s note: In his answer to this question, the late John Margrave argued that salt dissolves in water as ions of sodium and chlorine, and these ions hydrate, or join to, the water molecules. This process gives off heat, which thaws ice. A number of readers alerted us to problems with this explanation. Chemical engineering professor Arthur Pelton of the University of Montreal provided a representative correction. His explanation follows, and Margrave’s original answer appears below that....
In 2011 Meredith Perry, then a senior paleobiology student at the University of Pennsylvania, reached for her laptop charger and found herself wondering whether that cumbersome cord might someday become obsolete. She began researching ways to turn that idea into a reality. Perry learned that wireless power transmitters based on magnetic resonance and induction already existed but that they had limited range. Their curse was the inverse square law, which states that the intensity of electromagnetic radiation is inversely proportional to the distance from the emitting source....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The story of Cinderella is one of the most popular in the world. In the west, it has enjoyed a continuous following since its revision and publication by Charles Perrault in 1697 CE but the tale of the young heroine, unjustly forced into servitude, who becomes elevated to royalty was told for centuries before in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) in the story of Yeh Shen....
Chikungunya is a scary-sounding virus with some scary symptoms: joint pain so excruciating that patients often can’t stand or even sit upright for months. The mosquito-borne virus got its start thousands of years ago in southeastern Africa, where it generally caused a slow but steady stream of cases. About 50 years ago a mild strain of the virus spread to Asia. Then, following a drought in Kenya in 2004, cases of chikungunya in Africa soared and spread eastward across the Indian Ocean, causing severe disease and affecting hundreds of thousands of people across Asia....
A recent scientific discovery had researchers buzzing about, of all things, tartar. That’s right, the crusty deposits that the dentist scrapes off your teeth when you go for a cleaning. Except in this case, it was the tartar on the teeth of the nearly two-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba, which has been held up as a candidate ancestor for our genus, Homo. No one had ever before found tartar in an early hominin (a creature on the line leading to humans, after the split from the line leading to chimpanzees)....
Voters in the recent Iowa caucuses and Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary will rely on paper ballots as they have for generations. In the very next primary on January 21, South Carolinians will vote with backlit touch-screen computers. In an age of electronic banking and online college degrees, why hasn’t the rest of the nation gone the way of the Palmetto State? The reason is simple and resonates with the contentious debate that has yet to be resolved after at least 15 years of wrangling over the issue of electronic voting....
Metaphors make for colorful sayings, but can be confusing when taken literally. A study of people who are unable to make sense of figures of speech has helped scientists identify a brain region they believe plays a key role in grasping metaphors. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego and his colleagues tested four patients who had experienced damage to the left angular gyrus region of their brains....
By the numbers, the Piedmont Highlanders should not have won so many football games. The squad at the Piedmont, Calif., high school was cobbled together from slim pickings—thanks to an 800-person student body that’s half the size of the other schools in their division. But head coach Kurt Bryan and Steve Humphries, the Highlander’s offensive coordinator, invented a secret weapon to keep them competitive: the A-11 offense. View Slide Show of the plays....
Maya, a noisy, seven-year-old pooch, looks straight at me. And with just a little prompting from her owner says, “I love you.” Actually, she says “Ahh rooo uuu!” Maya is working hard to produce what sounds like real speech. “She makes these sounds that really, really sound like words to everyone who hears her, but I think you have to believe,” says her owner, Judy Brookes. You’ve probably seen this sort of scene on YouTube and David Letterman....
Standing in my office 25 years ago was an unknown, newly minted astronomer with a half-smile on her face. She had come with an outrageous request—really a demand—that my team modify our exhaustively tested software to make one of our most important and in-demand scientific instruments do something it had never been designed for and risk breaking it. All to carry out an experiment that was basically a waste of time and couldn’t be done—to prove that a massive black hole lurked at the center of our Milky Way....
The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word “diversity” can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male....
