Posts

Researchers in Arizona have found that urban heat islands made worse by sun-baked asphalt roads can be mitigated by a relatively simple measure. Paint the streets gray. A study by Arizona State University and the city of Phoenix found that applying a reflective, gray-colored emulsion material to black asphalt resulted in a 10.5- to 12-degree-Fahrenheit drop in average road surface temperatures, while sunrise temperatures saw an average 2.4-degree drop. “This is exactly what we were hoping for,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said in a statement....

Cities across the country are inadvertently underestimating their greenhouse gas emissions, new research suggests. And in many cases, they’re undercounting by a lot. In a study of 48 U.S. urban areas, researchers found that the average city had underreported its carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 20%. But in some cases, the report was more than 100% off. Torrance, Calif., and Blacksburg, Va., had some of the largest underestimates, at over 145% and 123% respectively....

An individual with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is overcome with an urge to engage in unproductive habits, such as excessive hand washing or lock checking. Though recognizing these behaviors as irrational, the person remains trapped in a cycle of life-disrupting compulsions. Previous studies found that OCD patients have abnormalities in two different brain systems—one that creates habits and one that plays a supervisory role. Yet whether the anomalies drive habit formation or are instead a consequence of doing an action over and over remained unclear....

Four years ago, as the world reeled from its most severe economic crisis in almost a century, the U.S. federal government poured roughly $800 billion into the economy, including $15 billion for scientific research and tens of billions more for green energy and environmental protection. The money must be spent by this month or returned to the government. Here are some highlights of what it bought us. BETTER MILESTONES FOR FETAL GROWTH To determine if a baby is properly developing in the womb, obstetricians use measurement standards devised decades ago....

Glassblowing artist Josh Simpson creates imaginary planets that have landmasses, oceans, mountain ranges, volcanoes, even clouds. His big mega-planets, shown at a variety of museums, are 30 centimeters in diameter and weigh 23 kilograms. But he also makes small orbs a couple of centimeters across, which are being placed surreptitiously around our own Earth. Simpson’s inspiration for his clandestine Infinity Project came from some marbles he found a long time ago on his property in Shelburne, Mass....

The James Webb Space Telescope is on the road again. After passing its final test at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the megatelescope is ready for the next stop on its trip to space: further testing at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The final mirrors for the giant space observatory arrived at Goddard in 2014, and the telescope’s construction was finally completed in November 2016, after more than 20 years of construction....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient Egyptians understood that their gods had prevailed over the forces of chaos through the creation of the world and relied upon humanity’s help to maintain it. The people of Mesopotamia held this same belief but felt they were co-workers with the gods, laboring daily to hold back chaos through even the simplest acts, but the Egyptians believed all they had to do was recognize how the world worked, who was responsible for its operation, and behave accordingly....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The legend of Mulan, now world-famous thanks to the Disney films of 1998 and 2020, is the story of a young girl who disguises herself as a man to take her aged father’s place as a conscript in the army and so preserve the family honor. The success of the story hinges on an audience’s acceptance of the cross-dressing protagonist and the enduring popularity of the tale – attested to from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) but, more so, from the 16th century CE onwards – would suggest such an acceptance in Chinese society but, in fact, this was not so....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Selja monastery has been considered one of the most sacred sites in Norway for more than 1000 years. The monastery is connected to the legend of St. Sunniva (10th century CE), who is the only female Norwegian saint, and was for a long time an important pilgrimage site in the country, second only to The Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim....

One of the most common causes of death in hospitals is acute kidney injury, or AKI, the sudden loss of function in this vital blood-cleaning organ. AKI, formerly called acute renal failure, struck almost four million people in the U.S. in 2014 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year. Survivors often need expensive dialysis for months or years afterward....

About 350 million people around the world suffer from depression. Therapists can use many different techniques to help, but none has more rigorous scientific evidence behind it than cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). This “inside-out” technique focuses primarily on thought patterns, training patients to recognize and reframe problematic thinking. Now, however, mental health professionals have another option: mounting evidence shows that a technique called behavioral-activation (BA) therapy is just as effective as CBT....

Pairs of stars with separations five hundred times the size of the solar system could be triplets in disguise. New research indicates that many of the known wide binaries (double star systems) may have once contained three stars, and many could still harbor a third. Bound together by gravity, binary stars make a large percentage of the universe. While most are close, some pairs can orbit with separations thousands of times larger than the distance between the Earth and the sun, known as an astronomical unit....

For one sleepless week in early September 2009, Garth Illingworth and his team had the early Universe all to themselves. At NASA’s request, Illingworth, Rychard Bouwens and Pascal Oesch had just spent the previous week staring into their computer screens at the University of California, Santa Cruz, scanning through hundreds of black-and-white portraits of faint galaxies recorded in a multi-day time exposure by a newly installed infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope....

The invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) nearly 30 years ago revolutionized neuroscience by letting researchers visualize brain activity associated with behavior. The technology is spatially precise, but its main limitation is speed; fMRI measures blood oxygen level changes, which take about six seconds—a snail’s pace as compared with brain signals themselves. Other methods, such as electroencephalography (EEG), are fast but imprecise and cannot detect deeper brain signals. Now physicists Samuel Patz of Harvard Medical School and Ralph Sinkus of King’s College London and their colleagues have adapted existing tissue-imaging technology to overcome fMRI’s speed limitation and tested it in mouse brains....

Clarification appended. A new study by Google.org projects that breakthroughs in clean energy technologies stemming from aggressive federal and private-sector investment would add $150 billion in additional economic output and 1.1 million new jobs by 2030, with the gains continuing to grow in future years. The study, “The Impact of Clean Energy Innovation,” is based on McKinsey & Co.’s Low Carbon Economics computer modeling. A key assumption is that technology breakthroughs can be made in solar, nuclear, wind and geothermal power, as well as in carbon capture and sequestration and electric vehicle batteries....

As COVID cases declined across the U.S. in recent months and mask mandates were lifted, more people returned to restaurants, concert halls and offices maskless. But the novel coronavirus’s Omicron subvariant BA.2—which caused another wave in Europe and China—and related variants threaten to reverse that progress here. Earlier this month dozens of attendees (including high-ranking government officials) tested positive for COVID after attending a dinner in Washington, D.C. The safest option, of course, is to continue avoiding crowded indoor activities....

Early this year one of the world’s most prominent scientists, Eric Lander, had to resign his position as President Joe Biden’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was forced to quit because of evidence that he had bullied staff members and created a hostile work environment. Lander, a leader in the successful effort to sequence the human genome, had headed the prestigious Broad Institute of Harvard and M....

Key concepts Chemistry Molecular gastronomy Surface tension Spherification Introduction Do you enjoy getting creative in the kitchen? If so, this activity is for you! Molecular cuisine—taking tools, ingredients and methods typically used in science and using them in cooking—might sound fancy and complicated, but some techniques are easy to replicate! Get your hands wet, fire up your creativity and see how rewarding it can be! Background Molecular gastronomy—the science of culinary phenomena—brings scientific procedures, ingredients and instruments into the kitchen....

Kevin Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University, has spent nearly two decades studying remote sites in Antarctica that experts like to call an “oasis in a desert of ice.” They are so inaccessible that even scientists who study them may not have laid eyes on them. The handful that Arrigo visited smelled like rotten eggs. They are called polynyas, formations that derive their name from the Russian word for “hole in the ice,” and are typically an expanse of open seawater along the coast that is enclosed by floating sea ice and the continental shelf....

Editor’s Note: This article is an extended version of “Bugs in the Ice Sheet” from the May 2012 Issue of Scientific American. BOZEMAN, Mont.—Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again....