If you were given a free hand to plan how your life will end—your last weeks, days, hours and minutes—what would you choose? Would you, for example, want to remain in great shape right up until the last minute and then go quickly? Many people say they would choose that option, but I see an important catch. If you are feeling fine one moment, the very last thing you would want is to drop dead the next....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In ancient Egypt, the people sustained the government and the government reciprocated. Egypt had no cash economy until the coming of the Persians in 525 BCE. The people worked the land, the government collected the bounty and then distributed it back to the people according to their need and merit....
The jockeying for the alternative energy source of the future is like a horse race with a staggered starting order. Corn got out to a big lead on the back of government subsidies, but it’s been brushed back by reports that it actually generates more fossil fuel emissions during its transformation to ethanol than it avoids as a fuel. This realization caused soybeans and switchgrass to catch up. Suddenly, technological advances allowed waste products such as straw and corn stover to zoom into the picture....
The first U.S. Ebola patient who walked into an emergency room last month posed a major test for the chosen hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. The hospital made some now-notorious missteps, including failing to diagnose Ebola virus the first time the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, arrived as well as allowing two nurses who treated him to become infected. In the aftermath of the case the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated its guidelines for health care workers’ protective gear, called personal protective equipment (PPE), which was probably at fault for the nurses’ infections....
Machine learning started in the 1950s with the work of pioneering scientists such as Frank Rosenblatt, who built an electronic neuron that learned to recognize digits, and Arthur Samuel, whose checkers program learned by playing against itself until it could beat some humans. But it is only in the past decade that the field has truly taken off, giving us self-driving cars, virtual assistants that understand our commands (up to a point) and countless other applications....
When I began reporting on autism about 15 years ago, therapists would talk about achieving the “optimal outcome” for children on the autism spectrum. What they meant was changing the classic behaviors associated with the condition—suppressing repetitive actions such as hand flapping, drilling young kids to make eye contact, rehearsing speech and social interactions—so that ultimately the children would no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for autism. It was an elusive goal that only a tiny percentage could reach....
Falling into a black hole was never going to be fun. As soon as physicists realized that black holes exist, we knew that getting too close to one spelled certain death. But we used to think that an astronaut falling past the point of no return—the so-called event horizon—would not feel anything special. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, no signposts would mark the spot where the chance of escape dropped to zero....
The story goes that in the landmark first Kennedy–Nixon debate, in September 1960, many of those who listened on the radio believed Nixon had won. Yet most of the 70 million or so citizens who watched on television were sure Kennedy had prevailed. On that night, (between 9:30 and 10:30 Eastern time), our understanding of the power of the visual image in politics entered a new era. Today, when every exchange can be repeatedly replayed and every nuance and gesture, however slight, can be analyzed and deconstructed, a candidate’s nonverbal communication is just as important as anything he or she might say....
Across the globe, hives of honeybees are dying off in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Among the proposed culprits are pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are supposed to be less harmful to beneficial insects and mammals than the previous generation of chemicals. Debate over neonicotinoids has become fierce. Conservation groups and politicians in the United Kingdom and Europe have called for a ban on their use, but agricultural organizations have said that farmers will face hardship if that happens....
A disk of gas and dust around a star some 450 light-years from Earth had astronomers puzzled. When observations of the star HL Tauri revealed a glowing disk split by crisp bands, some assumed unseen planets were carving out paths as they orbited. But new simulations suggest a more complex picture. Those gaps may actually result from gravitational tugs of planets elsewhere in the disk, even outside of the disk, and learning to read these patterns could speed the detection of currently hard-to-find planets....
Sometimes they lift. Sometimes they separate. But do underwire bras cause cancer? Could it be that the very garment designed to offer women support is actually killing them? That’s the rumor that has been circulating for decades. It all began in 1995 with a book called Dressed to Kill, in which Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer, a husband and wife medical anthropologist team, claimed that women who wore tight-fitting bras all day, every day, had a much higher risk of developing breast cancer than those who went au naturel....
A brain chemical linked to pleasure and depression may also trigger fear, according to a new study. Researchers say this may explain why the neurotransmitter dopamine, known to cause addictive behavior, may also play a role in anxiety disorders. “Showing that dopamine can enhance both approach and avoidance behaviors is an important finding,” says Howard Fields, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Approach behavior describes what someone attracted to an object does to obtain it....
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M.—The hangar at the operating hub for public space travel is being dedicated here today (Oct. 17), home base for pay-per-view suborbital treks out of Earth’s atmosphere. The Spaceport America Terminal Hangar Facility is to be utilized by Virgin Galactic, a spaceline operation backed by British billionaire and adventurer Richard Branson. The hangar-dedication ceremony is the latest in a string of opening events for the spaceport. In October 2010, officials dedicated the facility’s long runway, named “The Governor Bill Richardson Spaceway....
Simply planting trees will not necessarily slow down climate change, an analysis of Europe’s vegetation history shows. Although the continent’s forests have expanded by 10% since 1750, timber harvesting and shifts to more commercially valuable tree species have resulted in a net release of carbon to the atmosphere, a Science paper published on February 4 concludes. The changes have also had local effects, the analysis finds, raising surface temperatures by 0....
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Unusually heavy late summer rains have killed more than 30 people in South Africa but have brought welcome relief to grain farmers after drought conditions in some parts of the maize belt in January and February. The government said 32 people had died because of the rains over the past two weeks in the northern and eastern provinces of North West, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. The toll included 25 drownings and six people killed by lightning....
Digital technologies have the potential to dramatically transform Indian higher education. A new model built around massive open online courses (MOOCs) that are developed locally and combined with those provided by top universities abroad could deliver higher education on a scale and at a quality not possible before. University enrollment in India is huge and growing. It surpassed the U.S.’s enrollment in 2010 and became second only to China that year....
Relax. Until recently, lurking in the dark recesses of mathematical existence, there might have been a really weird sphere of 254 dimensions, or 510, or 1,022.* In fact, for all you knew, you might have had to worry about weird spheres when visiting any space with numbers of dimensions of the type 2k - 2. Not anymore. “We can all sleep a bit better tonight,” joked mathematical physicist John Baez of the University of California, Riverside, in his blog....
Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users’ photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out. Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency....
By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Air pollution tied to industrialization in the northern hemisphere almost certainly reduced rainfall over Central America in new evidence that human activity can disrupt the climate, a study suggested on Monday. “We identify an unprecedented drying trend since 1850,” the scientists wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience after studying the rate of growth since 1550 of a stalagmite found in a cave in the tiny nation of Belize....
Singing His Own Song This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin. Dutton Press, 2006 ($25) Everyone knows that music can calm a savage beast, rouse a marching platoon or move lovers to tears. But no one knows exactly how. Daniel Levitin, a professional musician, record producer and now neuroscientist at McGill University, explains the latest thinking into why tunes touch us so deeply....
