COVID-19 vaccine campaigns in Latin America lag well behind those in the global north. But Chile has been an outlier. It has defied the regional trend and plowed ahead with a campaign that has fully vaccinated a higher percentage of its population than any other country with more than 10 million inhabitants. By the end of March more than one in three Chileans had received a full course of vaccination for COVID-19....
Slowing cargo vessels near coastlines by 10 to 15 miles per hour could dramatically cut ships’ air pollution, according to a new study. But only a few U.S. ports have initiated such efforts. A speed limit of 14 mph, down from the current cruising speeds of 25 to 29 mph, would cut nitrogen oxides – a main ingredient of smog – by 55 percent and soot by almost 70 percent, according to the University of California, Riverside study....
One in nine Americans aged 65 and older has Alzheimer’s disease. Therapy could come in the form of new drugs, but some experts suspect drug trials have failed so far because compounds were tested too late in the disease’s progression. By the time people show signs of dementia, their brains have lost neurons. No therapy can revive dead cells, and little can be done to create new ones. So researchers running trials now seek participants who still pass as cognitively normal but are on the verge of decline....
This is a special series of SA Forum essays produced with the World Economic Forum and to run during the Summit on the Global Agenda, held in Abu Dhabi from November 18 to November 20 The word “drone”, a short term for an unmanned aerial vehicle, usually conjures up images of a menacing machine that spies and shoots from on high. However, over the past three years, a new generation of drones has emerged to address civilian and humanitarian needs, from surveying disaster zones to delivering aid....
The audiences at TED talks are used to being wowed as they learn about advances in technology. Even by TED standards, however, the 2011 presentation by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine was amazing. Unseen by the audience at first, various vials and nozzles hummed with mysterious activity behind Atala while he was on the stage. About two thirds of the way through the talk, a camera zoomed in on the device’s internal armature and showed it weaving back and forth, depositing living cells grown in a laboratory culture layer by layer on a central platform, basing its activity on highly accurate three-dimensional digital renderings....
Have one million free books. Actually, you don’t have to buy e-books, either. Once a book’s copyright has expired, it’s free and legal to download. You can find hundreds of thousands of such books (Poe, Twain, Austen…) at Gutenberg.org, ready to download for your e-book reader or e-book app. Take the Web with you. Try Instapaper. It lets you grab Web articles you encounter through your day, adding them to a Kindle or iPhone-readable “magazine” that you can read later....
Women who develop infections during pregnancy run an increased risk of having a child with autism. Most data indicate that an overactive maternal immune response underlies the risk. But a new analysis runs contrary to this view: It ties high levels of an inflammatory protein in pregnant women to a low risk of autism in their children, suggesting that a strong immune response is protective. Researchers looked at 1,315 mother-child pairs, including 500 children with autism and 235 with developmental delay....
Twelve years ago, members of the Havasupai Tribe entered into a legal battle with Arizona State University, over the ways in which school researchers were using blood samples from tribe members without proper informed consent. The case halted the research and the university returned the blood to the tribe, along with financial compensation. The scuffle became a landmark case in bioethics. Deborah Zoe Laufer’s play, “Informed Consent,” running through September 13 at The Duke on 42nd Street theater in New York City, dramatizes the important case....
Neurologist and dizziness specialist Kevin A. Kerber of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor offers the following explanation: In general, the most common causes of dizziness are activities everyone experiences, at least as children, namely running around in circles or riding carnival attractions that spin, loop or twist. These movements cause an asymmetry in the signals that stem from the vestibular system–a sensory system situated on each side of the head in the inner ear compartments–and that are processed in the brain....
Earthworms laying on sidewalks or streets after a heavy spring rain has become commonplace, but why do they do this … and could they be a travel hazard? Researchers hypothesize several reasons why heavy rain storms bring crawlers out of their soil homes. For years scientists seemed to think the only reason earthworms came to the soil surface after a good rain was to prevent drowning in their water-filled burrows. “This is not true as earthworms breathe through their skins and actually require moisture in the soil to do so,” said Dr....
Theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt did not expect to spend last summer travelling across spongy tundra to a remote gold-mining region in north-eastern Russia. But that is where he spent three weeks tracing the origins of the world’s only known natural example of a quasicrystal—an exotic type of structure discovered in 1982 in a synthetic material by Dan Shechtman, a materials scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who netted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the finding....
Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Today we sit down with Gordon Doherty to discuss his new book Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar. Based in the dark and cold north (i.e. Scotland), Gordon has written extensively on ancient Greece and Rome. His new novel, however, takes us further back to the Late Bronze Age, into the Hittite Empire of Anatolia....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The use of cavalry in Chinese warfare was a significant development which was largely responsible for the abandonment of chariots, that vehicle being much slower and more cumbersome to manoeuvre in battle conditions. The greater speed and mobility of cavalry not only changed battlefield dynamics and troop deployments but also necessitated a far greater investment in fixed defences than previously....
Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Early medieval Irish book art is both beautiful and fascinating. It reflects a flourishing monastic culture which played a key role in the cultural development of Europe from the 6th to 9th centuries CE. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than at the Abbey of St. Gallen, in St....
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 Greece the continued existence of the dead depended on their constant remembrance by the living. The after-life, for the ancient Greeks, consisted of a grey and dreary world in the time of Homer (8th century BCE) and, most famously, we have the scene from Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus meets the spirit of the great warrior Achilles in the nether-world where Achilles tells him he would rather be a landless slave on earth than a king in the underworld....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In his search to secure the continuation of the Tudor line, Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547 CE) married an incredible six times. Some marriages were the result of passion while others were arranged for political reasons. One divorce caused a split in the Church in England from Rome, two wives were imprisoned and executed in the Tower of London, and only two partners outlived Henry....
I have always been startled and fascinated by the sandlike abundance of galaxies sprinkled across the night sky. One of the most sensitive optical images ever made by human beings, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, captures some 10,000 galaxies in an area about 1/100th the size of the full moon. Scaled up to the whole sky, such a density implies a total of 200 billion or so galaxies. And those are just the most luminous ones; the true number is probably much larger....
Overcast days are the enemy of solar energy. Most photovoltaic cells respond to only a relatively narrow part of the sun’s spectrum—and it just happens to be the one that clouds tend to block out. Manufacturers deal with the problem by layering different materials in the cell, but that approach makes them more expensive. Led by chemist Malcolm Chisholm, a team at Ohio State University took a different tack. They doped a polymer commonly used for semiconductor applications, called oligothiophene, with atoms of the metals molybdenum and tungsten....
Exogen Biotechnology, a Berkeley, Calif.–based tech start-up, wants more than people’s money to fund its genetic research—it also wants their DNA. But the company doesn’t sequence people’s genomes, like 23andMe does. Rather, it measures the overall health of people’s genomes by counting double-strand breaks in their DNA. Exogen’s research project is one of the latest entrants into the burgeoning field of crowdfunded “citizen science.” It sells a DNA damage testing kit to consumers who send back a blood sample for analysis....
Distinguishing between male and female human remains can be tricky, especially in cases where only partial skeletons are found. Ann Ross, a forensic anthropologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and her colleagues have developed a new computer program called 3D ID that helps researchers make such distinctions based on skulls. Check out the video below, and as you watch the female and male skulls rotate, look for these features: Nuchal crest: This area, where the muscles from the back of the neck attach to the base of the skull, is smooth and rounded in females but hooked and protruding in males....
