One day in 2010, while taking a stroll in his backyard, Kandula the elephant smelled something scrumptious. The scent pulled his attention skyward. There, seemingly suspended in the air, was a sprig of bamboo decorated with bits of cantaloupe and honeydew. Stretching out his trunk, he managed to get the fruit and break off a piece of the branch, but the rest of the tasty leaves remained tantalizingly out of reach....
Children are natural negotiators. When taking on a tired parent, a six-year-old can adeptly turn five minutes more at the playground to 10 minutes more, the “last” episode into “just one more” and a kiddie-sized ice cream cone into a sundae with chocolate fudge and sprinkles. These negotiations—often exhausting (“Can I stay up for 10 more minutes? Please! Please! Please!”) and frequently hilarious (“I’ll be your best friend if …”)—seem worlds away from the negotiations children will be engaging in when they grow up and start their first jobs....
By Barbara Liston (Reuters) - U.S. commercial fishermen are throwing away about $1 billion worth of edible fish each year, according to a conservation group which is advocating for incentives to stop the waste. The quantity of so-called bycatch – that is, fish that wasn’t targeted but caught inadvertently – is estimated by the U.S. government at two billion pounds (907,185 tonnes) a year. The surprise was the quality of the bycatch that often is tossed back into the ocean dead or dying, said marine scientist Amanda Keledjian, author of the report from Oceana, a nonprofit international conservation group....
Eerie images from the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster still haunt us 30 years later. What is Chernobyl like today? On April 26, 1986, a safety test gone wrong led to an explosion in reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine. (At the time, Pripyat was part of the USSR.) Several factors then conspired to result in an unprecedented, widespread scattering of over 100 radioactive elements into the surrounding towns and cities....
Katherina K. Hauner, a postdoctoral fellow at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, answers: Under normal circumstances, fear triggers a natural fight-or-flight response that allows animals to react quickly to threats in their environment. Irrational and excessive fear, however, is typically a maladaptive response. In humans, an unwarranted, persistent fear of a certain situation or object, known as specific phobia, can cause overwhelming distress and interfere with daily life. Specific phobia is among the more prevalent anxiety disorders, affecting an estimated 9 percent of Americans within their lifetime....
ELKINS, W.Va. – On top of the wooded green, orange and red rain-soaked hills near here, AES Wind Generation LLC, a subsidiary of AES Corp., yesterday unveiled its new grid-scale power storage system, the largest facility of its kind in the world. The energy storage system is part of AES Laurel Mountain, a 13-mile stretch of 61 wind turbines traversing Barbour and Randolph counties. “We’ve never put wind and storage in one location [before today],” said Phil Harrington, AES’s president of global wind generation....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Daily life in the Byzantine Empire, like almost everywhere else before or since, largely depended on one’s birth and the social circumstances of one’s parents. There were some opportunities for advancement based on education, the accumulation of wealth, and gaining favour from a more powerful sponsor or mentor....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Zeno of Citium (c. 336 – 265 BCE) was the founder of the Stoic School of philosophy in Athens, which taught that the Logos (Universal Reason) was the greatest good in life and living in accordance with reason was the meaning of life. He was born in the Phonecian-Greek city of Citium on Cyprus in the same year that Alexander the Great ascended to the throne of Macedonia....
Key concepts Physics Force Gravity Mass Lever Introduction When the days grow shorter and it gets dark early in the evening many people enjoy candlelight. Candles are also a great tool for doing science—so why not combine both and add a little light to your science? In this activity you will use candles to investigate the balancing forces of a seesaw. Background Seesaws are classic playground equipment for children. They are not only fun to play on but also provide an excellent opportunity to explore a type of simple machine designed to lift objects much heavier than your strength would normally allow....
Whether we want to or not, we all age. So it is no surprise that a vast consumer industry exists for all things antiaging— creams, diets, mantras, contraptions, pills, surgeries and legitimate prescription drugs. To be sure, a robust area of scientific research is devoted to the topic. One of the most interesting findings to emerge is that longevity is closely correlated with intelligence. This may be discouraging for those who never graduated from Oxford, considering raw intelligence is a relatively stable psychological trait and not easily amplified by any intervention....
A 12-minute NASA video with scientist interviews gives an overview of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) project: The AMS YouTube channel has videos on the AMS and its hunt for antimatter and dark matter: https://www.youtube.com/user/ams02tv For more on antimatter: Antimatter of Fact: Collider Generates Most Massive Antinucleus Yet Fermilab Finds New Mechanism for Matter’s Dominance over Antimatter Why Did Matter Beat Out Antimatter? For more on dark matter: Reliance on Indirect Evidence Fuels Dark Matter Doubts New Subatomic Particle Could Help Explain the Mystery of Dark Matter Dark Matter Researchers Still in the Dark as Underground Search Returns Uncertain Results Mark Kelly, the husband of wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, will command the STS-134 space shuttle mission to deliver the AMS to the International Space Station: Rep....
SAN FRANCISCO—Parts of Mars were capable of supporting life as we know it for lengthy stretches in the ancient past—perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time, new observations by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity suggest. Since it landed inside the Red Planet’s Gale Crater in August 2012, Curiosity has studied a number of different rocks over an elevational range of about 650 feet (200 meters), which represents a time span of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years....
Since the pandemic began, its viral cause—SARS-CoV-2—has been mutating. These genetic changes appeared inconsequential at first. But recently some alterations have produced variants with the unsettling potential to make the new COVID vaccines less effective, just as the shots have begun to make their way into people’s arms. Now, drug makers are responding by developing different follow-up shots against these variants to keep the disease at bay. These efforts mark the next phase in what’s shaping up to be a long battle between an ever-changing virus and the immunizations deployed against it....
Bird species trace their migratory paths based on where they can find the most resources, but changes to the climate might soon make their knowledge outdated. In a recent study, a team of scientists from the University of Copenhagen tracked the movement of three species — the common cuckoo, the red-backed shrike and the thrush nightingale — to identify what prompted their annual migratory routes. They found that the birds tend to gravitate to places that had the best supply of food, like insects, at different times of the year....
For hundreds of years alchemists toiled in their laboratories to produce a mythical substance known as the philosopher’s stone. The supposedly dense, waxy, red material was said to enable the process that has become synonymous with alchemy—chrysopoeia, the metamorphosis, or transmutation, of base metals such as lead into gold. Alchemists have often been dismissed as pseudoscientific charlatans but in many ways they paved the way for modern chemistry and medicine. The alchemists of the 16th and 17th centuries developed new experimental techniques, medicines and other chemical concoctions, such as pigments....
When members of the Chicago Commercial Club arrived to hear a lecture by the famed electrical inventor Nikola Tesla on May 13, 1899, they were startled by the sight of an artificial lake sitting in the middle of the auditorium. Everyone knew that Tesla–the man who had devised the alternating-current (AC) system that brought electricity into people’s homes and businesses–was a master showman. Six years earlier at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, for example, the dapper engineer had dazzled spectators by sending 250,000-volt shocks coursing through his body....
The dietary supplement business is booming, with about 80% of US adults taking these products to improve their health. USP, also known as the US Pharmacopeia, is working to protect consumer health by helping supplement manufacturers maintain quality. Jaap Venema, executive vice president and chief science officer for USP, shares his perspective. What quality issues surrounding dietary supplements should consumers be aware of? People often think that because supplements can be naturally derived products, they are of good quality....
Public health communications are designed to tackle significant medical issues such as obesity, AIDS, and cancer. For example, what message can best combat the growing obesity epidemic? Are educational messages effective at increasing condom use? Should cancer prevention messages stress the health risks of too much sun exposure? These are not just medical problems. These are fundamentally questions about perception, beliefs, and behavior. Psychologists bring a unique expertise to these questions and are finding consequential, and often non-intuitive, answers....
We lie to ourselves all the time. We tell ourselves that we are better than average – that we are more moral, more capable, less likely to become sick or suffer an accident. It’s an odd phenomenon, and an especially puzzling one to those who think about our evolutionary origins. Self-deception is so pervasive that it must confer some advantage. But how could we be well served by a brain that deceives us?...
J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” Since the so-called “Cambrian explosion” of 500 million years ago marks the earliest appearance in the fossil record of complex animals, finding mammal fossils that predate them would falsify the theory. But would it really?...
