Posts

By Victoria Cavaliere(Reuters) - A massive winter storm that left parts of Southeastern United States in a deep freeze was pushing up the East Coast on Sunday, with snow and ice snarling road travel and forcing another round of airline cancellations.The storm system dropped between 3 and 6 inches of snow on West Virginia early Sunday before blanketing the Washington, D.C., metro area with its first accumulation of the season.Marching north, it was expected to pummel the East Coast with snow, sleet, and freezing rain from Baltimore to north of Portland, Maine, according to the National Weather Service....

Fifteen years ago Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess, marking the beginning of what Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Erik Brynjolfsson calls the new machine age—an era driven by exponential growth in computing power. Lately, though, people have been feeling uneasy about the machine age. Pundits and experts seem to agree that the robots are definitely taking our jobs. At last week’s TED conference, Brynjolfsson argued that the new machine age is great for economic growth, but we still have to find a way to coexist with the machines....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The camel caravans which crossed the great dunes of the Sahara desert began in antiquity but reached their golden period from the 9th century CE onwards. In their heyday caravans consisted of thousands of camels travelling from North Africa, across the desert to the savannah region in the south and back again, in a hazardous journey that could take several months....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The poem called The Lay of Greybeard (Old Norse: Hárbarðsljóð) is one story from Norse mythology that relates an intriguing verbal fight between two of its essential gods, Thor and Odin. The poem consists of 60 stanzas and is found complete in the 13th-century CE manuscript Codex Regius that contains the Poetic Edda, the most important source of Viking myth....

Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. the world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it, because prices are escalating. But another challenge looms. By 2050 the world’s population will increase by two billion or three billion, which will likely double the demand for food, according to several studies. Demand will also rise because many more people will have higher incomes, which means they will eat more, especially meat....

A powerful protein known as p53 has long been considered the master regulator of the genome because of its amazing ability to repair damaged DNA. Now scientists at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered that p53 not only mends genetic material but also kicks off the chemical cascade that results in tanning. The researchers report in Cell that when p53 is activated (in response to DNA damage caused by the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays and other factors), it triggers production of alpha-MSH, a hormone that then prompts production of melanin, or pigment....

The first indication that our expedition was not going as planned was the abrupt sputter and stop of the boat’s inboard engine at 2 a.m. The sound of silence had never been less peaceful. Suddenly, crossing the open ocean in a small fishing vessel from the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific Ocean seemed an unwise choice. A journey to a scientific frontier had led us to a different frontier altogether, a vast darkness punctuated by the occasional lapping wave....

It’s only a $100 toy—an aquarium of swimming robotic fish developed by the Eamex Corporation in Osaka, Japan. What makes it remarkable is that the brightly colored plastic fish propelling themselves through the water in a fair imitation of life do not contain mechanical parts: no motors, no driveshafts, no gears, not even a battery. Instead the fish swim because their plastic innards flex back and forth, seemingly of their own volition....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The average teen spends at least six hours a day looking at a screen, with most of it from using a smartphone. Many parents, naturally, have wondered if so much time spent in front of a screen is safe. Recent research suggests it’s not. Teens who spend five or more hours a day on electronic devices are 71 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide than those who spend less than an hour a day on a device....

This past March, Stanford University researchers published the results of one of the longest and most persuasive comparisons of weight-loss programs ever conducted. Three of the four diets in the study are heavily promoted regimens that have made their originators famous: the Atkins diet and the Zone diet, which both emphasize high-protein foods, and the Ornish diet, a plan that prohibits most fatty foods. The fourth was the no-frills, low-fat diet that most nutrition experts recommend....

For 19 years, Gerard Richardson sat in prison in New Jersey wondering how forensics experts had got his case so wrong. His conviction for a 1994 murder was based on a bite mark on the victim’s body that seemed to match his own teeth; it was the main physical evidence linking him to the crime. Last year, he was exonerated when DNA taken from the same bite mark turned out not to be his....

Light from distant quasars—early galaxies that shine with tremendous brightness—has given researchers a new clue to the origin of vast magnetic fields studding today’s galaxies: They were running strong when the universe was only a third of its present age. Astronomers had observed that radio emissions from quasars tend to be angled, or polarized, in such a way that powerful magnetic fields must have twisted them. The greater their distance from Earth, the more polarized their light....

North American homes, offices and other buildings contribute an estimated 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year—more than one third of the continent’s greenhouse gas pollution output. Simply constructing more energy-efficient buildings—and upgrading the insulation and windows in the existing ones—could save a whopping 1.7 billion tons annually, says a new report from the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), an international organization established by Canada, Mexico and the U....

Sometime after 70,000 years ago our species, Homo sapiens, left Africa to begin its inexorable spread across the globe. Other human species had established themselves in Europe and Asia, but only our H. sapiens ancestors ultimately managed to push out into all the major continents and many island chains. Theirs was no ordinary dispersal. Everywhere H. sapiens went, massive ecological changes followed. The archaic humans they encountered went extinct, as did vast numbers of animal species....

Of the 20,000 varieties of dahlia flowers, only 10 to 20 kinds are black in color. Now researchers say they’ve solved the molecular mystery of how these rare flowers get their dark hues. Flower color in dahlias is determined by a mixture of plant metabolites called flavonoids. Scientists already know that red dahlias’ tones come from high concentrations of anthocyanins, flavonoids that are responsible for the color of blueberries, blue corn, blackberries and other fruits and vegetables....

Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Available on iPad, print, and digital formats. CLIMATE CHANGE • Torrential rainstorms that flooded northern California in late November and early December are a warning to the government and scientists of a bigger issue: the potential arrival of a megastorm....

Neurosurgeons need all the help they can get to remove brain cancer tumors. If they leave cancer cells behind, the tumors can regrow. Finding cancer cells can be particularly difficult with infiltrative cancers such as glioma, which invades surrounding brain tissue. Raman spectroscopy could help neurosurgeons find those errant cells. A team led by engineer Frédéric Leblond of Montreal Polytechnique and neurosurgeon Kevin Petrecca of McGill University, also in Montreal, has developed a Raman probe that distinguishes between normal and cancer cells....

Twelve years ago, biologists and clinicians hoped for a fleeting moment that combining several new drugs might completely eliminate HIV from the body and thus achieve a cure. Those hopes quickly vanished when it was discovered that the virus hides in a dormant state inside certain cells out of reach of this therapeutic cocktail. Ever since, researchers in the war against AIDS have looked for drugs to coax the elusive virus out of hiding so that other drugs or the patients’ own immune systems could target them....

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology will go to a trio of American circadian rhythm researchers, the Nobel Committee announced Monday in Stockholm. Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash, who performed their award-winning work at Brandeis University, share the honor with The Rockefeller University’s Michael Young for their seminal discoveries explaining how living creatures—including plants, animals and humans—adapt their biological rhythms to align with Earth’s rotation. At the time of the announcement, around 5:30 A....

From Nature magazine Could nature be mocking North Carolina’s law-makers? Less than two weeks after the state’s senate passed a bill banning state agencies from reporting that sea-level rise is accelerating, research has shown that the coast between North Carolina and Massachusetts is experiencing the fastest sea-level rise in the world. Asbury Sallenger, an oceanographer at the US Geological Survey in St Petersburg, Florida, and his colleagues analysed tide-gauge records from around North America....