FINALIST YEAR: 1974 HER PROJECT: Using white noise to fight stuttering WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: As Linda Bockenstedt was growing up in Dayton, Ohio, her engineer father helped launch her medical research career in two ways: First, he believed that girls could do science projects every bit as well as boys—and encouraged his daughters to do such projects. Second, he had a friend with a pronounced stutter. The stutter fascinated her....
The Southern Ocean guards its secrets well. Strong winds and punishing waves have kept all except the hardiest sailors at bay. But a new generation of robotic explorers is helping scientists to document the region’s influence on the global climate. These devices are leading a technological wave that could soon give researchers unprecedented access to oceans worldwide. Oceanographers are already using data from the more than 3,900 floats in the international Argo array....
The switches in most electronic circuits are made of silicon, one of the commonest elements. But their successors might contain materials that, for now, are lab-grown oddities: strongly correlated metal oxides. The allure of these materials lies in the outer shells of electrons surrounding their metal atoms. The shells are incomplete, leaving the electrons free to participate in coordinated quantum-mechanical behavior. In some materials, electrons pair up to produce superconductivity, or coordinate their spins to produce magnetism....
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel Knopf, 2014 Stossel, editor of the Atlantic magazine, comes out in My Age of Anxiety as a lifelong sufferer of anxiety disorders. In this sprawling exploration of his private torment, he shares personal anecdotes that might be scenes from a sitcom. As his wife is in labor with their first child, Stossel, overcome by anxiety, faints by her side....
It’s 1820, and the whaleship Essex is in the Pacific Ocean, on a voyage to hunt sperm whales and collect their oil. The days are long, work is hard, it’s hot, land is nowhere to be seen, and food is, well, unpleasant to say the least. For the crew of this voyage, success depends on catching, killing and extracting as much oil as possible—remember, this is 39 years before petroleum is discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859....
By Eric HandFor many astronomers, NASA’s frontal assault on the Moon ended in a fizzle on Friday. The Lunar Crater Remote Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) crashed near the lunar south pole as planned, but an expected plume of bright debris was nowhere to be seen.However, mission scientists said they did spy a thermal flash and spotted a crater, perhaps 20 metres wide, created by the impact. They were most excited about a tiny bump in brightness seen by a mission spectrometer, which could signal the presence of water that some think exists as ice in the bottom of the target crater....
Melting mountain glaciers could account for nearly a third of the sea-level rise that’s occurred in the last 60 years, new research suggests. That makes their contributions to global ocean levels on par with the massive Greenland ice sheet and far more significant than Antarctica. As glaciers melt, much of the water runs into nearby rivers and eventually into the oceans. So even though they tend to be located in mountainous regions of the world, they’re immediate contributors to rising seas....
When a Boeing 757 struck the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, a blastproof film on its windows prevented them from shattering into a swarm of flying shards. Now, a version of that same film promises to block not only projectiles but also the collective electromagnetic chatter generated by our increasingly wireless society. Once manufactured under an exclusive contract with the U.S. government, this recently declassified window film is now available to the public....
The insecticide DDT is infamous for traveling up the food chain and, in addition to its other ills, making the shells of bald eagle eggs paper thin. The carcinogen entered the food chain in small concentrations, but because of its ability to hide in fat molecules, it reached larger and larger concentrations (a process called biomagnification) as it traveled from algae to larvae to fish to eagle—leading to its 1972 ban in the U....
As early as 1.8 million years ago ROASTED MEAT Fire-kissed food is easier to digest and more nutritious than raw food is. Some anthropologists argue that cooking was the essential step that allowed early humans to develop the big brains characteristic of Homo sapiens [see “Case for (Very) Early Cooking Heats Up”]. 30,000 years ago BREAD Agriculture began around 12,000 years ago, but early Europeans were baking bread many thousands of years before that time....
I love spending time outside. From wild places like the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to the mundane nature in my back yard, I find comfort in my natural experiences. These places are restful. Peaceful. They restore my batteries, and help me to focus. And I am not alone in these experiences. People around the world seek out natural experiences. Even when confined to built spaces, we add pets, plants, pictures, and momentos from nature....
Greenpeace is accusing one of the nation’s largest conglomerates of sowing confusion around scientific assertions behind climate change, a broadside that comes amid waning public engagement on human-caused emissions. Koch Industries, a sprawling private corporation based in Wichita, Kan., and run by two brothers, is the primary sponsor of the “climate denial machine,” the environmental group asserts in a 44-page report. A company spokeswoman said Greenpeace is mischaracterizing Koch’s efforts to facilitate “an open and honest airing of all sides” on the climate debate....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, England on 25 September 1066 CE saw an army led by English king Harold II (r. Jan-Oct 1066 CE) defeat an invading force led by Harald Hardrada, king of Norway (r. 1046-1066 CE). Hardrada, aided by Harold’s renegade brother Tostig, had managed to inflict a defeat on two English earls at the Battle of Fulford Gate a few days before, on 20 September, but Harold’s army marched north to gain total vengeance, and both Hardrada and Tostig were killed at Stamford Bridge....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The 4th century CE Temple of Saturn is situated in the north west corner of the Roman Forum of Rome and has eight majestic columns still standing. Built in honour of Saturn it was the focal point of this ancient cult and stood on the site of the original temple dedicated in c....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The great estates of the Gilded Age were more than lavish displays of wealth for the American aristocracy c. 1870-1917, they supported the economy of the local communities and encouraged development. As they declined, many of the surrounding towns followed suit unless they were able to find other means to sustain themselves....
A Japanese miner climbs onto the stage, his helmet light bobbing and a pickax slung over his shoulder. He swings the pick a few times before kneeling to inspect something unusual and then worries at some loose rubble with his hands. Suddenly his face lights up, and he turns to the audience, his newfound riches held forward in his open hands. “I have discovered a new supermagnet that attracts wood,” he announces....
Did you ever get the giggles during a religious service or some other serious occasion? Did you ever have to smile politely when you felt like screaming? In these situations, the emotions that we are required to express differ from the ones we are feeling inside. That can be stressful, unpleasant, and exhausting. Normally our minds and our bodies are in harmony. When facial expressions or posture depart from how we feel, we experience what two psychologists at Northwestern University, Li Huang and Adam Galinsky, call mind–body dissonance....
The heat is on the US Environmental Protection Agency. President Donald Trump’s administration and Republicans in Congress have begun to reshape the agency’s policies on everything from climate change to the use of scientific data in policy-making. On March 9, Republicans on the House of Representatives’ Science, Space and Technology Committee approved bills that would bar scientists with current EPA grants from serving on agency advisory committees and require that all scientific data used to justify new regulations be made public....
What’s it like to visit the only U.S. lab focused on high-energy particle physics? I found out recently, when I went to give a talk to the physicists working there as part of their colloquium series. As usual, I learned more from the scientists than they ever have from me. Although its Tevatron accelerator, four miles in circumference, closed in 2011 and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe has superseded it for experiments involving the highest energy levels, particle physics remains alive and well in many studies at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill....
Android 4.3 isn’t a big enough upgrade to the Android software to get its own dessert name, but that doesn’t mean Google fans won’t be clamoring for it. So which devices will get the new release of software first? The software, announced Wednesday at a special Google event in San Francisco, will ship with the newly updated Nexus 7. The software will also be coming to older Google Nexus devices. Starting Wednesday, the original Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, along with Google’s Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus smartphones, will get the upgrades over the air, said Hugo Barra, vice president of Android product management....
