Editor’s Note (4/13/21): Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced they are recommending a pause in use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. while scientists investigate a possible but rare link between the vaccine and a blood clot combined with a low platelet count. Six individuals out of nearly seven million people who have gotten this vaccine in the U....
“Her hair was dyed orange, red, and yellow, dark-rooted, cut short as a boy’s, with sideburns plunging like daggers past each multi-ringed ear. Words spewed from her pell-mell, accompanied by equally vigorous hand signals and facial expressions. She was keen on onomatopoeic sound effects: Ahhhhh (to express her pleasure at finding other smart people when she entered Oxford); DUN da la DUN da la DUN (the galloping noise she heard as she sped down a tree-lined tunnel in her first out-of-body experience); Zzzzzzt (the sound of reality dissolving after her second toke of the psychedelic dimethyltryptamine)....
ROME, Nov 2 (Reuters) - A series of earthquakes that rocked central Italy last week reshaped more than 600 square km (230 square miles) of land, lowering areas around the epicentre by up to 70 cm (28 inches), according to data released on Monday. Earthquakes measuring 5.5 and 6.1 hit the area on Oct. 26, followed by a 6.6 magnitude quake on Oct. 30, the biggest tremor to strike Italy for 36 years....
For bats in peril, white noses nothing to sniff at First it was bees. Now bats have come down with a mysterious ailment that’s killing them by the thousands in upstate New York and Vermont, sparking fears of a massive die-off if it is not contained. Dubbed “white nose syndrome” for the rings of white fungus found around many of the affected bats’ snouts, the plague claimed 13,500 (90 percent) of 15,000 bats over two years, and since last January has spread from four caves west of Albany, New York, to four other sites in the state and to one in neighboring Vermont, the Associated Press reports....
Roughly 600 million years ago, thousands of embryos of primitive animals drifted into seawater laced with sulfides and died. But in addition to potentially killing them, the sulfides protected the microscopic nascent creatures and permitted the process of fossilization to occur. Research in the Doushantuo Formation in China uncovered these fossilized embryos–among the rarest of finds both for their fragile nature and depth in past time–and new imaging techniques have provided a window into the internal workings of the most ancient animals yet discovered....
Most of us take it for granted that compasses point north. Sailors have relied on Earth’s magnetic field to navigate for thousands of years. Birds and other magnetically sensitive animals have done so for considerably longer. Strangely enough, however, the planets magnetic poles have not always been oriented as they are today. Minerals that record past orientations of Earth’s magnetic field reveal that it has flipped from north to south and back again hundreds of times during the planets 4....
POLICING ETHICS “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?”—Charles Seife’s article claiming that scientific institutions and individual scientists are not properly policing conflicts of interest—distorts the National Institutes of Health’s interest and role in ensuring objectivity in research. Interactions between researchers and companies are vital for developing drugs, vaccines and medical devices. These partnerships function through collaboration and the need to maintain objectivity. The NIH is committed to ensuring that NIH-funded research is conducted with the highest scientific and ethical standards and that all stakeholders understand and comply with their responsibilities....
The past 15 years have been a roller coaster for gene therapy. After being touted in the early 1990s as “the medicine of the future,” gene therapy left an 18-year-old dead and three others with leukemia; in July it was tied to the death of a 36-year-old Illinois woman undergoing treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, although further investigation cleared her therapy of the blame. Gene therapy scientists, however, believe they can put the bad news behind them, thanks to a handful of recent developments and others just over the horizon....
Palaeontologists have a fuzzy view of Earth’s history. An incomplete fossil record and imprecise dating techniques make it hard to pinpoint events that happened within geological eras spanning millions of years. Now, a period that saw a boom in animal complexity and one of Earth’s greatest mass extinctions is coming into sharp focus. Using the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer, Tianhe II, a team of scientists based mostly in China mined a database of more than 11,000 fossil species that lived from around 540 million to 250 million years ago....
Dear EarthTalk: What are some things that children and families can do to be greener (and to provide life lessons for the kids in the process)? – Cynthia Mosher, via email There are many ways to be green around the family that are sure to rub off on the littler ones in your midst—if they don’t beat you to it, that is. With environmental awareness so widespread among younger people in our society, most kids have learned more about being green from their school teachers and camp counselors than we adults might have gleaned in a lifetime....
Among primates, humans are unique in having nearly naked skin. Every other member of our extended family has a dense covering of fur—from the short, black pelage of the howler monkey to the flowing copper coat of the orangutan—as do most other mammals. Yes, we humans have hair on our heads and elsewhere, but compared with our relatives, even the hairiest person is basically bare. How did we come to be so denuded?...
In December 1994 then former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop launched a national weight-loss campaign at a White House press conference, stating that obesity had become the country’s second-largest cause of death, “resulting in about 300,000 lives lost each year.” This marked the beginning of a long, influential life for the statistic. Pundits and scientists alike began citing the number to highlight the gravity of the “obesity epidemic.” It was leveraged in Food and Drug Administration approval hearings for weight-loss medications with questionable safety profiles....
Though trees are hard to miss, they are also hard to quantify. They are not even always easy to identify. “Their crowns are hundreds of feet up; they’re in between other things; they look like similar [species],” says Miles Silman, a conservation biologist at Wake Forest University, who was not involved in the new study. “It’s a rare breed of person that sits out in the wild for months on end and looks at every single tree....
2005 has been a year of tempests both literal and figurative. Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma led a record pack of devastating storms; the issue of whether to teach intelligent design in the classroom went to trial; the decision about whether to make “Plan B” emergency contraception available over the counter was postponed; a celebrated stem cell researcher was revealed as a fraud; and the threat of avian flu loomed large....
Renewables could be the world’s primary source of energy if only someone could solve the storage problem—how to store lots of electricity cheaply on a wide scale? Batteries are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Pumped hydro is cheap but not feasible for most locations. Thermal storage is promising but still too expensive or hard to scale. Compressed air is cheap and scalable but not yet efficient enough (although LightSail, a new company backed by Peter Thiel, Vinold Khosla and Bill Gates, hopes to change that)....
Dave Belote was sleeping on his cot at Camp Victory in Iraq early one morning in 2004 when he awoke to the sound of deadly mortar rounds exploding on base a scant 50 yards away. Suddenly, it clicked: “It would be a really good thing to stop paying people to shoot at us,” he thought. “Those mortar shells we paid for indirectly, through our addiction to oil,” the retired Air Force colonel told ClimateWire....
Dear EarthTalk: What are the environmental implications of all the food we throw away here in the United States? —Mike Schiller, Cambridge, Mass. Food waste is a huge issue in America, especially in light of the growing divide between the profligate rich and the hungry poor. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Loss Project, we throw away more than 25 percent—some 25.9 million tons—of all the food we produce for domestic sale and consumption....
A three-person crew will blast off to the International Space Station today (March 27), and two of them won’t be coming back to Earth for a full year. You can watch live online as the yearlong mission begins. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka will fly to the station atop a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia. Kelly and Kornienko will participate in the yearlong mission aboard the orbiting outpost, while Padalka spends six months on the station before flying home....
Reports of recovery from serious illness caused by the coronavirus have been trickling in from around the world. Physicians are swapping anecdotes on social media: a 38-year-old man who went home after three weeks at the Cleveland Clinic, including 10 days in intensive care. A 93-year-old woman in New Orleans whose breathing tube was removed, successfully, after three days. A patient at Massachusetts General Hospital who was taken off a ventilator after five days and was doing well....
This year marked the 40th anniversary of two momentous events related to space exploration. One, the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, was a hallmark technological achievement. The other, the complete first run of Stanley Kubrick’s remarkable movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, vividly depicted author Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of humans traveling the solar system with abandon. Much of the related flurry of reporting noted the stark differences between reality—people have not been back to the lunar surface since the December 1972 visit—and Clarke’s idea....
