Posts

Thanks to global shipping and trade, species of exotic fish are fording into new waterways worldwide, shoving native species toward extinction and costing countries billions of dollars each year as fisheries collapse and governments fight to stem the tide of aquatic interlopers. According to a new study, however, the success of these invaders depends less on ecology and more on economies. The news has come as a surprise to ecologists, who have long debated the conditions that make a habitat vulnerable to invasion....

Albert Einstein once said that there are only two things that might be infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And, he confessed, he wasn’t sure about the universe. When we hear that, we chuckle. Or at least we smile. We do not take offense. The reason is that the name “Einstein” conjures an image of a warm-hearted, avuncular sage of an earlier era. We see the good-natured, wild-haired scientific genius whose iconic portraits—riding a bike, sticking out his tongue, staring at us with those penetrating eyes—are emblazoned in our collective cultural memory....

It was to be the ultimate urban paradise. Hundreds of pages of plans, maps and charts detailed the construction of a state-of-the-art eco-city called Dongtan on China’s Chongming Island, at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Energy-efficient buildings would be clustered together to encourage residents to travel on foot; only battery- or hydrogen-powered cars would be permitted in the development. Surrounding organic farms would supply food; sea breezes and the burning of husks of China’s staple crop, rice, would furnish power....

More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez foundered off the coast of Alaska, puddles of oil can still be found in Prince William Sound. Nearly 25 years after a storage tank ruptured, spilling oil into the mangrove swamps and coral reefs of Bahia Las Minas in Panama, oil slicks can still be found on the water. And more than 40 years after the barge Florida grounded off Cape Cod, dumping fuel oil, the muck beneath the marsh grasses still smells like a gas station....

IN 1857 British novelist George Eliot wrote, “Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no questions and they pass no criticism.” So it is no surprise that scholars have long been intrigued by the possibility that animals possess largely untapped therapeutic powers. But are animals good for our psychological and physical health, either as pets or as “therapists”? Most Americans are animal lovers; about 63 percent of U.S. households contain one or more pets, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association....

With the stream of accusations of child sexual abuse not losing any gusto lately, from the ever-growing charges against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky to allegations of such behaviors by assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine, it’d be easy to assume a real upsurge in such abuse. But that may not be the case. First, Sandusky was accused of sexually molesting at least eight boys over the past 15 years; he has pleaded not guilty to the more than 40 charges against him....

NEW YORK—When convincing someone to trade in a commodity that cannot be seen or touched, it’s best to hold their hand—even if only by telephone. Standing while talking helps, too, at least for broker Lenny Hochschild, who specializes in convincing everyone from agribusiness to electric utilities to buy and sell in a market that doesn’t exist yet—a U.S. market for the right to emit carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas changing the global climate....

Almost every time one of my scientific manuscripts returned from the mandatory peer-review process during the past three decades, I had to cope with the inevitable recommendation that all scraps of speculative thinking about our ability to interface brains and machines should be removed from the papers. More often than not, other neuroscientists who reviewed these papers before publication did not wish to entertain the notion that this research could lend support to more daring scientific dreams in the future....

For the first time ever, a NASA probe has performed a sample-snagging operation on an asteroid in deep space. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spiraled down to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu this afternoon (Oct. 20) to grab material that mission team members hope harbors clues about the solar system’s early days and the rise of life on Earth. “We did it!” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona, said during a webcast that provided updates about today’s maneuver....

(Credit:Xbox World)Microsoft’s Xbox 720 will unveil a new version of Kinect, a Blu-ray drive, and an A/V port for watching and recording broadcast TV, at least according to details leaked by Xbox World.Promising “next-gen secrets inside,” the latest issue of the U.K.-based magazine dug up several reported specs on Microsoft’s next console.First off, the Xbox 720 will introduce Kinect 2.0.Microsoft has been as publicly mum about the next version of Kinect as it has about all details concerning the new Xbox....

Climate change could tip the scales for states already at risk of failing, ultimately threatening global stability and security, finds a new report funded by the European Commission. Pakistan and other areas facing the dual threats of precarious governance and adverse impacts of climate change, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and central and western Africa, may be more vulnerable to conflicts over decreased water supplies, food shortages and energy infrastructure weakness, the report says....

Name: Pamela Fletcher Title: GM’s Global Chief Engineer for Volt and Plug-In Hybrid Electric Powertrains Location: Milford Proving Grounds, Michigan GM developed the Volt in only 29 months. Its lithium-ion battery powers the car for the first 25 to 50 miles, at which point a small gasoline engine kicks in to replenish the battery, allowing the car to travel up to another 300 miles. What were some of your biggest engineering challenges?...

As soccer fans around the world celebrate the “beautiful game” at this year’s men’s World Cup in Qatar, one big part of the sport is being conspicuously overlooked: female players. It’s no secret that women’s soccer has not received anywhere near the level of attention or funding the men’s game has. Female professional players are paid far less than male ones—a discrepancy the U.S. women’s team hoped to help remedy when it reached an equal pay settlement with the U....

The newest chemical under investigation for managing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is actually not new at all. Insulin, the therapeutic hormone all-too familiar to individuals with diabetes, has been around for decades. In fact December will mark 90 years since its discoverers earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the extraction of insulin for clinical use. Yet to say that insulin has been under our noses all these years wouldn’t exactly be correct....

Power in nonhuman animals used to play out in such a tidy and simple way. Bigger, stronger animals beat up smaller, weaker ones. The vanquished slunk away, and the victor claimed the prize. Or so we thought. To be sure, there are enough of these sorts of brutish battles going on in nature to make war-of-all-against-all theorist Thomas Hobbes smirk. But we now know the quest for power in the animal kingdom is oh-so-much more subtle, interesting and, dare I say, beautiful than we previously thought....

At the end of the Permian period, about 252 million years ago, animals started dying at ferocious rates. In just 20,000 years 90 percent of all species on the planet had gone extinct. What triggered this die-off? Researchers have been trying to figure that out for decades. Because the scale of the extinctions was so large, paleobiologists and geochemists started looking for an equally massive disaster as the root cause. Some proposed that an asteroid struck Earth, similar to what ended the reign of the dinosaurs....

As a favor to friends in my academic department, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, I’ve frequently been a guinea pig in the fMRI scanner. Normally I fight valiantly against slumber as the stimuli flash on the small screen in front of me and the hypnotic, high-pitched beeps of the scanner reverberate around me. This time, though, it was very different. This time, my colleague Martin Monti was going to read my mind....

From Our Partner Years later, it was said that the whole idea started as a joke. It was January 1896, and at the Boston Athletic Association’s annual indoor track meet at Mechanic’s Hall, Arthur Blake—a 23-year-old distance-running star for the BAA—had just won the hotly contested 1,000-yard race. Afterward, stockbroker Arthur Burnham, a prominent member of the well-heeled association, was congratulating him on his performance. Blake laughed and said in jest, “Oh, I’m too good for Boston....

First, there was too much rain. An ill-timed storm thrashed barley fields in Montana—home to over a fifth of the country’s barley crop—and the water ruined the golden fruits. Just a few years later a dry heat wave shriveled grains and bowed the plants over. Resulting shortages shot the price of high-quality barley through the roof, squeezing both farmers and some of their key customers: beer brewers. Even if you didn’t notice beer price fluctuations following those years—2014 and 2017—consumers probably will in the near future....

Seasoned cells: Researchers at the University of Leicester in England have discovered a new way to regulate plant development. R. Paul Jarvis and his team screened thale-cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) plants, model organisms in the mustard family, for genes affecting chloroplasts, the structures within plant cells where photosynthesis occurs. A healthy chloroplast (middle) is made up of thousands of proteins, one of which acts to sort the others; when chloroplasts lack this guide, they become small and underdeveloped (right)....