Posts

TOKYO (Reuters) - Heavy rain battered a wide swathe of Japan on Thursday, sending rivers over their banks and setting off a landslide as a weakened but still dangerous storm made landfall and headed east, leaving three people dead. Neoguri, which first threatened Japan as a super typhoon this week, had weakened to a tropical storm by the time it ploughed ashore on the westernmost main island of Kyushu. But it was still packing wind gusts of up to 126 kph (78 mph)....

Myrtle Beach’s popular oceanfront is retreating at a rate of up to 30 centimeters per year. But visitors who flock to that part of South Carolina’s Atlantic coast continue to enjoy its wide, sandy stretches, because the state refills them every seven years or so with sediment dredged from the sea bottom. Deciding whether to re-sand an area of beach is one impetus behind a study by researchers from the U....

Two hundred years ago it was enough to rely on natural advantages to build a great city. Cities were built on the intersections of rivers or along gentle bays that launched commerce and trade on mighty oceans. Those days are long gone. Today our greatest competitive advantages are the qualities that attract the best and brightest from around the world to come here: our freedom, our diversity, our tolerance and our dynamism....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Maths is the language of science. It crops up everywhere from physics to engineering and chemistry – aiding us in understanding the origins of the universe and building bridges that won’t collapse in the wind. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, maths is also increasingly integral to biology. For hundreds of years mathematics has been used, to great effect, to model relatively simple physical systems....

Lee Kantar lost two moose calves this past weekend. They are just a few among many calves that did not survive their first year in the forests of Maine. Kantar, a moose biologist for the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, has only been tracking calves for a few years but early death is a trend he and others can see across the animal’s southern range, which stretches through the northern U....

Economists call them ex ante rewards. They are the technology prizes designed to spur innovation, challenging entrepreneurs to do something that outstrips the state-of-the-art in return for a sizable payoff. They have yielded a wealth of advances, including precision timepieces, unpickable locks and private suborbital joyrides. Awards up for grabs today include those from J. Craig Venter’s science foundation, which may offer as much as $10 million for anyone who can develop automated technology that can sequence a human genome for $1,000, and NASA, which is offering $250,000 for a machine that can extract oxygen from lunar soil....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Book of the Duchess is the first major work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (l. c. 1343-1400 CE), best known for his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, composed in the last twelve years of his life and left unfinished at his death. The Canterbury Tales, first published 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 Bay of Islands is a subtropical region in New Zealand’s far north and is a popular destination for big-game fishing, sailing, and dolphin watching. It is an area rich in the history of Maori (Māori in their own language) and European (Pākehā) relations and conflict. The American author of adventure novels, Zane Grey (1872-1939 CE), catapulted the region to international fame when he visited the Bay of Islands in the 1920s CE....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The culture of drinking wine was enjoyed throughout the Mediterranean world, and what is true now was true in antiquity, too: wine is always good business. The Hellenistic Period (c. 335-30 BCE), between Alexander the Great and Cleopatra VII, witnessed the expansion of trade relations over an ever-growing area, bringing distant regions into direct or indirect contact with each other....

I JUST STARTED TEACHING MY SPRING CLASSES, and on the first day a student asked me if my work as a science journalist had taken me to any cool places. I said that in 1985 I rode a trolley into a tunnel at the Nevada Test Site in which a nuclear bomb would be detonated the next day. In 1991 I stood at the edge of an oil field whose wells, ignited by Iraqi troops during the first Gulf War, shot huge jets of fire into the sky, which was so black with smoke that I could barely see my notebook....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Science is hard and good science is harder—it takes persistence and tons of patience. When we began planning a mission to Pluto over 15 years ago, we knew it was going to be, as they say, a long haul. But we also knew it had a huge potential payoff. New Horizons would be the first closeup look at a world that we’d known about only distantly for 70 years....

Dear EarthTalk: Now that hot weather is coming, I want to upgrade my home’s A-C. Which are the most energy-saving models and should I go central air or window units?—Jackie Smith, Cary, N.C. According to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), energy consumption for home air conditioning units accounts for more than eight percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S., at a cost to homeowners of $15 billion annually....

By Will Boggs MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - All children 6 months and older should receive the 2015-2016 seasonal influenza vaccine, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) Committee on Infectious Diseases. To protect younger infants, the AAP recommends vaccination of all household contacts and out-of-home care providers, all health care personnel, all child care providers and staff, and all women who are pregnant, are considering pregnancy, are in the postpartum period, or are breastfeeding during the influenza season....

Most of my students were born after the U.S. war in Afghanistan was already underway. Now President Joe Biden has finally said: Enough! Fulfilling a commitment made by his predecessor (and adding a deadline), Biden has pledged to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, exactly 20 years after the attacks that provoked the invasion. Pundits, predictably, have criticized Biden’s decision. They say the U.S. withdrawal will hurt Afghan women, even though, as journalist Robert Wright notes, U....

HONOLULU—The mood is different this year at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the largest gathering of astronomers, which meets every three years. Amid the usual scientific posters and talks on the history of the solar system and galaxy formation here at the Hawaii Convention Center are alert sentries at every entrance diligently screening for protesters. The normally benign field of astronomy finds itself embroiled in controversy around the planned construction of one of the world’s most powerful telescopes on the peak of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano with ideal conditions for observation that is also a sacred place to Native Hawaiians....

Asian women at risk for breast and ovarian cancers may not be getting the genetic screening that could save them. The reason: computer models commonly used to assess whether women should be tested for harmful genetic mutations may underestimate the risk in families of Asian descent, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. To determine which patients would benefit from genetic testing for breast and ovarian malignancies, physicians routinely use the BRCAPRO and Myriad II computer models....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Antibiotics are a vital component of modern medicine. The introduction of penicillin in the 1940s dramatically reduced deaths from bacterial infections. Today antibiotics continue to save lives and make possible major treatments such as cancer therapy and organ transplants. We knew before penicillin was even on the market, however, that drug resistance could happen, and indeed it has....

Editor’s Note: “Climate at Your Doorstep” is an effort by The Daily Climate to highlight stories about climate change impacts happening now. Find more stories like this at www.dailyclimate.org/doorstep. Climate change is creating significant new risks for the $65-billion-a-year U.S. corn industry, foundation for the nation’s favorite soft drink sweetener – corn syrup – says a report released today by Ceres, a coalition of investor and environmental groups. But while climate change may prove more durable than America’s fickle diet trends, a consumer shift away from the sweetener may ultimately have bigger influence in the amount of corn syrup in our lives....

By Jonathan Kaminsky Dec 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued rules on Friday labeling coal ash, a byproduct of coal-based power production containing toxic materials such as arsenic and lead, as non-hazardous waste. The label means that states, and not the EPA, will be the primary enforcers of the new rules, which will require the closure of some coal ash holding ponds leaking contaminants into surrounding water. “This rule is a huge step forward in our effort to protect communities from coal ash storage impoundment failures as well as the improper management and disposal of coal ash in general,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, speaking on a conference call with reporters....

From Nature magazine Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions....