Astronomers have spotted a faint cosmic glow, unseen until now, that may come from stars that float adrift between galaxies. The discovery suggests that as many as half of all stars in the Universe lurk outside galactic boundaries. “There might be people living out there, out in the middle of cold dark space, that don’t have a Milky Way,” says Harvey Moseley, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....
Although the U.S. has experienced a 27 percent decline in cancer death rates during the past 25 years, the drop has not benefited everyone equally: poor individuals and people of color have significantly higher mortality than this average. One reason for the disparity is that people living in poverty have lower rates of routine screening, as well as a lower likelihood of getting the best possible treatment, and African-American, Native American and Hispanic people are more likely to be living in poverty than are whites and Asians....
Calorie-Burning Fat Once thought to disappear after infancy, the calorie-burning tissue known as brown fat may actually be keeping some adults slim. Newborns have brown fat to help generate body heat, but it seems to melt away as part of the aging process. A new study shows that some adults, especially those with a healthy body mass index, maintain reserves of the good fat that is metabolically active. The work, published in the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, could potentially point to novel obesity-fighting compounds....
A California Democrat flipped a GOP-held House seat last month after running on a clean energy platform. Now he wants to flip thinking about climate change as a voting issue in the 2020 presidential election. Rep.-elect Mike Levin, 40, won the seat of retiring Rep. Darrell Issa, a nine-term GOP House member. He beat Republican candidate Diane Harkey 56.4 percent to 43.6 percent, the widest spread of the seven GOP-held seats in California that Democrats flipped in the November elections....
The war on cancer has been a long, slow slog, but a new breed of soldier, with a new set of skills, is entering the fray. Historically, biologists have studied cancer through trial and error, testing molecular pathways and treatments one by one in hopes of finding a cure. That approach has not led to one. In October 2009 leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute launched a campaign to draw more scientists, engineers and thinkers outside of the field into the cancer research sphere....
By John Whitfield of Nature magazineA study of open-access publishing–published last week in the open-access journal PLoS ONE–has found that the number of papers in freely accessible journals is growing at a steady 20% per year (M. Laakso et al. PLoS ONE 6, e20961; 2011). To many, the growth confirms the health of the free-access, author-pays model. But to a few it is a discouraging sign that open access is not about to take over the world of scholarly publishing....
The FBI, NSA and CIA all agree that the Russian government tried to influence the 2016 presidential election by hacking candidates and political parties and leaking the documents they gathered. That’s disturbing. But they could have done even worse. It is entirely possible for an adversary to hack American computerized voting systems directly and select the next commander in chief. A dedicated group of technically sophisticated individuals could steal an election by hacking voting machines in key counties in just a few states....
Golden, sharp strands of so-called goddess hair are covering parts of Hawaii’s Big Island. But what are these potentially dangerous threads—called Pele’s hair—and where did they come from? The mats of Pele’s hair—a product of the ongoing eruption from Kilauea volcano—consist of thin glass fibers that form when gas bubbles within lava burst at the lava’s surface, said Don Swanson, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. “The skin of the bursting bubbles flies out, and some of the skin becomes stretched into these very long threads, sometime[s] as long as a couple of feet [0....
By Jonathan Kaminsky DARRINGTON, Washington (Reuters) - The death toll from a massive landslide in Washington state stood at 24 on Wednesday, but the mud-stricken community braced for a higher body count as search teams combed through debris looking for scores of people still missing four days after the disaster. Emergency management officials said as many as 176 people remained unaccounted for on Wednesday near the rural town of Oso, where a rain-soaked hillside collapsed on Saturday, cascaded over a river and engulfed dozens of homes on the opposite bank....
SYDNEY – Earlier this month, as Sydney’s financial district hummed during the early-morning rush hour, Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner outside of ANZ Bank that read, “ANZ Polluting Your World.” It sought to saddle the bank with a bad reputation for financing large coal-fired power projects, and put the nearby Reserve Bank of Australia on notice that public investment in projects that expand coal’s role in the economy is just as unacceptable....
It is said that the Inuit have many words for snow, but when it comes to the Northwest Passage only one type of frozen water matters: multiyear ice. It can slice through the hull of a ship like a knife through butter and it persists in the passage’s waters despite unprecedented warming in the Arctic Ocean, thwarting shippers in search of a shortcut between Europe and Asia. The fabled Northwest Passage has made headlines ever since it thawed last year for the first time....
On July 10 in Paris a gathering of nearly 2,000 scientists and academics reaffirmed what most climate scientists have been saying for decades: The cost of making cuts in greenhouse gas pollution rises with every day of delay and zero emissions must be the goal for this century. Such was the outcome of the Our Common Future under Climate Change conference held in Paris from July 7–10 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known by its acronym, UNESCO, and meant to advise the upcoming international negotiations to curb global warming in Paris this December....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Local trade in ancient Mesopotamia began in the Ubaid Period (c. 5000-4100 BCE), had developed into long-distance trade by the Uruk Period (c. 4100-2900 BCE), and was flourishing by the time of the Early Dynastic Period (2900-2334 BCE). Developments in trade continued up through 651 CE, the beginning of the modern period of the Near East....
This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – An ancient Egyptian pigment – apparently humanity’s first artificial pigment – could soon find new life-enabling modern high-tech applications such as telecommunications networks and state-of-the-art biomedical imaging, according to researchers. Known as Egyptian blue, the pigment first appeared roughly 5,000 years ago in a tomb painting dated to the reign of Ka-sen, the last king of Egypt’s First Dynasty....
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin Dutton, 2014 The influx of information streaming from our technology these days can make remembering what is important tougher than ever. Neuroscientist Levitin explains how our brains organize all the input and offers tips on decluttering one’s thinking at work, in social interactions and with one’s kids. “This is the story of how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of civilization,” he says....
Among the list of environmental disasters created by Soviet central planning, Mayak must rank high. Commissioned as a plant in southern Russia to manufacture plutonium for bombs in 1948, it soon segued into a long life as a reprocessing center for nuclear material from reactors and decommissioned weapons. But Mayak, or “beacon” in Russian, created its own radioactive waste as well–uranium, plutonium and other actinides–and, at least in the beginning and possibly well into the 1950s, dumped them into surrounding waterways, including the now dry Lake Karachai as well as two adjacent rivers: the Techa and Mishelyak....
This week, mosquito eggs placed in the Florida Keys are expected to hatch tens of thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes, a result of the first U.S. release of such insects in the wild. A biotechnology firm called Oxitec delivered the eggs in late April as part of a federally approved experiment to study the use of genetic engineering—rather than insecticides—to control disease-carrying mosquito populations. The move targets an invasive species, called Aedes aegypti, that carries Zika, dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and other potentially deadly diseases, some of which are on the rise in Florida....
A short, fossilized femur from a 38-year-old Neandertal, which sat untouched in a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, could lead to the first full genome sequence of Homo sapiens’s closest relative and help scientists understand what is special about humans, say teams that published analyses of two partial sequences of Neandertal DNA in this week’s issues of Science and Nature. “We’re at the dawn of Neandertal genomics,” proclaims Edward Rubin, genomics division director at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lead author of the paper in Science....
Billions of people worldwide speak two or more languages. (Though the estimates vary, many sources assert that more than half of the planet is bilingual or multilingual.) One of the most common experiences for these individuals is a phenomenon that experts call “code switching,” or shifting from one language to another within a single conversation or even a sentence. This month Sarah Frances Phillips, a linguist and graduate student at New York University, and her adviser Liina Pylkkänen published findings from brain imaging that underscore the ease with which these switches happen and reveal how the neurological patterns that support this behavior are very similar in monolingual people....
Steven Laureys greets me with a smile as I enter his office overlooking the hills of Liège. Although his phone rings constantly, he takes the time to talk to me about the fine points of what consciousness is and how to identify it in patients who seem to lack it. Doctors from all over Europe send their apparently unconscious patients to Laureys—a clinician and researcher at the University of Liège—for comprehensive testing....
