At the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, tucked away in the trees near Chiang Mai, a pair of Asian elephants gazes at two bowls of corn on the other side of a net. The corn is attached to a sliding platform, through which researchers have threaded a rope. The rope’s ends lie on the elephants’ side of the net. If only one elephant pulls an end, the rope slides out of the contraption....
By Alister Doyle and Valerie Volcovici LIMA, Dec 14 (Reuters) - About 190 nations agreed on Sunday the building blocks of a new-style global deal due in 2015 to combat climate change amid warnings that far tougher action will be needed to limit increases in global temperatures. Under the deal reached in Lima, governments will submit national plans for reining in greenhouse gas emissions by an informal deadline of March 31, 2015 to form the basis of a global agreement due at a summit in Paris in a year’s time....
By Nina Chestney and Valerie VolcoviciLONDON (Reuters) - The United States called on Tuesday for a more flexible approach to a new United Nations’ climate deal which balances the needs of all countries and has a better chance of success.Two years ago, some 190 countries agreed to develop a pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol which would force all nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. The deal is to be signed by 2015 and come into force in 2020....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. It is often when one is faced with the most difficult circumstances that one is given the greatest opportunity for clarity. History provides ample evidence of this experience in showing how, when faced with seemingly impossible situations, people found a way to see beyond a difficult situation and prevail against it....
Francisco Mojica was not the first to see CRISPR, but he was probably the first to be smitten by it. He remembers the day in 1992 when he got his first glimpse of the microbial immune system that would launch a biotechnology revolution. He was reviewing genome-sequence data from the salt-loving microbe Haloferax mediterranei and noticed 14 unusual DNA sequences, each 30 bases long. They read roughly the same backwards and forwards, and they repeated every 35 bases or so....
September 1965 Cities on the Rise “Urbanized societies, in which a majority of the people live crowded together in towns and cities, represent a new and fundamental step in man’s social evolution. Although cities themselves first appeared some 5,500 years ago, they were small and surrounded by an overwhelming majority of rural people; moreover, they relapsed easily to village or small-town status. The urbanized societies of today, in contrast, not only have urban agglomerations of a size never before attained but also have a high proportion of their population concentrated in such agglomerations....
For decades, patients behind the Iron Curtain were denied access to some of the best antibiotics developed in the West. To make do, the Soviet Union invested heavily in the use of bacteriophages — viruses that kill bacteria — to treat infections. Phage therapy is still widely used in Russia, Georgia and Poland, but never took off elsewhere. “This is a virus, and people are afraid of viruses,” says Mzia Kutateladze, who is the head of the scientific council at the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, which has been studying phages and using them to treat patients for nearly a century....
From Quanta Magazine (Find original story here). The brain performs its canonical task — learning — by tweaking its myriad connections according to a secret set of rules. To unlock these secrets, scientists 30 years ago began developing computer models that try to replicate the learning process. Now, a growing number of experiments are revealing that these models behave strikingly similar to actual brains when performing certain tasks. Researchers say the similarities suggest a basic correspondence between the brains’ and computers’ underlying learning algorithms....
The notion of the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit is based on the assumption that particles of light, called photons, have no mass. But astrophysical observations cannot rule out the slim chance that photons do have a tiny bit of mass—a prospect with wide ramifications in physics. For instance, if photons weigh nothing at all, they would be completely stable and could theoretically last forever. But if they do have a little mass, they could eventually decay into lighter particles....
High in the mountains of China’s Sichuan Province, George Davis of George Washington University is collecting tiny, seemingly harmless snails from a muddy ditch that runs through terraced fields. As the evolutionary biologist wields his tweezers, he contemplates how massive disruptions of the environment produce widespread problems, including emerging epidemics. “Diseases like SARS can pop up because of the interference of man in the ecosystem,” he explains. “And now we have one of the most dynamic ecosystem changes in history in the Three Gorges Dam....
Most Americans flush the toilet without thinking twice about where the contents end up, but a handful of companies are paying close attention to what goes down the drain. They argue it should be seen as a resource rather than waste. Dealing with human waste is a tricky business. The wet material typically has to be treated at a sewage plant, dried and turned into a biosolid, then either hauled away to a landfill or turned into mulch and reused as fertilizer....
Children exposed in the womb to two chlorinated chemicals widely found in the environment are more likely to develop asthma by the age of 20, according to new research in Denmark. The study is the first to link asthma to hexachlorobenzene exposure during fetal development, and builds on two earlier studies that linked the respiratory disease to polychlorinated biphenyls. The blood of 872 Danish women was tested for persistent organic pollutants....
Epidemics expose a society’s vulnerabilities. And we were already an unhealthy population before COVID emerged. Compared with some other developed countries, the U.S. has extraordinary rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and other afflictions that leave people more susceptible to severe COVID. These vulnerabilities were influenced strongly by social factors—not purely genetics. How did we get here? Partially it was because our public health system had been depleted and eroded....
Last April, Amina Helmi felt goose bumps while driving to work in the northern Netherlands. It had nothing to do with the weather—it was pure anticipation. Just days earlier, a flood of data had been released from Gaia, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that has been mapping the Milky Way for five years. The University of Groningen astronomer and her team were racing to comb through the data for insights about the galaxy before others got there first....
Dietary supplements aren’t regulated like pharmaceutical drugs, so that means they shouldn’t contain pharmaceutical drugs. Yet over the last decade, more than 750 supplement brands have been found to be tainted with drugs—sometimes containing two or more hidden drug ingredients, a new study finds. What’s more, although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identified these tainted supplements, less than half of these products were recalled. That means that these products—which are essentially “unapproved drugs”—remain on the market, where they have the potential to cause serious health problems, the researchers, from the California Department of Public Health, wrote in the study, published today (Oct....
NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston is closed today (Aug. 27) to all but mission-critical staff, due to heavy rainfall caused by Hurricane Harvey. Mission Control, which oversees the operation of the International Space Station, “remains operational and fully capable of supporting [the station],” according to NASA’s website. The main entrance to JSC, and many of the roads leading to JSC’s other entrances, were flooded as of this morning, according to the JSC Emergency Management website....
By Nicola Nosengo of Nature magazineSix Italian seismologists and one government official will be tried for the manslaughter of those who died in the earthquake that struck the city of L’Aquila on 6 April 2009.The seven were on a committee that had been tasked with assessing the risk associated with recent increases in seismic activity in the area. Following a committee meeting just a week before the quake, some members of the group assured the public that they were in no danger....
A treasure trove of fossils uncovered in Utah is helping paleontologists understand why some meat-eating dinosaurs evolved into vegetarians. The bones represent a new species belonging to a group known as the therizinosaurs, plant-eating cousins of Jurassic Park’s Velociraptor. Scientists unearthed some 1,700 bones, which date to 125 million years ago, from the base of the Cedar Mountain rock formation in Utah. According to James Kirkland of the Utah Geological Survey, hundreds to thousands of individual dinosaurs could have perished at the two-acre dig site....
Take a look up in the night sky. Whether on a mountaintop, largely unfazed by light pollution, or wedged in the heart of a muddied-sky metropolis, thank your lucky stars that you can see anything at all. A new study investigating the disruptive effects of galaxies merging or tugging on each other shows that there should be numerous stars thrown from their habitual confines during such interactions and into intergalactic space....
By Alison Abbott of Nature magazine The town of Ozersk, deep in Russia’s remote southern Urals, hides the relics of a massive secret experiment. From the early 1950s to the end of the cold war, nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated. Some were blasted with -, - or -radiation. Others were fed radioactive particles. Some of the doses were high enough to kill the animals outright; others were so low that they seemed harmless....
