Key concepts Psychology Choices Colors Behavior Introduction Have you ever wondered if your preferences bias the choices you make? You make choices all the time, whether you are aware of them or not. Many different factors probably work together to affect the option you end up choosing. Which do you think are the most important? Everyone has personal preferences, and these may affect the choices we make. What about your favorite color?...
Dear EarthTalk: Recent news reports have revealed the discovery of previously unknown species inhabiting the deepest parts of our oceans. Is anything being done to protect this habitat before humans have a chance to fish it to death or otherwise destroy it?—Matthew Polk, Gary, Ind. Unfortunately it may already be too late for some of the deep sea’s undiscovered life forms. Advances in so-called “bottom trawling” technology in recent years has meant that fishing boats now have unprecedented access to deep ocean habitats and the sea floor itself where untold numbers of unknown species have been making a living for eons....
One big problem with putting autonomous drones to work delivering packages—or flying search-and-rescue missions—is that the sky is complicated and unpredictable. Trees, utility wires and spiraling footballs can turn up almost anywhere in the flight path. A new strategy for dodging these obstacles could come from an unexpected source: the way bats wiggle their ears. The idea first occurred to Rolf Mueller, a Virginia Tech mechanical engineering professor, a few years ago while looking at bat photographs....
Fossils of an ancient creature resembling a shrimp with an armored head contain the oldest and best-preserved nervous system ever found, which could help scientists decipher the evolution of nervous systems in animals alive today, according to a new study. The remarkable remains belonged to Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis, a crustaceanlike creature that lived 520 million years ago in what is now South China. The fossils revealed a long “ropelike” central nerve cord that extended throughout the body, with visible clusters of nerve tissue arranged along the cord, like beads strung on a thread....
A robotic Russian cargo vessel has died a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere, nine days after launching on a failed mission to the International Space Station. The unmanned Progress 59 freighter burned up at 10:04 p.m. EDT Thursday (May 7; 0204 GMT May 8) over the central Pacific Ocean, officials with the Russian space agency, known as Roscosmos, said in a statement. According to Canadian satellite watcher Ted Molczan, the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) determined that Progress 59 fell to Earth at 10:20 p....
Key concepts Light Shadow Rotation Planetary motion Introduction When was the last time you really examined the shadows around you? Most people don’t pay much attention to shadows and how they change. That’s because most people don’t think shadows are all that important. But the movement of shadows in sunlight is evidence of something very important, something that it took people thousands of years to figure out—that the Earth spins like a top and orbits around the sun....
WHEN REGINA BARZILAY had a routine mammogram in her early 40s, the image showed a complex array of white splotches in her breast tissue. The marks could be normal, or they could be cancerous—even the best radiologists often struggle to tell the difference. Her doctors decided the spots were not immediately worrisome. In hindsight, she says, “I already had cancer, and they didn’t see it.” Over the next two years Barzilay underwent a second mammogram, a breast MRI and a biopsy, all of which continued to yield ambiguous or conflicting findings....
By Tiffany O’CallaghanThe discovery in a hardy microbe of a novel way of processing carbon shows that there are more ways for organisms to sustain life in the harshest of environments than previously thought.The breaking down of carbon compounds into basic building blocks is the daily grind of living organisms. Vertebrates use a metabolic process known as the Krebs cycle, in which the molecule acetyl coenzyme A (acetyl-CoA) has a crucial role, helping to usher compounds from one enzyme to the next as they are dismantled....
Both Brazilian sugarcane farmers who turn excess to ethanol and Chinese city dwellers who enjoy hot tea thanks to solar water heaters don’t realize it but they are at the forefront of what an international panel of scientists hopes the future will look like. The Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council—a group that represents 150 national scientific and engineering academies—released a report this week detailing how countries can shift from burning coal and other greenhouse-gas emitting fuels to cleaner energy while also introducing modern forms of energy to the billions worldwide who rely on charcoal, firewood or even dung as their fuel....
Skin cells from an adult mouse reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells have silenced symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in rats. Scientists injected healthy rats with a toxin that destroyed their dopamine-making neurons, producing motor symptoms reminiscent of Parkinson’s. The rodents then received treatment with the modified cells (called induced pluripotent stem cells). Within four weeks most of the rats showed improved balance and coordination; one even had heightened dopamine activity....
The North Atlantic jet stream, a fast-moving air current circling the Northern Hemisphere, may migrate northward in the coming decades if strong global warming continues. The consequences could be dramatic: shifts in rainfall patterns across the midlatitudes and an increase in droughts, heat waves, floods and other extreme weather events in Europe and the eastern U.S. A new study finds that the jet stream could shift outside the bounds of its historic range within just a few decades — by the year 2060 or so — under a strong warming scenario....
Larry page, ceo of Google, has said that he gets excited about ideas that can change the world even though “it’s easy to think they’re crazy now.” Take the company’s self-driving cars project. Within 10 years, he told a rapt audience at the 2012 Google Zeitgeist meeting, the technology could eliminate a leading cause of death for 16-year-olds. They would have the illusion of driving, he explained: “They just can’t kill themselves or anybody else....
A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved fishbowls. The sponsors of the measure explained that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl because the curved sides give the fish a distorted view of reality. Aside from the measure’s significance to the poor goldfish, the story raises an interesting philosophical question: How do we know that the reality we perceive is true?...
Aspiring bank robbers, take heed. Recent statistical analyses of confidential bank data suggest that mountains of riches aren’t in your future but that a jail cell is. “The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish,” wrote the authors of a June article about the economics of British bank robberies in Significance, a bimonthly statistics magazine published by the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society. To complete their research, economists Neil Rickman and Robert Witt of the University of Surrey and Barry Reilly of the University of Sussex spent months negotiating with the British Bankers’ Association to obtain confidential records detailing 364 bank heists that occurred in the U....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Contact between Korea and China goes back to mythology and prehistory. Trade developed from the Bronze and Iron Ages with raw materials and manufactured goods going in both directions for centuries thereafter. In addition to traders, migrants came, beginning with those escaping from the 4th-century BCE conflicts of the Warring States period, and a regular stream of diplomats, monks, and scholars travelled in both directions, too, so that Chinese culture spread to the whole of the Korean peninsula....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, dogs were considered little more than ‘machines’ which performed certain tasks, such as guarding a home or tracking game, but this view changed significantly during the Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) of the 17th and 18th centuries....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Battle of Colmar (58 BCE): one of the first battles of the Gallic War, in which Caesar defeated an army led by the Germanic leader Ariovistus. In 58 BCE, Julius Caesar had invaded Central Gaul. The pretext had been the plan of the Helvetians to migrate to Aquitania, something that the Roman general considered unacceptable....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pythagoras (569-475 BC) is recognized as the world’s first mathematician. He was born on the island of Samos and was thought to study with Thales and Anaximander (recognized as the first western philosophers). Pythagoras believed that numbers were not only the way to truth, but truth itself. Through mathematics, one could attain harmony and live an easier life....
CLIMATEWIRE | California is sweltering in a record-breaking September heat wave, sending electricity demand soaring and triggering repeated calls for residents to cut back on their power usage to prevent rolling blackouts. Monday evening, electricity supplies had so far covered demand. But the California Independent System Operator (ISO) issued a stage one warning statewide that electricity supplies were nearing danger territory. Northern California entered stage two, where the grid manager seeks power from all sources and amps up calls for consumer conservation....
March is National Colorectal Cancer Awareness month, when public health groups take special pains to promote screening for cancer of the rectum and colon. A leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S., this disease kills about 50,000 people each year; caught early, however, it has a good chance of being cured. For screening, physicians commonly recommend colonoscopy as the tool of choice: once every 10 years starting at age 50 for people of average risk, earlier and possibly more frequently for those with a family history of colon cancer or other signs of added susceptibility....
