Posts

This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. It is part of a collaboration among the Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting and Michigan Radio. It was featured on Reveal, a new program from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. MOUNT VERNON, Maine—Living in the lush, wooded countryside with fresh New England air, Wendy Brennan never imagined her family might be consuming poison every day....

Onboard navigation and mobile applications can tell drivers how to avoid traffic jams. Trouble is, most of the drivers are already on the road, perhaps already in the jam. But IBM is about to deploy a system that will predict traffic flow up to an hour before it occurs, giving travelers ample time to avoid trouble. During pilot tests in Singapore, forecasts made across 500 urban locations accurately predicted traffic volume 85 to 93 percent of the time and vehicle speed 87 to 95 percent of the time....

LUCY’S LEGACY: THE QUEST FOR HUMAN ORIGINS by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong. Harmony, 2009 In 1974 paleontologist Donald C. Johanson found a female skeleton 3.2 million years old that exhibited both ape and human characteristics. Johanson and Kate Wong (who is an editor at this magazine) recount the stunning discovery of Lucy, and then they venture far beyond that to bring readers up-to-date on what has been unearthed since and the implications of these new finds for what it means to be human....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineIt has been a medical mystery for 67 years, ever since the British geneticist Anthony Allison established that carriers of one mutated copy of the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia are protected from malaria. The finding wasn’t trivial: in equatorial Africa, where Allison did his work, up to 40% of people are carriers of this mutated gene. Since then, scientific sleuths have wondered how exactly the gene protects them....

GENEVA—The two largest collaborations of physicists in history Tuesday presented intriguing but tentative clues to the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle thought to endow ordinary matter with mass. Representing the 6,000 physicists who work on two separate detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), called CMS and ATLAS, two spokespersons said that both experiments seemed to agree, as both their data sets suggested that the Higgs has a mass close to that of about 125 hydrogen atoms....

In a previous, more adventurous stage of life, I hitchhiked around Australia. I got a lift out of Adelaide from a man with one leg, the other having been amputated after a car accident when he was six. There were two remarkable things about this man. The first was that he drove a manual - three pedals, one leg. The second was his remarkable method of gaining relief from an excruciating pain in his missing foot: he would put his prosthetic leg in the exact location he felt his own leg to be, and then drive a screwdriver into the painful spot....

Using high-speed videography, a pair of researchers may have cracked the mystery of how raindrops take shape between the clouds and the ground. The conventional view held that raindrops take shape as a result of the forces resulting from numerous collisions and mergers with other drops as well as from the atmospheric drag that fragments the drops; these interactions cause raindrops to adopt a variety of sizes by the time they reach the ground....

A plague of oxygen-deprived waters from the deep ocean is creeping up over the continental shelves off the Pacific Northwest and forcing marine species there to relocate or die. Since 2002 tongues of hypoxic, or low-oxygen, waters from deeper areas offshore have slipped into shallower near-shore environments off the Oregon coast, although not close enough to be oxygenated by the waves. The problem stems from oxygen reduction in deep water, a phenomenon that some scientists are observing in oceans worldwide, and that may be related to climate change....

London – Austria’s alpine lakes are warming, and that’s bad news for the region’s fish and economy, according to new research in the journal Hydrobiologia. Martin Dokulil of the Institute for Limnology at the University of Innsbruck studied data from nine lakes larger than 10 square kilometers, or about 2,500 acres. The largest, Bodensee or Lake Constance, touches Austria’s border with Germany and Switzerland; on the other side of the country, 800 kilometers (500 miles) to the east, Neusiedler See borders Germany and Hungary....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. If you are reading this, you probably love history and archaeology. And if you have children, then you have probably struggled at times to excite them about ancient ruins and archaeology. Here is an idea: let them be an archaeologist and see how interesting (and yes, even exciting) it is!...

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In this interview, World History Encyclopedia is joined with Elodie Harper, the author of the novel The Wolf Den. Kelly (WHE): Do you want to start us off by telling us what the book is about? Advertisement Elodie Harper (author): Hi, it is so nice to be here with you....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Prostitution in ancient Athens was legal and regulated by the state. During the Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-479 BCE) brothels were instituted and taxed by the lawgiver Solon (l. c. 630 - c. 560 BCE), and this policy continued into the Classical Period (480-323 BCE). For many Athenian women, prostitution was the only way to make a living....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Maccabean Revolt of 167-160 BCE was a Jewish uprising in Judea against the repression of the Seleucid Empire. The revolt was led by a country priest called Mattathias, and his military followers became known as Maccabees. Successful, Jerusalem was captured and the Temple of Jerusalem reconsecrated, an act still commemorated today in the Jewish Hanukkah festival....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Racialized chattel slavery developed in the English colonies of North America between 1640-1660 and was fully institutionalized by 1700. Although slavery was practiced in the New England and Middle colonies, and Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the first slave law in 1641, Virginia pioneered institutionalized slavery and the Virginia Slave Laws, adapted from those of the English colony of Barbados, became the model other colonies drew from in creating their own....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The lives of women in the Middle Ages were determined by the Church and the aristocracy. The medieval Church provided the ‘big picture’ of the meaning of life and one’s place while the aristocracy ensured that everyone stayed in their respective places through the feudal system that divided society into three classes: clergy, nobility, and serfs....

Radar uses radio waves to enable aircraft, ships and ground stations to see far into their surroundings even at night and in bad weather. The metal antennas behind those waves also strongly reflect radar, making them highly visible to others—a deadly disadvantage during wartime. A new class of nonmetallic radio antennas can become invisible to radar—by ceasing to reflect radio waves—when deactivated. This innovation, called plasma antenna technology, is based on energizing gases in sealed tubes to form clouds of freely moving electrons and charged ions....

By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazine Some patients with Lyme disease still show symptoms long after their treatment has finished. Now proteins have been discovered that set these people apart from those who are easily cured. People who experience the symptoms of Lyme disease, which include fatigue, soreness and memory or concentration loss, after treatment for the disorder are sometimes diagnosed as having chronic Lyme disease or post-Lyme disease syndrome. But these diagnoses are difficult to make, because the individuals no longer seem to harbour the bacteria that cause Lyme disease....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. Every year, as winter closes in, transportation authorities prepare to deploy their vast stockpiles of salt and sand to keep the roads and highways safe and ice-free for drivers. In the United States, roughly 18 million metric tons of road salt are spread on the roads each year, with another 5 million used in Canada. In Minnesota, nine tons of salt are applied per lane mile each winter—meaning a single mile of a four-lane highway gets 36 tons of salt dumped on it each year....

Climate change is bringing more droughts, heat waves and powerful rainstorms, shifts that will require governments to change how they cope with natural disasters to protect human lives and the world economy, a new U.N. report says. The 592-page analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released yesterday, also makes clear the uneven toll extracted by extreme weather, because its effects can be magnified by a lack of resources to plan for disasters and cope with their aftermath....

By Jatindra Dash VISAKHAPATNAM India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The death toll from a powerful cyclone which battered India’s eastern coastline rose to 24 on Monday, as the storm weakened and moved inland, leaving a swathe of destruction and triggering fears heavy rains would bring flash floods. Packing wind speeds of up to 195 kph (over 120 mph), cyclone Hudhud hammered the coasts of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha states on Sunday, forcing tens of thousands of coastal inhabitants to seek safety in storm shelters....