Oxygen is vital for life—without it, severe brain damage may ensue in as little as three minutes. So doctors routinely treat traumas such as heart attack or stroke by providing victims with more oxygen. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that resuscitating with too much of the gas may actually have a harmful effect. The culprit in brain damage may not be a lack of oxygen but rather its reintroduction into the body....
A “new normal” is settling over the Arctic, experts warned yesterday. Temperatures are rising, ice is melting, snow is disappearing and the region’s delicate ecosystems are rapidly evolving. It’s already not the same place it was a few decades ago, and it won’t be the same place a few more decades into the future. That’s the stark conclusion of this year’s Arctic Report Card, an annual update on the Arctic climate from NOAA....
DENVER — Old buildings may be the safest spot to be when in Liechtenstein. A new study in this tiny European country reveals that buildings constructed during the Middle Ages ride out earthquakes better than those built to modern standards. The reason for this counterintuitive truth appears to be that old buildings were constructed so that the floor doesn’t attach to the walls. “Instead of rolling like a boat,” these structures actually stabilize during quakes, said study researcher Maria Brunhart-Lupo, a geologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo....
Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Have you ever wondered why doctors seem so stingy with antibiotic prescriptions? I mean, here you are suffering from a nasty cold and you simply cannot be sick right now (what with your crazy, busy life). What’s the harm in taking a few anti-bacterial zappers? They couldn’t hurt, right?...
Measuring the minuscule mass of neutrinos has so far proved impossible—and not for lack of trying. Numerous laboratory experiments over the past few decades have succeeded only in placing loose limits on the three neutrino masses. We have very compelling reasons to expect that the best way to measure the mass of these tiny particles is, surprisingly, to look for their influence at the largest scales of the universe. For although neutrinos are virtually massless and nearly invisible, their sheer numbers—some 1089 in the universe—make them very consequential players in the cosmos....
By Anthony Deutsch AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A second Dutch farm was hit by an outbreak of bird flu, the government said on Thursday, prompting the destruction of 43,000 chickens and prolonging crippling restrictions on trade in the world’s leading egg exporter. A three-day, nation-wide ban on the transportation of all poultry, eggs and related farm products was extended until Sunday, a statement said. The measures have already led to tens of millions of euros (dollars) in losses....
Originally posted on the Nature news blog More than 130 leading population geneticists are publicly condemning a book arguing that genetic variation between human populations could underlie global economic, political and social differences. “A Troublesome Inheritance“, by science journalist Nicholas Wade, was published in June by Penguin Press in New York. The 278-page work garnered widespread criticism, much of it from scientists, for suggesting that genetic differences (rather than culture) explain, for instance, why Western governments are more stable than those in African countries....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Bullying, as many people know, can be a tremendously painful experience for a young person. The point has been driven home over the last decade by stories about teens like Phoebe Prince or Amanda Todd, who killed themselves after experiencing bullying. Recently, the parents of eight-year-old Gabriel Taye filed a federal lawsuit against the Cincinnati public schools, alleging that their son committed suicide because the school covered up and failed to prevent a culture of bullying....
Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds. For decades, scientists have suspected that water lurks below the polar ice caps of Mars, just as it does here on Earth. In 2018, researchers using the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected evidence for a lake hidden beneath the Red Planet’s south polar ice cap, and in 2020, they found signs of a number of super-salty lakes there....
The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech now have applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for full approval of their vaccines against COVID-19, reports Daniel E. Slotnik at The New York Times. Currently, both are authorized on an emergency-use basis by the agency. Many people, me included earlier this year, mistakenly have referred to the Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines as approved in the U....
Astronomers have waited years to get their hands on this kind of x-ray data from distant galaxy clusters—but it was short-lived. Japan’s Hitomi spacecraft launched to Earth orbit on February 17, and its instruments worked beautifully, giving researchers a taste of measurements from the most sensitive x-ray detector ever built. Yet just over a month later scientists completely lost contact with the craft, which was spinning out of control after a series of errors caused its thrusters to fire in the wrong direction....
Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Procrastination is the opposite of inspiration. It’s when we shilly-shally away our time when we’re supposed to be doing something bigger and better. Today our topic comes by request from Savvy Psychologist listener Anson N. of San Mateo, CA. He speaks for millions of us when he asks how to stop procrastinating....
Global positioning system (GPS) devices may not always provide spot-on directions, but they do provide drivers, cyclists and hikers with convenient access to digital map data of every square meter of the planet shadowed by satellites. Step indoors and you will find that same GPS receiver becomes an expensive paperweight. Indoor GPS has been in the works for at least a decade, but the plethora of interfering signals from wi-fi, ultrasound, cellular and other devices make it difficult for GPS units to come up with an accurate reading....
A week after granting an emergency-use authorization for the country’s first COVID-19 vaccine, US regulators have followed with a second: another RNA vaccine, this one made by Moderna of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The emergency-use authorization followed quickly after a panel of external advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted unanimously, with one abstention, to recommend use of the vaccine on 17 December. One week earlier, the agency authorized a similar vaccine made by Pfizer of New York City and BioNTech of Mainz, Germany, about a week after UK regulatory authorities did the same....
In a move that has been widely criticized, NASA leaders recently terminated a test project that allowed employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to display pronouns in their official agency identifiers. The decision affected more than 100 employees who saw their stated pronouns vanish from communication platforms. The project’s termination attracted public attention after it was described in an anonymous post on Reddit. Scientific American has since verified many of the details revealed by the post with multiple GSFC employees—all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal....
Of the more than 80,000 chemicals used in the U.S., only 300 or so have ever undergone health and safety testing. In fact, only five chemicals have ever been restricted or banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But now some 10,000 agricultural and industrial chemicals—as well as food additives—will be screened for toxicity for the first time, with the help of a rapid-fire testing robot. “We are screening 10,000 chemicals using these rapid tests to characterize the bioactivity of the chemicals to predict their hazard and to use that information to prioritize for further screening and testing,” says biologist David Dix, deputy director of EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology....
What is science worth? For many researchers, the answer is “priceless.” It’s not just that science has provided the basis for modern life through sanitation and energy and electricity and telecommunications or that technology gives us useful things. It’s that science deepens our understanding of the world around us in a way the transcends material benefits. Poet William Blake may not have been thinking about science when he described seeing “a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” but he could have been....
In the past couple of years speech-recognition software has quietly grown tendrils into every corner of our lives. It’s at the other end of customer-support hotlines and airline reservation systems. It’s built into Microsoft Windows. It’s an alternative text-input method for touch-screen phones such as the iPhone and the Android. But let’s face it: most people who use this software wish they didn’t have to. That’s because speech recognition is usually plan B: a least terrible alternative to typing or actual human conversation....
The Epstein–Barr virus and its relatives in the herpesvirus family are known for their longevity. They persist in host tissues for years, causing diseases like mononucleosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma and herpes, and are notoriously difficult to kill. University of California, Los Angeles, biophysicist Z. Hong Zhou thinks the secret to herpesviruses’ resilience may be a layer of microscopic chain mail. Zhou and his colleagues examined the outer shells, or capsids, of a primate herpesvirus under an electron microscope and saw a pattern of interlocking protein rings....
The Department of Energy is preparing a new set of partnerships and innovations that could help the nation’s three power grids handle a transformation in U.S. energy generation to meet lower emissions goals. One scientist summed up the challenge by saying it’s like updating a reliable 1957 Chevrolet for the complex technologies and climate-related hazards of the 21st century. Last week, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo....
