Angela Post wasn’t supposed to study hemp. The North Carolina State agriculture researcher focuses on small grains like wheat and barley. But after the 2014 Farm Bill allowed states to investigate hemp, it became clear the seeds were lucrative. Post had the right equipment to study them, so the job was hers. At first, Post thought hemp would get as much attention as the other alternative crops she and her colleagues dabble in....
Key concepts Chemistry Water Saturation Absorption Introduction Have you ever wondered what art and science have in common? Although art draws on emotions and science uses rational thought, science and art both demand creativity and excellent observational skills. Most techniques used by artists even have interesting scientific explanations. This activity explores just one: painting with water-based paint on wet surfaces. See how science can help you become a more versatile artist!...
The United States is on pace to install record amounts of wind and solar this year, underscoring America’s capacity to build renewables at a level once considered impossible. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. will install 37 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity this year, obliterating the previous record of almost 17 GW in 2016. The renewable boom boosts U.S. climate efforts. Energy modelers think the nation will need to deploy about 40 GW of wind and solar every year over the next decade to achieve deep decarbonization of its electric grids....
The observable Universe contains about two trillion galaxies—more than ten times as many as previously estimated, according to the first significant revision of the count in two decades. Since the mid-1990s, the working estimate for the number of galaxies in the Universe has been around 120 billion. That number was based largely on a 1996 study called Hubble Deep Field. Researchers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a small region of space for a total of ten days so that the long exposures would reveal extremely faint objects....
Around 500 million years ago, something awful seems to have happened on Venus. Maybe in spurts or maybe all at once, a fury of volcanism paved over nearly the entire surface. Some scientists think Earth’s planetary sister could have supported life for billions of years, yet scarcely a trace now remains of that lost world. To fathom why a planet would have done such a thing to itself, researchers need to know its inner torment....
With few clear warning signs, ovarian cancer frequently evades detection until it’s too late. Only about half of the patients diagnosed with it survive more than five years. OCRA Survivors Teaching Students program, winner of the 2018 President’s Award, takes a unique approach in making a difference. Disease survivors visit medical education programs to share their experience — including stories of diagnosis, treatment and survivorship — to educate medical students in how to spot ovarian cancer....
How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Hold that thought. We will get to the answer shortly in this column, which addresses how difficult it is to make a change, despite our best intentions. Consider how many people engage in self-defeating patterns of behavior despite negative consequences: Smoking, obesity and problem drinking can lead to chronic illness and premature death. Nevertheless, recent large-scale surveys of adults by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that more than 20 percent of American adults continue to smoke, more than 30 percent are significantly overweight and approximately 15 percent are binge drinkers....
This story is a supplement to the feature “Why Migraines Strike” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. In recent years researchers have identified several gene mutations that underlie familial hemiplegic migraine, a rare, inherited form of migraine. Although the genetic work is in early stages, it is already clear that these mutations disrupt the complex workings of the ion channels and pumps that regulate the activity of nerve cells....
With medical supplies in high demand, federal authorities say health workers can wear surgical masks for protection while treating COVID-19 patients—but growing evidence suggests the practice is putting workers in jeopardy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said lower-grade surgical masks are “an acceptable alternative” to N95 masks unless workers are performing an intubation or another procedure on a COVID patient that could unleash a high volume of virus particles....
The first of a two-part series on electric cars. When Kevin Czinger wanted to start building electric cars, he knew where to begin: China. His company, Los Angeles-based CODA Automotive, had a blueprint for an electric sedan with a 100-mile range. His engineers had designed a lithium-ion battery with electronic “brains” that maximized its range while keeping it as cool, and safe, as possible. If he could produce this battery on the cheap, an affordable electric car was within reach....
Public health interventions don’t just work during your run-of-the-mill pandemic. They are effective even when people are trying to kill you by using a disease outbreak as a genocidal weapon of mass destruction. A paper published on Friday in Science Advances reports on a sophisticated mathematical analysis that shows how personal hygiene, quarantines, social distancing and a grass-roots public education campaign appeared to extinguish a raging typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941....
1969 Attitudes to Pot “The prevailing public attitude toward marihuana in the U.S. is charged with a hyperemotional bias. In part this is the product of an ‘educational campaign’ initiated in the 1930’s by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a campaign that has disseminated much distortion and misinformation about the drug. The still powerful vestige of the Protestant ethic in this country condemns marihuana as an opiate used solely for the pursuit of pleasure (whereas alcohol is accepted because it lubricates the wheels of commerce and catalyzes social intercourse)....
A Metric Daydream “A proposal that the U.S. switch to the metric system has been sent to Congress by Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans. The proposal adopts recommendations made in a National Bureau of Standards report, which describes metrication as ‘a decision whose time has come.’ The U.S. is the only major nation not on the metric system or committed to change to it. ‘A metric America,’ the report says, ‘would seem to be desirable in terms of our stake in world trade....
It’s baaaaack, that reputation-shredding, stock-moving fight to the death over key CRISPR patents. On Monday morning in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments in University of California v. Broad Institute. Questions? How did we get here? The patent office ruled in February 2017 that the Broad’s 2014 CRISPR patent on using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit genomes, based on discoveriesby Feng Zhang, did not “interfere” with a patent application by UC based on the work of UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna....
Last January, California’s beekeepers were worried they wouldn’t have enough bees to pollinate the almond bloom, their biggest money-making event of the year. Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper and the former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, said winter losses were “as bad or worse than I believe it’s been.” It turns out he was right. It was another grim year for America’s beekeepers, already reeling from more than a decade of colony losses that threaten the commercial honeybee industry....
China is set to introduce its equivalent of U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan next week, even as the Trump administration prepares to discard its electricity rule for the carbon sector. China will debut an emissions trading system as soon as today that will begin by covering coal- and natural-gas-based power production. The program will eventually expand to a variety of manufacturing and industrial sectors. “It is important to bear in mind that the first phase will be embryonic,” said Li Shuo, senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, who has been briefed on some details of the coming plan....
How hot are Earth’s scorching insides? A sweltering 2,570 degrees Fahrenheit (1,410 degrees Celsius), a new study finds. The discovery reveals that the mantle under Earth’s oceans — the area just below the crust that extends down to the planet’s inner liquid core — is almost 110 degrees F (60 degrees C) hotter than scientists previously thought, the researchers said. The finding will help scientists more accurately model Earth’s many geodynamic processes, including plate tectonics, they said....
Nevada hit the jackpot yesterday in a five-state bid to host Tesla Motors Inc.’s $5 billion battery factory, which could help achieve a mass market for low-emissions electric vehicles by the end of the decade. Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) offered the automaker $1.25 billion in tax breaks over the next 20 years—more than double Tesla’s requested $500 million incentive package—to build what will become the world’s largest lithium-ion battery plant at a location outside of Reno....
Entanglement, that most counterintuitive quantum phenomenon by which particles share an unseen link that aligns their properties, is looking more mundane all the time. Just last week two groups of researchers reported entangling a photon with a crystal-based device, potentially paving the way for solid-state memories that can store and then release entangled particles as needed. Another week, another advance. In a paper published online January 19 in Nature a team of physicists announced that they have developed the capability to churn out pairs of entangled particles, billions at a time....
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett Viking (Penguin), 2006 If nowhere else, the dead live on in our brain cells, not just as memories but as programs–computerlike models compiled over the years capturing how the dearly departed behaved when they were alive. These simulations can be remarkably faithful. In even the craziest dreams the people we know may remain eerily in character, acting as we would expect them to in the real world....
