Posts

EPA’s Science Advisory Board wants to review Administrator Scott Pruitt’s plan to restrict studies the agency uses when crafting regulations. The board is now led by a Pruitt appointee, Michael Honeycutt, who signed off on the request for more discussion on Pruitt’s plan to limit the agency’s use of scientific studies to those that use public data. In a May 12 memo, members of an SAB working group flagged potential problems with the rule and determined that it could affect regulations by making them more or less stringent....

Key Concepts Biology Physiology Senses Vision Perception Introduction Did you know that you have a blind spot in each of your eyes? This doesn’t mean you see a constant black spot in your field of vision. Normally you don’t notice these blind spots at all. There are, however, some ways you can make these blind spots come to light, so to speak! This activity will show you how to find them....

The world’s leggiest creature on record is even more bizarre than its 750 wiggling limbs attest, according to new research. The white millipede named lllacme plenipes (Latin for “the pinnacle plentiful feet”) and found only in a small area of Northern California wowed researchers with its unusually complex build in such a tiny package — it measures 0.4-1.2 inches (1-3 centimeters) long. “It basically looks like a thread,” lead study author Paul Marek, a postdoctoral entomologist at the University of Arizona, told LiveScience....

The organs of speech are the same for all people, or so linguists have typically assumed. But it turns out that may not be true—in fact, what you eat can change how you talk. The conventional wisdom held in the field of historical linguistics is the vocal apparatus of human beings has remained fixed since the emergence of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. As a consequence, all humans, both ancient and modern peoples, possess the same basic capacity to produce speech sounds....

By Julie Steenhuysen and Meredith Davis CHICAGO (Reuters) - The strain of avian flu that has been identified in 12 U.S. states and led to the extermination of more than 7 million birds is different from the H5N1 bird flu virus that has spread from birds to humans in the past, an official with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. An analysis of the genetic composition of avian viruses circulating in North America, including the H5N2 strain, showed they do not contain genetic markers which in the past have been linked to more severe outbreaks in birds and transmission to humans, Alicia Fry, a medical officer in the CDC’s influenza branch, said on a conference call with reporters....

Astronomers have peered out into the vast expanse and spotted what they think is the farthest (and oldest) galaxy ever observed. The galaxy GN-z11 might not have a flashy name, but it appears to be the most distant and oldest galaxy ever detected, scientists have found. Astronomers led by Nobunari Kashikawa, a professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Tokyo, embarked on a mission to find the universe’s most distant observable galaxy, to learn more about how it formed and when....

The “hair” sprouting off this branch resembles a downy feather duster or fluffy tuft of cotton—maybe even fragments of a bad white wig. But each strand is in fact made of hard, cold ice. For these manes of silky-smooth ice crystals (aptly termed “hair ice”) to appear, a particular fungus called Exidiopsis effusa has to colonize rotting wood from a broadleaf tree, and temperatures must hover just below freezing in a sufficiently humid environment....

BOULDER, Colo. — On most days here, a small team of scientists uses a global climate model to explore a scenario that begins 23 years from now. It starts in 2040 after a series of shocks have finally roused the world to take immediate action against the escalating effects of climate change. To billions of people who live in coastal cities, by 2040, sea-level rise has become obvious, dangerous and costly as governments ponder how and where to move people out of harm’s way, according to the scenario....

Margit was only 19 when the horrific headaches began. In the middle of training to become a physical therapist, she found that the right side of her head began pounding, as if her skull were about to explode. For a while that first time, she muddled through the day, doing her best to ignore the pain, made worse by the blinding artificial light and stress of the clinic. But eventually she went home, pulled down the blinds and fell asleep on the couch....

On a cloudless January afternoon, two tourists climb into bright-yellow kayaks and set out to explore Myanmar’s Indawgyi Lake, one of the largest and most pristine bodies of freshwater in Southeast Asia. The lake’s clear, still surface perfectly reflects the grassy wetlands fringing its shores and the forested mountains towering just beyond. The golden outline of Shwe Myitzu Pagoda—a pilgrimage site for local Buddhists, accessible only by boat during most of the year—shimmers on the horizon like a mirage....

After leaving the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) physics laboratory years ago, I crossed the Swiss-German border by high-speed train. Looking out the window of the carriage, I was enthralled by the scenes flashing by: a young couple embracing on an otherwise deserted platform, an old man standing by a rusty wagon with a missing wheel, two girls wading into a reedy pond. Each was just a few flickering frames, gone in the blink of an eye, but enough for my imagination to fill in a story....

Dear EarthTalk: What are the “Growing Green Awards”?—Allen Sherwood, Denver The Growing Green Awards is a program of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that recognizes and gives exposure to individuals across the United States who have demonstrated original leadership in the field of sustainable food. Each year NRDC gives out the awards to those making extraordinary contributions advancing ecologically-integrated farming practices, climate stewardship, water stewardship, farmland preservation, and social responsibility “from farm to fork....

When FDR famously proclaimed there is nothing to fear but fear itself, little did he know was forecasting a psychological phenomenon known anxiety sensitivity. The term wasn’t coined until 1985, but when the concept was defined, it was kind of a big deal. I’ll stop short of calling anxiety sensitivity the mother of all anxiety disorders (which sounds like a Freudian comic book villain), but high anxiety sensitivity puts you at greater risk for developing a problem with anxiety, from panic to PTSD to phobias and beyond....

Every six hours this week, in a bit of meteorological choreography, dozens of National Weather Service (NWS) offices have been releasing weather balloons in unison. It is an effort to help answer a big question mark that has been hanging ominously over Florida all week as Hurricane Irma creeps closer: What part of the state—if any—will bear the brunt of a hurricane that is one of the strongest ever measured in the Atlantic Ocean, a storm that has already left a trail of destruction across the Caribbean?...

On Tuesday 6 August, the police shot and killed a schoolteacher outside his home in Shaler Township, Pennsylvania. He had reportedly pointed a gun at the officers. In Grants Pass, Oregon, that same day, a 39-year-old man was shot and killed after an altercation with police in the state police office. And in Henderson, Nevada, that evening, an officer shot and injured a 15-year-old suspected of robbing a convenience store. The boy reportedly had an object in his hand that the police later confirmed was not a deadly weapon....

The Earth’s mantle acts like a giant churn, circulating cool oceanic crust downward toward the core, where it heats up into a goopy solid and then rises again—a process that powers everything from plate tectonics to volcanism. But there are some hitches in this system, and new research reveals why: A slippery layer about 416 miles (670 kilometers) deep stops chunks of crust in their tracks, creating “stagnant slabs" in the middle of the mantle, the layer between the Earth’s crust and its core....

It may not be the most appetizing way to extend life but researchers have shown for the first time that older fish live longer after they consumed microbes from the poo of younger fish. The findings were posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint server on March 271by Dario Valenzano, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, and colleagues. So-called ‘young blood’ experiments that join the circulatory systems of two rats — one young and the other old — have found that factors coursing through the veins of young rodents can improve the health and longevity of older animals....

In the early experiments it looked like the virus called VP882 was doing something that should be impossible for a thing that is not a bacterium, and not technically even alive: intercepting molecular messages exchanged by its host bacteria, and reading them to determine the best time to annihilate the whole bacterial colony. “As scientists, this is just unimaginable to us,” says Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University. “We were delighted and skeptical at the same time....

This special issue, 169 Best Illusions, contains a smorgasbord of static images that appear to be moving (such as the Hatpin Urchin shown here), “impossible” sculptures, freaky faces, ghostly afterimages and even some edible illusions. Illusions make great eye candy, but they also serve a serious purpose. When we look at an illusion, we “see” something that does not match the physical reality of the world around us. Scientists take advantage of this discrepancy between perception and reality to gain insights into how our eyes and brains gather and interpret (or misinterpret) visual information....

After James Webb Space Telescope officials released a stunning image of a single star, the team is ready to get other telescope parts in line with the observatory’s mirrors. The $10 billion telescope successfully aligned with its near-infrared camera (NIRCam), as the star image showed. But the observatory still has four other instruments that it must be able to switch between with perfect alignment to obtain sharp images of distant objects....