Do you have wistful memories of the cookies that came from your grandmother’s oven? Do you enjoy recalling the jokes and pranks that you and your school friends used to find hilarious? On a restless night, does the whoosh of a train on a long-ago journey linger in your mind? If your recollections sometimes evoke a sentimental yearning for the past, then you know what it means to experience nostalgia....
This is what Earth looks like through a planet hunter’s eyes. Our home planet blazes like a cosmic lighthouse in a photo taken by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has discovered more than 2,500 alien worlds to date. “Captured on Dec. 10, 2017, after the spacecraft adjusted its telescope to a new field of view, Earth’s reflection as it slipped past was so extraordinarily bright that it created a saber-like saturation bleed across the instrument’s sensors, obscuring the neighboring moon,” NASA officials wrote in a description of the photo, which was released Wednesday (March 7)—the ninth anniversary of Kepler’s launch....
The marsquakes are coming fast and furious. From its landing site near the Martian equator, NASA’s InSight mission is detecting about two quakes per day—and the rate is going up. “We have a lot,” said Bruce Banerdt, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and InSight’s principal investigator. He reported the findings on 12 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California. Since arriving on Mars just over a year ago, InSight has detected 322 marsquakes....
In December leaders from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to agree on cutting back greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The most effective step to implement that goal would be a massive shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources. If leaders can have confidence that such a transformation is possible, they might commit to an historic agreement. We think they can. A year ago former vice president Al Gore threw down a gauntlet: to repower America with 100 percent carbon-free electricity within 10 years....
Americans drove more miles than ever before in 2015, a departure from totals that have stayed mostly flat since 2004. Driving jumped 3.5* percent over 2014, the largest uptick in more than a decade, according to new data released by the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. They show that Americans drove more than 3.15 trillion miles in 2015, equivalent to around 337 round trips from Earth to Pluto. The previous record, around 3 trillion miles, was set in 2007....
In the summer of 2017, before a series of wildfires ripped across California’s wine country, killing 44 people, incinerating thousands of homes and causing $9.4 billion in damage, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was riding high. The San Francisco-based power company had recently resolved a lawsuit stemming from a 2010 pipeline explosion. Moody’s Investors Service had just upgraded the company’s credit rating. And the company’s stock was trading for more than $60 a share....
In With the Good Air When the muscular diaphragm at the base of the chest cavity contracts, the cavity expands and air rushes into the lungs to equalize pressure. When the diaphragm relaxes, the cavity shrinks again, forcing air back out as an exhalation. An adult at rest breathes on average between 10 and 15 times a minute, although the rate can rise to more than once a second during heavy exercise....
DENVER, Colo. - 2011 may well be remembered as the year of extreme weather in the United States, with drought in Texas, floods along the Mississippi River, a freak October snowstorm on the East Coast. Tornadoes alone would make the year memorable, with some 1,270 twisters causing 544 deaths and $25 billion in damages. The outbreak is reshaping climate science, as researchers hone their abilities to predict severe weather and link the record-shattering destruction to humanity’s increasing emissions....
By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazineA controversial category of mental illness will not be included in the revised fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has said. Attenuated psychosis syndrome, also known as psychosis risk syndrome, had been intended mainly for young adults who have heard whispers in their heads, viewed objects as threatening or suffered other subtly psychotic symptoms.The DSM is used by doctors, researchers and insurance companies in the United States and many other countries to assess patients; the fifth edition is set to be published in May 2013....
This conclusion is important because the study of language plays a central role in diverse disciplines—from poetry to artificial intelligence to linguistics itself; misguided methods lead to questionable results. Further, language is used by humans in ways no animal can match; if you understand what language is, you comprehend a little bit more about human nature. Chomsky’s first version of his theory, put forward in the mid-20th century, meshed with two emerging trends in Western intellectual life....
Much as a ripple in a pond reveals a thrown stone, the existence of the mysterious stuff known as dark matter is inferred via its wider cosmic influence. Astronomers cannot see it directly, but its gravity sculpts the birth, shape and movement of galaxies. This makes a discovery from last year all the more unexpected: a weirdly diffuse galaxy that seemed to harbor no dark matter at all. Even as some researchers hailed the finding, others aired their doubts, criticizing measurements of the galaxy’s distance and motion....
A new study finds striking metabolic differences between fat cells from obese and normal weight people—but it’s not clear what the findings mean to overall health. Why it matters: Obesity is associated with complications like diabetes and heart disease. But over the past 15 years, evidence has emerged that a subgroup of obese people are metabolically healthy, meaning they don’t have the insulin resistance, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and high triglycerides typical of obesity....
Nature may have handed scientists a new clue in a longstanding mystery: how matter beat out antimatter for dominance of the universe. Early data from twin experiments at the Tevatron, the world’s reigning particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., suggest an unexpected chink in the hugely successful standard model of particle physics. The twist comes from odd behavior in a particle called the BS (pronounced “B-sub-S”), which flips back and forth between its matter and antimatter forms three trillions times per second....
Twenty-five years ago no one had even heard of the hepatitis C virus. Today it is a leading cause of liver cancer and a major reason why people get liver transplants. Globally it kills about 350,000 people a year; in the U.S., more people now die of hepatitis C than of AIDS. The infection can be cured—albeit with debilitating side effects. Standard treatment with interferon and ribavirin causes fever, headaches, fatigue, depression and anemia....
A mass gathering on the scale of the Olympic and Paralympic Games inevitably focuses international scrutiny on the host city’s ability to deliver a successful and safe event. This scrutiny extends to the host’s public health systems. Large international mass gatherings have the potential to encourage the spread of infectious diseases and, although the potential has not often been realized in recent times, it warrants effective preparation to detect and respond to any possible threats....
In central Zambia, at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage, dozens of parentless chimpanzees are raised among their peers, without adults. The arrangement is a lucky one for the chimps: in the wild, orphanhood can mean death. Yet the parentless life—even at a refuge—has its drawbacks. Across a wide range of social species, research has demonstrated how normal social development depends on the presence of mature individuals, which leaves orphans at a disadvantage....
From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. Ground-level ozone, or O3, is a hazard to human health and the environment, causing respiratory problems and exacerbating asthma while also harming some vegetation and wildlife. Created when by-products of combustion interact with sunlight, it may cause more than a million deaths each year around the world, along with tens of billions of dollars in crop losses. From a technological standpoint, this is a fixable problem....
My dependence on devices reached an embarrassing low recently. As I hurried to leave for work one morning, I patted my back pocket and realized I did not have my phone. Seconds later, in a fully automatic behavioral response, I patted my back pocket again, this time reaching for my phone in order to help find my phone. Shame washed over me as I realized the thought process I had just went through: “I don’t know where my phone is!...
Before they were postponed to this year, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were billed by some as the “Hydrogen Olympics” because of plans to power much of the event’s infrastructure with the clean-burning gas. The Olympic Village, home to the athletes during the Games, was slated to run on it. One hundred hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered buses and 500 hydrogen-powered cars were supposed to transport competitors and staff between venues. Even the iconic Olympic torch and cauldrons were set to be lit with hydrogen-powered flame....
Mariana Matus has spent years studying what comes out of human bodies in order to better understand what is happening inside us. The computational biologist helped develop heavy-duty devices that are about the size of a milk crate and can be lowered into manholes to dangle over wastewater—steadily sucking up a stream of urine and feces through a strawlike tube. Matus and her colleagues originally set out to scour sewers for chemical signatures of drug use....
