Posts

The following post is from a series about the annual Ig Nobel Prizes in science, which honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” They were awarded in September in Cambridge, Mass. Now we come to the Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and in other social animals, especially primates. In humans, yawning has been thought to do various things, including cooling the brain, increasing arousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly, helping to synchronize group behavior....

With the economy tanking, unemployment skyrocketing, schools slamming their doors and the Big Ten and PAC-12 conferences canceling fall football, America is a country looking for an answer to COVID-19 yesterday. And one might be available—if you can handle instant coffee rather than espresso. The coffee analogy is one used by Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and it’s meant to describe the functional difference between two approaches to rapid testing for the virus....

Africa’s Great Divide —Erin Biba A giant superplume of primordial gases is tearing Africa apart. Don’t Put the “Pee” in Pool —Carrie Arnold This study reports the little-known health risks of urinating in a swimming pool. A Network That Never Goes Down —Corinne Iozzio Check out this Web site for more info on the widespread creation of reliable emergency cellular networks. Street-Legal Robots —Corrine Iozzio California has laid out new laws for driverless cars....

Joshua Hinson’s first biological son was born in 2000. His son’s birth marked the start of the sixth generation that would grow up speaking English instead of Chickasaw, which was the primary language his ancestors had spoken for hundreds of years. Hinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Texas. Other than a small handful of words, he knew almost nothing about his ancestral language—formally known as Chikashshanompa’. Hinson had a few pangs of sadness over the years about what was lost, but it didn’t really affect him—until his son was born....

Comprehensive sex education works. Years of research show that it is much more effective than an abstinence-only approach at preventing teen pregnancy. In fact, abstinence-only programs may actually increase unplanned pregnancies and can contribute to harmful shaming and sexist attitudes. Yet abstinence, or “sexual risk avoidance,” programs persist in the U.S. Why? Ultimately many people believe that teenagers should not have sex. If adolescents just abstain, they reason, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases will no longer be a problem....

Saving the trees could slow climate change, new research shows. Each year, nearly 33 million acres of forestland around the world is cut down, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Tropical felling alone contributes 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon—some 20 percent of all man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—to the atmosphere annually. If such losses were cut in half, it could save 500 million metric tons of carbon annually and contribute 12 percent of the total reductions in GHG emissions required to avoid unpleasant global warming, researchers recently reported in Science....

Scientists have pondered a mystery about life for at least a century: Many biological molecules come in two mirror-image versions, just like human hands; in fact, they’re known as “right-handed” and “left-handed.” Natural chemical reactions produce approximately equal numbers of both types of molecule. But the sugars and amino acids that serve as the building blocks of life on Earth have only one handedness which allows proteins and nucleic acids to adopt stable helical structures, like DNA, which, in turn, allows living organisms to evolve and thrive....

Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps are melting to such a degree that they are “significant” contributors to global sea level rise and constitute 20 percent of Greenland’s overall mass loss, according to a new study. The research breaks new ground in measuring the melting dynamic of Greenland’s local glaciers separately from its larger ice sheet. It is the first such estimate of the country’s glaciers and ice caps by themselves and sets the stage for much better predictions of rising sea levels, the researchers said....

Global climate awareness may never have been higher, but two recent studies show just how much work the world has to do to turn its carbon-cutting dreams into reality. The first study, released last week by the World Bank, found 5% of carbon prices employed around the world today are stringent enough to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. BP PLC released the second yesterday in the form of its annual statistical review of global energy markets....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Volkswagen has set aside €6.5 billion to cover the costs of the growing scandal over cheating on emissions tests in the US. Putting a number on the cost further down line will be far harder, however, as it is a crisis which calls into question the ethical credentials of the company and the industry, as well as posing tough questions about the regulators and authorities who were duped....

By midcentury, the Arctic coastline and most of the Arctic Ocean will be devoid of sea ice for an additional 60 days each year, with some regions seeing closer to 100 days more of open water, according to a study released this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. The shift toward more sea-ice-free days would affect “all aspects of the Arctic environment,” the authors wrote, including which areas of the region will be open to commercial shipping and therefore natural resource extraction....

Octopuses are some of the most complex, bizarre and intelligent creatures in the sea. They can squeeze through holes smaller than a quarter, pull with hundreds of pounds of force, change the color and texture of their skin in an instant and, with their walnut-sized brains, figure out how to open a childproof pill bottle to reach a tasty morsel of crab. With such an impressive array of skills, it was only a matter of time before engineers started asking: Could we make a robot that behaves like an octopus?...

In just about any system or group, elements with a larger number of connections tend to have more clout than others. Think of Instagram “influencers,” for example—or the chief executive officers of companies. Even within a virus, some structural components—in this case, parts of proteins—have more links to one another than others do. And coaching the immune system to recognize and destroy such influencers is an efficient way to kill HIV, suggests a study published in May 2019 in Science....

The kitten loitering outside my local firehouse was still there two hours later, yowling with hunger, when the community council meeting I was attending broke up. “Will you take him home?” asked my neighbor. “My friend Steve wants to adopt a cat, so it would just be for one night.” Of course, I would. But the next day I learned Steve wanted a tabby, and this kitten had a coat as soft as a rabbit’s but no stripes....

The strange world of quantum mechanics just got a little stranger with the discovery that a magnetic field can control the flow of heat from one body to another. First predicted nearly 50 years ago, the effect might some day form the basis of a new generation of electronic devices that use heat rather than charge as the information carrier. The research stems from the work of physicist Brian Josephson, who in 1962 predicted that electrons could ’tunnel’ between two superconductors separated by a thin layer of insulator — a process forbidden in classical physics....

Oil and gas wells let loose a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In April, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suspended for three months an Obama administration rule to restrict such emissions, it did not defend wells or deny climate change. Instead the agency said the rule had not been studied enough. For instance, the EPA said the costs to get new well-venting systems approved had not been analyzed, so oil and gas companies had been unable to provide input as required by law....

Key concepts Springs Elasticity Weight Distance Introduction Have you ever played with a Slinky, used a pinball machine, written with a click pen or ridden in a car? If so, then you have made use of a spring! Springs are in machines all around us and have many useful purposes. In this activity you will learn another cool use for a spring: making a scale to weigh objects. Background Springs are usually spirals made out of metal....

Most Americans want their government to do more to address climate change—as long as it doesn’t take a big toll on their pocketbooks, according to a new poll. About 7 in 10 respondents said climate change is happening, according to results released yesterday from the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s about the same result the poll registered this time last year, and it aligns with survey results released this summer from Yale and George Mason universities....

By Ivan Semeniuk, Meredith Wadman, Susan Young, Eric Hand, Eugenie Samuel Reich & Richard Monastersky of Nature magazine"It’s not every day you have robots running through your house," Barack Obama quipped last week at the White House science fair, a showcase for student exhibitors that also gave the US president a chance to reiterate a favourite theme. Science and technology, he said, “is what’s going to make a difference in this country, over the long haul”....

An owl glides by on silent wings. Many holiday travelers probably wish airplanes could do the same. “On airplanes, the back edge of the wing is where you get most of the noise,” Justin Jaworski, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, told TechNewsDaily. “My work is looking at developing theoretical models to explain trailing-edge noise.” Most recently, he and his colleague Nigel Peake showed, mathematically, that the noise from airplane wings could be reduced tenfold if their designers took a few cues from the feathers that fringe the trailing edge of an owl’s wings....