In 1900 diver Elias Stadiatis, clad in a copper and brass helmet and a heavy canvas suit, emerged from the sea shaking in fear and mumbling about a “heap of dead naked people.” He was among a group of Greek divers from the Eastern Mediterranean island of Symi who were searching for natural sponges. They had sheltered from a violent storm near the tiny island of Antikythera, between Crete and mainland Greece....
In October 2010, Lisa and Eugene Jeffers learned that their daughter Jade, then nearly 2 and a half years old, has autism. The diagnosis felt like a double whammy. The parents were soon engulfed by stress from juggling Jade’s new therapy appointments and wrangling with their health insurance provider, but they now had an infant son to worry about, too. Autism runs in families. Would Bradley follow in his big sister’s footsteps?...
In 1956 psychologist J. P. Guilford coined the term “divergent thinking” to describe a thought process that generates out-of-the-box ideas and innovations. It’s used by individuals who create surprising solutions to problems that no one else considers. This kind of thinking fills the following pages—the most far-out ideas to tackle some of our biggest challenges, from climate change and water availability to species extinction and debilitating human disease. These atypical, and sometimes controversial, scientific endeavors employ unusual approaches that seem far-fetched but may just save the day....
JIM HOLT’S SMARTPHONE IS NOT ALL THAT SMART. IT HAS A MAPPING APPLICATION HE USES TO FIND RESTAURANTS, but when he’s finished searching, the app continues to draw so much power and memory that he can’t even do a simple thing like send a text message, complains Holt, an engineer at Freescale Semiconductor. Holt’s phone highlights a general problem with computing systems today: one part of the system does not know what the other is doing....
Materials scientists have constructed round, pom-pom-like graphene microparticles by spraying graphene oxide droplets into a hot solvent—a process akin to deep-frying (Chem. Mater. 2014, DOI: 10.1021/cm5034244). The technique could provide a simple, versatile means to make electrode materials for batteries and supercapacitors, possibly leading to devices with improved energy and power densities, the researchers say. Scientists want to use graphene in electrodes because it has excellent conductivity, stability, and high surface area....
In what was already a record-setting fire season for California, two blazes have dealt another devastating blow to communities in the state. The Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history, gutted the northern town of Paradise in hours as the flames of the Woolsey fire tore through the southern beach enclave of Malibu. Collectively they have torched more than 200,000 acres and left at least 66 people dead and dozens more missing....
Air travel in Europe inched back to normal Wednesday, as officials estimated that newly opened flight routes would permit air traffic to approach 75 percent of its normal capacity. Ash plumes from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano had all but extinguished flight operations across the U.K. and mainland Europe for the better part of a week. Barring a tragic outcome, which is thought to be unlikely, it will be difficult to know the extent to which jet engines can tolerate mild to moderate intakes of ash....
Admit it. There are few things worse than being sick over the holidays. So we have some advice. Well, Dr. Gary Brunette has some advice. Brunette heads the travelers’ health branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He gave STAT some recommendations to maximize your chances of healthy holidays, especially if you’re traveling. (Confession: We should have done this sooner. Because for those of you who are traveling overseas for the holidays, some of this advice may be coming too late....
On Monday Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed November “National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month.” The administration’s ambitious goal is to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s by 2025. Although there are currently no approved therapies that slow or stop progression of the disease, several approaches are showing promise. In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, a team from Merck Research Laboratories reports results of early human and animal trials of a drug called verubecestat, which targets the production of protein plaques associated with the disease....
For centuries the notion that the adult brain could not make new neurons stood as a central tenet of neurobiology. Even Santiago Ramón y Cajal—the Barcelona-based histologist who essentially invented modern neuroscience at the end of the 19th century—declared such neural renewal impossible. After decades of careful observation and painstaking illustration of the microscopic architecture of nerve cells and their connections, Ramón y Cajal concluded that in the adult brain, “the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, and immutable; everything may die, nothing may be regenerated....
This week Pres. Donald Trump dealt a blow to global warming mitigation efforts with his executive order on energy. The president’s directive intends to “promote energy independence and economic growth,” according to the order—mainly by rolling back Obama-era climate policies. The order’s chief target is the Clean Power Plan, which requires the power sector to reduce its carbon emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It also instructs agencies to reconsider methane regulations and lifts a freeze on federal land leases for coal mining, among other actions....
Government buyouts of flood-damaged homes disproportionately benefit whiter, wealthier communities, even as low-income and minority homeowners are more likely to participate in such programs, according to new research from Rice University. In a nationwide analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, researchers found that buyout programs both create and reflect historical discriminatory practices, even if the implementing agencies comply with anti-discrimination laws. The phenomenon is especially prevalent in urban areas and is an unintended outcome of other discriminatory housing practices like mortgage redlining and renter refusal based on race or other factors, the researchers found....
The Aral Sea gets almost all its water from the Amu and Syr rivers. Over millennia the Amu’s course has drifted away from the sea, causing it to shrink. But the lake always rebounded as the Amu shifted back again. Today heavy irrigation for crops such as cotton and rice siphons off much of the two rivers, severely cutting flow into their deltas and thus into the sea. Evaporation vastly outpaces any rainfall, snowmelt or groundwater supply, reducing water volume and raising salinity....
Russian engineers are scrambling to try to save the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which was launched Tuesday (Nov. 8) but has failed to head toward Mars as planned. The spacecraft appears to be stuck in Earth orbit instead, after its engine failed to ignite to send the probe on a trajectory to the Red Planet. Now Russian Space Agency officials say they have two weeks to figure out how to start up Phobos-Grunt’s thrusters before the spacecraft is lost completely....
The New York Times recently conducted an important investigation revealing the use of sickle cell trait (SCT) as a cover-up for the deaths of Black people at the hands of police while in custody. The newspaper reported finding 47 cases in the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers cited the trait as a cause or major factor in a Black person’s death in custody, with 15 of these deaths occurring since 2015....
By Elie DolginResearchers have transformed human skin cells into stem cells similar to those in an embryo without using any reprogramming genes, just the viral vector normally used to deliver them.The findings, reported last week at the International Society for Stem Cell Research annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif., challenge the conventional wisdom about what it takes to produce stem cells that are compatible with a specific patient.“There needs to be a note of caution and respect for the way the virus works,” says Andrew Baker, a gene therapy researcher at the University of Glasgow, UK....
Editor’s Note (2/4/20): Our partners at STAT have reported that the study discussed in this story was based on faulty information. People showing no symptoms appear to be able to spread the novel coronavirus that has caused an outbreak in China and led world health authorities to declare a global emergency, researchers reported Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. If confirmed, the finding will make it much harder to contain the virus....
The average age at which children are diagnosed with autism is between three and four, but scientists have long suspected that the disorder starts much earlier. A key piece of evidence is a phenomenon known as brain overgrowth. Autistic toddlers tend to have large brains for their age, and researchers have shown a correlation between the degree of excess growth and the severity of autism symptoms. Eric Courchesne, director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California, San Diego, helped to pioneer the overgrowth hypothesis....
Annual opioid fatalities have now surpassed the yearly number of deaths from AIDS at the height of that epidemic in the mid-1990s. In 2016 drug overdose deaths numbered 63,000, more than the U.S. death toll from the entire Vietnam War. The trend is terrifying: the problem is getting worse each year. Cities and states reeling from opioid deaths need to give serious consideration to setting up safe injection rooms, which could significantly reduce fatalities....
It’s 2030, and the risk of raging wildfires has intensified since the largest utility in California made history a decade earlier by triggering intentional blackouts for millions of residents. Higher temperatures bake the arid West, and warmer, drier winds threaten to turn sparks into roaring infernos. In this potential future, envisioned by climate scientists and policy experts, utilities would still need to cut power when high winds race across tinder in northern forests and southern chaparral....
