Posts

On the morning of May 24, 1987, sometime after 1:30 A.M., a 23-year-old Canadian named Kenneth Parks drove 14 miles to his in-laws’ home, strangled his father-in-law to the point of unconsciousness, and beat and stabbed his mother-in-law to death. A year later he was acquitted of both assault and murder. After a careful investigation, specialists reached the astonishing conclusion that Parks had been sleepwalking—and sleep driving and sleep attacking—during the incident....

Fluorescent proteins, which are compounds that can absorb and then emit light, have become a powerful instrument in the cell biologist’s toolkit—so powerful, in fact, that the discovery and development of green fluorescent proteins from jellyfish earned the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (Here’s a Q&A with one of the winners, Columbia University’s Martin Chalfie, about his work.) These proteins have limitations, however: They need to be excited with the blue to orange part of the visible spectrum, at wavelengths of 495 to 570 nanometers....

TROUBLED PRACTICES Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good? by Richard P. Bentall. New York University Press, 2009 ($29.95) Despite advances in our understanding of mental illness, treatments leave patients no better off today than they did almost half a century ago according to British clinical psychologist Richard P. Bentall. In his provocative book, Doctoring the Mind, Bentall takes on the conventional field of psychiatry, arguing that it works in a way that is “profoundly unscientific” and fails to actually help patients who are suffering from mental problems....

We recognize Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver by his commanding presence, his stoicism and the absence of his left leg, cut off below the hip. Although we think we know the roguish Silver, characters such as he are not of this world, as Stevenson himself admitted in Longman’s Magazine in 1884. He described fictional characters as being like circles—abstractions. Scientists use circles to solve problems in physics, and writers and readers likewise use fictional characters to think about people in the social world....

Picture the scene: A small drone the size of a suitcase descends into a dark Martian crevasse—perhaps a lava tube that was formed billions of years ago by volcanic activity on the Red Planet. The drone illuminates its surroundings, recording views never seen before by human eyes as its suite of instruments seeks out signs of past or present alien biology. Finally, its reconnaissance complete, the drone flies back to a landing zone on the surface to transmit invaluable data back to Earth....

As everybody knows, if you do not work out, your muscles get flaccid. What most people don’t realize, however, is that your brain also stays in better shape when you exercise. And not just challenging your noggin by, for example, learning a new language, doing difficult crosswords or taking on other intellectually stimulating tasks. As researchers are finding, physical exercise is critical to vigorous mental health, too. Surprised? Although the idea of exercising cognitive machinery by performing mentally demanding activities—popularly termed the “use it or lose it” hypothesis—is better known, a review of dozens of studies shows that maintaining a mental edge requires more than that....

“French science has to deal with a peculiar problem, how to prevent the depopulation of the country, which is now going on so rapidly that deaths exceed the births by nearly 40,000 a year. At a recent meeting of the new Society for the Protection of Children, Dr. Rochard stated that 250,000 infants die yearly, of whom at least 100,000 could be saved by intelligent care. Stringent laws have been already passed to aid in preventing this great waste of life....

By Aditya Kalra NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India is considering a ban on electronic cigarettes over the risks to public health that they may cause, a senior Health Ministry official told Reuters. The World Health Organization (WHO) in August called for stiff regulation of e-cigarettes as well as bans on indoor use, in the latest bid to control the booming $3 billion global market. Such devices use battery-powered cartridges to produce a nicotine-laced vapor but there is a lack of long-term scientific research that confirms they are safe....

A cosmic phenomenon in Earth’s magnetic field that is both dazzling and potentially dangerous for people on the surface is the focus of a new scientific mission, scheduled to launch into orbit on Thursday (March 12). The Magnetsopheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, consists of four satellites that will study a process called magnetic reconnection: the explosive phenomenon that can send powerful bursts of particles hurtling toward Earth, potentially damaging satellites. But magnetic reconnection is also responsible for the auroras — the northern and southern lights — near Earth’s poles....

For immigrants, a medical appointment is never just another routine errand. Instead, it is a challenge, a test of strength, one that provokes anxiety at every step. Will the receptionist understand my accent, or flash a toothy, disingenuous smile while asking me to repeat myself for the third time? Will the doctor ask my own child to translate my diagnosis for me, or attempt to explain using broken phrases learned from a college language class?...

COVID has wreaked havoc on Black and Indigenous communities and other people of color, and U.S. medical institutions should be doing everything they can to root out and eliminate entrenched racial inequities. Yet many of the screening assessments used in health care are exacerbating racism in medicine, automatically and erroneously changing the scores given to people of color in ways that can deny them needed treatment. These race-based scoring adjustments to evaluations are all too common in modern medicine, particularly in the U....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. “Don’t Rasp Your Throat With Harsh Irritants, Reach for a LUCKY instead,” reads one Lucky Strike Cigarettes ad from the 1930s. It’s almost beyond belief today that a cigarette company could get away with an ad touting its product as beneficial for the throat, but according to a new study, the days of false and misleading commercials are far from over....

Some ocean-dwelling creatures ended up with common names that seem to belong to another animal entirely: A sea cow has neither horns nor an udder. A sea lion lacks a tawny mane. And jellyfish aren’t true fish at all. But the sea butterfly, a tiny marine snail, has more in common with flying insects than you might expect, according to a new study. Also known as Limacina helicina, the sea butterfly navigates cold ocean waters in the northern Atlantic and Pacific....

For one monstrous parasitic flower, it is reeking of rotten meat; among other odd creatures, it is a wide array of otherworldly adaptations that allow them to survive the most extreme conditions found on Earth. All of the organisms in the American Museum of Natural History’s Life at the Limits exhibit, however, can be said to have superpowers. Organized by categories such as breathing, eating and reproduction, the organisms included in Life at the Limits, which opens April 4th at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, represent the extreme ends of the normal evolutionary spectrum for particular traits....

Many animals follow daily schedules or seasonal cycles—but can they distinguish, say, three seconds from 13? Some—bumblebees, pigeons, cats and others—are known to perceive passing time with some precision. After years working with the captive seals at the Marine Science Center at Germany’s University of Rostock, biologist Frederike D. Hanke suspected the slippery mammals might be able to as well. Hanke and her team tested her hunch on Luca, an 11-year-old harbor seal at the center....

For some male spiders, love is all-consuming. In a grisly practice known as sexual cannibalism, females of many spider species devour their mates after procreation, either for sustenance or to keep their reproductive options open. Female spiders are usually much larger than their male counterparts and thus have a strong physical advantage. But new research published on Monday in Current Biology shows that a number of seemingly overmatched males are not completely helpless....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. I had the most awesome Thanksgiving this year. My husband took our two boys, ages 8 and 10, to his family’s celebration, and I had five days of uninterrupted sleep, fun with friends and grownup time. Don’t get me wrong; I love my husband’s family and I believe that holidays are important opportunities for making memories....

What may be the most threatening asteroid known to humankind was discovered in 1999, tumbling through space on an unstable orbit that periodically intersects that of Earth around the sun. Astronomers eventually named the half-kilometer-wide object Bennu, after a creation god from Egyptian mythology. And indeed, if Bennu, filled with organic compounds and water-rich minerals, fell on a barren world, it might sow the seeds of life. Instead it may be destined to cause immense suffering and death....

A young Ernest Hemingway, badly injured by an exploding shell on a World War I battlefield, wrote in a letter home that “dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death, and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did.” Years later Hemingway adapted his own experience—that of the soul leaving the body, taking flight and then returning—for his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” about an African safari gone disastrously wrong....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve suddenly been seeing a lot of those tiny “Smart Cars” around. Who makes them and what is their fuel efficiency? And I’m all for fuel efficiency, but are these cars safe? – David Yu, Bend, OR Originally the brainchild of Lebanese-born entrepreneur/inventor Nicolas Hayek of Swatch watch fame, Smart Cars are designed to be small, fuel-efficient, environmentally responsible and easy to park—really the ultimate in-city vehicle. Back in 1994, Hayek and Swatch signed on with Daimler-Benz (the German maker of the venerable Mercedes line of cars) to develop the unique vehicle; in fact, the company name Smart is derived from a combination of the words Swatch, Mercedes and the word “art....