Posts

It is a central dilemma of human life—more urgent, arguably, than the inevitability of suffering and death. I have been brooding and ranting to my students about it for years. It surely troubles us more than ever during this plague-ridden era. Philosophers call it the problem of other minds. I prefer to call it the solipsism problem. Solipsism, technically, is an extreme form of skepticism, at once utterly illogical and irrefutable....

Is This Copyright Protection? The people who make digital locks sell them as “copy protection” (that is, protection against having a file copied), and sometimes as “copyright protection.” We can debate their claim to the former, but we should certainly reject the idea that digital locks protect copyright. As things stand now, it’s the other way around. Many different reasons and rationales for copyright have been offered since its inception. The English Statute of Anne (1710) set out to protect the established English publishers from Scottish competition....

Chop a magnet in two, and it becomes two smaller magnets. Slice again to make four. But the smaller magnets get, the more unstable they become; their magnetic fields tend to flip polarity from one moment to the next. Now, however, physicists have managed to create a stable magnet from a single atom. The team, who published their work in Nature on March 8, used their single-atom magnets to make an atomic hard drive....

The successor to NASA’s famed Hubble Space Telescope won’t get off the ground next year after all. NASA has pushed the planned launch of the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope from October 2018 to the spring of 2019, citing spacecraft-integration issues. “The change in launch timing is not indicative of hardware or technical performance concerns,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D....

Understanding the carbon cycle is crucially important for many reasons. It provides us with energy, stored as fossil fuel. Carbon gases in the atmosphere help regulate Earth’s temperature and are essential to the growth of plants. Carbon passing from the atmosphere to the ocean supports photosynthesis of marine phytoplankton and the development of reefs. These processes and myriad others are all interwoven with Earth’s climate, but the manner in which the processes respond to variability and change in climate is not well-quantified....

Six years ago, when she was 24, Rachelle Alston woke up one morning and noticed she was having trouble seeing out of her left eye. “Everything was blurry from the bridge of my nose down,” recalls the slim Seattle native. “I thought my contacts must have scratched my eye or I had dry eyes, so I left my contacts out and went to work.” She mentioned the problem to her co-workers....

A new White House strategy to combat biological threats issues a stark warning about infectious disease. But it fails to mention the many ways they can be influenced by climate change. The National Biodefense Strategy unveiled yesterday outlines the federal approach to preventing, mitigating and recovering from disease outbreaks and other biological incidents. These events might occur naturally, through the result of laboratory accidents or as a biological terrorist attack. “Biological threats emanate from many sources, and they know no borders,” President Trump said yesterday in a statement....

Although solar cell technology for converting the sun’s power into electricity has improved steadily in recent years, high costs and inefficiencies have kept it from being a serious replacement for fossil fuels. A few high-tech heavyweights—IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP)—hope to change this using the same formula of mass production and commoditization that helped them make personal computers mainstream over the past three decades. IBM last week announced plans to make solar panels covered with a thin film of chemical compounds....

Neil Sims tends his rowdy stock like any devoted farmer. But rather than saddling a horse like the Australian sheep drovers he grew up with, Sims dons a snorkel and mask to wrangle his herd: 480,000 silver fish corralled half a mile off the Kona coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. Tucked discretely below the waves, Sims’s farm is one of 20 operations worldwide that are trying to take advantage of the earth’s last great agricultural frontier: the ocean....

On April 2, 1979, a mysterious powder wafted unseen into the air from a chimney that rose 25 meters above a Soviet military camp some 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow. Over the course of the next few weeks, at least 80 residents in the surrounding Central Asian city of Sverdlovsk, now known as Yekaterinburg, fell ill with what at first seemed like flu. After a few days, however, they developed massive internal bleeding, among other problems, and 68 or more of them died....

Last year Congress issued a moral call to action when it ordered the National Institutes of Health to reevaluate its ethical oversight of government-funded primate research. Although the scientific community widely sees nonhuman primates as essential for advances in biomedicine (they have facilitated major gains in the fights against AIDS and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, for example), researchers agree more can be done to treat the animals more humanely and conduct research less wastefully....

By Susanna Twidale COLOGNE (Reuters) - Donald Trump would be “highly unlikely” to be able to renegotiate the global accord on climate change if elected U.S. president, the U.N.’s climate chief said on Wednesday, as doing so would require the agreement of 195 countries. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told Reuters earlier this month he was “not a big fan” of the climate accord and would seek to renegotiate elements of the deal....

Imagine taking a genetic test that could tell you your personal risk of developing complications and dying from a particular disease, such as cancer, heart attack or even COVID. A version of such a test exists—albeit an imperfect one. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are becoming an increasingly common avenue to assess COVID risk. The approach holds potential for fighting the disease by identifying the locations, or loci, on the human genome that put an individual at higher or lower risk for severe disease....

According to the old saying, you learn more from a failure than a success. Well, if that’s the case, the consumer electronics industry ought to have a master’s degree by now. There was the ­ROKR E1 from Apple and Motorola, the first iTunes phone that, idiotically, held a maximum of 100 songs. There was Google Wave, a piece of Web software more baffling and complex than the 1040 tax form. There was the KIN smartphone, which Microsoft spent several years and around $1 billion to develop, only to withdraw it from the market after only two months....

MYTH HUMANS USE ONLY 10 PERCENT OF THEIR BRAIN FACT The 10 percent myth (sometimes elevated to 20) is mere urban legend, one perpetrated by the plot of the 2011 movie Limitless, which pivoted around a wonder drug that endowed the protagonist with prodigious memory and analytical powers. In the classroom, teachers may entreat students to try harder, but doing so will not light up “unused” neural circuits; academic achievement does not improve by simply turning up a neural volume switch....

Amid lightly falling snow on a gray April morning, Lee Kantar crouches over a dead moose calf. Its head rests on the ground and its legs are tucked beneath its frail torso. A GPS collar Kantar had strapped around its neck in January pinged his phone the night before, signaling the calf had not moved in more than six hours and was likely dead. “Nose is normal. Eyes are normal. Ears are normal—quite a bit of ticks on her ears,” Kantar calls off to his field assistant, Carl Tuggand, who records the data on a clipboard....

How does anesthesia work? William J. Perkins, associate professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., offers this explanation: ANESTHETICS WORK by blocking transmission of nerve signals to pain centers in the central nervous system. The exact mechanisms for general anesthetics are not completely understood. In 1846 physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., coined the term “anaesthesia” for drug-induced inability to experience sensation (particularly pain) after the first publicized demonstration of inhaled ether rendered a patient unresponsive during a surgical procedure....

Editor’s note: The original online version of this story was previously posted. Magnets are remarkable exemplars of fairness—every north pole is invariably accompanied by a counterbalancing south pole. Split a magnet in two, and the result is a pair of magnets, each with its own north and south. For decades researchers have sought the exception—namely, the monopole, magnetism’s answer to the electron, which carries electric charge. It would be a free-floating carrier of either magnetic north or magnetic south—a yin unbound from its yang....

Between 1945 and 1962 the U.S. conducted more than 200 atmospheric nuclear weapon tests and captured the detonations on film. Multiple cameras capable of recording 2,400 frames per second covered each blast, creating a highly technical record of the U.S. nuclear arsenal—and a visual deterrent against its use. At that time physicists analyzed the roughly 10,000 classified movies to understand how the weapons worked and calculate their effects in a potential war scenario....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Aly writes: “I recently bought some carob at my local organic food store on a whim and now I’m wondering about its nutritional profile. Is it a healthy alternative to chocolate? What are the pros and cons?” What is Carob? Carob is an ingredient that you only seem to run into in health food stores—or in the “healthy foods” aisle of the regular grocery store....