As the specter of a global flu pandemic looms ever larger, both veteran flu scientists and newcomers to the field are making important progress against the disease. Robert G. Webster, now at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., first discovered during the 1960s that the novel flu viruses that seem to sweep through the human population every 30-odd years can arise from combinations of bird and human flu strains....
Two scientists who discovered the roles of key immune cells have won one of the 2019 Lasker medical-research awards—prizes often dubbed the American Nobels. Immunologists Jacques Miller, at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and Max Cooper, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, will split the US$250,000 prize for basic medical research. The duo identified T and B cells, which are key components in the immune system’s ability to recognize specific pathogens and cancer cells....
WORLD 4/4/16 is a Square Root Day. Only nine days in each century qualify, and the next one occurs in nine years.* BOLIVIA Lake Poopó, formerly the country’s second-largest lake, has nearly dried up because of a combination of drought, water use for agriculture and mining, and the shrinking of Andean glaciers that serve as its source. The remains of the lake have been declared a disaster site. FRANCE The French government announced it will “pave” 1,000 kilometers of public roads with solar panels....
Torn tendons, muscles and ligaments plague athletes in many types of sports. In attempts to help heal the wounded tissue, some athletes, both amateur and professional, have turned to platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy. For the treatment, doctors take a small vial of a patient’s blood, about 30 milliliters, and spin it in a centrifuge to separate the platelet-rich plasma from the other components. Then they inject the concentrated platelets at the site of the patient’s injury....
On August 16, 2022 an approximately 70-meter asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere. At 2:02:10 P.M. EDT, the space rock exploded eight miles over Winston-Salem, N.C., with the energy of 10 megatons of TNT. The airburst virtually leveled the city and surrounding area. Casualties were in the thousands. Well, not really. The destruction of Winston-Salem was the story line of the fourth Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, run by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office....
All it took was four minutes. That is how long it took to put the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) into orbit around the Moon on 6 October. Those four minutes were run from mission control at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. But Ames, like the rest of NASA, is technically closed because of the US government shutdown on 1 October. Fortunately LADEE, which launched 6 September, is an active mission and thus exempt from federal closure....
After carefully dissecting out the muscles of a disembodied arm, biologist David Carrier and his team tied fishing lines from each isolated tendon to a guitar tuner knob, allowing the researchers to move the fingers around like ghastly marionettes. Using this setup, they could measure the varying strain on the bones when the hand was arranged in different positions and slammed into a padded dumbbell weight. Each limb took a week to prepare, but Carrier, who is head of the Evolutionary Biomechanics Lab at the University of Utah, wanted to get the study right....
Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc across the world, accounting for more than 2.7 million deaths so far; prolonged economic shutdowns; and the dismantlement of global health systems. In no small part, this is due to failures of governance and intentional health policy choices....
By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineLucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, was found by accident when palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson took a detour back to his Land Rover in Ethiopia in 1974. Such luck will always have a place in fossil hunting, but artificial intelligence now promises to assist, after a team trained a computer neural network to recognize fossil sites in satellite images.The network, described in a paper in Evolutionary Anthropology, independently identified several places from which palaeontologists had unearthed mammal fossils, and researchers are now set to use its predictions to explore further sites in the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming....
Dear EarthTalk: As I understand it, hair salons are pretty toxic enterprises on many counts. Are there any efforts underway to green up that industry? —Paula Howe, San Francisco Hair salons have long been criticized for the pollution they generate. Traditional hair dyes and many shampoos contain harmful synthetic chemicals that are routinely used on customers’ scalps—and then washed down the drain where they can accumulate in waterways, soils and even our bloodstreams....
At more than 14 billion kilometers from the sun, Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other man-made object, yet the spacecraft is still within range of NASA’s budget ax. The agency’s new focus on human exploration–including the resumption of space shuttle flights scheduled for this month–is pulling funds from the unmanned spacecraft that study Earth, the sun and the outer reaches of the solar system. In addition to devoting 40 percent of its $16....
Malaria kills between one million and three million people in sub-Saharan Africa every year, most of them children. Disease outbreaks, which also include meningitis and dengue, have only recently been linked to variations in rainfall: more rain or drought can bring harsher epidemics. Using this understanding, scientists at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) several years ago piloted an early-warning system to forecast where the most devastating outbreaks will likely occur....
The brain relies on a system of chemical messengers, known as neurotransmitters, to carry missives from cell to cell. When all is well, these communications enable the brain to coordinate various functions, from complex thought to quick, knee-jerk reactions—but when the system is out of whack, serious disease or disorder can ensue. A team of researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (D.T.U.) and University of Oxford have for the first time identified the molecular structure of dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH), the enzyme that controls the conversion between dopamine and norepinephrine, two major neurotransmitters....
Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that the DEET used in most mosquito repellents is toxic? If so what problems does it cause? And what are some non-toxic alternatives for keeping mosquitoes at bay? – Tom Pollack, Oakland, CA DEET is commonly known as the king of mosquito repellents, though not everyone is keen to slather it on their skin. A study conducted in the late 1980s on Everglades National Park employees to determine the effects of DEET found that a full one-quarter of the subjects studied experienced negative health effects that they blamed on exposure to the chemical....
We connect to each other through particles. Calls and texts ride flecks of light, Web sites and photographs load on electrons. All communication is, essentially, physical. Information is recorded and broadcast on actual objects, even those we cannot see. Physicists also connect to the world when they communicate with it. They dispatch glints of light toward particles or atoms, and wait for this light to report back. The light interacts with the bits of matter, and how this interaction changes the light reveals a property or two of the bits—although this interaction often changes the bits, too....
Mosquitoes—and the parasites and viruses that they carry—are pushing up the incidence of malaria globally and causing periodic explosive outbreaks of Rift Valley fever, which first brings on flulike symptoms but can turn into a severe hemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola.* Bluetongue virus, a ruminant virus spread by midges that was once confined to tropical areas, has reached as far as Norway. Studies have shown shifts in cholera transmission with recent climate variability....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As winter begins and the holidays are in full swing, the COVID-19 pandemic has entered another worrying phase. Emergence of the omicron variant, along with increasing rates of infections, have left many people unsure about their holiday plans. On Dec. 2, 2021, President Joe Biden outlined a series of actions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, including making at-home COVID-19 rapid tests eligible for reimbursement by private insurance....
Key Concepts Physics Center of mass Fulcrum Torque Introduction Ever wonder how balancing toys work? Simple toys that entertain by precariously balancing were popular in the Victorian era. These seemingly gravity-defying curiosities can rock back and forth at the edge of a table but remain relatively stable. But how do they balance? The secret lies in a heavy but visually nondescript counterweight attached to the toy. Our eyes are drawn more immediately to the large, ornamental part of the toy that depicts a person or animal rocking back and forth on a tiny pivot point....
From: The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics and the Future of Wilderness in America, by Summer Brennan. Counterpoint Press. Copyright © 2015 The oyster pirates preferred to ambush the beds by moonlight. Working mostly in pairs, with two men per vessel, they mustered together in ramshackle armadas of thirty or forty small boats. They waited until cloudless nights when the full moon shone brightly on the piles of pale shells on shore, before advancing on the oyster companies’ camps en masse, their pistols at the ready....
Fish or cut bait. Put up or shut up. There’s even a certain saying regarding the bathroom. Whatever you call it, it’s the endless conundrum of choice that comes from that pesky thing called free will. We make a million decisions a day, from what to eat for breakfast to what shoes to wear, but some choices can get a lot more complicated. For instance, a job that fills your bank account but drains your humanity one billable hour at a time: stay or go?...
