As a result of excessive drinking, which is defined as anything more than two drinks a day for men or more than one drink a day for women, more than two million people in the U.S. have liver disease. Excessive drinking also increases the risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, inflammation of the pancreas and certain forms of cancer, especially cancers of the esophagus, mouth, throat, larynx and possibly the breast, colon and rectum....
On a rocky mudflat nestled between a few islands off Portsmouth, N.H., Gabriela Bradt rustles a clump of seaweed and shifts her ear toward the ground. “Hear that?” she asks. The rasps of something scuttling emerge from underneath the mound. “There’s one,” she says, pointing to the mottled brownish-green back of a European green crab sidestepping across the matching mud. She grabs the crab, jots down its size and color on her clipboard and drops it into a bucket with several others....
In order to answer this question, it helps to define a calorie. A calorie is a unit that is used to measure energy. The Calorie you see on a food package is actually a kilocalorie, or 1,000 calories. A Calorie (kcal) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius. Sometimes the energy content of food is expressed in kilojoules (kj), a metric unit....
Sometime in the next 10 or so years, the massive antennas that comprise NASA’s Deep Space Network will pick up a faint, distant signal for the final time. When that day comes, humanity will say goodbye to Voyager 1, the first and to date only spacecraft to reach interstellar space. For scientists at NASA, Voyager’s death will be a moment long prepared for, and something they will have spent decades attempting to delay....
For millions of years the extinction rates among large, medium and small land mammals were similar. Yet the large species started dying off much faster, about 100,000 years ago in Eurasia, 50,000 years ago in Australia, and 15,000 years ago in North and South America A. These shifts, it turns out, correspond with when a hominin species—Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and especially Homo sapiens—spreads across a continent. “There is an astoundingly tight fit” among the data sets, says Felisa A....
The safeguards of democracy—including the exhausting, underappreciated work of so many people who uphold them—have stopped the U.S. from descending into authoritarianism, but the facts of our division remain bleak. Institutional distrust has been rising for decades. A Monmouth University survey found that 77 percent of 2020 Donald Trump voters believe that Joe Biden won the presidency through fraud. Trust in Congress is in the basement. Until recently, a majority of Americans at least trusted one another....
BOSTON – The world has seen seven global cholera outbreaks since 1817, and the current one seems to have come to stay. Rising temperatures and a stubbornly persistent, toxic bacteria strain appear to have given the disease the upper hand. Public health officials are working on vaccines, struggling to improve sanitation in impoverished nations and grasping for ways to predict the outbreaks. One team of researchers has proposed attacking the pandemic using a combination of high- and low-tech: Satellites and sari cloth....
This is the third of a three-part series that examines our growing understanding of the scope and impacts of microplastics pollution. At several locations around London last winter and spring, researchers stalked the streets counting the number of discarded plastic water bottles they encountered, as if tallying species across a coral reef. Their aim was to see if a new initiative to enlist businesses where people can refill empty bottles with tap water was making a dent in the trash littering the pavement, says marine biologist Heather Koldewey, who oversaw the research....
By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineA retina made in a laboratory in Japan could pave the way for treatments for human eye diseases, including some forms of blindness.Created by coaxing mouse embryonic stem cells into a precise three-dimensional assembly, the ‘retina in a dish’ is by far and away the most complex biological tissue engineered yet, scientists say.“There’s nothing like it,” says Robin Ali, a human molecular geneticist at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London who was not involved in the study....
While still a graduate student in 1974, I had a chance to see malignant tumors from a most unusual perspective. I was working at the National Cancer Institute in the laboratory of the late Pietro M. Gullino, who had developed an innovative experimental setup for studying cancer biology—a tumor mass that was connected to the circulatory system of a rat by just a single artery and a single vein. As a chemical engineer, I decided to use this opportunity to measure how much of a drug injected into the animal would flow to the tumor and back out again....
An aspiring entrepreneur could be forgiven for thinking that dropping out of college to start a company is the key to success. After all, it worked beautifully for Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. These business moguls’ well-known stories give the impression that to become a triumph in business, all you need is a big idea in college and the will to quit school to pursue it. The problem is that college dropouts do not usually become billionaires—there are many more budding entrepreneurs who dropped out of college to start companies and failed than those who succeeded....
Over the past 20 years a dramatic transition has altered the diet and health of hundreds of millions of people across the Third World. For most developing nations, obesity has emerged as a more serious health threat than hunger. In countries such as Mexico, Egypt and South Africa, more than half the adults are either overweight (possessing a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or higher) or obese (possessing a BMI of 30 or higher)....
Most of us think our pets say a lot about who we are. Why else would we proudly proclaim our loyalty on T-shirts and in online profile pictures? Yet few scientists have rigorously investigated whether our choice of pet reveals anything about our personality, beliefs or lifestyle. Scientific American rounded up the smattering of available research and highlighted some of the more interesting findings in the infographic that starts below and continues on the next pages....
More than 30 years after scientists identified HIV as the cause of AIDS, we still have not managed to devise an effective vaccine against the virus. An array of drugs can usually keep the infection under control for decades, but a vaccine that prevents infection in the first place would be the best weapon—particularly in the developing world, where the costs of drugs and other factors can put effective therapy beyond the reach of many....
For months, there was a fear among energy observers that 2022 would turn into a carbon bomb for the planet. Then, renewables galloped to the rescue. Global carbon dioxide emissions associated with energy use are on track to increase 1 percent this year, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. That’s significantly less than what many observers projected earlier this year—when a global surge in natural gas prices prompted worries that many countries would turn to coal as an alternative....
By Daniel CresseyTheoretical suggestions for creating a one-way mirror for sound have finally been turned into reality by a device that blocks acoustic waves moving in a certain direction.In the same way that electronic diodes permit current to move in only one direction, the team’s “acoustic rectifier” converts a sound input to a new frequency and allows this frequency to move through the device, while preventing the original frequency from moving in the opposite direction....
By Karen Jacobs(Reuters) - Airlines canceled more than 4,400 flights on Monday as extreme cold in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast froze fuel lines to airplanes and posed exposure hazards for employees working on the tarmac.JetBlue Airways took the most drastic step of any airline by suspending all flights at New York and Boston airports on Monday, with plans to gradually resume them on Tuesday.The brunt of the 4,400 cancelations was felt in areas such as Chicago, Minneapolis and Cleveland, according to the FlightAware....
The distinction between comets and asteroids is in principle a clear one, encoded right in the words themselves. Both terms come from Greek roots—“comet” descends from a word meaning “long-haired” and “asteroid” means, roughly, “starlike.” So there it is: comets are fuzzy, and asteroids are discrete pinpricks of light. The definitions hint at compositional differences as well: comets are icy, which leads them to come apart when they draw near the sun, whereas rocky asteroids are somewhat more robust....
Patients who lose consciousness for more than a year are considered extremely unlikely to regain it, but a 35-year-old Frenchman who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years has shown hints of awareness after having key brain regions electrically stimulated, scientists reported on Monday. The patient was able to follow an object with his eyes, turn his head when asked to, and widened his eyes in surprise when a researcher’s head came close to his face — none of which he did in a vegetative state....
By Heidi LedfordA key study on chronic fatigue syndrome was delayed from publication after officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga., learned of a conflicting report published by other government agencies.The paper, which was published online July 2 by the journal Retrovirology, finds no evidence of a controversial link between the xenotropic murine leukaemia virus (XMRV) and chronic fatigue syndrome. Retrovirologist William Switzer and his colleagues at the CDC conducted a blinded study of 51 people with chronic fatigue syndrome and 56 healthy controls....
