Posts

In May 2006 Dwayne Berg woke up on a gurney in a Seattle emergency room, an IV in his arm and a team of doctors and nurses working him up. The last thing the 42-year-old financial executive could remember was running on a treadmill at his gym, part of his regular fitness regimen. He had suffered a seizure and tumbled off the machine, and although he had not hurt himself in the fall, doctors had asked for an MRI scan of his brain to see if they could find a cause for the seizure....

STARS ON THE MOVE In “New View of the Milky Way,” Mark J. Reid and Xing-Wu Zheng state that they “find that the sun circles the Milky Way every 212 million years. To put this in perspective, the last time our solar system was in this part of the Milky Way, dinosaurs roamed the planet.” But because the rest of the stars in our galaxy are also moving in the same direction about the center, shouldn’t we “always” be in the same place with respect to them?...

In the first clip, the boy appears to drag his feet as he walks, while his knees—particularly the left one—stay bent throughout his steps. In the second clip, his knees remain bowed inward. But his legs—now clad in a robotic exoskeleton—swing more as they move, and his feet lift off the ground and his knees bend and flex in time with his step. The boy is one of seven children with cerebral palsy who were outfitted with exoskeletons in hopes that the robotic devices could improve their crouched posture, making it easier for them to take simple steps....

MUSEUMS/EXHIBITIONS Looking Back from Ground Zero: Images from the Brooklyn Museum Collection The fifth anniversary of the September 11 attack is upon us. The focus of this exhibition of works in various media is the transformation of the landscape of lower Manhattan and Ground Zero leading up to, during and after that appalling crime; it is a change that serves as a physical metaphor for the paradigm shift in our individual and national psyches....

Something fishy’s goin’ on with the the shrimp off the coast of Maine. Maine Shrimpers Cut off You may have heard, the 2014 shrimp season in the Gulf of Maine, the most southern region where northern shrimpreside, has been called off. On December 3, state regulators in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section, who set annual catch limits for shrimpers, took a step they hadn’t taken since 1978:they declared a moratorium....

Three people died and more than 100 have been sickened in the past few weeks after taking synthetic cannabinoids, human-made compounds that target the same brain receptors as marijuana. Symptoms documented by poison centers—first mostly in the Midwest, and now in Maryland—include unexplained bruising, coughing up blood, bleeding from the nose and gums, blood in urine and feces, and excessively heavy menstruation. An ongoing investigation has identified a likely culprit in the blood of those affected: rat poison, specifically brodifacoum....

Whether you’re the owner of the Dallas Cowboys or captain of the playground dodge ball team, the goal in picking players is the same: Get the top talent. Hearts have been broken, allegiances tested, and budgets busted as teams contend for the best athletes. The motivation for recruiting peak performers is obvious — exceptional players are the key to team success — and this belief is shared not only by coaches and sports fans, but also by corporations, investors, and even whole industries....

President-elect Donald Trump’s meeting with Al Gore yesterday could soften his image on climate change a week after he claimed to have an open mind about man-made warming, according to some observers. The discussion came just 27 days after Gore, the former vice president, told voters that electing Trump would be devastating for the planet. Yet Gore emerged yesterday to say the meeting was “extremely interesting.” It’s unclear if their conversation was impromptu; Gore was in Trump Tower to discuss climate issues with Ivanka Trump, the next president’s daughter, who is reportedly interested in the topic....

One morning several years ago a black triangular-shaped object flew over my home in the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California. It was almost completely silent, made rapid turns and accelerations, and was so nonreflective it looked like a hole in the sky, almost otherworldly. It was, in fact, the B-2 Stealth Bomber, looping around to make another run over the Pasadena Rose Parade on January 1, an annual tradition. But had I not known what it was and seen it first, say, out in the desert at dusk, I might easily have thought it a UFO....

In his 1994 book Black Holes and Time Warps, physicist Kip Thorne wrote of the tantalizing discoveries to come in the 21st century. In particular, the existence of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time—might soon graduate from theoretical prediction to known fact. And those waves could carry all-important hints about their origins in the motion or collision of extremely massive objects. “Gravitational-wave detectors will soon bring us observational maps of black holes, and the symphonic sounds of black holes colliding—symphonies filled with rich, new information about how warped spacetime behaves when wildly vibrating,” Thorne wrote....

As artificial-intelligence systems become widespread, the chances grow that their glitches will have dangerous consequences. For example, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently fooled a Google-trained AI program into identifying a plastic toy turtle as a rifle. If a future robot cop or soldier made such an error, the results could be tragic. But researchers are now developing tools to sniff out potential flaws among the billions of virtual “brain cells” that make up such systems....

I knew things had changed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early 2018 when my routine request to interview a CDC scientist was held up for days on end. I’d been interviewing researchers there for decades and had never before hit a delay that meant missing my deadline. When I asked what was going on, I was told, off-the-record, that media requests were now being routed from the CDC press office in Atlanta up to the bosses at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D....

With the U.S. heading into a pivotal midterm election, little progress has been made on ensuring the integrity of voting systems—a concern that retook the spotlight when the 2016 presidential election ushered Donald Trump into the White House amid allegations of foreign interference. A raft of start-ups has been hawking what they see as a revolutionary solution: repurposing blockchains, best known as the digital transaction ledgers for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, to record votes....

Editors’ note: An article in the February 2008 issue of Scientific American, “Building a Future on Science” by Christine Soares, describes a project led by neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis to use science as an agent of social and economic transformation in his native Brazil. In this essay, Nicolelis explains the origins of his idea and how it could be extended to other nations. Key Concepts In the 21st century, innovative knowledge and technology creation, arguably the most unique by-products of the human brain, are likely to become the most valuable commodities fueling the global economy....

A study of mouse metabolism suggests that a product of fiber fermentation may be directly affecting the hypothalamus, a region of the brain involved in regulating appetite. People have long been told that a diet high in fiber can help to fight obesity, but how it does so has been unclear. “There has been lots of epidemiological information showing a relationship between fiber and obesity, but no one has been able to connect the epidemiological results with actual mechanisms,” says Jimmy Bell, a biochemist at Imperial College London who worked on the research, published today in Nature Communications....

Short people know the sad litany all too well: Numerous studies show that they probably earn less than taller colleagues. They get fewer dates as well as fewer promotions. Their bosses are probably taller than they are—in fact, more than half of U.S. CEOs clock reach six-feet- (183-centimeters-) plus. And if all that wasn’t depressing enough, now comes word from Johns Hopkins University that height-advantaged Americans—particularly women—are also less likely to suffer from dementia....

Since the 1970s invasive Asian carp have steadily migrated north into the U.S. Midwest, infesting the watersheds of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers. The voracious bottom-feeders can strip entire river ecosystems of zooplankton, the basic food of native fish species—and now they seem poised to breach the Great Lakes ecosystem. Earlier this summer a commercial fisherman contracted by the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee (ACRCC) caught a species of the intruding fish in Illinois, only 14 kilometers south of Lake Michigan....

Women who undergo hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) to treat symptoms of menopause are at increased risk of developing all categories of breast cancer, a new study has found. In the study, postmenopausal women on hormone replacement therapy that included both estrogen and progestin were 1.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer over an 11-year period compared with women not on the hormones. HRT increased the risk of breast cancers that have a low risk of recurrence, such as estrogen-receptor-positive cancers, as well as the risk of more aggressive breast cancers, such as triple-negative breast cancer....

“Don’t Bother Me Mom—I’m Learning!” by Mark Prensky. Paragon House Publishers, 2006 ($19.95) As kids spend ever more time in the virtual world, the debate over whether video games foster harmful or helpful real-world habits rages. Marc Prensky, an educational software developer, is pro-game. In “Don’t Bother Me Mom–I’m Learning!”, Prensky maintains that kids “are almost certainly learning more positive, useful things for their future from their video and computer games than they learn in school!...

In the 30 years since New York City adopted its first official waterfront plan, hundreds of miles of shoreline have been revitalized with parks and greenways, retail businesses, high-rise condominiums and office towers. Now comes the hard part: protecting billions of dollars of shoreline property and infrastructure across all of New York’s boroughs from the ravages of climate change without losing sight of other priorities. Those include racial and social equity, affordable housing, middle-income jobs and waterborne transit....