When Valerie Starks, a mother from Denver, found out that her 13-year-old daughter was posing as an older teenager to post raunchy photographs to the Web, she took to social media to teach her a lesson. She berated her child in a Facebook video that spread like wildfire in May 2015—in less than a week it had more than 11 million views. Starks was not alone. In the past year numerous parents have used social media to punish their kids....
From Nature magazine Thresher sharks can use their lengthy tail fins to swat sardines from shoals, researchers have found by taking underwater footage. Such tactical use of the tail fin during hunting — which was previously observed only in mammals such as dolphins and killer whales — might indicate that sharks are more intelligent than scientists thought. Pelagic thresher sharks (Alopias pelagicus) are nocturnal and notoriously shy. Researchers have long suspected that the shark uses its tail — which makes up half of its body length — to stun its prey, but the behaviour has not been documented before under natural conditions....
Controlling animal movements with your thoughts alone. Monitoring a pupil’s attention in class with a headset that scans brain activity. And, of course, the much more familiar cochlear implants that help the deaf hear or deep-brain stimulators that assist people with Parkinson’s disease to regain functional mobility. This is neurotech—new, potentially revolutionary technology that promises to transform our lives. With all the global challenges of today, we need revolutionary technology to help the world cope....
The mice scurrying around their cage in Katsuhiko Hayashi’s laboratory do not look remarkable. They run, eat and sleep like others of their kind. But these eight rodents have an unusual origin story, one that Hayashi, a reproductive biologist at Kyushu University in Japan, revealed three years ago in the pages of Nature. The tawny-colored mice, he and his colleagues announced, did not spring from the mating of sperm and egg....
After two years of war the massive number of casualties was no longer a secret to any thinking civilian or soldier, and few still expected an easy or quick resolution to the conflict. Governments had become desperate for manpower, armaments and military supplies of all kinds. Significant portions of the population, as well as industrial and agricultural production, had been shifted over to war work. In a search for victory, science and technology was pressed into service, and 1916 saw the first use of tanks in warfare as well as widely expanded use of chemical weapons, flamethrowers, and the airplane in a wide variety of roles on land and sea....
The federal government spent $7 billion to repair damage from tornadoes since 2001, and experts say the conditions for killer twisters, like the storms that ravaged Alabama over the weekend, might be sharper with rising temperatures. The United States has a long history of deadly tornadoes, underscored by the EF4 twister that killed at least 23 people on Sunday in Lee County, Ala., about 110 miles south of Atlanta. The National Weather Service reported that the tornado’s path of destruction stretched at least 24 miles, packing 170 mph winds and opening a milewide gash through forests, homes and buildings in Beauregard, Ala....
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Heavy rainfall in a wildfire-charred area of North Central Washington state triggered flash flooding and mudslides that stranded motorists and closed highways, a forecaster said on Friday. Vehicles were trapped in debris-laden water at about 8 p.m. PDT Thursday (0300 GMT Friday) in Okanogan County, and mud and rocks carried by moving water blocked State Highway 20, said National Weather Service meteorologist Stephen Corfidi. Up to 10 vehicles were also stranded in mud in the Methow Valley, Corfidi said....
Veterinarians know this opioid as a powerful elephant sedative. Security hawks know it too, thanks to its apparent use by the Russian government to put down a hostage crisis in 2002 (yes, really). But in the past year more U.S. doctors and paramedics are getting first-hand knowledge about the deadly effects of carfentanil from users who have overdosed on it. The drug is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more powerful than fentanyl, the drug that pop star Prince overdosed on earlier this year....
In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Krauss bemoans what he sees as contemporary science’s “ideological corruption.” He blames this corruption on humanities scholars for pointing out how science can be “tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.” His complaint rests on a basic mistake. Krauss confuses what he calls ideological corruption—ideology leading science astray from facts—with ideological awareness. Ideological commitments and social and political values have always influenced scientific research....
Gary Marcus suffers from what a friend jokingly describes as congenital arrhythmia—the inability, despite many hours of his youth spent practicing and taking lessons, to learn to play a musical instrument. A few years ago Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, decided at 38 to make one last try when he took up guitar. No surprise: He did not succeed in becoming the next Jimi Hendrix, but managed to acquire a modicum of skill—and went on to describe his experience in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning....
It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. Science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft considered The Colour Out of Space his best story. In this 1927 classic tale of cosmic horror, a small Massachusetts farming community faces unspeakable evil from the outer reaches of the universe....
Perhaps all money should be laundered. Studies have piled up in recent years describing exactly how filthy—specifically how bacteria-laden—our dollars and cents can be. Fecal bacteria and other pathogens may have hitched a ride from someone’s hands, nose or apron onto our cash. And yeast or mold might have taken hold, too. The result could be a durable risk to our health whenever our money changes hands. The fibrous surfaces of U....
Excerpted with permission from Gentlemen Scholars and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment, by Tom Shachtman. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2004. During the Revolutionary War, while American laboratory and field research was much reduced, science did not grind to a halt. Scientific thought helped frame America’s initiating rhetoric of the war, and throughout the conflict innovations in medicine and disease control and in arms and armaments were integral to the American effort....
At Hotel Star Sapphire in Dawei, Myanmar, guests sip from coconuts in cool, air-conditioned comfort as the steamy tropical night rolls on. Seven thousand kilometers to the west, in dry Khartoum, Sudan, patients rest in a United Nations Hospital, cocooned from the baking desert heat. In both buildings, the pleasant conditions come courtesy of air-conditioning units that rely in part on dark glass tubes that turn sunlight into cooling power. These aren’t the familiar solar panels that harvest light to make electricity....
As Hurricane Maria exited the northwestern coast of Puerto Rico en route to other islands in the Caribbean, the storm was officially classified “category 4”. When Maria steamrolled the island of Dominica earlier this week, it was a “category 5”. These designations refer to the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale, which meteorologists have been using since 1973 as a shorthand to describe a storm’s intensity. Such generalizations are convenient, but a closer look at Saffir–Simpson reveals the U....
Government buyouts of flood-damaged homes are becoming more common in cities like Houston to eliminate risk for people in floodplains while reducing taxpayer costs to repair infrastructure like power and sewer lines. But researchers from the Nature Conservancy and Texas A&M University say buyout programs are often shortsighted and place too much emphasis on obtaining at-risk properties across large geographic areas, rather than targeting smaller parcels where reclaimed properties are close to natural features like streams that provide environmental services....
By Marian Turner of Nature magazineMunich Confronted with what has become one of the world’s most severe outbreaks of Escherichia coli, physicians and scientists in Germany say that the country’s fractured health-management system has failed to handle the crisis properly. They are calling for major reforms so that outbreaks are reported sooner and more modern technology is used to help identify their source, in order to bring health emergencies under control more quickly....
One third of the drugs used in the clinic today were synthesized not by chemists or biotechnologists but by plants or microorganisms. Most of these “natural products” come from a few genera of soil and marine bacteria that have long been known for their prolific chemistry. In addition to antibiotics, that group includes compactin, the grandfather of the entire drug class of statins, which Japanese microbiologists cultured from mold in rice sampled from a grain shop in Kyoto; sirolimus, an immunosuppressant used to prevent organ rejection following transplants, which Brazilian scientists uncovered in soil samples from Easter Island; and doxorubicin, a widely used anticancer drug, which Italian researchers isolated from the soil that surrounds Castel del Monte, a 13th-century castle....
Astronomers have many tools for studying the cosmos: telescopes, satellites, interplanetary spacecraft, and more. The humble human eye is a critical part of this toolkit, too, as it can often spot patterns or aberrations that algorithms miss. And our vision’s scrutinizing power has been bolstered recently by virtual reality (VR) as well as by thousands of eyes working in tandem thanks to the crowdsourcing power of the Internet. Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center recently announced the discovery of 10 stars surrounded by dusty debris disks—whirling masses of gas, dust and rock left over after the earliest phases of planet formation....
Insects that live in colonies—ants, bees, wasps, termites—have long fascinated everyone from naturalists to artists. Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian poet, once wrote, “What is it that governs here? What is it that issues orders, foresees the future, elaborates plans and preserves equilibrium?” These, indeed, are puzzling questions. Each insect in a colony seems to have its own agenda, and yet the group as a whole appears to be highly organized. Apparently the seamless integration of all individual activities does not require any supervision....
