The 5,000 North Carolinians who call Hyde County home live in a region several hundred miles long where coastal residents are coping with severe changes that few other Americans have yet to endure. Geological changes along the East Coast are causing land to sink along the seaboard. That’s exacerbating the flood-inducing effects of sea level rise, which has been occurring faster in the western Atlantic Ocean than elsewhere in recent years....
The moment that incited Mark Bertolini’s workplace revolution did not happen in the office, at a conference or even when he was thinking about his job—it occurred during a family vacation. But it was not a happy moment; in fact, it nearly killed him. In February 2004 Bertolini, then 47 years old, was on a skiing trip with his family in Killington, Vt. While speeding downhill, he collided with a tree and fell 30 feet down a ravine....
The biggest roadblock for the commercialization of solar power in the United States is not the technology of the modules but the mundane back-end issues of permitting, installation, electrical controls and business practices, according to a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute. The report, summarizing the institute’s design charrette in June, concludes that “balance of system” (BoS) costs – everything other than the modules themselves – could be cut in half through streamlined, standardized approaches....
Evidence of life on Mars, even if only in the distant past, would finally answer the age-old question of whether living beings on Earth are alone in the universe. The magnitude of such a discovery is illustrated by President Bill Clinton’s appearance at a 1996 press conference to announce that proof had been found at last. A meteorite chipped from the surface of the Red Planet some 15 million years ago appeared to contain the fossil remains of tiny life-forms that indicated life had once existed on Mars....
By Barani Krishnan (Reuters) - A federal nuclear inspector urged U.S. regulators to shut down a California nuclear power plant until tests showed its reactors could withstand shocks from nearby earthquake faults, according to the Associated Press and an environmental group. Michael Peck’s call to close the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County was in a report he made to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2013, the AP reported on Monday, a day after a strong earthquake shook California’s Napa Valley region....
Hepatitis-Beating Bananas Potatoes, tomatoes and other edible plants might someday serve to immunize people, especially those in the developing world [see “Edible Vaccines,” Scientific American, September 2000]. In a review published in the June issue of Biotechnology Progress, Indian researchers conclude that bananas are the most promising edible vaccine against the hepatitis B virus, which lives in about 5 percent of the world’s population. Potatoes have received more extensive study, but the researchers argue that bananas are the better choice because they can be eaten raw and taste good to most children....
Henrietta Lacks’s cells have long been familiar to scientists — but it was the ethical controversy around those cells that made her famous to the wider world. Her fame was thanks to an award-winning book published in 2010 that explored how, in the course of Lacks’s treatment for cancer, doctors isolated what became the first “immortal” human cells. The HeLa cells survived, thrived, and multiplied outside her body, so much so that they have been in continual use in labs around the world for 65 years, even though Lacks herself succumbed to cancer in 1951....
Guess what Apple’s research and development spending is as a percentage of revenue? Chances are your answers are so far off that Apple’s R&D spending could be a drinking game. If you ask a few friends you’re likely to get guesses anywhere from 4 percent to maybe 10 percent or so. The real answer: R&D represents 2.2 percent of sales. The point is worth pondering as Apple preps its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow....
Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of biofuels? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? Like any new industry, biofuels face their own share of challenges—from environmental to cost to infrastructure compatibility. Amyris, however, has chosen a unique path to overcome current challenges....
Xavier Becerra, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, is set to be a pandemic-era secretary with no public health experience. Whether that matters depends on whom you ask. Becerra built his career in the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming California’s attorney general, and some wonder whether his political and legal skills would be the right fit to steer HHS through a health catastrophe that’s killing thousands of Americans every day....
February 1968 Nuclear Economics “Nuclear power, like the boy next door, seems to have grown up overnight. That it has indeed come of age is incontrovertible. For two years running it has accounted for nearly half of all the new power-generating capacity ordered by U.S. utilities. That maturity came quickly is also incontrovertible. The first truly large-scale nuclear unit—a 428,000-kilowatt installation at San Onofre, Calif.—was licensed for construction as recently as February 24, 1964, and announcements of commercial nuclear power projects did not begin to gain momentum until the fall of 1965; yet by the summer of 1966 nuclear power had drawn abreast of fossil power in the utility marketplace....
China’s prototype space station, whose name translates as “Heavenly Palace 1,” met a fiery end in Earth’s atmosphere today (April 1), breaking apart and burning up in the skies over the southern Pacific Ocean at about 8:16 p.m. EDT (0016 April 2 GMT), according to the U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC). “The JFSCC used the Space Surveillance Network sensors and their orbital analysis system to confirm Tiangong-1’s re-entry,” U....
Although laptops, cell phones and other gadgets give us remarkable mobility, we can roam untethered only for as long as our batteries hold out. Photonics researcher Marin Soljačić of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to eliminate that shackle by delivering wireless electricity, or WiTricity. Soljačić hung a copper coil 0.6 meter (two feet) in diameter from a ceiling, then hung another coil about 2.1 meters (seven feet) away, with a 60-watt lightbulb dangling from it....
Years before a person is disabled by Alzheimer’s disease, the memory problems of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) start causing difficulty in daily life. Research published in May in Neuron suggests that a drug currently used for epilepsy might improve sufferers’ cognition—and perhaps even slow the progression of the disease—by quieting activity in the hippocampus. Past research has found that people with MCI have an overactive hippocampus, the brain region associated with memory function....
From savoring a piece of cake to hugging a friend, many of life’s pleasures trigger a similar reaction in the brain—a surge of chemicals that tell the body “that was good, do it again.” Research published Friday in Nature Communications suggests this feel-good circuit may do much more. Using lab tools to activate that reward circuit in mice, scientists discovered that its chemical signals reach the immune system, empowering a subset of bone marrow cells to slow the growth of tumors....
Luk Vandenberghe walks over to a shelf in his office and picks up two fist-sized objects. One is a more complicated version of a Rubik’s Cube, with 20 individually coloured sides instead of the standard 6. The other is an off-white glob of hard plastic produced by a 3D printer. It’s studded with bumps, dimples and repeating triads of vaguely pyramid-like shapes, 20 in all. Both are models of an adeno-associated virus (AAV), a favourite vector among clinicians for delivering genes to cells....
The record-breaking drought in California—brought about by a severe lack of precipitation, especially mountain snows—has exacted a $2.7 billion toll on the state’s economy because of agricultural losses, researchers said Tuesday. During a briefing for the California Department of Food & Agriculture, scientists from the University of California, Davis, told officials that based on their preliminary research and modeling, the drought is resulting in a harder economic pinch this year than it was in 2014....
New standards for climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil refineries were announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday. Collectively the nation’s roughly 500 fossil fuel-fired power plants and 150 oil refineries emit some 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases per year—nearly 40 percent of total U.S. emissions. The EPA proposes to set standards for both existing and new facilities under the nation’s clean air law for greenhouse gas pollution in July and December of 2011 under the new plan, with such standards to take effect in 2012....
Think about the most meaningful experiences in your life. You will probably recall your wedding, or a trip across Europe, or your first skydive. You won’t name brushing your teeth. Yet recent research suggests that the mundane regularities of life can very much contribute to your overall sense of meaning. As squishy as the concept sounds, meaning in life is an integral part of our well-being. Research has associated it with good mental health, success at work and longevity....
In November, Russia ignited an international uproar with a weapon test that launched an interceptor against a defunct military satellite. When it hit, that deliberate collision shattered the satellite into more than 1,500 trackable pieces of debris. This space debris is dangerous; it could hit and severely damage an orbiting space station, akin to the opening scenes of the movie Gravity. The debris from this test could knock out any of dozens of satellites working to monitor climate and weather, not to mention those that provide critical national security information and perform other vital services for us on Earth....
