The transmission grid that delivers electricity from power plants is a vital piece of America’s infrastructure. It is also good at hiding its flaws. People may notice the towers and wires marching across the landscape or the local substations that step down the voltage so electricity can be distributed to homes and businesses, but the transmission grid does not show congestion like highways do or flooding like burst water mains do....
Diabetes drugs help to manage the body’s constantly fluctuating levels of blood glucose. But a healthy biochemical balance of the hormones involved in that process—insulin, incretins and more—is painfully delicate. Diabetes medications have consequently often had side effects that were unpleasant (such as weight gain) and, in a few cases, even dangerous. Witness Avandia, a popular drug available since 1999 that lowers blood glucose by making cells more receptive to insulin—but that also, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May, increases the risk of heart attack....
The military has already taken some action. Planning for climate change impacts is being folded into base Master Plans around the world. And renewable energy projects have popped up on a few installations, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing power separate from the grid. Given that the DOD owns and manages a real estate portfolio worth $850 billion, these are big steps. Beyond the walls of its bases, the Pentagon has also recognized that climate change presents a threat to national security and is looking at options to address changes already taking place....
An oral medicine was able to hinder the coronavirus behind COVID-19 as it attempted to replicate itself in human lung cells in test tubes, scientists reported Monday. It also hampered closely related coronaviruses from reproducing in mice for several days and improved their lung functions.* The drug, called EIDD-2801, interferes with a key mechanism that allows the SARS-CoV-2 virus to reproduce in high numbers and cause infections, the researchers explained in the journal Science Translational Medicine....
For many years scientists believed that you were born with all the neurons you would ever get. The evidence for this dogma seemed strong: neuroanatomists in the early 20th century had identified immature neurons under the microscope but only in the brains of mammalian embryos and fetuses, never after birth. We now know that the truth is not quite so simple. By radioactively labeling DNA, researchers gradually began to find exceptions to the rule against new neurons in the adult brain....
Bristlecone pine trees dot the White Mountains in eastern California, giving the stark and rocky landscape one of its few highly visible signs of life. These gnarly-barked trees can survive at altitudes of up to 3,470 meters, although their growth rate at these heights is limited because of cold temperatures. But those limits have been loosening lately. In the past 50 years, as regional temperatures have warmed, the growth of bristlecone pine trees at high altitudes has been accelerating, whereas that of trees lower down the slopes has not, according to the results of a study published November 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....
In 85 B.C. or thereabouts, a Greek named Posidonius set sail on a curious mission. He was not carrying freight or passengers, nor was he engaged in warfare. He simply wanted to answer an age-old question: How deep is the ocean? Halting his vessel in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Posidonius coaxed his ships crew to let out nearly two kilometers of rope before a large stone attached to the end of the line nally hit bottom....
Brains contain maps of the bodies they inhabit, with neurons dedicated to the perception or control of particular parts—and research suggests there may be quite a bit of wiggle room in that representation. In 2016 scientists set up an experiment that made subjects fleetingly feel like they had a sixth finger on one hand (one subject yelled, “Witchcraft!”), and in 2020 another research group extended that sensation indefinitely. The second group went further in its latest work, published in Cognition, to make participants feel as if they had a sixth finger—and to control the invisible digit’s perceived length....
Researchers have decoded the genomes of mammoths and a 700,000-year-old horse using DNA fragments extracted from fossils in the past few years. DNA clearly persists far longer than the bodies for which it carries the genetic codes. Computer scientists and engineers have long dreamed of harnessing DNA’s tininess and resilience for storing digital data. The idea is to encode all those 0s and 1s into the molecules A, C, G, and T that form the twisted, ladder-shaped DNA polymer—and this decade’s advances in DNA synthesis and sequencing have bought the technology forward by leaps and bounds....
Proteins are the stuff of life. They are the eyes, arms and legs of living cells. Even DNA, the most iconic of all molecules in biology, is important first and foremost because it contains the genes that specify the makeup of proteins. And the cells in our body differ from one another—serving as neurons, white blood cells, smell sensors, and so on—largely because they activate different sets of genes and thus produce different mixtures of proteins....
Secretary of Defense James Mattis has asserted that climate change is real, and a threat to American interests abroad and the Pentagon’s assets everywhere, a position that appears at odds with the views of the president who appointed him and many in the administration in which he serves. In unpublished written testimony provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee after his confirmation hearing in January, Mattis said it was incumbent on the U....
Fifty-four percent of Americans are opponents of nuclear power, according to a 2016 Gallup poll. I can certainly understand why. I used to be one of them. Back in the 1990s, I wrote an entire Ph.D. dissertation about the errors that led to disasters such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and it didn’t leave me with much faith in our ability to safely tap fission energy. But in recent years I’ve swung around to a different point of view....
In recent years, Lyme disease has almost become another one of those fad medical conditions that tends to catch headlines (and audiences), similar to Vitamin D, supplemental testosterone, and gluten sensitivity. I’m not saying these things are not real … they are very real for some. But they are overly-used and abused in order to gain media attention (sorry again, Dr. Oz). With Lyme disease being so over-hyped in the media, and with it being such a mysterious illness with common symptoms, it’s challenging to decipher fact from fiction....
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Susan Freinkel’s book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. Combs are one of our oldest tools, used by humans across cultures and ages for decoration, detangling, and delousing. They derive from the most fundamental human tool of all—the hand. And from the time that humans began using combs instead of their fingers, comb design has scarcely changed, prompting the satirical paper the Onion to publish a piece titled “Comb Technology: Why Is It So Far Behind the Razor and Toothbrush Fields?...
From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. October 17, 2017—Artificial sweeteners pop up in products all over the grocery store, from diet soda to yogurt, to help people keep calories down and pounds off. It turns out their popularity has given artificial sweeteners—sucralose in particular—a purpose beyond helping with weight or carb control. Sucralose, and to some extent acesulfame, may also play a role in keeping water contamination down by helping researchers and water resource managers identify hot spots of pollutants in order to better manage them....
Efforts to grow neurons from schizophrenia patients, surprising facts about the latest E. coli outbreaks and reindeer’s UV-seeing ability are among the issues addressed in the Advances section of Scientific American’s August issue. For readers interested in learning more about any of these developments, a selected list of further resources follows below. “Mental Illness in a Dish” “Modeling schizophrenia using human-induced pluripotent stem cells,” by Kristen J. Brennand and colleagues, describes their schizophrenia neuron-growing experiment....
Jon Stone, a consultant neurologist and honorary senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, replies: Strokes are areas of damage in the brain caused by blocked blood vessels or bleeding. They can set off a host of problems, including paralysis or impaired vision. Cognitive and behavioral changes after stroke are common yet often overlooked because the effects may be subtle. Friends and relatives may report a personality change that is hard to pin down....
Despite their awareness of being in microgravity, astronauts often reach for a falling object too soon, as though they expected the normal pull of the earth’s gravity. The source of this expectation may be hardwired. Italian researchers showed volunteers two groups of animations, one in which a ball jumped up and bounced down under normal gravity, g, and the other in which the ball accelerated upward in each bounce. Subjects were better at predicting the ball’s return when its behavior matched that of normal gravity....
BEIJING (Reuters) - China is poorly prepared to tackle the impact of climate change that presents a serious threat to the country, thanks to a lack of planning and public awareness, the government said on Monday.The world’s most populous country already faces challenges from weather extremes, with 2,000 people dying on average each year since the 1990s in natural disasters that are set to get worse, China’s powerful economic planning agency said....
Welcome or not, dying is a natural part of the circle of life. Death initiates a complex process by which the human body gradually reverts back to dust, as it were. In the language of forensics, decomposition transforms our biological structures into simple organic and inorganic building blocks that plants and animals can use. Four main factors affect the pace and completeness of decay. The most important is temperature: the rate of chemical reactions in a cadaver doubles with each 10 degree Celsius rise....
