Fear and fraud often travel together. As coronavirus anxiety began to spread across the land, so did bogus nostrums promising protection from this modern-day plague. As early as March 6, 2020, U.S. regulators began to issue warnings to companies promoting false claims, such as this one touting the benefits of drinking a daily dose of silver particles: “It’s actually widely acknowledged in both science and the medical industry that ionic silver kills coronaviruses....
The ability of music to evoke specific, often powerful feelings is no secret to anyone who has listened to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” Lizzo’s “Good as Hell” or any of the other countless compositions that have found their way onto Western playlists in the past few centuries. The emotional effects of music are the point, of course. They are also the subject of a burgeoning field of research around the world in which scientists are exploring the nature of the many “subjective experiences”—such as joy, sadness, anxiety and serenity—that music induces....
UNITED NATIONS – Devastating flooding that has swamped one-fifth of Pakistan and left millions homeless is likely the worst natural disaster to date attributable to climate change, U.N. officials and climatologists are now openly saying. Most experts are still cautioning against tying any specific event directly to emissions of greenhouse gases. But scientists at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva say there’s no doubt that higher Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to the disaster begun late last month....
PASADENA, Calif.—NASA’s Juno spacecraft has successfully entered orbit around Jupiter. At 8:53 P.M. Pacific time, ground controllers received a telemetry tone of 2,327 hertz—equivalent to the highest D note on a piano keyboard—indicating that Juno’s 35-minute engine burn had slowed the spacecraft enough to slip into the giant planet’s gravitational embrace. Launched in 2011 on a nearly five-year interplanetary voyage, Juno is only the second spacecraft to ever orbit Jupiter, after the Galileo mission that explored the giant planet from 1995 to 2003....
As many expected, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year will go to three scientists who led the 50-year quest to detect gravitational waves. Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne will share the prize for their work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), which in 2016 announced it had detected ripples in spacetime for the first time. “This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world,” Göran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said this morning at the Nobel Prize press conference announcing the award....
Physicists have taken a major step towards a future quantum version of the Internet by linking three quantum devices in a network. A quantum internet would enable ultrasecure communications and unlock scientific applications such as new types of sensor for gravitational waves, and telescopes with unprecedented resolution. The results were reported on 8 February on the arXiv preprint repository. “It’s a big step forward,” says Rodney Van Meter, a quantum-network engineer at Keio University in Tokyo....
Key concepts Chemistry Physics Materials science Carbonation Physical reactions Explosions Introduction Have you ever seen the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment that is all over the Internet and wondered what makes the reaction work? You might think that there is some ingredient in a Mentos candy that causes a chemical reaction with the soda pop, like the way baking soda reacts with vinegar. But the amazing eruption that takes place when Mentos are dropped into Diet Coke or other brands of diet soda pop is not a chemical reaction at all!...
As President-elect Biden takes office, he will assume leadership of the U.S. government’s scientific enterprise that was once the envy of the world, but which has been battered and marginalized for the past four years. The Trump administration steadfastly refused to follow the lead of scientific experts during the COVID-19 crisis, promoting scam cures with no evidence and undermining public trust in measures like masks and social distancing. Their failure to heed the advice of experts has had predictably deadly effects: more than 300,000 dead Americans in the grim equivalent of a daily 9/11....
In the before times, clinical psychologist Leslie Becker-Phelps met with patients in a tidy private office in Basking Ridge, N.J., carefully observing their demeanor, body language and, with couples, interpersonal vibe. That changed with COVID’s social-distancing exigencies. “My office is a 14-foot by 14-foot room,” she explains, “and I am not going to do therapy with masks that cover something that is so important in therapy—the face.” Today her sessions take place by videoconference or, sometimes, phone....
HANCOCK, Mass. – The scene is something no ski resort operator wants to see early in the season: Sunlight glaring off the sloppy snow pooling like dirty mashed potatoes at the base of the high-speed six-person chairlift. The thermometer at Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in western Massachusetts reads 59 degrees Fahrenheit on this mid-November day, and Brian Fairbank, president and CEO of Jiminy Peak, is convinced the remaining snow will keep....
One key to harvesting the ocean’s clean energy—at least a little of it—may lie in static electricity. A team of researchers in Portugal has now successfully used it to run small generators inside a navigational buoy, powering the sensors and lights that the buoy uses to collect data and aid sailors. Though the project’s scale is small so far, the researchers say it is an important proof of concept for a technique that could supplement existing attempts to harness the power of waves, as well as other kinds of naturally occurring motion....
For decades Henry Markram has dreamed of reverse engineering the human brain. In 1994, as a postdoctoral researcher then at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, he became the first scientist to “patch” two living neurons simultaneously—to apply microscopic pipettes to freshly harvested rat neurons to measure the electrical signals fired between them. The work demonstrated the process by which synapses are strengthened and weakened, making it possible to study and model how the brain learns....
Editor’s note: This story was originally posted in the December 1998 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes and Scientific American. “The last seminar, given at a gorgeous house left unburned near Riken, was dedicated to [electron] shower theories…. It was difficult to continue the seminars, because Minakawa’s house was burnt in April and the laboratory was badly destroyed in May. The laboratory moved to a village near Komoro in July; four physics students including myself lived there....
Conservatives’ trust of science has gradually decreased over the past 40 years, beginning perhaps when empirical research was increasingly used to justify government regulations, according to a new academic analysis. The study, appearing this week in the April edition of the journal American Sociological Review, identifies a 25 percent drop among conservatives who express trust in the scientific community since 1974. That decline is striking to researchers because conservatives were more trusting of science than other political groups when data were first collected nearly four decades ago....
If there were an app on your phone that could improve your memory, would you try it? Who wouldn’t want a better memory? After all, our recollections are fragile and can be impaired by diseases, injuries, mental health conditions and, most acutely for all of us, aging. A multibillion-dollar industry for brain training already capitalizes on this perceived need by providing an abundance of apps for phones and tablets that provide mental challenges that are easily accessible and relatively inexpensive....
WE HUMAN LIKE to think that we have much more self-discipline than other animals. We know how to set goals—losing 25 pounds, starting our own businesses—and then we resist temptations and slog through difficulties to achieve them. We are far from perfect at this talent, but in most of our minds there is no question that our powerful self-control is one of the things that sets us apart from more lowly beasts....
The tropical Pacific Ocean is once again carrying on a will-it-or-won’t-it flirtation with an El Niño event, just a year after the demise of one of the strongest El Niños on record. The odds right now are about even for an El Niño to develop, frustrating forecasters stuck in the middle of what is called the spring predictability barrier. During this time, model forecasts aren’t as good as seeing into the future, in part because of the very nature of the El Niño cycle....
I was 24, and I felt invincible. I taught aerobics. I was a sprinter, a long jumper, the former athletics captain of my school and a ballet dancer. I loved to twirl in space, run on the beach and hike through the wilderness. All of that changed in a split second. In a freak somersault while downhill skiing, I shattered four vertebrae, along with the illusions of my immortality. An electric current zapped through my legs, and then I lost all movement and sensation below my pelvis....
Young people suing the state of Montana over the effects of climate change are expected to go to trial next June, becoming the first youth climate activists in the U.S. to argue their case in court. Attorneys with Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based public-interest law firm that represents a number of kid-centered climate cases in the U.S., said Tuesday the case will go to trial June 12 at the 1st Judicial District Court in Helena....
For the past 36 years Frank Marks has accumulated thousands of hours probing the hearts and souls of hurricanes, getting to know them from their birth to their death. Now Hurricane Matthew, the first major cyclone to hit the U.S. mainland in 11 years—is giving him still more quality time with a monster. Marks—meteorologist and director of the Hurricane Research Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory—has been flying into the storm for the past several days and nights, along with some 18 other scientists, pilots, navigators and engineers....
