Finding an ant in the kitchen often triggers my sense of alarm, because for any ant I see there must be many more out of view. The same applies to many aspects of life, occasionally with greater consequences. Take scientific breakthroughs as an example. The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in part for the first discovery of a Jupiterlike planet close to a sunlike star by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz in 1995....
In this big universe, it’s easy to feel small and insignificant, as if there’s nothing special about our planet, our star, our celestial neighborhood. After all, the sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. What do we have to brag about? Yet astronomers in the know have long realized that our galaxy is exceptional. By size alone, it’s “in the top percentile of all the galaxies that exist,” says Joss Bland-Hawthorn, an astronomer at the University of Sydney who helped compile the galaxy’s vital statistics for a 2016 article in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics....
President-elect Joe Biden is starting to announce nominees to prominent science positions in his administration. As the U.S. grapples with the consequences of the last four years of the Trump administration undermining science and harming already marginalized groups at every turn, it is crucial that the Biden team choose highly qualified leaders who bring strong scientific expertise and who reflect the values and diversity of the nation. During the campaign, Biden said that his administration would “choose science over fiction”; now is the time to fulfill that campaign promise....
Editor’s Note (10/4/21): David Julius, interviewed in this story from September 2019, is the co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to how the human body senses temperature and touch. David Julius knows pain. The professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine has devoted his career to studying how the nervous system senses it and how chemicals such as capsaicin—the compound that gives chili peppers their heat—activates pain receptors....
Every few weeks a heart-warming tale of regular folks deciding to “pay it forward” makes the news. One driver decides to, say, pay the toll for the next person in line, that person pays for the following driver, and so on. A recent example started on Christmas Eve, when more than 1,000 patrons at a Starbucks in Connecticut agreed, one by one, to pay for the customers behind them. People have engaged in pay-it-forward chains at laundromats, fast food joints and car washes....
When Waber thought about this, it made sense. “If you ate lunch with someone, you were much more likely to talk to them later in the week,” he says, and more communication is often linked to higher performance. That is because people who eat with more colleagues at lunch forge more in-person connections, which they can leverage if they get stuck or need help on a task. So from a company’s perspective, millions of dollars could hinge on differences in lunch-table size....
It is one of those facts of life that we learn early and don’t forget: normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But a new study in eLife argues that that number is outdated. The figure was probably accurate in 1851, when German doctor Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich found it to be the average armpit temperature of 25,000 patients. Times have changed, though, according to the recent paper: the average American now seems to run more than a degree F lower....
If all goes according to plan, two spacecraft will commence close encounters of the curious kind with two separate asteroids by the end of August. Their goal: to retrieve samples that may contain organic materials dating back to the solar system’s birth. These building blocks may be key to understanding the origins of the planets and of life on Earth—and could also make future space prospectors very rich. As of this writing, Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe was on track to arrive at a kilometer-wide asteroid called Ryugu around June 27....
One of the U.S.’s largest infrastructural projects underway is a new bridge slowly rising above the Hudson River near New York City. The design, called a cable-stay, is cheaper and faster to construct than a traditional suspension bridge for medium-length projects (such as those that span rivers). As America’s bridges age, cable-stays will be popping up more frequently. As people age, memory can become a problem. A creative way to test for Alzheimer’s is now undergoing investigation....
VAN HORN, Texas — William Shatner has boldly gone where no 90-year-old has ever gone before. The famed “Star Trek” actor and three other private crewmembers launched into space today (Oct. 13) on a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, marking the second time that Blue Origin has successfully launched a crewed suborbital mission on its vehicle for space tourism. Dubbed NS-18, it was the 18th flight of a New Shepard vehicle overall....
(Adds price reaction, analyst) HOUSTON/LONDON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - BP Plc will face a maximum fine of $13.7 billion under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill, several billion dollars less than feared, after a judge ruled that it was smaller than the U.S. government claimed. The ruling by federal magistrate Carl Barbier put the size of the worst offshore spill in U.S. history in 2010 at 3....
Close your eyes and imagine being a passport officer at London Heathrow. There is a long line of slightly tired, irritated, and often impatient passengers aching to get to the end of their journeys. One by one they come to your counter and hand over passports with rather outdated photographs, looking at you for approval to reach their final destination. Different hair, glasses, sun tan, and a bit of weight gain or loss – the list goes on....
By Alister Doyle and Stian ReklevWARSAW (Reuters) - Haiti, the Philippines and Pakistan were hardest hit by weather disasters in 2012, a report issued at U.N. climate talks on Tuesday showed, as the death toll mounted from the latest typhoon to devastate the Philippines.Germanwatch, a think-tank partly funded by the German government, said poor nations had suffered most from extreme weather in the past two decades, and worldwide, extreme weather had killed 530,000 people and caused damage of more than $2....
A brief encounter between a European spacecraft and a large asteroid has revealed that the space rock is likely a mostly intact leftover from the planetary formation process. But the flyby raised more questions than it answered, providing tantalizing but somewhat puzzling hints about the asteroid’s makeup and internal structure. The spacecraft, a European Space Agency probe called Rosetta, flew by Asteroid Lutetia in July 2010. The spacecraft is on its way to a planned encounter with Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014; Rosetta shut down most of its systems and entered communication hibernation this past June to conserve power during its a 2....
In the spring of 2002, a large chunk of the Larsen B ice shelf (LIS-B) on the Antarctic Peninsula broke off and tumbled into the Weddell Sea. A new analysis published today in the journal Nature suggests that the more than 3,200 square kilometer area that collapsed signifies an unprecedented loss in the past 10,000 years and can be attributed to accelerated climate warming in the region. Eugene Domack of Hamilton College and his colleagues studied six sediment cores collected from the area around the ice shelf as well as other data, such as temperature and salinity measurements of the Weddell Sea....
(Credit: Apple) At least some of the 200 million people that have downloaded iOS 7 to this point aren’t so pleased with what they’ve found. Apple’s iPhone and iPad owners have been taking to the company’s forums over the past week to complain about iOS 7’s new parallax and zoom features. Many of the folks in the forum said that they’ve experienced motion sickness, vertigo, nausea, and headaches due to the motion on-screen....
Ken Gibson was an advanced reader in elementary school and easily retained much of what he read. But when the teacher would stand him up in front of the class to read a report out loud, he floundered. His classmates, he noticed, also had their inconsistencies. Some relished oral presentations but took forever to read a passage on their own; others had a hard time following lectures. Gibson now explains these discrepancies as “learning styles” that differ from one student to the next....
A team of climate scientists has delivered a rare bit of good news: it could be easier than previously thought to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, as called for in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. But even if the team is right — and some researchers are already questioning the conclusions — heroic efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions will still be necessary to limit warming. Published on 18 September in Nature Geoscience1, the analysis focuses in part on the fact that global climate models used in the 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tend to overestimate the extent of warming that has already occurred....
At more than 2,150 meters deep in the ocean, the water pressure is a crushing 220 kilograms per square centimeter. Oceanographers who have tried to snag samples of life in these pitch-black, frigid and high-pressure places have had to suck in water at high speed and try to filter out organisms, often damaging them in the process. But a team led by Duke University, the University of Oregon and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week snatched up the intact larvae of 16 different animals....
The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles....
