Whoops! NASA off by decades on hottest year Hank Aaron wasn’t the only one to lose his record last week amid swirling controversy. Climate scientists seemed unprepared for (or perhaps just blasé about) the media backlash after a correction to a NASA analysis stripped 1998 of its title as the hottest year on record in the U.S. That dubious honor was rightly returned to 1934, the year the infamous dust bowl devastated the Midwest....
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a special report on the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016 produced by the World Economic Forum. The list, compiled by the Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, highlights technological advances its members, including Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina, believe have the power to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard the planet. It also provides an opportunity to debate any human, societal, economic or environmental risks and concerns that the technologies may pose prior to widespread adoption....
Edited by Dava Sobel There was a way of beholding nature that was like a form of prayer. When she painted a caterpillar, she limned the whole bracing saga of its life from birth, instars, and metamorphosis to the plants it gorged on and the predators who stalked, ambushed and gobbled it. Balancing the mingled dramas on one toothy page of vellum, she by the bye bore witness to feats of nature both outlandish and ordinary, such as maggots hatching freely from eggs like many living things, not from dead flesh or dust, without cause or coupling, in a mysterious brew of spontaneous generation....
About 230 million years ago a Silesaurus opolensis was hungry. The close dinosaur relative, which stood as tall as a Great Dane and had a meter-long tail, foraged for food in the swampy vegetation of what is now southwestern Poland. Then, like all vertebrates, the reptile pooped out what it could not absorb. Millennia passed, and the waste petrified—along with several minuscule beetles embedded within it. These beetles, ambassadors of a long-lost lineage, now represent the first ever insect species described from a piece of fossilized excrement....
The eyes are the window to the soul. That is why we ask people to look us in the eye and tell us the truth. Or why we get worried when someone gives us the evil eye or has a wandering eye. Our language is full of expressions that refer to where people are looking—particularly if they happen to be looking in our direction. As social primates, humans are keenly interested in determining the direction of gaze of other humans....
Credit: Moritz Stefaner and Christian Lässer Since at least the 17th century, science has struggled with words. Francis Bacon, visionary of a new, experimental natural philosophy, called language an “idol of the marketplace”: a counterfeit currency we trade in so habitually that we no longer notice the gap between words and the world. True to its Baconian ideology, the Royal Society of London, one of the world’s oldest scientific societies, made nullius in verba (roughly, “on no one’s word”) its motto soon after it was established in 1660....
Mighty forces beyond the solar system billions of years ago might have shaped much of the land beneath our feet today. A study recently published in the journal Geology proposes that Earth’s continental crust went through major growth spurts when the early solar system surfed through the four major spiral arms of the Milky Way. The galactic passages triggered a rain of comets on Earth, and their giant impacts built colossal amounts of new crust....
The disappointing results of clinical trials will no longer be able to languish unpublished, thanks to rules released on September 16 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The long-awaited changes to the HHS clinical-trial disclosure laws require, for the first time, that researchers report the design and results of all clinical trials and empowers the government to enforce penalties for those that do not comply....
I grew up in a tiny New York City apartment, packed in alongside our four cats and my father’s immense personal library of some 3000 books. My father designed books for a living, and he revered them. His books were everywhere in the apartment, covering every possible surface in the house, the radiators and toilet tanks included. To my father, these books were objects of art: beautiful to hold, beautiful to look at, and beautiful to read....
Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. Rarely a day goes by without national news stories about vaccine hesitancy: how many people say they definitely will or won’t get a shot and how many are in the “maybe” box. No account is complete without a particular focus on Black people who—despite contracting, being made severely ill by and dying from coronavirus at elevated rates—express a high degree of reluctance to being injected with something developed to save their lives....
Many questions still remain about the tragic and untimely death of musician and cultural icon Prince, but a report released last Thursday by the Anoka County, Minn., Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office answered a big one: Prince’s death was caused by an accidental overdose of the powerful opioid drug fentanyl. Little is known for certain about the circumstances leading up to his death but it now appears that, like millions of Americans, Prince was taking opioids to manage chronic pain....
“Living ink” sounds like fantasy from a Harry Potter novel. But it is actually how scientists describe a new 3-D gel laced with bacteria that turn out molecules helpful in wound healing and water cleanup. The material can be customized for different uses by adding a variety of bacteria, and sprayed out of the nozzle of a 3-D printer into many useful shapes. Although bacteria can cause infections, they are also versatile workhorses....
Miranda Massie is on a mission to create an institution from scratch. It will cost many millions of dollars and years to build, but when done, it will help define the next 200 years of human existence. So what exactly is at the core of this mission? A museum based in New York City that chronicles the global and local impacts of climate change, the possible solutions and the connections that exist between every visitor to the museum and the world around them....
Working together can hasten brain evolution, according to a new computer simulation. When programmed to navigate challenging cooperative tasks, the artificial neural networks set up by scientists to serve as mini-brains “learned” to work together, evolving the virtual equivalent of boosted brainpower over generations. The findings support a long-held theory that social interactions may have triggered brain evolution in human ancestors. “It is the transition to a cooperative group that can lead to maximum selection for intelligence,” said study researcher Luke McNally, a doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin....
Alarms go off so frequently in emergency rooms, doctors barely notice. And then a colleague is wheeled in on a gurney, clinging to life, and that alarm becomes a deafening wake-up call. For Dr. Kip Wenger, that colleague, a 33-year-old physician, was also his friend. Wenger is regional medical director for TeamHealth, one of the country’s largest emergency room staffing companies, based in Knoxville, Tenn. “It’s devastating,” he said. “This is a young, healthy person who has everything in the world ahead of them....
The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it would send nearly $1 billion to school districts to buy more than 2,300 electric school buses. The chunk of funds—from last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law—is an historic investment in the country’s young fleet of school buses that run on batteries. It will more than quadruple the current fleet of about 740. “This is a total game changer,” said Sue Gander, the director of an electric school-bus initiative at the World Resources Institute....
The Food and Drug Administration will soon be alerting companies that certain gene therapies in development can qualify for less arduous review at the agency, Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Tuesday. Specifically, gene therapies for hemophilia, a rare disease in which blood doesn’t clot properly because it lacks certain proteins, could be evaluated based on whether therapy increases those proteins in the blood, regardless of whether the therapy actually causes the patient to bleed less....
There are few sights as peaceful as the lakes atop the Greenland ice sheet, tranquil pools of sapphire meltwater on a bed of sparkling white. But beautiful as they are, they don’t always last for long. These lakes have a habit of suddenly disappearing. It’s a process researchers refer to as rapid draining. If a crack opens in the surface of the ice, the water can quickly rush thousands of feet to the bottom of the ice sheet, leaving a gaping hole behind....
Nutrients in agricultural runoff is the biggest contributor to algae blooms in Lake Erie. What brings that runoff from farm fields to the lake is rain, and lots of it. “It’s a combo of more rainfall; that climate change is predicted to cause more severe rain events. And more rainfall means more nutrients and higher nutrients mean more toxicity,” Timothy Davis, an ecologist at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, said....
Mammoths are among the best-known inhabitants of the last ice age, but their travels across the tundra have long remained a mystery. Now experts have used the chemical composition of a 17,100-year-old mammoth tusk from Alaska to map out where the animal wandered during its lifetime. They found it put in almost enough miles to loop around the world twice. Woolly mammoths roamed North America, Europe and northern Asia during the last ice age....
