Being smart is the most expensive thing we do. Not in terms of money, but in a currency that is vital to all living things: energy. One study found that newborn humans spend close to 90 percent of their calories on building and running their brains. (Even as adults, our brains consume as much as a quarter of our energy.) If, during childhood, when the brain is being built, some unexpected energy cost comes along, the brain will suffer....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Few Americans probably know that their tax dollars paid to kill 76,859 coyotes in 2016. The responsible agency was Wildlife Services (WS), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its mission is to “resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.” This broad mandate includes everything from reducing bird strikes at airports to curbing the spread of rabies....
A trawl of existing data has identified drugs that seem to stall organ rejection in patients who have undergone transplants. By crunching through large, publicly available data sets, researchers pinpointed a suite of genes involved in organ rejection. They were then able to identify drugs that affect the activity of these genes—with candidates including a widely prescribed statin, a class of drug used to lower blood-cholesterol levels. A subsequent analysis of thousands of medical records indicated that statins do in fact help transplant patients....
It’s official: 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. The average temperature in the lower 48 states reached 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, shattering the previous record set in 1998 by a full degree. The government’s temperature records for the contiguous United States go back to 1895. What’s remarkable, said NOAA climate scientist Jake Crouch, is that the other 117 years in that temperature record fell within a 4....
This demand needn’t be polluting. China has the capacity to generate the electricity it needs from its hydroelectric plants. Unfortunately, these plants are mainly far from the coastal urban centres that consume much of the country’s power. China’s response has been to use advanced power transmission technology that can bridge vast distances – technology that, ironically, harks back to the earliest days of electric power. In 2010, it became the first country to adopt ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC)....
Early this month, the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that winter sea ice levels in the Bering Sea had dropped to a record low level for this time of year. That wasn’t surprising news to the Alaska Native villages along the state’s western coast. For the last decade, those communities have been enduring the impacts of a warming climate, from the melting tundra that’s causing waterfront homes to fall into the ocean to a lack of coastal sea ice, which traditionally protected those communities from winter storm surges....
Though the moon is our closest, most familiar celestial neighbor, the question of how it formed is surprisingly unsettled and controversial. Scientists widely agree that about 4.5 billion years ago, a large object called Theia slammed into Earth—an idea known as the giant impact hypothesis. What happened next is up for debate, however. Some scientists favor a “classical” model, where the impact created a lot of debris that gradually clumped together into the moon, while Earth was left intact....
Even as information technology has been driving striking social transformations over the past decade, a new form of information with similar transformative potential has also been coming online: the kind encoded in the DNA sequence of the human genome. Beginning on page 46 of this issue, John I. Nurnberger, Jr., and Laura Jean Bierut describe how the power of genetic analysis is even beginning to reveal the interactions of genes, environment and personal choice that make a person more or less vulnerable to a disorder as complex as alcohol addiction....
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a promising new treatment for a particularly deadly form of cancer, bringing hope to desperate patients while rekindling a global conversation about the escalating cost of new therapies. The treatment, made by Gilead Sciences, is made by extracting patients’ white blood cells and re-engineering them to home in on tumors. Called a CAR-T, the one-time treatment has shown unprecedented results for patients with dire diagnoses....
By Andrew Bennett HellmanResearchers have unveiled a catalogue of genes from microbes found in the human gut. The information could reveal how ‘friendly’ gut bacteria interact with the body to influence nutrition and disease.“This is the most powerful microscope that’s been used so far to describe microbial communities,” says George Weinstock, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study.The human body contains about ten times as many microbes as human cells, and most of them live in the gut....
In 1835 French philosopher Auguste Comte asserted that nobody would ever know what the stars were made of. “We understand the possibility of determining their shapes, their distances, their sizes and their movements,” he wrote, “whereas we would never know how to study by any means their chemical composition, or their mineralogical structure, and, even more so, the nature of any organized beings that might live on their surface.” Comte would be stunned by the discoveries made since then....
GALVESTON, Texas (Reuters) - Hurricane Harvey intensified early on Friday into potentially the biggest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in more than a decade, as authorities warned locals to shelter from what could be life-threatening winds and floods. Harvey is set to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday on the central Texas coast where Corpus Christi and Houston are home to some of the biggest U.S. refineries. Oil and gas operations have already been affected and gasoline prices have spiked....
Pluto’s icy heart beats with a planetary rhythm. When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft whizzed by the dwarf planet in July 2015, it famously spotted a heart-shaped feature just north of the equator. Now, researchers are recognizing how that enormous ice cap drives much of Pluto’s activity, from its frosty surface to its hazy atmosphere. Planetary scientists revealed their latest insights this week at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California....
In his seminal 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, American naturalist Aldo Leopold warned of the perils of cheatgrass—a tall and hairy invasive plant that originated in Europe and Asia. Today cheatgrass outcompetes native species across large swaths of the western U.S., displacing sagebrush steppe grasses and threatening grain and cattle farms. But a new study shows cheatgrass also seems oddly and particularly drawn to the bright lights of city life—a rare twist for researchers who usually tackle such invaders in fields and forests, not back alleyways and boulevards....
In the past couple of years imbroglios erupted on college campuses across the U.S. over trigger warnings (for example, alerting students to scenes of abuse and violence in The Great Gatsby before assigning it), microaggressions (saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”), cultural appropriation (a white woman wearing her hair in cornrows), speaker disinvitations (Brandeis University canceling plans to award Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree because of her criticism of Islam’s treatment of women), safe spaces (such as rooms where students can go after a talk that has upset them), and social justice advocates competing to signal their moral outrage over such issues as Halloween costumes (last year at Yale University)....
Just offshore from the pebble beaches of Bere Point on Malcolm Island, British Columbia, the Naiad Explorer rocks gently in the waters of the Queen Charlotte Strait. The sun has burned off most of the morning mist, save for a thin layer that still shrouds the tips of the island’s cedars, firs and spruces. I watch from the boat as three killer whale brothers named Cracroft, Plumper and Kaikash gently scrape their bodies against the small, smooth stones in the shallows off the bow....
We humans often watch and wonder at wildlife. But a defense agency’s new initiative turns the tables—it aims to deploy marine animals to keep an eye on human activity. The agency wants to know if sea life ranging from bioluminescent plankton to goliath grouper can serve as components of underwater surveillance systems capable of detecting the enemy’s oceangoing drones, large nuclear submarines and other underwater vehicles. The research effort is called Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS)....
We humans may think of ourselves, or possibly beetles, as typical Earthlings, but to a first approximation, life on Earth exists in the sea. And what spectacular life! Our special package on the oceans is teeming with images of eerie, delicate, elaborate, glowing and occasionally kind of frightening creatures that have rarely been seen by terrestrial species. The in-depth report was guided by sustainability senior editor Mark Fischetti along three main themes: mystery, discovery and surprise....
Patients at risk for chronic pain following major surgery might be identified before going under the knife, according to a new study. People who have a certain gene variant are at lower risk of developing severe chronic pain and are less sensitive to painful stimuli, researchers report. Besides the potential for diagnosing the risk of chronic pain, the discovery offers a starting point for identifying new painkillers. Chronic pain is remarkably common after major surgery, occurring after 15 percent of hernial repairs and up to 50 percent of mastectomies, for example....
Score one for the tykes—researchers find that two-year-old toddlers are more socially mature than adult chimps and orangutans. In tests, all the species on average showed a similar facility with physical tasks, but human tots were more than twice as competent when it came to dealing with social challenges. In one task, for instance, the subjects had to retrieve a piece of food from inside a tube. The youngsters swiftly removed the morsel by following the lead of the experimenter, but the chimps and orangs bit, scratched and pummeled the container in a number of mostly futile attempts....
