Dear EarthTalk: One of the objections to wind power has been that the turbines can kill birds. Has there been some progress in developing bird-friendly wind power?—Marcie Mahoney, Boston Bird collisions have been one of the primary negatives of the recent growth in wind power across the United States and beyond. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) estimates that almost a half million birds are killed each year in the U....
By Jane Qiu BEIJING–Counting the cost of decades of breakneck development, Chinese scientists and policy-makers last week outlined the daunting challenges they face in trying to halt the country’s environmental degradation.Government officials at the Symposium on Ecosystem Monitoring and Evaluation in Beijing promised to step up investment in ecological conservation and restoration over the next five years, although no precise details were given. Other delegates warned that the lack of a national long-term strategic plan for the environment, compounded by insufficient coordination among government sectors, could jeopardize such efforts....
Climate change is straining the social fabric that holds communities together. But—if not done correctly—positive efforts meant to respond to global change can have a negative impact, too, according to new findings. In a nearly 50-page report released last week, the nonprofit EcoAdapt and the University of California, Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project found that “climate change stressors and impacts” are primary concerns for most communities, especially those with disadvantaged populations. However, efforts to reduce impacts through adaptation and resilience measures must be meshed with other concerns like affordable housing, food and water security, as well as safe and vibrant neighborhoods....
Twin quakes—the biggest to hit Southern California in decades—rattled a parched stretch of the Mojave Desert on Thursday (July 4) and Friday (July 5), sending seismic waves rippling through Earth that could be felt from Los Angeles to San Jose. Thankfully, no deaths were reported, partly because the two quakes hit a sparsely populated region of the Golden State. The ruptured faults were not part of the San Andreas Fault system, which snakes 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) from north to south along the coastline, where the North American and Pacific plates meet....
It was the fourth week of June in 2020, and the middle of the second wave of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. Cases had passed 2.4 million; deaths from the novel coronavirus were closing in on 125,000. In his home office in Atlanta, Tom Chiller looked up from his e-mails and scrubbed his hands over his face and shaved head. Chiller is a physician and an epidemiologist and, in normal times, a branch chief at the U....
New research shows for the first time that we process cash and social values in the same part of our brain (the striatum)—and likely weigh them against one another when making decisions. So what’s more important—money or social standing? It might be the latter, according to two new studies published in the journal Neuron. “Our study shows that both behaviorally and in the brain, people place an importance on social status,” says Caroline Zink, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md....
Watching worms die may not sound particularly exciting, but what if when they kicked the bucket they started glowing blue? That’s what a team of biologists has observed in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. A blue “death wave” ripples down the worms’ bodies for up to six hours as the life drains out of them—a phenomenon that is yielding insights into how death spreads throughout an organism. “Death actually propagates,” says David Gems, a biogerontologist at University College London (U....
When a Greenland glacier melted in the unusually hot summer of 2012, it pushed so much water through that it warped the Earth’s crust and caused a massive wave of ice and water to push its way seaward. That wave is a newly identified phenomenon for climate researchers and represents a troubling new trend in the understanding of how current sea-level rise estimates may be underestimated, according to a new study published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters....
The U.S. Coast Guard today announced that it had suspended its search at 6:30 P.M. EST for three boaters, including two pro football players, missing in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Clearwater, Fla. The trio was part of a group of four men who left from Clearwater on a fishing trip Saturday and were reported missing early Sunday after failing to return. In calling off the hunt, Coast Guard Capt....
Excerpted from Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, by Steven Strogatz, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 2, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Strogatz. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Working behind the scenes, calculus is an unsung hero of modern life. By harnessing the forecasting powers of differential equations—the soothsayers of calculus—humans have used an arcane branch of mathematics to change the world....
By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineKenya is expected to become the fourth African country to allow the commercial production of transgenic crops.The country’s National Biosafety Authority is due to publish long-awaited regulations governing the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops in open fields for research and commercial purposes. Kenya follows Burkina Faso, Egypt and South Africa in giving commercial production of GM organisms the go-ahead.Kenya’s agricultural researchers say the move could not come soon enough, as the absence of regulations was stalling research....
Thirty years ago most psychologists, philosophers and psychiatrists thought that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric and amoral. They believed children were locked in the concrete here and now—unable to understand cause and effect, imagine the experiences of other people, or appreciate the difference between reality and fantasy. People still often think of children as defective adults. But in the past three decades scientists have discovered that even the youngest children know more than we would ever have thought possible....
Update, August 5, 2:23 PM ET: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Wednesday, August 5, that the wing debris did come from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014. The high-profile disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains a mystery—but the recent discovery of a possible wing part points to an ocean landing, raising hopes for a resolution. “It would be unusual to have only one piece of an airplane floating around on the surface....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. If you’ve watched flamingos at the zoo – or if you’re lucky, in the wild – you’ve likely wondered how flamingos manage to sleep standing on one leg. Of course, as humans, we think standing on one leg is hard because it’s difficult for us. Tree pose in yoga becomes increasingly difficult as you lift your leg higher, reach your arms up and tilt your head....
Many foreign aid workers in the ongoing Ebola epidemic have a safeguard that their West African counterparts are denied: emergency air evacuation should they become dangerously ill. Since June, air ambulances have rescued at least 10 foreign health workers who came into contact with the Ebola virus. Those cases include a Doctors Without Borders staffer sent home to France, a British man sent to the U.K., two Dutch doctors airlifted to the Netherlands and four infected Americans flown to U....
In 1954 Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, then a young mathematician, visited an exhibition on Dutch artist M.C. Escher. Inspired by Escher’s art, Penrose devised the impossible figure known as the tribar (independently from Oscar Reutersvärd, its first creator) and sent his sketch to the artist. Escher then embedded Penrose’s design into his work Waterfall, further blurring the line between math and art. Following in Escher’s footsteps, Australian artist Michael Cheshire routinely turns geometry into the art of the impossible, using one of the earliest and most concrete materials: wood....
When eight bizarrely big-headed soldier ants turned up in a wild colony collected from Long Island, N.Y., scientists knew they had found something interesting. This discovery of these oversized versions of soldier ants, whose job is to defend the nest, led researchers to create their own supersoldier ants in the lab with the help of a hormone, and, by doing so, offer an explanation for how ants, and possibly other social insects, take on specific forms with dedicated jobs within their colonies....
Early in life, most children learn that touching a hot stove or even being near a roaring fire can burn them. Whether conveyed via direct contact or rays of light zipping through space, the often painful lessons of heat transfer are as intuitive as they are unforgettable. Now, however, scientists have revealed a strange new way that warmth can wend its way from point A to B. Through the bizarre quantum-mechanical properties of empty space, heat can travel from one place to another without the aid of any light at all....
The state of Alaska may no longer loom as large in the American consciousness as it did during the presidential election, but enviros won’t let us forget failed GOP veep candidate Gov. Sarah Palin’s support for aerial wolf hunting. Conservation watchdog Defenders of Wildlife this week launched the Eye on Palin Web site to spotlight the moose-hunting Alaska chief exec’s “Anti-Wolf, Anti-Wildlife Agenda”. “I am outraged by Sarah Palin’s promotion of this cruel, unscientific and senseless practice, which has no place in modern America,” actress and animal activist Ashley Judd said in a press release....
After weeks of will-they-or-won’t-they tensions, the House managed to pass its GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act on Thursday by a razor-thin margin. The vote was 217-213. Democrats who lost the battle are still convinced they may win the political war. As the Republicans reached a majority for the bill, Democrats on the House floor began chanting, “Na, na, na, na … Hey, hey, hey … Goodbye.” They claim Republicans could lose their seats for supporting a bill that could cause so much disruption in voters’ health care....
