Posts

I have addressed the idea of mindfulness and its role in fitness before. In the article “Mindfulness as a Fitness Motivator,” I mentioned a scientific study on the associations of what is known as Dispositional Mindfulness with cardiovascular health, which concluded: “dispositional mindfulness is positively associated with cardiovascular health, with the associations particularly driven by smoking, body mass index, fasting glucose, and physical activity.” I also dug into a super cool scientific trial that examined the relationship between exercise consistency and mindfulness....

As a Sri Lankan marine biologist, I have often found myself challenging stereotypes. At the beginning, some of my fellow Sri Lankans questioned my choice of career path. Despite coming from a tropical island with jurisdiction over eight times more ocean area than land area most people had never heard of, let alone met, a marine biologist. Historically countries like mine used the ocean as a space of extraction and not protection....

“Weakest” is rarely a superlative worth celebrating, but experiments began this summer in a room (below) with the weakest magnetic field in our solar system—and scientists are excited. Built by physicists at the Technical University of Munich, the room achieves a millionfold reduction in the intensity of ambient magnetic fields, a 10-fold improvement on any previous man-made structure, registering even less such activity than the vast, empty space between planets. The facility’s shielding consists of layers of a highly magnetizable metal that ensnare fields so they do not pass through to the structure’s interior....

The Trump administration’s ambivalence—some might say hostility—toward science and research took a turn for the worse when the president signed a controversial new tax bill into law at the end of last year. Donald Trump’s first year in office was marked by questionable appointments to federal departments and agencies—including Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency and Rick Perry at the Department of Energy (DoE)—that handle important policy decisions best informed by science....

Food-borne viruses, bacteria and protozoa caused some 582 million cases of intestinal infection and 351,000 deaths in 2010, according to new figures from the World Health Organization (WHO). The agency, which released the data on April 2, recommends common-sense measures to lessen the health and economic toll of illnesses caused by bacteria, viruses, parasites and chemicals in food. These steps include improving basic sanitation, building government capacity to track cases of foodborne illness, and ensuring that health workers are trained and equipped to treat the sick....

A proposed carbon fee in Washington state appeared headed for resounding defeat yesterday, capping off a disappointing night at the ballot box for climate hawks. Voters also overwhelmingly rejected a renewable portfolio standard in Arizona and an enhanced oil and gas setback proposal in Colorado. The Washington loss is the third time in three years a carbon pricing proposal has failed in the Evergreen State. It deals greens a massive setback nationally just as the idea of pricing carbon dioxide emissions has begun to gain momentum....

Astronomers have observed for the first time the thunderclap of x-rays that announces a star has exploded into a supernova. Researchers monitoring spiral galaxy NGC 2770, approximately 88 million light-years away, observed a brief but intense flash of x-rays in early January, followed by a prolonged afterglow of visible and ultraviolet light—the hallmark of a supernova. Although the x-ray outburst lasted only seven minutes, it flashed 100 billion times brighter than the sun in that time....

In 1970 child welfare authorities in Los Angeles discovered that a 14-year-old girl referred to as “Genie” had been living in nearly total social isolation from birth. An unfortunate participant in an unintended experiment, Genie proved interesting to psychologists and linguists, who wondered whether she could still acquire language despite her lack of exposure to it. Genie did help researchers better define the critical period for learning speech—she quickly acquired a vocabulary but did not gain proficiency with grammar—but thankfully, that kind of case study comes along rarely....

California has a history of going it alone to protect the environment. Now, as US President Donald Trump pulls back on climate science and policy, scientists in the Golden State are sketching plans for a home-grown climate-research institute—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The initiative, which is backed by California’s flagship universities, is in the early stages of development. If it succeeds, it will represent one of the largest US investments in climate research in years....

Some patients with severe brain damage may be more aware than we think, according to the first study to assess their brain activity with imaging technology. Minds of minimally conscious patients appear to retain the ability to process language. The results are “a new voice for these patients,” says Columbia University professor Joy Hirsch, one author of the multi-institutional study. A minimally conscious patient will occasionally respond to commands, reach for objects or make other purposeful gestures....

The modern-day homes of cave-dwelling arachnids called harvestmen trace the long-gone southern limits of glaciers at the peak of the last major ice age, about 22,000 years ago, recent research suggests. “We can now potentially look at the distribution of this species just to reconstruct this glacial maximum,” says Stefano Mammola, an ecologist at the Italian National Research Council’s Water Research Institute. Mammola is lead author on the new work, published last August in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research....

The mysterious disease known as chronic-fatigue syndrome has long defied classification, as the millions of people who suffer from it show a wide variety of symptoms. Now a panel commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has produced what is sure to be an influential report on how the disease should be diagnosed. This new definition comes with a new moniker: systemic exertion intolerance disease (SEID). The report, released by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) on February 10, says that the new name better reflects the key symptom of the disease—extreme exhaustion after any exertion....

Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to distinguish between African ethnic groups that have a history of attacking them and groups that do not. Now a study reveals that they can even discern these differences from words spoken in the local tongues....

Neuroscience has long focused on the brain in terms of components: the visual cortex processes what we see, Broca’s area is the center for language, and so on. As our understanding of the brain has improved, however, it has become clear that a more accurate model depends on how these modules are wired together in circuits. A technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) gives us a tool to probe the nature of those connections....

Powerful jets of material spewing from the edge of monster black holes may be more likely to arise where two galaxies have merged together, a new study suggests. Like a cosmic version of Old Faithful (the famous Yellowstone geyser), some black holes at the center of galaxies will spew jets of material into space that stretch for thousands of light-years. You can see an illustration of what these gushing pillars look like in a video of the galaxy crash discovery....

The world’s first telephone call—“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”—was a request for a face-to-face meeting. I live in Boston, where Alexander Graham Bell made that historic call in 1876, and on a recent trip I passed through Brantford, Ontario, where Bell first dreamed up his telephone in 1874. In Brantford, which bills itself as the “Telephone City,” there’s a giant memorial to Bell that includes a bronze casting with figures meant to represent Knowledge, Joy and Sorrow—the varieties of information spread by the telephone....

Driven to Save Metro Taxi Inspired by lower operating costs and consumer enthusiasm, metro taxi in denver is switching its entire fleet of 420 cars to hybrid vehicles. It has already replaced 37 standard sedans—mostly Ford Crown Victorias, rated at 19 miles per gallon by the Environmental Protection Agency—with the Toyota Prius, rated at 46 mpg. After the fleet is fully converted, which will take up to eight years, the company says it will save 2....

One morning earlier this month, on the rain-soaked slopes of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Noe Noe Wong-Wilson was settled in for the long haul. Wrapped in a trench coat to keep out the wind and cold, the educator and activist held a meeting amid camp beds and folding chairs inside a giant tarpaulin-sheltered tent. Wong-Wilson is a leader of the Mauna Kea kia’i, a group of Native Hawaiians who have been encamped near the volcano’s base since July....

We all know that smoking is bad for our health and that eating vegetables is good for it. Yet how bad and how good are they? Without a clear notion of threat and reward, it is that much harder to avoid a cigarette or to choke down a serving of broccoli. “I hate when someone tells me that something is risky,” says David Spiegelhalter, a professor of risk assessment at the University of Cambridge....

Engineers in the US have created a miniature shooting range to show that multilayer graphene, 10 to 100nm thick, may make excellent body armor. The results suggest graphene may absorb 10 times the amount of energy steel can before failing. Since the discovery of graphene in 2004, the material has been lauded for its static strength and stiffness, owing to its two-dimensional honeycomb structure. One of the more outlandish illustrations of its strength, according to some researchers, is that it could withstand the force of an elephant balancing on a pencil....