Raymond Smullyan—logician, magician, mathematician, puzzlist, and Taoist philosopher—passed away last year at the age of 97. In each of his vocations, he made serious contributions. But in his heart, and from his head to his toes, he was an entertainer. In gatherings large and small, among friends and among strangers, Ray was ‘‘on.’’ If there was a piano, there would be music. If there was a deck of cards, there would be tricks....
The tide is rising fast, but the monkeys don’t seem to mind. They bicker and loll on the rocks and mangroves farther up the shore, munching quietly on an oyster or enjoying a gentle grooming. The younger ones make a game of jumping from a tree branch into the warm, clear sea below. Like everyone along this coastal stretch of rural Thailand, they live in tune with the daily tidal rhythms....
The Zika virus is tenacious. In less than a year it has hopscotched to roughly 40 countries around the world, and more than 150 U.S. travelers have picked up the virus elsewhere and became sick at home, according to an exclusive Scientific American state-by-state count. With the summer months ahead simmering concerns are now reaching a fever pitch for what the global outbreak could mean for the U.S. And the outlook does not look good....
2020 will see a veritable Mars invasion as several spacecraft, including three landers, head to the red planet. NASA will launch its Mars 2020 rover, which will stash rock samples that will be returned to Earth in a future mission and will also feature a small, detachable helicopter drone. China will send its first lander to Mars, Huoxing-1, which will deploy a small rover. A Russian spacecraft will deliver a European Space Agency (ESA) rover to the red planet — if issues with the landing parachute can be resolved....
The James Webb Space Telescope — already famous for its mesmerizing images of the cosmos — has done it again. The telescope has captured the first unambiguous evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System. The finding not only provides tantalizing hints about how the exoplanet formed, it is also a harbinger for what’s to come as Webb studies more and more alien worlds. It was reported in a manuscript on the preprint server arXiv, ahead of peer review, and is expected to publish in Nature in the coming days....
Nearly two years ago Alden Research Laboratory in Holden, Mass., hauled the scale model of a promising hydropower turbine out of its massive test flume and set it in a dim corner of the company’s hydraulics laboratory building. As an innovation developed in the 1990s, the device proved quite promising in reducing one of hydropower’s drawbacks: the turbines kill creatures that pass through them. The novel design enabled at least 98 percent of fish to survive....
They say good news comes in threes. For the third time in a week, a coronavirus vaccine developer has reported preliminary results suggesting its vaccine is highly effective. Today, biotech company Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported that its RNA-based vaccine was more than 94% effective at preventing COVID-19, based on an analysis of 95 cases in its ongoing phase III efficacy trial. But scientists say that the press-released results share a few more details than last week’s positive announcements from Pfizer and BioNtech, which are together working on a rival RNA vaccine, and from Russian developers behind the controversial ‘Sputnik V’ vaccine....
The idea that learning to speak two languages is good for your brain has come to be widely accept as fact, particularly in popular media. Studies have shown that bilingual speakers of all ages outperform monolinguals on certain cognitive performance measures. Other studies show delays in the onset of dementia and some even claim enhanced intelligence. But a handful of attempts to replicate some of these seminal findings have failed to confirm this “bilingual advantage....
The year is 2030. After years of wrangling, the North Korean leadership agrees to stop making weapons-grade plutonium and to destroy its stockpiles. Officials invite inspectors to watch them load this nuclear fuel into reactors and transform it into a form useless for bombs. Yet the North Koreans secretly divert some plutonium and fill the reactor instead with lower-grade uranium. The uranium emits radiation, including neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos—harmless and light subatomic particles that pass ghostlike even through lead or rock....
Dear EarthTalk: Since nitrogen oxide compounds are components of smog and are common water pollutants, does nitrogen-enriched gasoline create additional pollution? —Rick Oestrike, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. It might seem like adding nitrogen to gasoline is all the rage among oil companies today, but the idea has been around for years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires that automotive fuels sold in the U.S. contain detergents to help scrub away pollution before it goes out the vehicle’s tailpipe....
Well, we always knew the alien-megastructure idea was a long shot. E.T. has nothing to do with the bizarre dimming events of the mysterious object known as Tabby’s star, a new study reports. “Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten,” study leader Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, said in a statement. “The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities....
To reach Nihoa, an uninhabited 171-acre piece of land in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, scientists must take a 30-hour boat ride, leap ashore from an inflatable dinghy amid violent waves and then scale a cliff. Until recently, the critically endangered millerbird lived nowhere else on earth but Nihoa. But in 2011 and 2012 Sheldon Plentovich led a team that brought 50 of the tiny songbirds on a three-day voyage to Laysan, a sister island where introduced rabbits had driven a different millerbird subspecies to extinction roughly a century ago....
Darwin’s finches are perhaps the best-known examples of adaptive radiation—the evolutionary phenomenon in which one ancestral species rapidly diversifies into several new ones, each with unique adaptations for surviving in its own environment. But these Galápagos birds have nothing on the cichlids of East Africa. In the same two or three million years it took for 14 finch species to evolve, more than 1,000 cichlid species diverged from common ancestors in Lake Malawi alone....
By Philip Ball of Nature magazine Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction is packed with memorable dialogue–“Le Big Mac,” say, or Samuel L. Jackson’s biblical quotations. But remember this exchange between the two hitmen, played by Jackson and John Travolta?Vincent (Travolta): “Antwan probably didn’t expect Marsellus to react like he did, but he had to expect a reaction”.Jules: “It was a foot massage, a foot massage is nothing, I give my mother a foot massage....
When Sen. David Vitter persuaded the EPA to agree to yet another review of its long-delayed assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde, he was praised by companies that use or manufacture a chemical found in everything from plywood to carpet. As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a “probable” rather than a “known” carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer....
By Zeeya MeraliAs if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) didn’t have enough to look for. It is already charged with hunting for the fabled Higgs boson, extra dimensions and supersymmetry, but physicists are now adding even more elaborate phenomena to its shopping list–including vanishing dimensions that could explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Some argue that signs of new and exotic physics could show up in the LHC far sooner than expected....
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration screens new opioid drugs it should better anticipate how people might abuse them in the real world, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warns in a major report issued Thursday on the country’s opioid crisis, which kills 91 people a day—often via overdoses on prescription drugs. The FDA needs to move beyond its traditional focus on clinical studies about drug effectiveness and side effects, and to seek public health data on potential abuse, the Academies advises in its 400-page proposal for targeting the deadly issue....
Those suffering from advanced stages of macular degeneration may by the end of this year be able to halt and even reverse vision loss caused by the age-related eye disease. If, that is, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives ophthalmologists the green light to implant new miniature telescopelike devices in patients’ damaged eyes. The optical prosthetics, tiny enough to be balanced on a fingertip, dramatically improved the vision of about two thirds of the 206 patients studied in a 24-month clinical trial, according to a new study published in Archives of Ophthalmology....
Mary Ann Steiner drove 2½ hours from her home in the St. Louis suburb of University City to the tiny Ozark town of Centerville, Missouri, to get vaccinated against covid-19. After pulling into the drive-thru line in a church parking lot, she noticed that the others waiting for shots had something in common with her. “Everyone in the very short line was a woman,” said Steiner, 70. Her observation reflects a national reality: More women than men are getting covid vaccines, even as more men are dying of the disease....
By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazine The Fukushima nuclear disaster, already casting a long shadow over the nuclear industry, has claimed another victim. Last week, Britain’s Nuclear Decommiss ioning Authority (NDA) announced that it will close a troubled Sellafield facility that is one of only two commercial plants in the world producing mixed oxide nuclear fuel (MOX), after reactor shutdowns in Japan eliminated its only customers for the plutonium-containing fuel. “The reason for this [closure] is directly related to the tragic events in Japan and their ongoing impact on the power markets,” says Tony Fountain, the NDA’s chief executive....
