Posts

The first humans who ventured onto the Tibetan Plateau, often called the “roof of the world,” faced one of the most brutal environments our species has ever confronted. At an average elevation of more than 4,500 meters, it is a cold and arid place with half the oxygen present at sea level. Although scientists had long thought no one set foot on the plateau until 15,000 years ago, new genetic and archaeological data indicate that this event may have taken place much earlier—possibly as far back as 62,000 years ago, in the middle of the last ice age....

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema, chronic bronchitis and other conditions, is among the top causes of death in the U.S. No current therapies can prevent or reverse COPD. But thanks to amoebas, a new study has identified genes that may help protect lung cells against such harm—and potentially reverse COPD symptoms. “I see COPD patients, so this was something very important to me,” says the study’s lead author Corrine Kliment, a lung disease researcher and physician at the University of Pittsburgh....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. End-to-end encryption is technology that scrambles messages on your phone and unscrambles them only on the recipients’ phones, which means anyone who intercepts the messages in between can’t read them. Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo are among the companies whose apps and services use end-to-end encryption. This kind of encryption is good for protecting your privacy, but governments don’t like it because it makes it difficult for them to spy on people, whether tracking criminals and terrorists or, as some governments have been known to do, snooping on dissidents, protesters and journalists....

The U.S. influenza season has arrived much earlier than usual. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first detected the early increases of flu activity in mid-October. The agency noted that the phenomenon was happening in most of the country, but more intensely in the Southeast and in south-central regions. A month later, levels of the virus continue to rise steeply. According to the latest CDC flu report, 25 states or jurisdictions now experience high or very high levels of outpatient visits for influenza-like illness, which is characterized by fever plus cough or sore throat....

How could we have missed it? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visual scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, visual artists, architects, engineers and biologists all missed it–until three years ago. The “it” in question is the leaning tower illusion, discovered by Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University. In this illusion, two identical side-by-side images of the same tilted and receding object appear to be leaning at two different angles. This incredible effect was first noticed in images of the famed Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it also works with paired images of other receding objects....

CLIMATEWIRE | For two decades, scientists have been getting better and faster at investigating the links between individual weather events and climate change. They can now analyze everything from heat waves to hurricanes — and in many cases, they can do it nearly in real time. In the last few weeks alone, scientists have found that climate change increased the likelihood of catastrophic floods in South Africa and deadly heat in South Asia — events that both occurred this spring....

For centuries, people have painted cities as unnatural human conglomerations, blighted by pathologies such as public health crises, aggression and exorbitant costs of living. Why, then, do people throughout the world keep leaving the countryside for the town? Recent research that is forming a multidisciplinary science of cities is beginning to reveal the answer: cities concentrate, accelerate, and diversify social and economic activity. The numbers show that urban dwellers produce more inventions and create more opportunities for economic growth....

Exploring the tropics of Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa would be no walk on the beach. Equatorial regions of the potentially life-supporting Europa, which harbors a huge ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell, are probably studded with blades of ice up to 50 feet (15 meters) tall, a new study suggests. This finding should be of interest to NASA, which is developing a lander mission that will hunt for signs of life on the 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) satellite....

Our body movements always convey something about us to other people. The body “speaks” whether we are sitting or standing, talking or just listening. On a blind date, how the two individuals position themselves tells a great deal about how the evening will unfold: Is she leaning in to him or away? Is his smile genuine or forced? The same is true of gestures. Almost always involuntary, they tip us off to love, hate, humility and deceit....

IRELAND Every household—2.2 million in all—will receive its own seven-digit postal code this spring. Until now, many addresses were specified with just a name and neighborhood, which mixed up deliveries and misrouted ambulances U.K. Archaeologists will reinter the skeleton of Richard III—discovered underneath a parking lot in 2012—at Leicester Cathedral this month. After two years of study, they concluded that the king had a rich diet, endured a roundworm infection and probably died in battle from head wounds....

Science has long considered itself to be an apolitical enterprise. But in the midst of a global pandemic and with the 2020 election looming, some scientific institutions and elite journals have suddenly become willing to take a political stance against President Donald Trump and his allies. On October 8, for instance, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) jumped into the fray for the first time in 208 years with an unprecedented political editorial calling for leadership change....

COVID-19 packs its punch largely through uncertainty. If the virus were visible to our eyes, we could have avoided it and conducted the rest of our business as usual. It’s not only that we cannot see the virus itself, but that we also don’t see its symptoms in some of the people who might infect us. And so, we take severe precautions, far out of proportion to the specific locations and times where we are significantly exposed....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) – National and international medical congresses have been encouraging attendees to “tweet” about the conferences on Twitter, but doctors are finding it’s not that easy to accurately share the meetings’ news on social media. Medical conferences often provide special hashtags for attendees to use, to indicate that their tweets relate to the meeting, like #ACSCC14 (for this year’s American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress) or #RSNA14 (for last month’s meeting of the Radiological Society of North America)....

In 1923 explorers in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo brought out a specimen of a monkey with grayish-green fur, a red face and webbed digits. Dubbed Allen’s swamp monkey, or Allenopithecus nigroviridis, the primate was the most recent new genus of primate discovered–until now. Scientists have determined that a monkey previously identified as a new species from photographs deserves its own genus name. Based on the photographs, taxonomists had thought that the grayish-brown monkey with its long, curling tail and the crest atop its head was a new species of mangabey, though it lacked that animal’s distinctive call....

From Nature magazine The US National Science Foundation (NSF) director Subra Suresh on 5 February announced his resignation in a letter to agency staff, cutting short a six-year term after less than three years. He said he would leave the basic research agency in late March, in order to become president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “In a way, I’m not surprised,” says Samuel Rankin, chair of the Coalition for National Science Funding, an advocacy group based in Washington DC....

Many flat roofs in the U.S. could be generating electricity if they were covered with photovoltaic cells. But traditional solar panels are still relatively expensive to instal. Solyndra in Fremont, Calif., hopes to cover the rooftops with solar tubes instead. Solyndra is churning out thin-film cells made of copper, indium, gallium and selenium. The film is wrapped into a cylindrical shape and encased in glass that seals out moisture and concentrates sunlight....

Native to the Indian and Pacific oceans, lionfish invaded coral reefs in the Bahamas beginning in the early 2000s—likely when multiple aquarium owners surreptitiously liberated some of these fast-growing tank menaces into the Atlantic. As new predators with no enemies and venomous spines, lionfish have multiplied almost unimpeded and have wreaked havoc on Bahamian coral reef fish species, especially little ones. Invasive predators often capitalize on the naivete of native species that do not recognize them as a threat—at least initially....

Doctors have transplanted the heart from a genetically modified pig into the chest of a man from Maryland in a last-ditch effort to save his life. The first-of-its-kind surgery is being hailed as a major step forward in the decades-long effort to successfully transplant animal organs into humans. Although it’s been tried before—one of the earliest subjects, known as Baby Fae, survived 21 days with a baboon’s heart in 1984, according to Time—the practice has fallen into disuse because the animal organs are usually quickly rejected by their human host....

American manufacturing and its workers will fall behind other countries if Congress and the Trump administration don’t enact new policies to both fight climate change and support clean energy production. That was the message from experts testifying at a hearing held yesterday by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, chairwoman of the committee, said a $23 trillion clean energy market will emerge between now and 2030 as countries work to meet the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement....

Fish will struggle to breathe as the ocean waters warm, researchers say, and bigger fish will have bigger problems. That means important species could soon top out well short of their current sizes—shrinking fisheries and potentially causing problems up the food chain. Fish have proved sensitive to subtle changes, and higher temperatures could present them with two problems—a change in the water and a change in their biology. First, warmer water holds less oxygen....