Posts

Stonemasonry is a craft nearly as old as civilization itself. (More on thishere [pdf],here [pdf] and here [pdf].) But is it art? The craft-versus-art debate is one that has echoed over time. All art certainly requires craftsmanship. But when is craft art? You can find a wide range of opinions on the subject —for example fromheretohere,hereandhere. And there are those who argue that the distinction is artificial, a product of a cultural bias — as Margo Jeffersonwritesin theNew York Times,“art for art’s sake seems pretty pass....

It is not unusual for tech companies to spar with law enforcement over access to customer data. Most cases, however, do not go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is where Microsoft found itself Tuesday. The tech giant argued it was not obligated to turn over certain e-mails to U.S. investigators prosecuting a 2013 drug-trafficking case. Microsoft’s reasoning caught the court’s attention: The e-mails are stored at a data center in Ireland and therefore not subject to U....

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazineThe closed eyes, the unresponsiveness, the drool–sleep is an easily recognizable, all-encompassing state. But the divide between sleep and wakefulness may not be as clearcut as we thought. Research published today in Nature demonstrates that in visibly awake rats, neurons in some areas of the brain’s cortex briefly go ‘offline’. In these pockets, neuronal patterns resemble those associated with non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep.“The rats were awake, but awake with a nice sprinkling of localized sleep in the cortex,” says Guilio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the study....

About 2,900 kilometers away–less than three days drive, if that were possible–lies Earths most dramatic structure. Largely ignored in past research, the remote region between the lowermost mantle and the upper core is proving to be crucial in understanding the chemical and thermal evolution of the planet. No longer regarded as simply a contact delineating the liquid-iron outer core from the rocky mantle, the core-mantle region may actually be the most geologically active zone of Earth....

People have often sought solitude in the starry night sky, and it is an appropriate place for that. The night is dark because, in cosmic terms, our sun and its family of planets are very lonely. Neighboring stars are so far away that they look like mere specks of light, and more distant stars blur together into a feeble glow. Our fastest space probes will take tens of thousands of years to cross the distance to the nearest star....

Got motivation? Without it, the long, difficult hours of practice that elevate some people above the rest are excruciating. But where does such stamina come from, and can we have some, too? Psychologists have identified three critical elements that support motivation, all of which you can tweak to your benefit. Autonomy Whether you pursue an activity for its own sake or because external forces compel you, psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard M....

The last time I visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts was in 2004 to see a Rembrandt exhibition. But I might have wandered away from the works of the Dutch master in search of an ancient Greek artifact, had I known at the time that the object in question, a wine vessel, was in the museum’s collection. According to the 2012 Christmas issue of the BMJ (preacronymically known as the British Medical Journal), the 2,500-year-old cup, created by one of the anonymous artisans who helped to shape Western culture, is adorned with the image of a man wiping his butt....

On Saturday morning, Dr. Kamal Fadlalla traveled more than two hours from his family’s home in Wad Madani, Sudan, to the country’s capital of Khartoum to board a flight back to the United States. For Fadlalla, a second-year resident in internal medicine at Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn, this was to be an early ending to his first trip back to his home country since he started in his training program 20 months ago....

President Obama’s announcement Saturday that the United States and China had joined last year’s landmark Paris climate agreement together elicited tepid response from Republicans in Congress who insist the administration has shirked its obligation to submit the deal to the Senate. Instead of threatening to take down the deal through legislation or litigation, Republicans released a few muted statements arguing that the global agreement would falter on its own. “History already shows that this Paris Agreement will fail,” said Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla....

For 25 years, physicists have used an exotic state of matter made from ultracold atoms to probe quantum behaviour at the macroscopic scale. Now, they can do it in space. The feat—the creation of a Bose–Einstein condensate—comes from physicists behind NASA’s US$100-million Cold Atom Lab, which began operating on the International Space Station in June 2018. The results are a proof-of-principle showing that the laboratory can successfully exploit the microgravity of space in ways that should allow scientists to create phenomena that would be impossible on Earth....

As the initial priority groups are being offered a COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S., one population in particular faces a difficult decision: Pregnant people who are health care personnel or essential workers—categories that are eligible for the early phases of the vaccination program—“may choose to be vaccinated,” according to the latest official guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem is that there are scant data available on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant individuals....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has one job: to protect public health and safety and the environment we live in, with the best available science. It is a mission that saves lives. But that mission could end if EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler succeeds in restricting the science that the agency can use. Wheeler is pushing a new proposed rule—cloaked in the rhetoric of “transparency”—that in most cases would effectively bar the EPA from using a study in its policy making if all of that study’s data, computer code and models have not been made public....

Local forecasters knew Hurricane Harvey would be a bad storm. Their models suggested it would drop 10 to 15 inches of water across the city the first day after landfall, says Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District. “But if we go back,” he says, those models “were a bit low on the rainfall totals that Saturday night–Sunday morning period.” Northeast of Harvey’s eye on August 25, the hurricane encountered something scientists did not realize might contribute to the torrents that broke centuries-old rainfall and flood records: the City of Houston....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. The World Health Organization (WHO) quickly responded to a group of researchers’ essay published early this week (7/6/20) urging public health authorities to acknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 can spread by way of small droplets that float in the air (“aerosol transmission” or “airborne transmission”), reports Dyani Lewis for Nature (7/8/20)....

On April 7, global carbon dioxide emissions plummeted to levels not seen since 2006, according to a study released yesterday that suggests the coronavirus pandemic might have led to the largest reduction in CO2 ever recorded. But few scientists are cheering the sudden change. To the contrary, researchers increasingly view the precipitous drop in emissions as a sign of how much work the world has to do to avoid the worst impacts of climate change....

When the temperature soars, so does the use of air conditioners—and demand for the electricity that powers them. Unusually high electricity use can strain power grids, sometimes forcing grid operators to implement rolling blackouts to avoid a system-wide collapse. Blackouts are not only unpleasant but also potentially life-threatening in extreme heat. The possibility of outages was a major concern during a record-breaking heat wave that smothered California, the most populous U....

Before he faces off against undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather, UFC champion Conor McGregor must conquer the scale. And that could prove an even more dangerous opponent. In pre-fight trash talk, Mayweather has claimed that McGregor looks “extremely heavy” and has been scrambling to try to drop 10 pounds. (Both fighters have to come in under 154 pounds at the weigh-in on Friday afternoon if their much-hyped bout is to proceed.) The truth is, though, shedding 10 pounds in a couple days is no big deal for most MMA fighters....

It’s now or never for physicists’ favorite explanation of dark matter, the invisible material that seems to pervade the universe. The largest, most sensitive search yet for the particles many physicists think make up dark matter—weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)—will begin in March at the XENON1T experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. The project is the latest in a line of detectors that date back as early as the 1980s but have all failed so far to find dark matter....

A first step has been taken toward a treatment for gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) notorious for its high reinfection rates. This news comes within days of a troubling update from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that placed the STD on a list of “urgent threats” in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria. According to the CDC, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacteria that causes the malady in humans—which can initially result in painful inflammation and discharge, and can cause infertility and even death if not treated—requires urgent and aggressive action from the medical research community....

For all of our early-21st-century hand-wringing about how we all eat too much salt, sodium chloride is a vital chemical for human metabolism and we have evolved to crave it. It is claimed that salt is one of the founding pillars of civilization, because it enabled food to be preserved, it was one of the earliest goods to be manufactured, and it was one of the first articles to be traded....