For astronomers seeking Earth twins around other stars, the exoplanet GJ 1132 b probably isn’t an identical sibling—but it may be the closest cousin yet found. It weighs in at just over one Earth mass, but circles its star in a warm orbit that could make it more like Venus than our own world. Moreover, its diameter is nearly 50 percent larger than that of Earth, suggesting it possesses a thick atmosphere....
Red blood cells are not just vehicles that transport oxygen in our bodies: they also clear harmful substances from the bloodstream. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University recently investigated how synthetic biomimicking (or “biomimetic”) nanoparticles, masquerading as red blood cells, can best pull off the same feat in mice. They found that molding these impostors into nonspherical shapes before disguising them improved performance. Previous work had shown that coating synthetic nanoparticles in membranes borrowed from real red blood cells lets the particles act like cleansing sponges....
We have all felt shame at one time or another. Maybe we were teased for mispronouncing a common word or for how we looked in a bathing suit, or perhaps a loved one witnessed us telling a lie. Shame is the uncomfortable sensation we feel in the pit of our stomach when it seems we have no safe haven from the judging gaze of others. We feel small and bad about ourselves and wish we could vanish....
In a new survey, my company, M Booth Health, found that a seismic shift has already begun. People are changing the ways they talk to their doctors about all of their medicines, and in particular, which prescription medications they accept or reject. With a historic pandemic bringing unprecedented upheaval to their lives, people have spent more time and energy learning about science and medicine. They’ve become more knowledgeable and empowered. This goes beyond just COVID; it extends into all of their medical needs....
By Amy MaxmenBon appétit! A team of European researchers has decoded the genome of the delectable Périgord black truffle. Within its nucleotides reside secrets to the flavour and elusive lifestyle of this fungus, offering clues that could help a truffle industry that is fraught with unpredictable yields and a counterfeit market.“There’s a mystique around truffles. They’re prized, rare and worth several thousand dollars per kilo,” explains David Read, a mycologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, who was not involved in the genome study, which is published online in Nature....
By Reuters Staff WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. health officials outlined on Tuesday how they planned to divide up $1.1 billion in funds approved by Congress to fight the Zika virus, including repaying $44.25 million they were forced to borrow from a fund allocated for other emergencies. The funds were borrowed from the Public Health Emergency Preparedness cooperative, which helps state and local public health departments develop response plans to emergencies, while Congress battled over whether to supply the funds....
By Valerie VolcoviciWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Diplomatic talks on a deal to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the global aviation industry have intensified recently as EU and U.S. officials try to stave off the threat of a trade war, lawmakers and observers said.Peter Liese, a member of the European Parliament from the conservative German Christian-Democratic Union, led a delegation to meet with Obama administration officials in Washington last week to discuss the issue....
We spend 90 percent of our lives indoors, yet most of us seldom spare a thought for the quality of the air we breathe there. More than a century ago, pioneering nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale proclaimed the importance of open air and bedroom ventilation for tuberculosis patients. Today in Nordic countries, it is common practice to let babies nap outside, sometimes in freezing temperatures. But even though humans have long attributed health benefits to fresh outdoor air, it is a lesson many of us seemed to have largely forgotten—until the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to relearn it....
Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath. Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue in the west, with the first-ever rain-free January in San Francisco; bitter cold hangs tough over the upper Midwest and Northeast; and New England is being buried by a seemingly endless string of snowy nor’easters....
Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. As a culture, we’re fascinated by narcissists and psychopaths, two of the more dramatic disordered personalities. But what about the most common personality disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, or OCPD? Affecting 3-8% of the population, OCPD often gets overlooked because it’s not dramatic. In fact, with its focus on order, perfection, and control, it’s straightlaced to the extreme....
We think we know what we want—but do we, really? In 2005 Lars Hall and Petter Johansson, both at Lund University in Sweden, ran an experiment that transformed how cognitive scientists think about choice. The experimental setup looked deceptively simple. A study participant and researcher faced each other across a table. The scientist offered two photographs of young women deemed equally attractive by an independent focus group. The subject then had to choose which portrait he or she found more appealing....
The four-month-long, nationwide salmonella outbreak from peanut butter—coming on the heels of other, widespread food-borne illnesses—raises the question: Why not just zap all of our food with radiation to destroy contaminants? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last summer okayed irradiation to destroy pathogens in fresh iceberg lettuce and spinach in the wake of an Escherichia coli (E. coli) outbreak traced to the latter in 2006. Since the early 1980s, irradiation has also been approved for that same purpose in meats as well as to both extend the shelf life of and kill insects in fruits, veggies and spices....
In recent years wildfires have entered urban areas, causing breathtaking destruction. The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise and Butte County, California was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history. It took 86 lives and destroyed more than 18,000 structures in a matter of hours. Almost two years later, only a fraction of the area’s 40,000-plus population has returned. This disaster followed the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people in California’s Sonoma and Napa counties....
It may have set a national record for a state’s wind power production, too. The Lone Star State hit “peak wind” at 8:48 p.m. on March 26, when the state’s wind farms produced 10,296 megawatts of electricity. At that moment, wind turbines provided enough electricity to supply power for 29 percent of the total electricity load of the state’s main power grid. Texas’ self-contained power grid, operated by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, supplies power to all the state’s major cities — about 85 percent of the state’s electric power customers — except El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock and those along Texas’ eastern border....
The vast majority of neuroscientific studies contain three elements: a person, a cognitive task and a high-tech machine capable of seeing inside the brain. That simple recipe can produce powerful science. Such studies now routinely yield images that a neuroscientist used to only dream about. They allow researchers to delineate the complex neural machinery that makes sense of sights and sounds, processes language and derives meaning from experience. But something has been largely missing from these studies: other people....
Weigh all the creatures that roam the sea, and a striking balance emerges. Researchers have found that the total mass of this life, when grouped in size classes, roughly follows a regular mathematical distribution—although humans may have disrupted part of the pattern. For a study in Science Advances, researchers combined satellite images, water samples, commercial fishing catch data and computer simulations to estimate the combined weight of all the organisms that move through the open ocean....
The U.S. has no clear vision of how to reach a postpandemic world. Over the past two years, we have developed extraordinary scientific tools for the mitigation, treatment and prevention of COVID. But we’ve stumbled badly in implementing them. Many of these failures happened because our public health messages were not clear about how to use those tools, which include vaccines, masks, tests, antiviral drugs and temporary activity restrictions. The result is confusion among the public that has left us vulnerable to the disease and unable to respond to new and more transmissible variants such as BA....
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is not enough to stop global warming. At this point, we will have to remove some of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to do this. The bad news: those methods generally require huge amounts of energy. The ideal carbon-sequestering technology would generate electricity rather than burn it. In a study published in July in Science Advances, Wajdi Al Sadat and Lynden Archer, both researchers at Cornell University, described a design for an electrochemical cell that captures carbon dioxide....
After spending years fighting claims that cell phone use can cause brain tumors, industry reps may be getting some welcome news. A new study suggests cell phone radiation may actually have a beneficial biological effect—two hours of exposure a day staved off Alzheimer’s disease in mice. Scientists at the University of South Florida studied mice that are genetically predisposed to develop Alzheimer’s and its accompanying memory problems. Based on previous research, the researchers hypothesized that radiation from phones would accelerate progression of the disease because other types of radiation cause free radical damage....
Scientists have constructed a custom enzyme that reverses the process by which the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) inserts its genetic material into host DNA, suggesting that treatment with similar enzymes could potentially rid infected cells of the virus. In tests on cultured human tissue, the mutated enzyme, Tre recombinase, snipped HIV DNA out of chromosomes. Curing real infections by this or any other technique, however, would require mastering one of HIV’s sneakiest tricks—its ability to hide from the immune system by laying dormant for months or years in host cells....
