Posts

(Editor’s Note (1/30/16): In response to Pres. Donald Trump’s immigration order to close U.S. borders to refugees and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, which has impacted scientists and students, we are republishing the following article from our 2014 special report on how diversity powers science and innovation.) Collaboration has been a recurring theme in science and technology in recent years. The life of the mind is increasingly transnational in nature....

Key concepts Physics Chemistry Water treatment Drinking water Introduction Do you know where your drinking water comes from? Sure, it comes out of your faucet. But how does it get there? Drinking water all over the world originates from either surface waters—such as lakes, reservoirs and rivers—or from underground sources, such as groundwater. But would you want to drink water straight from a river or lake? Probably not; they can be really dirty!...

The world is gradually becoming less green, scientists have found. Plant growth is declining all over the planet, and new research links the phenomenon to decreasing moisture in the air—a consequence of climate change. The study published yesterday in Science Advances points to satellite observations that revealed expanding vegetation worldwide during much of the 1980s and 1990s. But then, about 20 years ago, the trend stopped. Since then, more than half of the world’s vegetated landscapes have been experiencing a “browning” trend, or decrease in plant growth, according to the authors....

By Carey Gillam (Reuters) - Farmers in important crop-growing states should consider the environmentally unfriendly practice of deeply tilling fields to fight a growing problem with invasive “superweeds” that resist herbicides and choke crop yields, agricultural experts said this week. Resistance to glyphosate, the main ingredient in widely used Roundup herbicide, has reached the point that row crop farmers in the Midwest are struggling to contain an array of weeds, agronomists say....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Heat waves are becoming supercharged as the climate changes – lasting longer, becoming more frequent and getting just plain hotter. One question a lot of people are asking is: “When will it get too hot for normal daily activity as we know it, even for young, healthy adults?” The answer goes beyond the temperature you see on the thermometer....

Gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime produced by merging black holes, colliding neutron stars, detonating supernovae and other cosmic cataclysms—have sparked a revolution in astrophysics. First observed in 2015, a century after Albert Einstein predicted their existence, these elusive whispers in the fabric of reality are already revealing otherwise hidden details of the exotic objects that produce them. Studies of gravitational waves have provided researchers with the first direct evidence that black holes exist, produced new estimates of the cosmic expansion rate, and shown that neutron stars are the main sources of the universe’s supply of gold, platinum and other heavy elements....

A little snow and rain are falling in a few states today, but the 2011–12 winter has been extremely warm and dry across the continental U.S. Meteorologists think they have figured out why. First, a few records: The initial week of January was the driest in history. And more than 95 percent of the U.S. had below-average snow cover—the greatest such percentage ever recorded—according to some intriguing data maps generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....

Whether or not an animal can recognize itself in the mirror has long been used by scientists as a means of self-awareness. Apes pass the test, but monkeys have been thought to perceive a stranger in their reflection. The results of a new study suggest that what monkeys see is not so simple: although they don’t recognize themselves, they also treat their mirror twins differently than they do real animals....

Astronaut Scott Kelly famously spent an entire year residing onboard the International Space Station (ISS), about 400 kilometers above Earth, and his NASA colleague Christina Koch spent nearly that long “on station.” Each returned to Earth with slightly atrophied muscles and other deleterious physiological effects from their extended stay in near-zero gravity. But another, more insidious danger lurks for spacefarers, especially those who venture beyond low-Earth orbit. Space is filled with invisible yet harmful radiation, most of it sourced from energetic particles ejected by the sun or from cosmic rays created in extreme astrophysical events across the universe....

Danone had done its research. Increasingly, people say they want to buy from brands that do good, that give them sense of purpose. Surely a yogurt that helped the needy would be appealing. But Juntos was a failure. Despite sinking millions into a state-of-the-art marketing campaign, Danone pulled Juntos from the market only months after it launched. Now the same product is simply marketed as a tasty yogurt. What happened?...

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineWhen pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced on June 8 that it is teaming up with eight research institutions in the Boston area to hunt for candidate drugs, the news was cheered from all sides. The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, praised the $100-million, five-year deal for the jobs it would bring to the region. Eric Buehrens, interim chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the academic partners, extolled the benefits to scientific research....

Key concepts Computers Pictures Resolution Technology Data Introduction Have you ever wondered why video games today look better than the ones from the 1980s? Today we have video games with relatively realistic figures, a lot of color and a lot of details—but these were not features of games from three decades ago. One major change between then and now is the number of pixels, or dots on the screen, used to represent video game objects....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineNeutrinos have long perplexed physicists with their uncanny ability to evade detection, with as many as two-thirds of the ghostly particles apparently going missing en route from the Sun to Earth. Now a refined version of an old calculation is causing a stir by suggesting that researchers have also systematically underestimated the number of the particles’ antimatter partners–antineutrinos–produced by nuclear reactor experiments.The deficit could be caused by the antineutrinos turning into so-called ‘sterile antineutrinos’, which can’t be directly detected, and which would be clear evidence for effects beyond the standard model of particle physics....

Bijan Nejadnik, chief medical officer at Eureka Therapeutics. Credit: Eureka Therapeutics What are the top three challenges in T cell therapy today? The lack of success in treating solid tumors, significant toxicities related to hyperactivation of T cells, and the high costs and consequences of those toxicities. Although the recent clinical data generated by the initial class of T cell therapies showed exciting results in hematological cancers, it’s hard to realize their full potential due to these current limitations....

When businessman Howard Bisla was tasked with saving a local shop from financial ruin, one of his first concerns was energy efficiency. In June 2018, he approached his local electricity provider in Sacramento, California, about upgrading the lights. The provider had another idea. It offered to install an experimental cooling system: panels that could stay colder than their surroundings, even under the blazing hot sun, without consuming energy. The aluminium-backed panels now sit on the shop’s roof, their mirrored surfaces coated with a thin cooling film and angled to the sky....

U.S. A team of American and German physicists measured the radiation emitted from a single, orbiting electron for the first time. FRANCE Parisian lawmakers are cracking down on noise pollution. One new mandate: an acoustic asphalt coating on the city’s peripheral highway, which could reduce noise by 7.5 decibels (equivalent to a one-sixth reduction in traffic). U.K. An aerospace laboratory in Stevenage is in the midst of a three-month microbe-killing “bake-off” in preparation for the construction of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover....

What began as a public relations campaign to encourage people to switch from bottled water to tap water has turned into a brisk business. A year ago Eric Yaverbaum, president of the public relations company Ericho Communications, and Mark DiMassimo, founding partner of the DiMassimo Goldstein advertising agency, created Tappening, a campaign and a Web site (www.tappening.com). They intended to educate the public about the petroleum consumed to make disposable water bottles and the huge burden the products impose on landfills....

Editor’s note: The following is part of a Nature magazine special report, Protecting the Planet. Bob Pressey: Maximize returns on conservation Douglas J. McCauley: Mega-parks need greater oversight Lance Morgan: Protect diverse marine habitats Hugh Possingham: Represent ecosystems Lee White: Manage parks professionally Emily Darling: Conserve climate refuges Peter J. S. Jones: Assess governance structures Bob Pressey: Maximize returns on conservation Professor, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University Protected areas are meant to preserve biodiversity, but practice, measures of progress and targets do not reflect this role....

“By now, I’ve lost any hope of educating my senior colleagues,” I joked after a lengthy debate about the educational implications of COVID-19 at a recent online faculty meeting. “Oh, stop it,” others protested. And in fact, the truth is that I do have hope. It rests squarely on the shoulders of the younger generation, which lacks a baggage of prejudice, scars from past battles or an entrenched agenda. Our junior colleagues are unbiased enough to carry the torch of innovation, they are energetic and fearless enough to shape reality as if it was clay, and they are innocent enough to believe that the future can be better than the past....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. The winter season wouldn’t be complete without a cold. But besides your own runny nose, your computer might also fall victim to any number of nasty bugs currently going around. And unfortunately, these can take a little more than hot tea or acetaminophen to heal. So in today’s episode, I’ll explain certain types of malware and how they find your way into your computer....