A 10-year-old boy, Orlando Serrell, knocked unconscious one day by a baseball, discovered afterward that he could bring to mind the exact day of the week for any date after the accident and could remember the weather for each day since the trauma as well. He could also recall the most minute daily events. Jason Padgett, the victim of a brutal mugging in 2002 that left him with a severe concussion, soon afterward began to see what he describes simply as “images....
One might expect a game of logic to appeal to very few people–mathematicians, maybe, computer geeks, compulsive gamblers. Yet in a very short time, Sudoku has become extraordinarily popular, bringing to mind the Rubik’s cube craze of the early 1980s. Unlike the three-dimensional Rubik’s cube, a Sudoku puzzle is a flat, square grid. Typically it contains 81 cells (nine rows and nine columns) and is divided into nine smaller squares containing nine cells each; call them subgrids....
By Laila Kearney SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California is coming off of its warmest winter on record, aggravating an enduring drought in the most populous U.S. state, federal weather scientists said Monday. The state had a average temperature of 48 Fahrenheit (9 Celsius) for December, January and February, an increase from 47.2 F in 1980-81, the last hottest winter, and more than 4 degrees hotter than the 20th-century average in California, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a statement....
Los Angeles is known for many things – Hollywood, of course, and glitz. A history of smog and choking traffic. Now comes another distinction. For the third year running, the City of Angels tops the federal list of cities with the greatest number of Energy Star certified buildings. Los Angeles leads the way with 510 Energy Star labeled buildings, that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, save a total of $118 million in energy costs and cut electrical usage equivalent to almost 40,000 homes....
BENT CREEK EXPERIMENTAL FOREST, N.C. — When the woolly adelgid come and a white cloud of tiny insects descends on the forest, the eastern hemlock dies. It’s been like this since the insect was discovered in Virginia in 1951, where it is suspected to have arrived to the East Coast inside packing material. The sap-sucking aphid-like pest spread north first, but by the early 2000s, eastern hemlocks in the southern Appalachians were being decimated by the insect native to East Asia....
CHELSEA, Mass.—Steve Saling is sitting in his bedroom at the Leonard Florence Center for Living just north of Boston. He aims his gaze at the tablet mounted to his wheelchair and, with a small movement of his facial muscles, raises the window shade to sunlit afternoon clouds. Now, behind thin, oval eyeglasses, Saling again blinks purposefully, like a telekinetic superhero. The door opens, and he steers his well-equipped wheelchair through smoothly....
In November of 2017, scientists at a subsidiary of Artelo Biosciences in Manchester, U.K., tasked an intern with compiling any scientific study published on the body’s absorption, distribution and metabolism of cannabidiol. The company hoped to treat stroke with the compound, which is derived from the cannabis plant and commonly known as CBD, and this background research was crucial. When the intern returned with all the literature she could find, it was a short stack: only a couple of dozen papers....
A conflict several years in the making between Republican leaders in Congress and US science agencies has reached boiling point. Science advocates and researchers that depend on government grants are particularly worried now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress. They fear that science budgets will be cut and the independence of research agencies curtailed. Their concerns have been sparked by two simultaneous developments: increasing public criticism by key Republicans of research funded by agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a congressional power shift that has placed many vocal so-called climate change sceptics and opponents of environmental regulations in positions of power....
The $465-million Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) is designed to collect precise, high-resolution measurements of the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. It is a near-copy of a NASA probe that crashed in 2009 before it reached orbit, devastating the scientists who had hoped to use its data to map sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas — both man-made and natural — in unprecedented detail. Once OCO-2 reaches orbit, its spectrometer will sample a column of air extending from the upper atmosphere down to Earth’s surface, taking hundreds of thousands of measurements each day and covering the entire globe every 16 days....
Diseases once thought to be rare or exotic in the United States are gaining a presence and getting new attention from medical researchers who are probing how immigration, limited access to care and the impacts of climate change are influencing their spread. Illnesses like schistosomiasis, Chagas disease and dengue are endemic in warmer, wetter and poorer areas of the world, often closer to the equator. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1 billion people are afflicted with more than one tropical disease....
About 13.8 billion years ago, just 400,000 years or so after the big bang, the universe abruptly went dark,” writes science journalist Michael D. Lemonick in this issue’s cover story, “The First Stars in the Universe.” So began the mysterious dark ages of the universe. What happened next has always intrigued me. How did that cosmic fog lift? How did the first stars flare and then coalesce into the galaxies we know today?...
As warmer temperatures herald the arrival of pesky mosquitoes, researchers are feverishly working on several promising vaccines against Zika, a virus notorious for infecting humans through this insect’s bite. The speed and debilitating effects of last year’s Zika outbreak in the Western Hemisphere prompted a sprint to develop a vaccine. Just a little more than a year after the pandemic was declared a global health emergency, a handful of candidates are undergoing preliminary testing in humans....
As nanotechnology to ferry drugs to their destinations is tested in both the laboratory and in clinical trials, scientists have made a surprising discovery about the kinds of nanoparticles that might be most effective for eventually transporting a number of different cancer-fighting therapies throughout the body. The conventional wisdom is that the smaller, the better. But that may not be true, according to a team of scientists led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (U....
You might think you’re an expert at navigating through city traffic, smartphone at your side. You might even hike with a GPS device to find your way through the backcountry. But you’d probably still be surprised at all the things that GPS—the global positioning system that underlies all of modern navigation—can do. GPS consists of a constellation of satellites that send signals to Earth’s surface. A basic GPS receiver, like the one in your smartphone, determines where you are—to within about 1 to 10 meters—by measuring the arrival time of signals from four or more satellites....
I was lying on a lumpy off-white sofa under a mountain of blankets, wearing an eye mask and listening to a Brahms symphony playing through my headphones. The notes of a violin solo lit three strands of deep red light, which trickled like water in my right visual field. Deeper tones poured from above in huge blue clouds in the middle distance. Another violin flourish turned the sky yellow and brought with it a comet’s tail of body parts flying from the upper left of my visual field to the lower right, disappearing behind me....
Deep red sunsets offer more than just a stunning backdrop for Old Masters’ paintings: They can tell how dirty the air was when the painter picked up the brush. The degree of red in the skies depicted in historic paintings offers a proxy for pollution levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere, according to a study published Tuesday. What’s more, artists’ sunsets have gradually gotten redder over the past 150 years, likely reflecting increased manmade pollution....
What you are describing is termed mental imagery, or the ability to create a mental picture of a person, place or experience without any external cues or stimuli. People differ greatly in the extent to which their recollections are visual. Constructing a mental image relies on coordinating several different processes in the brain. The hippocampus, long regarded as the main storage site for memories of complex events, has recently—and perhaps surprisingly—been found to be important for imagining new or fictitious events....
They had known each other since eighth grade, sharing the silly private jokes that only longtime pals know. Later, they lost touch for a couple of years, when they went to different colleges. But in their senior year the friends—now a young man and woman—became inseparable whenever they were home visiting their families. One evening just after graduation, when he dropped her off at her house in his old green pickup truck, he leaned over and kissed her....
When large airliners approach an airport for a landing, a combination of radio signals and high-intensity lighting shows the pilot exactly where the runway is, even at night or in fog. But millions of people a year fly on smaller commercial planes, many private, that do not have such technology. The pilots of those craft must rely on less sophisticated instruments, along with their cockpit window view during landing, a situation that can be fatal in bad weather....
Last month marked the 19th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, an orbiting observatory that has become a household name and a linchpin of astronomical science. The telescope has proved remarkably resilient, enduring numerous glitches over the years—from a flawed primary mirror at deployment to a serious electronic failure this past September. Each time, Hubble has held on until astronauts arrived to perform repairs, an operation that is about to take place for the final time by a shuttle crew....
