By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineThe boy was perhaps seven or eight, although he could have been older: among other things, the disease that afflicts him stunts growth. When a seizure began, his mother summoned Sudhir Bunga, who found the boy sitting under a tree in a school playground. “The child was staring blankly and his head was intermittently nodding every five to eight seconds,” Bunga says. “This lasted about three minutes....
Tickling is a mysterious phenomenon: this specialized form of touch is so powerful that it can send us into almost uncontrollable fits of shrieking, gasping laughter or defenseless pleas for mercy. Yet we still don’t understand how it works. Several decades ago the scientific community was surprised to discover that rats share our susceptibility to tickling, and a study published today in Science reveals more about what happens in a rat’s brain while being tickled....
Having a low aerobic capacity can lead to problems greater than just being the slowest runner at the gym, new research suggests. Results of a rat study indicate that aerobically challenged animals exhibit more risk factors linked to heart disease than aerobically gifted rats do. Steven L. Britton of the University of Michigan Health System and his colleagues bred 11 generations of laboratory rats that were selected for their exercise capacity, so that the latest litters differ significantly from one another in their ability to use oxygen effectively....
Generations of minds have been inspired by Legos, the small, snap-together plastic blocks. These blocks have become fantastic cars, elaborate castles and many other whole creations that are greater than the sum of their parts. Today a generation of materials scientists is being inspired by a new type of Legos: building blocks on the atomic scale. These new construction elements are sheets of materials that can be as thin as just one atom and can be stacked, one on top of another, in a designed, precise sequence....
Stanford University cleared three faculty members of any misconduct in their interactions with the Chinese scientist who created “CRISPR babies” last year, the school announced on Tuesday evening. A review by a faculty member and an outside investigator concluded that they “were not participants in [He Jiankui’s] research regarding genome editing of human embryos for intended implantation and birth and that they had no research, financial or organizational ties to this research....
Key concepts Physics Chemistry Liquids Molecules Surface tension Soap Introduction Have you ever made decorative rainbows for Saint Patrick’s Day? They can be fun to make using colorful construction paper or other craft supplies. But did you know you can make a simple one with milk, liquid soap or detergent and food coloring? How the rainbow is created by this mixture might surprise you! In this science activity you’ll make your own milk rainbow and explore how detergent and surface tension are involved in its creation....
BOCA RATON, Fla. — Residents here watched Hurricane Irma plod toward the mainland and wondered if their luck during this one might be different. No one knew. A coastal development boom, coupled with a Republican state government that is ambivalent about climate change, has sharpened city and county preparations for the consequences of rising temperatures, including bigger storms. In southeast Florida, people were already talking about how to rebuild better, even as some Miami streets were being transformed into broad rivers with wind-whipped waves....
Excerpted from Water in Plain Sight: Hope For A Thirsty World by Judith D. Schwartz, with permission from St. Martin’s Press. Copyright 2016. When it comes to irrigation, water is not simply water. This is dogma to John Kempf, an Ohio farmer who has made a career of improving crop health and agriculture yields. In 2006, Kempf founded the company Advancing Eco Agriculture, a consulting service for farmers that provides testing and analysis of crop specimens and recommends various plant nutrition treatments to improve crop yields....
The brain does not function linearly, as most computers do. Instead groups of neurons compete to represent a concept, until one emerges dominant. The mind consists of an ensemble of such states, continuously evolving and sharing information. Michael Spivey, a psychologist at Cornell University, recently presented one more piece of evidence for this conclusion. The researcher asked 42 volunteers to move a cursor toward one of two images at the top of a computer screen after hearing a recorded voice speak the name of one of them....
After nightfall last November 16 a sleek and rare wild cat sauntered past a remote camera in the Dos Cabezas Mountains east of Tucson, Ariz. The animal triggered a motion sensor and a camera flash popped. Frozen in stride halfway through the frame was a jaguar, its pointy black ears splotched with yellow. Federal wildlife officials later scrutinized the image their camera caught, comparing the animal’s markings with jaguars spotted elsewhere in Arizona in recent years....
After weeks of speculation, the White House is expected to renege on America’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. It’s been less than a year since the U.S. formally endorsed the Paris accord, which has been ratified by 146 other nations since it was agreed upon in December 2015. The agreement calls on countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius....
Editor’s Note: Kay-Yut Chen, a leading experimental economist at HP Labs, was the subject of a March 2006 Scientific American profile written by Marina Krakovsky. Chen and Krakovsky recently collaborated on a just-released book, Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business, about the practical lessons from research by Chen and fellow behavioral economists. In the following edited excerpt, Chen and Krakovsky explain why we sometimes reject deals that we might be better off accepting....
On Sunday morning, scientists and volunteers struggled to get some of the 55 false killer whales that washed up on a beach near Cape Town, South Africa, back into the frigid water. But as soon as the rescuers sent the 15-foot (4.5-meter) dolphin relatives on their way, they nosed back for shore as if on a suicide mission. By Sunday afternoon, the scientists decided to euthanize the mammals with gunshots to their heads....
Until a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded on April 26, 1986, spreading the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs of fallout across the entire Northern Hemisphere, scientists knew next to nothing about the effects of radiation on vegetation and wild animals. The catastrophe created a living laboratory, particularly in the 1,100 square miles around the site, known as the exclusion zone. In 1994 Ronald Chesser and Robert Baker, both professors of biology at Texas Tech University, were among the first American scientists allowed full access to the zone....
As a single plant, cogongrass is unassuming, bucolic even. But in dense stands, it is a powerful vegetative force that alters forests and forges monocultures. The plant, known as Imperata cylindrica, has established itself on tens of thousands of acres in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia and on one million acres in Florida, and it’s spreading fast. “Cogongrass could become a greater threat than kudzu or Japanese honeysuckle,” says Stephen Enloe, an invasive plant specialist at Alabama’s Auburn University....
In 1907 Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) arrived in Los Angeles via a cargo ship. Within just a few years of their arrival the six-legged stowaways formed a single, massive colony—known as a supercolony—that stretched through California from south of the Mexico border to San Francisco A liberal spraying of pesticides in the past century has done nothing to diminish the ants’ numbers—L. humile infestations are the most common cause of pest control calls in southern California....
By Meredith WadmanThe routine use of mammography to screen healthy women for breast cancer is leading to the widespread detection and treatment of tumours that would never have caused symptoms, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine asserts today. The results inject yet another dose of controversy into an area that is already hotly debated.The study examined the effects of mammography screens on breast-cancer incidence between 1976 and 2008 in US women over 40....
YULIN, China—At about 8:30 on a chilly winter morning, a factory outside this desert city is already getting busy. Its five-story office building is almost fully occupied. Trucks drive in with coal and drive out with construction waste. And if you look closely, you can see workers wearing helmets, climbing up and down on giant pipes. In front of the office building, a row of colorful flags reads, “Fighting for success in 2015....
Matthew Brien has struggled with overeating for the past 20 years. At age 24, he stood at 5′10′′ and weighed a trim 135 pounds. Today the licensed massage therapist tips the scales at 230 pounds and finds it particularly difficult to resist bread, pasta, soda, cookies and ice cream—especially those dense pints stuffed with almonds and chocolate chunks. He has tried various weight-loss programs that limit food portions, but he can never keep it up for long....
Scientists are crafting a new cheap ingredient that can make carbon dioxide work harder and smarter in extracting oil. With a recent $1.3 million grant from the National Energy Technology Laboratory for unconventional gas and oil technologies, a pair of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh is tackling a problem that has dogged the oil industry for decades. Their solution may provide a market for captured greenhouse gas emissions in the future....
