The iconic iceberg is a towering white hunk of snow-covered ice, common in cold oceans. But take a trip to Antarctica and you will discover that icebergs come in myriad hues and multicolor patterns, even resembling striped candy. Icebergs can be green, blue, yellow or black. The ice can shine like a sapphire or be as murky as a frozen mud puddle. An iceberg’s color is determined by how it interacts with light....
Is this the end of the line for the “pharma bro” with the perpetual smirk? Martin Skhreli was found guilty on Friday of three counts of fraud after a five-week trial in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y. He faces a prison sentence of up to two decades. “This was a witch hunt of epic proportions,” Shkreli said outside court after the verdict, the Washington Post reported. “They may have found some broomsticks....
If you stumbled across a radio or a computer and had no idea how it worked, you would likely first want to find out what it was made from—what its component parts were. Your next step might be to determine what each component actually did, taking care to note which parts were connected to others. This is the approach to understanding the brain taken in two related studies published October 31 in Nature....
An ancient stone carving on the walls of an Egyptian temple depicts the Roman emperor Claudius dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh, wearing an elaborate crown, a team of researchers has discovered. In the carving, Emperor Claudius, who reigned from A.D. 41 to 54, is shown erecting a giant pole with a lunar crescent at the top. Eight men, each wearing two feathers, are shown climbing the supporting poles, with their legs dangling in midair....
The first mission of SpaceX’s new astronaut taxi is in the books. The Crew Dragon capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast today (March 8) at 8:45 a.m. EST (1345 GMT), wrapping up a historic mission to the International Space Station (ISS). There were no astronauts aboard this flight, only the sensor-packed dummy Ripley named after a character from the “Alien” films. But the success of the test flight, known as Demo-1, helps paves the way for a crewed mission of the SpaceX vehicle, perhaps as early as this summer....
Loops of superheated plasma far larger than Earth rain down on the solar surface in a dazzling video captured by a NASA sun-watching spacecraft. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) watched as a medium-strength flare erupted from the sun on July 19, 2012. The blast also generated the enormous, shimmering plasma loops, which are an example of a phenomenon known as “coronal rain,” agency officials said. “Hot plasma in the corona [the sun’s outer atmosphere] cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region,” NASA officials wrote in a description of the four-minute video of solar plasma “rain”, which NASA released Wednesday (Feb....
There are things in that [wall]paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. —From “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman The protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” suffers from the most notable case of pareidolia in fiction....
When eight men carrying assault rifles and wearing suicide vests killed 129 people in Paris last week, the issue of access to encrypted communications again reared its head. If the attackers planned their assault over secure data networks, doesn’t it make sense to give law enforcement organizations access to those networks? Not necessarily. The real question is whether anything has changed since the White House decided not to seek controls on encryption last month....
As a longtime researcher in psychology and a sometime teacher of courses on research methods and statistics, I have become increasingly concerned about how such studies are being interpreted. Although imaging technology has shed interesting new light on brain activity, it is dangerous to presume that snapshots of activity in certain regions of the brain necessarily provide useful information about the causes of thought, feeling and behavior. Automatically assuming that the brain causes behavior is problematic because we know that an individuals genes and environmental history–and even his or her own behavior–mold the brain over time....
By Elaine LiesTOKYO (Reuters) - A typhoon killed 17 people in Japan on Wednesday, most on an offshore island, but largely spared the capital and caused no new disaster as it brushed by the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power station, the plant’s operator said.More than 50 people were missing after the “once in a decade” Typhoon Wipha roared up Japan’s east coast. About 20,000 people were told to leave their homes because of the danger of flooding and hundreds of flights were canceled....
Twenty-eight years ago James R. Flynn, a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand, discovered a phenomenon that social scientists still struggle to explain: IQ scores have been increasing steadily since the beginning of the 20th century. Flynn went on to examine intelligence-test data from more than two dozen countries and found that scores were rising by 0.3 point a year—three full points per decade. Nearly 30 years of follow-up studies have confirmed the statistical reality of the global uptick, now known as the Flynn effect....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the 1988 Yellowstone fires—massive blazes that affected about 1.2 million acres in and around Yellowstone National Park. Their size and severity surprised scientists, managers and the public and received heavy media coverage. Many news reports proclaimed that Yellowstone was destroyed, but nothing was further from the truth....
CLIMATEWIRE | The world’s first named heat wave hit Seville, Spain, this week, pushing temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit and earning the most severe tier in the city’s new heat wave ranking system. Heat wave “Zoe” has brought scorching temperatures to the southern part of the country for the last few days, particularly the region of Andalusia where Seville is located. Even in the evenings, the Spanish meteorological service recorded temperatures that hovered in the mid-80s in some areas — an extra stress on the human body, which relies on cooler nights to recover from high daytime heat....
LONDON − New scientific discoveries have been made to beef up a biofuel, re-use waste heat, get more power from solar panels – and even deliver electricity across a room without using wires. Here are four promising inventions that offer tantalizing potential to improve our lives and change how we generate and use power. Fired by firs Scientists in the United States have crossed a fir tree with a gut bacterium, fed it beef soup, and watched it deliver the chemistry of the highest-octane rocket fuel....
Since the start of the pandemic, the most terrifying task in health care was thought to be when a doctor put a breathing tube down the trachea of a critically ill covid patient. Those performing such “aerosol-generating” procedures, often in an intensive care unit, got the best protective gear even if there wasn’t enough to go around, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. And for anyone else working with covid patients, until a month ago, a surgical mask was considered sufficient....
It’s one thing when environmentalists say that fossil fuel companies’ positions on climate change are similar to Big Tobacco’s past deflections about the hazards of smoking. It’s another entirely when it’s done by a coal official, who says his industry should heed tobacco’s costly lessons. That’s what Richard Reavey, vice president of public affairs of Cloud Peak Energy Inc., a major coal miner in the western United States, appears to have done on June 29, 2015, when he presented a 24-page slideshow at an industry conference organized by the Rocky Mountain Coal Mining Institute in Snowmass, Colo....
Buried under the south pole of Mars are the makings of one heck of a Halloween party. Radar soundings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have identified huge dry ice deposits under the Red Planet’s surface totaling roughly 10,000 cubic kilometers. That’s enough to make a foggy cauldron at each household in the U.S. every Halloween for the next 20 million years or so, or to chill a few quadrillion coolers of frozen steaks during cross-country shipping....
Sunscreen is supposed to safeguard against solar burn, but a handful of incidents are on record in which people seemed to literally burst into flames while wearing a spray-on product. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has on file five incidents—and Canadian regulators have noted another—in which people applied spray-on sunscreen and, after approaching a barbecue grill, lighting a cigarette or standing near a citronella candle, their skin caught fire, causing severe burns that needed medical treatment....
A Canadian firm today unveiled what it called “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer.” D-Wave Systems, Inc., “The Quantum Computing Company,” during a much ballyhooed rollout at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., hailed the new device as a big step toward the age of quantum computing, decades earlier than scheduled. But experts say the announcement may be a bit—er—premature. Even if the computer were to work as advertised, it still would be nearly 1,000 times too small to solve problems that stump ordinary computers....
Bees are making headlines these days, and not in a positive way. Colony collapse disorder has cut through honeybee populations, with some beekeepers reportedly losing up to 90 percent of their stock in recent years. European bee populations are also declining, and so are some species of North American bumblebee. That data is often interpreted to mean that all of the world’s 20,000 bee species are in danger, and that we may be in the midst of a “global pollinator crisis....
