A sharp-eyed Earth-observing satellite is launching today (Nov. 11), and you can watch all the spaceflight action live. The WorldView-4 satellite is scheduled to lift off today at 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT) atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. You can watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of ULA. You can also view the launch directly via ULA, at ulalaunch....
Every time that a colored square appeared on the monitor in front of me, I braced for pain. Early into the 10-minute session as a subject of this experiment, I learned that about half of the times that I saw that square, I received a low-voltage shock, via a bar strapped to my right wrist. I also learned that every time I saw a square of a different, “good” color, I could momentarily breathe easy....
An elderly woman suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease had neither talked to nor reacted to any of her family members for years. Then, one day, she suddenly started chatting with her granddaughter, asking for news of other family members and even giving her granddaughter advice. “It was like talking to Rip van Winkle,” the granddaughter told University of Virginia researchers of her astonishment. Unfortunately, the reawakening did not last—the grandmother died the next week....
We all suspect we’re unique, and methods for identifying individuals, whether by examining fingerprints or strands of DNA, confirm this conviction. A recent study shows that each person’s mind also exhibits a distinct pattern that could be used as a distinguishing feature with near-perfect accuracy. The researchers, led by Emily Finn of Yale University, relied on functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) to examine brain activity in 126 healthy young adults. A “connectivity profile” was then created for each subject based on an estimate of the strength of connections between every pair of nodes in a network of 268, representing various brain regions....
Call it the little chill. A group of theoretical physicists has mapped out the physics framework for what may be the smallest refrigerators imaginable. Each device would target just one quantum bit, or qubit, for cooling, and would require just one or two additional quantum particles to do the job. Theoretical physicists Noah Linden and Sandu Popescu, along with graduate student Paul Skrzypczyk, all of the University of Bristol in England, describe their concept in a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters....
Avi Loeb is no stranger to controversy. The prolific Harvard University astrophysicist has produced pioneering and provocative research on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the early universe and other standard topics of his field. But for more than a decade he has also courted a more contentious subject—namely, space aliens, including how to find them. Until relatively recently, Loeb’s most high-profile work in that regard was his involvement with Breakthrough Starshot, a project funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner to send laser-boosted, gossamer-thin mirrorlike spacecraft called “light sails” on high-speed voyages to nearby stars....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Social media are among the primary sources of news in the U.S. and across the world. Yet users are exposed to content of questionable accuracy, including conspiracy theories, clickbait, hyperpartisan content, pseudo science and even fabricated “fake news” reports. It’s not surprising that there’s so much disinformation published: Spam and online fraud are lucrative for criminals, and government and political propaganda yield both partisan and financial benefits....
The backbone of President Biden’s plan to use infrastructure spending to advance climate policy is a clean electricity standard for the power sector that has the potential to be the most aggressive ever enacted by the federal government. Tucked into his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal is the aim of “achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035,” according to a fact sheet released yesterday by the White House. “If we act now, in 50 years people are going to look back and say: ‘This was the moment that America won the future,’” Biden said during a rollout of the proposal in Pittsburgh....
HERMANN, Mo. – The Missouri River stretches more than a quarter-mile from shore to shore here, its muddy water the color of coffee with a shot of cream. The river carved this valley hundreds of thousands of years ago, and in the 1830s, it deposited the German settlers who founded this city. Today, visitors who sip local wine in hillside gazebos can gaze down at the water and imagine being on the Rhine....
PSYCHOLOGISTS, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have jousted for years over how much of our behavior is driven by our genes versus the environments in which we grow up and live. Arguments have persisted because there has been little hard evidence to answer basic questions: How exactly do genes and environment interact to determine whether someone will become depressed, say, or schizophrenic? And can environmental interventions such as drugs or psychotherapy really alleviate disorders that are largely determined by genes?...
Volcán de Fuego lives up to its name. Not only does Guatemala’s “Volcano of Fire” blast columns of ash skyward several times every hour, it also becomes a true inferno about once a month, when larger eruptions hurl menacing lava and debris down its slopes. This cyclic behavior is intensifying, making scientists wonder if a more explosive eruption is imminent. In a massive 1974 outburst the mountain shot an ash cloud four miles into the sky and sent a huge amount of debris racing down its sides....
By Mica Rosenberg BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) - A pioneer in cleaning up toxic messes, Thomas Schruben long suspected major oil companies of being paid twice for dealing with leaks from underground fuel storage tanks - once from government funds and again, secretly, from insurance companies. Schruben, a detail-oriented Maryland environmental engineer who helped draft government pollution rules going back 30 years, looked for a lawyer to help ferret out what he believed could in some cases be fraud....
Children suffering from autism pay very little attention to faces, even those of people close to them. Indeed, this characteristic can become apparent as early as the age of one, and is often used as a developmental sign of the disease. The results of a new study provide additional insight into why autistic children avoid eye contact: they perceive faces as an uncomfortable threat, even if they are familiar. Kim M....
In 2016, I (Catherine) was slated to give Canada’s statement as minister for environment and climate change at the COP22 climate negotiations in Marrakesh. Instead, I decided to share that time with Maatalii Okalik, then the president of the National Inuit Youth Council of Canada. I knew this young Inuk woman would convey more compellingly than I how climate change was affecting her community—their land, the ice, culture, food, health, safety—and how it is threatening that community’s very existence....
Bats are creatures of the night that are commonly held in fear. At first glance, those fears might seem to have some medical justification. Long known as vectors for rabies, bats may be the origin of some of the most deadly emerging viruses, including SARS, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra and Marburg. Instead of demonizing bats, however, research shows the real culprit behind these outbreaks could be human error. The Nipah and Hendra viruses were the first emerging diseases linked to bats....
In 2004 an underdog team of four undocumented Mexican-American teenagers managed to win a major student underwater robotics competition, beating the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team—Lorenzo Santillian, Christian Arcega, Oscar Vazquez and Luis Arranda—from Arizona’s Carl Hayden Community High School had little funding and no experience in similar contests, but they won the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition, sponsored in part by NASA and the Office of Naval Research....
A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The surprising answer, it turns out, may be language. The notion that different languages may impart different cognitive skills goes back centuries. Since the 1930s it has become associated with American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied how languages vary and proposed ways that speakers of different tongues may think differently....
FEAR OF DYING David G. Myers’s article, “The Powers and Perils of Intuition,” dealt in part with statistics; for example, women fear breast cancer more than heart disease but are more likely to die of heart disease than of breast cancer, and we fear planes more than cars, although more people die in cars than in planes. I think the author missed something central about how the brain assesses risk....
When Rachel Stein (not her real name) was a small child, she would pace around in a circle shaking a string for hours at a time, mentally spinning intricate alternative plots for her favorite television shows. Usually she was the star—the imaginary seventh child in The Brady Bunch, for example. “Around the age of eight or nine, my older brother said, ‘You’re doing this on the front lawn, and the neighbors are looking at you....
Annie, my friend John’s kid sister, got sick when she was 11. I wasn’t much older so I didn’t know how serious it was when John said her disease was called lupus. I didn’t realize her own cells were attacking her, sometimes going after her kidneys, other times her lungs. I did know, because her brother told me, that her face got really swollen because she had to take lots of pills called steroids, which had side effects that meant she could get very sick from flus or colds that he and I shrugged off....
