Posts

Editor’s Note: Carl Zimmer, author of this month’s article, “100 Trillion Connections,” has just brought out a much-acclaimed e-book, Brain Cuttings: 15 Journeys Through the Mind (Scott & Nix), that compiles a series of his writings on neuroscience. In this chapter, adapted from an article that was first published in Playboy, Zimmer takes the reader on a tour of the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York City. His ability to contrast the fantastical predictions of speakers at the conference with the sometimes more skeptical assessments from other scientists makes his account a fascinating read....

Testing is one of the most daunting obstacles to overcome before thousands can again pack beaches and baseball stadiums. The much-lauded gene-editing technology CRISPR is now making a bid to help fill in holes in testing regimens. Last week researchers published a study in Nature Biotechnology describing a new assay for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 that uses the technique to deliver results in about 40 minutes. The work began when study co-author Charles Chiu, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, was researching a CRISPR-based Lyme disease test earlier this year....

As Irene battered the East Coast two weeks ago, Frank Lombardo knew that only after the rain and wind stopped and the floods receded, would his work begin. That’s because as a forensic meteorologist, Lombardo is often called on to consult on legal and insurance cases resulting from violent storms. His job, and that of any forensic meteorologist, is to reconstruct the weather conditions that occurred at a specific time and location in question by retrieving and analyzing archived atmospheric data and re-creating a time line of meteorological events....

In the mid-1990s the U.S. embarked on a new strategy for exploring the Red Planet. In response to the 1993 failure of the Mars Observer mission—a billion-dollar, decade-in-the-making probe that mysteriously lost contact with ground controllers just before it was scheduled to go into orbit around the planet—NASA administrator Daniel Goldin decided to shift to smaller, less expensive spacecraft and create a sustained exploration campaign by sending one or two probes to Mars at every launch opportunity....

There are two kinds of cyclists in Manhattan: the quick and the dead. This narrow island between the Hudson and East rivers is possibly the least bicycle-friendly place on the planet. Delivery people, couriers and casual cyclists face the challenge of crossing six-lane avenues choked with heavy trucks and honking taxis. And even if you make it to the oasis of Central Park, you must contend with packs of riders on high-end racing bikes who seem to be engaged in a perpetual Tour de France....

Many species are on a path to become what scientists term the “living dead”—populations so small that extinction is inevitable. A century from now most of the big carnivores—including lions, tigers and cheetahs—will probably exist only in zoos or wildlife areas so small as to be quasi zoos. The same fate may await all rhinoceros and elephant species and our closest wild relatives: the two gorilla species, orangutans and chimpanzees....

NAME: Shree Bose AGE: 17 TITLE: Senior, Fort Worth Country Day School LOCATION: Fort Worth, Tex. How did you hear about the Google Science Fair? I did science fairs before, but it was mostly the “cut paper out and paste it on a board” sort of thing. And I saw this little ad on the Google home page introducing the first ever Google online science fair. And so I thought, well, I love Google and I love science fairs, so maybe this could work for me....

Babies born today will experience far more disruptions fueled by climate change than their parents or grandparents. In a study published in October 2021 Science, Wim Thiery of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and his colleagues combined climate model projections under three global warming scenarios with demography data to calculate the lifetime exposure to six types of extreme weather for every generation born between 1960 and 2020. Even as a climate scientist acutely aware of the dangers of rising temperatures, “seeing the numbers as a person, as a parent, is a punch in the stomach,” he says....

There is a joke in New Mexico that the rest of the country does not know the state is part of the U.S. This summer, as cases of COVID-19 surged in many parts of the nation, New Mexico really did seem to stand apart. While Arizona and Texas, its neighbors to the west and east, loosened activity and business restrictions and then experienced alarming increases in COVID-19 numbers, New Mexico kept a tighter grip on the spread of the contagion....

When the groundbreaking geneticist Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1902, her parents initially named her Eleanor. But they soon felt that the name was too delicate for their daughter and began to call her Barbara instead, which they thought better suited her strong personality. Her parents accurately predicted her determination. To say that McClintock was a pioneer is an understatement. In 1944, she became the third woman to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and the first woman to lead the Genetics Society of America....

As soon as the rain stops, mosquitoes flood the guard house of an upscale tourist resort near Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Without hesitation, one of the guards reaches under his desk to pull out a device that looks like a very large hair dryer. “Mosquito gun,” he says. He walks around, spraying a thick, white cloud of fumigant that engulfs the booth. Slowly, the mosquitoes disappear. It’s not uncommon to see clouds of pesticide wafting through Cuba’s houses and neighbour­hoods....

In the collections of the British Museum in London, a mummy known simply as EA6736 sits in eternal repose. Recovered from the Temple of Khons in Luxor, Egypt, it dates to the New Kingdom period, from 1550 B.C. to 1069 B.C. Clues to the identity of EA6736 emerge after close inspection. Its painstakingly wrapped linen bandages have disintegrated in some places, revealing fur underneath. Stout toenails poke out from the bandages around the feet....

The American Academy of Pediatrics is out with new recommendations to help kids maintain a healthy diet—of tablets and smartphones. Previous guidelines focused on stricter limits: No screen time for kids under 2, and just two hours a day for older kids. But with the media landscape shifting, the physician group decided flexibility was in order. The organization now recommends that parents keep infants and toddlers away from screens until they hit 18 months....

Close your eyes and touch two fingers together. The sense that enables this gesture is proprioception—feedback that tells your brain where body parts are and what they are doing. “Proprioception is essential to all human movement,” says Tyler Clites, a biomedical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scientists have made huge strides in controlling robotic limbs with the nervous system, but providing such sensory feedback has proved more challenging. Now, however, a team led by biomechanical engineer Hugh Herr, also at M....

The Mesozoic era, which spanned the time from 251 million to 66 million years ago, is often referred to as the age of dinosaurs. But although dinosaurs reigned supreme on land back then, they did not rule the air. Instead the skies were the dominion of an entirely different group of beasts: the pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were the first vertebrate creatures to evolve powered flight and conquer the air—long before birds took wing....

KIEV, Ukraine—In 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history took place when reactor No. 4 in the power plant at nearby Chernobyl exploded, spewing large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. Now, almost 25 years later, the lesson that scientists are learning is that radiation might not be the only cause of this disaster’s long-term medical effects, and perhaps not even the main one. The explosion immediately killed two workers, and 28 firemen and nuclear power plant staff died from acute radiation syndrome in the three months afterward....

Drug addiction exacts a variety of ill effects on a user’s health. Among other things, addicts often experience disrupted sleep. The mechanism behind how the substances may change a user’s circadian rhythms remains unknown but new research on mice is providing some insight. According to a report published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, circadian rhythm genes help to regulate the brain’s reward system and could influence the addictive properties of drugs such as cocaine....

Suspicions of a link between prenatal ultrasound scans and autism spectrum disorder are nothing new. The technology has exploded in recent decades, giving expectant parents more detailed images of their developing offspring than ever before. And as ultrasound use has sharply increased, so too have diagnoses of autism—prompting questions about a potential relationship. A rigorous new study examining the association between ultrasounds during the first or second trimester of pregnancy and later development of autism spectrum disorder, however, delivers some good news....

NEW YORK HARBOR—It’s an odd scene in New York Harbor. On the banks of tree-lined Governors Island, a small group has gathered to watch a tiny gray boat anchor itself in the water. Two figures lean over the side of the vessel, their red life vests standing out against the slate waves. Each clutches several rust-colored mesh sacks, dangling just above the surface of the water. “One … two … three!...

Deadly climate change could threaten most of the world’s human population by the end of this century without efforts well beyond those captured in the Paris Agreement. That’s the finding of a pair of related reports released yesterday by an international group of climate science and policy luminaries who warned that the window is closing to avert dangerous warming. They say carbon dioxide might have to be removed from the atmosphere....