Posts

Aha! Eureka! Bingo! “By George, I think she’s got it!” Everyone knows what it’s like to finally figure out a seemingly impossible problem. But what on Earth is happening in the brain while we’re driving toward mental pay dirt? Researchers eager to find out have long been on the hunt, knowing that such information could one day provide priceless clues in uncovering and fixing faulty neural systems believed to be behind some mental illnesses and learning disabilities....

You thought you’d seen the last of it. But your old AOL email address (remember, from the nineties?) could still return to haunt you. Spammers may have broken into AOL’s mail server to hijack old accounts and send tons of spam to people in the compromised accounts’ address books. Even if you don’t have an AOL email address, you might still find some emails in your inbox, ostensibly from a friend, containing links to spam websites advertising miracle diets....

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple (AAPL) on Thursday launched three observational studies — focused on mobility, menstruation, and hearing — that each aim to enroll hundreds of thousands of people and monitor them virtually using their own iPhones and Apple Watches. Amid rising concern about health data privacy, the tech giant has vowed not to sell the data collected from the studies. Apple will allow participants to control which types of information they share and to delete data within 24 hours of their collection....

A complex cascade of biochemical signals determines what we eat, when we eat and how much we eat. Our digestive tracts and fat cells are known to secrete hormones that drive our hunger levels and our sense of satisfaction after eating. Now a new player has come to the table, our bones. A paper published this March in Nature shows bone cells secrete a hormone called lipocalin 2—and it has a surprising effect in mouse experiments of reducing appetite and stabilizing blood sugar independently of other hormones....

The heat of the sun, a blazing basketball in the West African sky, was softened by a spring breeze one afternoon a few years ago. Every so often the wind whisked a mango off a tree branch and dropped it with a thud on the corrugated iron roof that covered the health center in Bissau, the biggest city in the tiny country of Guinea-Bissau, where the rust-colored ground hadn’t felt a raindrop in six months....

Following years of debate surrounding the project, top Forest Service officials yesterday hailed a key step forward for the nation’s largest forest restoration initiative. The agency yesterday announced that Coconino National Forest Supervisor Earl Stewart and Kaibab National Forest Supervisor Mike Williams have signed the final decision document for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative’s first environmental impact statement (EIS). It is the largest restoration project ever analyzed in the agency’s history, the Forest Service said....

When a patient complains of forgetfulness, a neurologist might not know immediately whether it results from normal aging, reduced blood flow to the brain—or, more ominously, Alzheimer’s disease. For much of the past century, a definitive Alzheimer’s diagnosis could only be made during an autopsy. Brain imaging and spinal fluid tests now make it possible to spot the disease in patients even before the initial symptoms appear. But these invasive tests are expensive and generally limited to research settings that are not part of routine care for the millions of people suffering from the most common neurodegenerative disorder....

In the hunt for alternatives to polluting and climate-warming fossil fuels, attention has turned to where rivers meet the sea. Here, freshwater and saltwater naturally settle their salinity difference, a phenomenon that two pioneering projects in Europe will try to harness to generate clean energy. This concept of “salt power”—also known as osmotic, or salinity-gradient, power—has been kicked around for decades, and now, proponents hope, technology has advanced enough to make it economically competitive....

The world greets newborn babies by bombarding them with everything from dust to disease-causing microbes. Babies can deftly parry exposures to certain harmful substances, thanks to antibodies passed onto them in the womb. But this kind of inherited immunity is short-lived, so a child must develop her own immune system response to combat life-threatening diseases. That’s where vaccines come into the picture. By age two, most children will receive almost 30 shots designed to boost a child’s natural defenses against disease....

During the past 10 months, as the COVID pandemic broke over the world, thousands of research laboratories and pharmaceutical companies rushed to study the novel coronavirus and develop a treatment. Hundreds of clinical trials are testing at least 200 different treatments against COVID, according to the Milken Institute, a health care think tank. About 100 more treatments are in earlier-stage lab tests. Despite the huge effort, scientists and clinicians are finding the search for new drugs hard....

More than 4,000 exoplanets are now known to orbit other stars. Indeed, astronomers suspect that such worlds are ubiquitous, estimating that, on average, every star in the Milky Way must have at least one planetary companion. But therein lies the rub: Although exoplanets seem to pop up everywhere, “everywhere” is far from the truth in describing where astronomers have actually looked. The vast majority of exoplanet surveys have stuck to either stars closely neighboring the sun or those farther off, in the direction of the Milky Way’s central galactic bulge....

The planet Mars has been associated with its namesake god of war for millennia, but its own past may have been more violent than was previously imagined. A new study suggests that Mars was once hit by an asteroid so large that it melted nearly half of the planet’s surface. Researchers came to this conclusion while studying a strange feature known as the Martian hemispheric dichotomy—a dramatic drop in surface elevation and crustal thickness that occurs near Mars’ equator....

Reading through their social media feeds, Americans are likely to encounter anguished accounts of political turmoil, the coronavirus pandemic and continued fallout from cyberattacks, among other less than cheerful topics. And yet many can’t stop scrolling even more, perhaps hoping to distract themselves from thinking too hard about any one of these ongoing problems. The practice has earned a suitably apocalyptic nickname: doomscrolling. In spring 2020, at the start of the global pandemic, Karen K....

I am in an overgrown lot leaning against an eight-foot-tall shipping container. I look both ways, weighing my options. A man with an assault rifle is looking for me, just as I am looking for him. Hoping for a better vantage point, I run toward the abandoned car to my right. A metallic bang rings out as my opponent’s shot hits the wall I have just left. I dodge around the next container, then circle behind it....

U.S. Hawaii’s state legislature announced it wants to get 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2045. The state already gets more than a quarter of its electricity from such sources. PACIFIC OCEAN A whale shark set a new distance record for its species by swimming more than 20,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean in 841 days. The creature, named Anne, traveled from off the western coast of Panama to near the Mariana Trench....

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine On 11 March, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) warned that a 3-metre-plus tsunami would hit northeastern Japan. In fact, the wave that came ashore stood more than 10 metres high – reaching 50 metres in some places – and is thought to have claimed the lives of more than 20,000 people. At a press conference on Monday, a somber Akira Nagai, head of the agency’s earthquake and tsunami observations division, acknowledged that the mistaken forecast “led to a slow evacuation” – a painful admission in a country that prides itself on its earthquake and tsunami preparedness....

Cellophane over the toilet bowl. Decaf coffee in the “regular” carafe. Armed with these or myriad other schemes, an April Fools’ Day prankster strikes. More than just a celebration of mischief—or a license for the boorish—the practical jokes and humor associated with this annual holiday actually play a role in the formation and maintenance of social bonds in small groups. “Humor is a very strong way of sharing world views and expressing that you’re on the same page,” says Giselinde Kuipers, an anthropologist and sociologist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands....

In a 2007 campaign advertisement, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chances of surviving prostate cancer—and thank God, I was cured of it—in the United States? Eighty-two percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent under socialized medicine.” Giuliani used these statistics to argue that he was lucky to be living in New York and not in York....

You may be looking forward to spring, but many people with multiple sclerosis are not—changing seasons can bring on a relapse. Scientists have attributed the seasonal fluctuations of MS to the rise and fall of vitamin D, which has anti-inflammatory properties and is produced by exposure to sunlight. Some studies, however, find that relapses increase in the spring and summer, when vitamin D levels are expected to be high, pointing to the possibility that other factors are involved....

A NASA spacecraft orbiting the huge asteroid Vesta is beaming home images that reveal the giant space rock like never before, showing its battered and pockmarked surface in stunning detail. The new Vesta photos from the Dawn probe, which NASA unveiled today (Aug. 1), include the spacecraft’s first full-frame view of the entire asteroid and should help astronomers understand how the space rock formed in the early solar system, researchers said....