As the costs of oil, natural gas and electricity to fuel conventional heating and cooling systems rise, homeowners are increasingly installing heat pumps. By extracting warmth and coolness from the outside air or ground, heat pumps can provide greater efficiency and lower cost over the long haul. Two basic options predominate. In air-to-air designs, a unit outside the house relies on air as a source of heat or a place to dump heat....
Nowadays many devices come with chips and are connected to the Internet—the so-called Internet of Things. The smart fridge that alerts you when milk is low or adds it to the shopping list—maybe even orders it from the grocery app! The air conditioner that anticipates when you want the house cooler for a run on the treadmill but turns itself down when you’re out at the movies. A baby monitor that tells you when it’s time to stock up on teething gel: the little one has been tossing and turning a little too much....
For the first time, scientists have without a doubt observed not one but two collisions between black holes and neutron stars. These two separate mergers occurred 10 days apart in January 2020 and were seen by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo facilities, which detect invisible gravitational waves. The achievement marks the long-awaited completion of a trifecta of events observed by gravitational-wave interferometers: black hole–black hole collisions, neutron star–neutron star collisions and now, at last, black hole–neutron star collisions....
A little more than three years ago a medical team from Berlin published the results of a unique experiment that astonished HIV researchers. The German group had taken bone marrow—the source of the body’s immune cells—from an anonymous donor whose genetic inheritance made him or her naturally resistant to HIV. Then the researchers transplanted the cells into a man with leukemia who had been HIV-positive for more than 10 years. Although treatment of the patient’s leukemia was the rationale for the bone marrow transplant therapy, the group also hoped that the transplant would provide enough HIV-resistant cells to control the man’s infection....
Self-help books often extoll the value of resilience. Last year one such primer—Bounce: Overcoming Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy—proclaimed: “By strengthening your inner power, your ability to handle stressful situations and your skill in persevering after setbacks threaten to fell you, you’ll develop real resilience—you’ll develop grit.” This implies weathering adverse life events is a character trait to be cultivated. Exercising, eating right and giving yourself mental pep talks certainly may help....
A couple of weeks ago, I had some basic blood work done for my routine physical. All the numbers looked pretty good, but my doctor and I were high-fiving each other about my HDL score, which was 88 mg/dL. Just by way of a quick review, there are lots of different kinds of cholesterol in your blood, and HDL (which stands for high density lipoprotein) is the one we often refer to as the “good” cholesterol....
The thylacine has long been an icon of human-caused extinction. In the 1800s and early 1900s, European colonizers in Tasmania wrongly blamed the dog-sized, tiger-striped, carnivorous marsupial for killing their sheep and chickens. The settlers slaughtered thylacines by the thousands, exchanging the animals’ skins for a government bounty. The last known thylacine spent its days pacing a zoo cage in Hobart, Tasmania, and died of neglect in 1936. Now the wolflike creature—also known as the Tasmanian tiger—is poised to become an emblem of de-extinction, an initiative that seeks to create new versions of lost species....
In an announcement that stunned scientists, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has cancelled grant applications for what was supposed to be a $20-million, four-year green chemistry program. The mysterious cancellation, announced on Friday, came less than three weeks before the April 25 deadline for the grant proposals. The federal grants, which were supposed to fund two new academic centers, would have been a major new source of funding for green chemistry, a field that seeks to design environmentally friendly chemicals and processes that can replace toxic substances....
Benasich is one of a cadre of researchers who have been employing brain-recording techniques to understand the essential processes that underlie early stages of learning. The new science of neuroeducation seeks the answers to questions that have always perplexed cognitive psychologists and pedagogues. How, for instance, does a newborn’s ability to process sounds and images relate to the child’s capacity to learn letters and words a few years later? What does a youngster’s ability for staying mentally focused in preschool mean for later academic success?...
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, large numbers of wealthy businessmen in the United States began dying from heart attacks. Shocked by the obituaries mounting up in his local newspaper, physiologist Ancel Keys decided to investigate. His findings would fundamentally change the way we eat for decades to come. Keys couldn’t understand why high-powered US executives, with access to plentiful food, had much higher rates of coronary heart disease than did people in post-war Europe, where food shortages were common....
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Some of London’s famous red telephone boxes are going green, transformed into free, solar-powered mobile chargers to provide a carbon-neutral source of energy in the city. The “solarbox”, unveiled on Wednesday, was invented by two graduates from the London School of Economics (LSE) and can be used to charge phones, tablets, cameras and other devices. The first pilot “solarbox” was opened for public use in Tottenham Court Road in London’s main central shopping district on Wednesday, equipped with a solar panel which provides a clean, carbon-neutral source of energy....
Medical algorithms are used across the health-care spectrum to diagnose disease, offer prognoses, monitor patients’ health and assist with administrative tasks such as appointment scheduling. But the history of such technology’s use in the U.S. is filled with stories of it running amok. From victims of sexual trauma being unfairly labeled as high risk for substance use to diagnostic failures by a sepsis-detection algorithm used by more than 100 health systems nationwide to clinical decision support (CDS) software discouraging necessary referrals to complex care for millions of Black patients, the problems abound....
Beloved crank and Seinfeld co-creator Larry David once told an interviewer that he tolerates people like he tolerates lactose—which is to say, I’m assuming, not well. David’s particular degree of grumpiness might be extreme, and perhaps embellished in the interest his shtick, but his social misgivings echo those of many in their dotage who’d rather spend time with old friends than deal with the sweat and small talk required to go out and make new ones....
THE ROOTS OF MODERN MORALITY have long been a point of contention among psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists. Do our ethical foundations arise from our relatively recent ability to reason or from our ancient emotions? Studies have recently lent support to the notion that we owe much of our sense of right and wrong to our animal ancestors. Evidence that morality comes before reason is supported by primate studies. A chimpanzee, for instance, will sometimes drown to save its peers and refuse food if doing so prevents others from injury....
WICHITA FALLS, Texas—City officials began blending 5 million gallons a day of treated wastewater into their municipal water system this week, launching one of the biggest so-called direct reuse programs in the country. While some residents in this city of about 105,000 are concerned about drinking water from a sewage treatment plant, city officials and business leaders say it was the only way to adapt to an unprecedented dry spell. The lakes that supply the city have dropped below 25 percent of their capacity....
In the Siberian Arctic, the Ob River flows lazily across vast, cold stretches of tundra. In the city of Salekhard, Russia, where it meets with the Polui River, lie the remains of an ancient ritual site. Overlooking the floodplains, it is known as Ust’-Polui. It is thought to date back to 260 B.C. and to have been occupied until A.D. 140. The site has long fascinated archaeologists due to the huge number and diversity of bone remains and artifacts present....
It’s hard to pin down the precise moment the world’s center of gravity shifted. For thousands of years, people lived in the countryside. They worked on farms or in villages, knew little of the world beyond their immediate families and neighbors, and generally got by on their own. Slowly, they began to congregate. It happened in Mesopotamia and Egypt, later in Greece and Rome, and also in Europe and the Americas....
The Supreme Court on Thursday turned back its third chance to upend the Affordable Care Act, rejecting a lawsuit filed by a group of Republican state attorneys general claiming that a change made by Congress in 2017 had rendered the entire law unconstitutional. By a vote of 7-2, however, the justices did not even reach the merits of the case, ruling instead that the suing states and the individual plaintiffs, two self-employed Texans, lacked “standing” to bring the case to court....
In Senegal’s Siné-Saloum and Casamance deltas, green seedlings poke through the water’s surface, standing on end like string beans reaching to the sky. There, in spindly clusters and lines, is the next generation of mangroves: six native species selected, seed collected from mature groves, then planted directly, or sometimes grown first in nurseries. Some villagers say that without reforestation, they would have left their ancestor’s lands. Mangroves, reaching down into the salty water, provide habitat for fish and oysters that support local diets and livelihoods....
For many of us, the past year and a half may have seemed to slow way down. And in fact, some studies have shown just this. But Maynard Okereke’s life has been anything but slow recently. He just got back from a month at sea where he worked with a team of oceanographers and roboticists to map the deep ocean and explore hydrothermal vents. That was right after he spent some time experiencing the sensation of weightlessness during a “zero gravity” flight with a group called Space for Humanity....
