Posts

The biggest, most complex rover ever sent to Mars is now on its way. NASA’s Perseverance rover launched successfully on 30 July, the third of three Mars missions to launch in the space of just ten days. The rover will be the first mission ever to attempt to collect rock samples for return to Earth; it will also search for signs of ancient alien life, launch the first helicopter on the red planet and use microphones to capture Mars’s sounds for the first time....

In 2021 Republican legislatures in 19 states passed 34 laws that restricted access to voting in more than a dozen different ways. And those are just the bills that succeeded; hundreds of other provisions, some still under consideration, were introduced nationwide. “The momentum around this legislation continues,” the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks these efforts, wrote on its Web site. At least 165 restrictive voting bills were already on the docket for this year by mid-January....

BEIJING (Reuters) - A super typhoon slammed into China on Friday killing one person, as the government ordered an all-out effort to prevent loss of life from a storm that has already killed at least 64 people in the Philippines. Typhoon Rammasun, with winds of up to 180 kph (112 mph), made landfall at Wenchang city on south China’s island province of Hainan on Friday afternoon, the National Meteorological Center said on its website....

Neuroscientists have limited tools for understanding the human brain and treating its illnesses. Surgery or inserted electrodes are too invasive for most situations. Existing noninvasive technology, such as magnetic stimulation, is imprecise. Now neuroradiologist Raag Airan of Stanford University and his colleagues have demonstrated a method that could enable researchers to manipulate small, highly targeted brain areas noninvasively. The study, published last November in Neuron, uses technology Airan has been developing for years—but this is the first time it has been shown to work with the necessary precision....

Twenty-seven major cities around the world may already have seen their greenhouse gas emissions peak, according to a new study. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Washington, D.C., are among the cities whose emissions have fallen more than 10 percent from their historic peaks, according to an analysis released yesterday by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a city-focused climate advocacy organization founded by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and championed by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg....

By Marian Turner of Nature magazineMan’s best friend bears a heavy burden in the pharmaceutical industry. Every year, tens of thousands of dogs are subjects in drug-toxicity studies in Europe and the United States, even though many scientists think that they are poor predictors of drug effects in humans. Discussions on this sensitive issue have now been opened up by a hefty donation from Hildegard Doerenkamp, a Swiss philanthropist and passionate dog-lover, to the Zurich-based Doerenkamp-Zbinden Foundation, which supports work to reduce animal testing....

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake sent a tsunami surging outward from Sumatra, devastating coastlines across Southeast Asia but doing much less damage by the time it reached Africa. Many scientists have since considered the tsunami risk in parts of East Africa to be relatively low. But new research conducted on a 1,000-year-old sand layer full of human bones, in northeastern Tanzania’s Pangani Bay, puts the threat of a monster wave back in the spotlight....

Global efforts to tackle climate change rest on a common goal: to keep the planet’s temperatures from rising beyond dangerous thresholds. But what if the gases that come from cars and power plants are harming the planet themselves, even without the warming they cause? Some scientists think that’s a risk. Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may have direct effects on the climate system, they say. In other words, even if global temperatures stay locked in at a certain point, higher CO2 concentrations could continue to affect the planet....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Right now, your computer might be using its memory and processor power—and your electricity—to generate money for someone else, without you ever knowing. It’s called “cryptojacking,” and it is an offshoot of the rising popularity of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Instead of minting coins or printing paper money, creating new units of cryptocurrencies, which is called “mining,” involves performing complex mathematical calculations....

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine Plastic Logic, a technology company that makes flexible organic electronic circuits and displays, has conceded defeat in the e-reader race. The company, founded in 2000 as a spin-out of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, UK, was given a US$200-million financial boost from the state-owned Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Rusnano) in January 2011. The investment was intended, in part, to develop a flexible and robust e-reader to be used in Russian schools....

When Robert Lindsay chose to become a medical researcher in the early 1970s, he did not do it for the money. His field—the effect of hormones on bone—was a backwater. It was also a perfect opportunity for a young researcher to make his mark and, he hoped, help millions of people who suffered from the bone disease osteoporosis. As the body ages, sometimes bones lose the ability to rebuild themselves fast enough to keep pace with the normal process of deterioration, and the skeleton weakens....

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine nearly three weeks ago, the threat of nuclear weapon use has risen. This was made clear on Feb. 27, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country’s nuclear forces had been placed on “high alert,” the Associated Press reported. The current situation, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is a “nightmare scenario” brought to life. So, when Putin said his country’s nuclear weapons were on high alert, what did he mean?...

Nature rounds up reaction from researchers around the world to US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Jane Lubchenco, marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis and former administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Where to start? President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement shows a blatant disregard for the wishes of most Americans and business leaders, an irresponsible and callous dismissal of the health, safety, and economic well-being of Americans, a moral emptiness in ignoring impacts to the poorest people in the US and around the world, and gross ignorance about overwhelming scientific evidence....

Just three years ago patients suffering from hepatitis C faced some bleak treatment options. The main drug employed against this viral disease was only available via injection. It also came with serious side effects and—for too many patients—was not even effective. Then a transformative new pill called sofosbuvir hit the market. Better known as Sovaldi, the drug managed to recast hepatitis C from a hard-to-treat illness into an easily managed one that can be cured in just a few months....

James Casey recalls having a fondness for fireworks while growing up on the outskirts of small towns in rural Louisiana and North Carolina. That was before his 2011 deployment as a U.S. Army medic to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was steadily exposed to the trauma of modern warfare. After he returned to the U.S. a year later at age 19, the sound of fireworks and similar blasts of noise produced ghastly images of the lifeless Kandahar patients who proved beyond his medical aid, mangled bodies that at times covered his entire field of view....

A late-afternoon earthquake hit the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, about 900 miles (1,400 kilometers) from Tokyo, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) says. About an hour and a half later, the USGS also reports, an earthquake shook Peru, 450 miles (725 kilometers) southeast of Lima. Don Blakeman, an earthquake analyst at the USGS, told ScientificAmerican.com that the two Pacific Rim tremors are probably unrelated. “We don’t really see evidence for one triggering the other at those distances,” he explains....

An insect with paper-thin wings may carry much the same defense technology as some of the military’s heavy-duty warships. The finding that a species of tiger moth can jam the sonar of echolocating bats to avoid being eaten seems to be the “first conclusive evidence of sonar jamming in nature,” says Aaron Corcoran, a biology PhD student at Wake Forest University and the lead author of the paper reporting the discovery in today’s issue of Science....

Late in 2006 several events moved the U.S. and other countries closer to serious global negotiations to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. First, the signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, including the U.S., agreed to initiate negotiations on the framework to follow the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012. Second, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments that the Federal Government must control CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act....

The Trump administration on Tuesday announced it would name Ned Sharpless, the director of the National Cancer Institute, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration next month. The announcement came just a week after the current commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, announced he plans to resign in early April. Health secretary Alex Azar confirmed the announcement at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee. The news was first reported by Fox Business Network....

In theory, fracking can be done safely and cleanly. In practice, the firms that do the work of pumping chemically treated water into the ground to crack shale and free natural gas have made an environmental mess. The political backlash is now making it difficult for the Obama administration to sell its plan to move the nation toward greater use of cleaner energy. The administration’s ongoing woes were evident in August, when U....