Most of the warnings we hear about reducing the amount of salt in our diets have to do with reducing the risks related to high blood pressure. But a new study suggests another reason that some people may want to curtail their sodium intake: Eating salty foods may make you hungrier. I’ve always suspected on an intuitive level that salty foods might lead you to eat more than you otherwise would—simply because they can be tasty....
J. Alex Halderman is a computer scientist who has shown just how easy it is to hack an election. His research group at the University of Michigan examines how attackers can target weaknesses in voting machinery, infrastructure, polling places and registration rolls, among other features. These days he spends much of his time educating lawmakers, cybersecurity experts and the public on how to better secure their elections. In the U.S., there are still serious vulnerabilities heading into the 2020 presidential contest Given the cracks in the system, existing technological capabilities and the motivations of adversaries, Halderman has speculated here on potential cybersecurity disasters that could throw the 2020 election—and democracy itself—into question....
Three times now, Mark Jacobson has gone out on the same limb. In 2009 he and co-author Mark Delucchi published a cover story in Scientific American that showed how the entire world could get all of its energy—fuel as well as electricity—from wind, water and solar sources by 2030. No coal or oil, no nuclear or natural gas. The tale sounded infeasible—except that Jacobson, from Stanford University, and Delucchi, from the University of California, Davis, calculated just how many hydroelectric dams, wave-energy systems, wind turbines, solar power plants and rooftop photovoltaic installations the world would need to run itself completely on renewable energy....
Perchlorate seems to be everywhere these days. It is in a lot of water supplies, in fruits and vegetables, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and even on Mars. That is good and bad news for the Defense Department and military contractors battling accusations that they have polluted groundwater with perchlorate, a primary component of rocket fuel. The fact that perchlorate – a salt comprising a chlorine atom and four oxygen atoms – occurs naturally makes it difficult to draw simple conclusions about whether to regulate it or remove it from the drinking-water supplies of at least 35 states and the District of Columbia....
The human eye is a limited organ. The portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see is about 0.0035 percent of the total light in the universe. Without any aid, a normal human eye with 20/20 vision can clearly view up to only about five kilometers (about three miles) in the distance and can distinguish an object as small as about 0.1 millimeter. Just as spyglasses and telescopes extended our range of sight across Earth and into the cosmos, light microscopes allow us to peer at scales hundreds of times smaller than we would otherwise be able to detect....
NASA’s first-ever asteroid-sampling operation apparently went a little too well. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx probe snagged so much dirt and rock from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu on Tuesday (Oct. 20) that the spacecraft’s sampling mechanism didn’t close properly, allowing some of the collected material to escape into space, mission team members announced Friday (Oct. 23). OSIRIS-REx’s handlers now plan to stow the collected material in the probe’s return capsule as soon as possible, to minimize the material lost....
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria that have infected more than 100 people and that have been linked to pet store puppies appear to have spread at least in part because healthy dogs were given antibiotics—a decision that all but surely fostered antibiotic resistance. “This is shocking,” said Lance Price, head of George Washington University’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center. “This is an important study that’s shining a light on something that we need to spend more time on....
Repeatedly heading a soccer ball exacts a toll on an athlete’s brain. But this cost—measured by the volume of brain cells damaged—is five times greater for women than for men, new research suggests. The study provides a biological explanation for why women report more severe symptoms and longer recovery times than men following brain injuries in sports. Previously some researchers had dismissed female players’ complaints because there was little physiological evidence for the disparity, says Michael Lipton, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a co-author of the paper....
From Thirst for Power: Energy, Water and Human Survival, by Michael E. Webber. Copyright© 2016, by Michael E. Webber. Excerpted by permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved. One of the approaches to saving water and energy is to put the waste streams from water and energy systems to good use. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this goal. In particular, there are 30 to 40 billion gallons of treated effluent generated each day in the U....
CLIMATEWIRE | One study after another is coming to the same conclusion about the rapidly warming Arctic: It’s heating up a lot faster than earlier research suggested. The latest figures indicate that the planet’s northernmost region is warming a whopping four times faster than the Earth as a whole. That’s a significant update compared to earlier estimates. Scientists have known for years that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification....
The electric vehicle (EV) has become one of the great modern symbols of a world awakened to the profound challenges of unsustainability and climate change. So much so that we may well imagine that Deep Thought’s answer today to Life, the Universe and Everything might plausibly be “EV.” But, as Douglas Adams would surely have asked, if electric vehicles are the answer, what is the question? Let us imagine the “perfect” EV: solar powered, efficient, reliable and affordable....
What, exactly, makes music to the ears? Time will tell, according to a new study of five centuries’ worth of compositions. Using techniques derived from statistical mechanics—typically used to study large groups of particles—a team of physicists has mathematically measured the “time irreversibility” of more than 8,000 pieces of Western classical music. Published in Physical Review Research in July, their study quantifies what many listeners intuit: noise can sound the same played forwards or backward in time, but composed music sounds dramatically different in those two time directions....
Paris, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago. These cosmopolitan cities hardly conjure up the bucolic image of an ideal home for honeybees. But to millions of busy bees, they’re just that. Whereas large-scale commercial beekeepers are busy trucking hives from state to state to pollinate crops, city-dwellers are learning a thing or two about home-raised honey. Bees are being cultivated on roofs everywhere from the Paris Opera House to Chicago’s City Hall....
Nate Cira was working in a lab as an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin–Madison when he saw something unusual. He was working with a mixture of food coloring and water, placing droplets on an ultra-clean slide—and the droplets seemed to be breathing. They were dancing, too: multiple droplets would race around and crash into one another in complicated patterns. Now after three years of work as a graduate student at Stanford University, Cira and colleagues have derived the physics behind the strange behavior of those droplets....
At six simultaneous press conferences around the globe, astronomers in April announced they had accomplished the seemingly impossible: taking a picture of a black hole, a cosmic monster so voracious that light itself cannot escape its clutches. This historic feat, performed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—a planet-spanning network of radio observatories—required more than a decade of effort. The project’s name refers to a black hole’s most defining characteristic, an “event horizon” set by the object’s mass and spin beyond which no infalling material, including light, can ever return....
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, urologist and clinical epidemiologist Kari Tikkinen found his schedule full of cancelled surgeries, so he had some time to kill. “Do whatever you feel is most useful,” his boss at the University of Helsinki advised him. So Tikkinen threw himself into running clinical trials for COVID-19 therapies. From the start—before the world learnt of long COVID—Tikkinen saw a need to follow study participants for months after their recovery....
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have compiled national estimates of emergency room injuries resulting from outdoor recreation. Every year in the U.S. tens of millions of people participate in activities that range from boating and bobsledding to tobogganing and water-skiing. Predictably, teenagers get hurt the most, and legs and arms bear the brunt of the punishment. ESTIMATED ANNUAL INJURIES: 212,708...
When ecologist Jose Valdez and his team released 10,000 tadpoles to populate a new conservation site in Newcastle, Australia, they surrounded the area with a mesh fence to keep out hungry snakes, birds and mammals. But they hadn’t considered much smaller predators: diving beetles. The researchers soon began to witness the insects’ violent attacks, and three years later only a handful of frogs remained. In two recent papers, Valdez, a researcher at Denmark’s Aarhus University, and his colleagues documented the beetles’ devastating predation tactics and possible implications for conservation efforts....
Millions of pacemakers have been successfully implanted in the past half century to regulate erratic heartbeats, but the electrical leads, which connect the device to the heart, complicate the surgery and increase infection risks. The heart’s continuous and vigorous beating also creates strain on the leads and can damage them over time. Now researchers seek to go wireless. In a new pacemaker called the Wireless Cardiac Stimulation (WiCS) system, a wireless electrode replaces one or more leads....
In late February, the Biden administration made a major announcement that has the potential to affect the health of Americans for generations. Notably, it had nothing directly to do with COVID-19 or even health care reform. Instead, the news was that the recently reestablished “Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases” had released a preliminary report on the federal government’s best estimate of the cost to society of continuing to burn fossil fuels....
