Posts

A 24-year-old man who tested positive for Ebola virus disease caused by Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV) was the first confirmed case in Uganda’s ongoing Ebola outbreak, but health authorities believe he was probably not the initial, or index, case. As of October 9, confirmed cases totaled 48, with 17 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health Uganda. But those numbers will likely continue to rise. Uganda’s health authorities officially declared the outbreak on September 20....

An international consortium of researchers has reported that an Ebola vaccine appears to provide volunteers protection against the virus two years after they were injected—encouraging findings both for the public health community and the vaccine’s manufacturer. An earlier study, conducted in Guinea near the end of the devastating West African Ebola outbreak, showed the vaccine from Merck, which is given in a single shot, rapidly generated protection against the virus. But how long that protection lasts remained an open question....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Government officials continue to seek technology companies’ help fighting terrorism and crime. But the most commonly proposed solution would severely limit regular people’s ability to communicate securely online. And it ignores the fact that governments have other ways to keep an electronic eye on targets of investigations. In June, government intelligence officials from the Five Eyes Alliance nations held a meeting in Ottawa, Canada, to talk about how to convince tech companies to “thwart the encryption of terrorist messaging....

Back in 1997 all the friends from that eponymous television show trekked to the beach, only to witness a jellyfish sting Monica. In this episode, Joey remembered seeing a documentary that advised urinating on the sting to ease the pain. Monica agreed to try the treatment and it worked. Unfortunately, in the real world treating a jellyfish sting by urinating on it may actually cause someone in Monica’s situation even more pain, rather than relief....

“A new moment for mankind.” That was how Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, described his country’s biofuel boom in March 2007. Back then, Brazil was the poster child of ethanol fuel, its output second only to that of the United States. Fermenting the sugars in the country’s abundant sugar cane produced a motor fuel that lowered carbon dioxide emissions, and many saw Brazil as a model for how the world could shed its addiction to oil, creating jobs along the way....

Mark Kelly has won a seat in the U.S. Senate, making him only the fourth NASA astronaut to be elected to Congress. Kelly, who launched four times into space before pursuing a career in politics, was successful in his bid to represent the state of Arizona in the U.S. Senate. Kelly, a Democrat, ran against incumbent Martha McSally, a Republican and former U.S. Air Force combat pilot. The special election was held to complete the six-year term of Senator John McCain, who died in 2018 (McSally was temporarily appointed by Arizona’s governor after McCain’s death)....

One weekend about 10 years ago, when she was a nurse at a hospital in Cologne, Bettina Sorger volunteered to help the intensive care unit staff. One of her patients was still recovering from anesthesia after a surgery in which doctors removed a brain tumor. He was not talking, and he did not seem to move much. While Sorger was making his bed, the man reached up and put his hands around her neck....

The quest for a universal flu vaccine, one that provides long-lasting protection from multiple types of influenza, even those that might cause a pandemic, has moved a step closer. For the first time, scientists have shown that targeting a specific portion of the flu virus that varies relatively little from strain to strain offers protection in humans. The study was published in the June 3 issue of Nature Medicine. “If you have a universal flu vaccine you would take off the table the need to have to vaccinate persons every single year, and change the vaccine every year,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)....

The devastating string of tornadoes, droughts, wildfires and floods that hit the United States this spring marks 2011 as one of the most extreme years on record, according to a new federal analysis. Just shy of the halfway mark, 2011 has seen eight $1-billion-plus disasters, with total damages from wild weather at more than $32 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Agency officials said that total could grow significantly, since they expect this year’s North Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1, will be an active one....

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday warned that contaminated medical devices used in open-heart surgeries could be to blame for a rash of infections in patients in the United States and Europe. Data published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicate that at least 11 patients in the US were infected with bacteria from a heater-cooler device that maintains patients’ internal temperatures during surgery. Previous reports indicated that six people in Switzerland were infected, and dozens of Americans have come forward with symptoms....

Toward the end of his life, in an essay entitled “Topic of Cancer” in 2010 in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens answered his own rhetorical query poignantly: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” The cosmos has never been particularly loquacious with its intentions, often requiring Brobdingnagian-sized ventures—from particle accelerators and space telescopes to genome and connectome projects—to tease out its deepest secrets....

Mark Pandori was worried. It was 2008, and he had just read the latest in a string of reports from Japan. The articles all described patients infected with a particular strain of gonorrhea that was less susceptible than usual to an important class of antibiotics. Pandori, director of the laboratory at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, knew that gonorrhea had become resistant to other antibiotics in past decades. Each time, the resistance seemed to arise in Asia and spread to California....

The promise of robotic exoskeletons has long offered the hope that motorized suits could one day restore movement to the disabled or grant soldiers and workers superhuman strength. But despite decades of hype, the fabled “exosuit” remains largely the stuff of Iron Man and science fiction, with most real-life prototypes quietly flopping or struggling to find a market. But the concept refuses to fade. Instead, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere are rethinking the design process, literally from the ground up....

By Curtis Skinner Jan 19 (Reuters) - A small moth with a yellowish-white coif of scales has been named after U.S. President-edit Donald Trump, in honor of the former reality TV show host and real estate magnate’s signature hairdo. The new species, dubbed Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, lives in a habitat that spans southern California and Mexico’s Baja California and was named by evolutionary biologist Vazrick Nazari in an article published in the scientific journal ZooKeys....

EDGEWATER, Md.—In a forest dense with maple, beech and poplar trees just a few miles from the Chesapeake Bay, researchers are simulating a flood of the future. Using a web of PVC pipes and rubber hoses, they inundate sections of woodland half the size of a football field to study how the trees might respond to climate change and its effects—namely rising seas and torrential downpours. It’s a local experiment, but the researchers said they hope to build a global model that will help scientists understand what events lead to the earliest stages of tree stress and when forests near coasts start converting to wetlands....

When a football player clocks an opponent on the field, it often does not look so bad—until we see it in slow motion. Suddenly, a clean, fair tackle becomes a dirty play, premeditated to maim (as any bar full of indignant fans will loudly confirm). But why? A study published last August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that slow motion leads us to believe that the people involved were acting with greater intent....

HER FINALIST YEAR: 1972 HER FINALIST PROJECT: Figuring out what an odd perfect number would look like What led to the project: As a student at the Bronx High School of Science, Susan Landau excelled at math. Born to immigrant parents who never went to college, Landau was already taking linear algebra at Lehman College when she was a high school senior. When it came time to choose a project for the annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search, Landau decided to work on the number theory problem of what an odd perfect number would have to look like....

From building-blocking bollards to millimeter-wave scanners, the September 11 terrorist attacks have led to significant changes in security techniques and technology worldwide over the past decade to discourage future attacks and to avoid being surprised again. To meet these goals, law enforcement and counterterrorism operations worldwide have come to rely heavily on surveillance of public spaces. Nowhere is surveillance more pervasive in the U.S. than Lower Manhattan, home to such landmarks as the New York Stock Exchange, the World Financial Center and, of course, Ground Zero, where the new One World Trade Center Tower is under construction....

Something very old, very powerful and very special has been unleashed on Earth. Humans are strange. For a global species, we’re not particularly genetically diverse, thanks in part to how our ancient roaming explorations caused “founder effects” and “bottleneck events” that restricted our ancestral gene pool. We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet)....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you spend a lot of time reading about nutrition (which I do), it starts to feel as if we’re all in some sort of contest to see who can eat the most antioxidants. Those who are interested in (dare I say, obsessed with?) antioxidant nutrition will often talk about a food’s ORAC value....