Posts

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration on Monday announced new fuel and automobile rules to cut soot, smog and toxic emissions, which it says will reduce asthma and heart attacks in the United States. The so-called Tier 3 rules unveiled by the Environmental Protection Agency have been under development since President Barack Obama issued a memorandum instructing the agency to develop them in 2010. The rules, the third tier in a series of standards, will cut gasoline sulfur levels by more than 60 percent and should also reduce tailpipe and evaporative emissions from cars, light and medium-duty trucks and some heavy-duty vehicles....

Edited by Dava Sobel That we need the sky to tell us we don’t matter is why, before totality, we are so giddy and akimbo. In its random masking, how shall the Sun disclose its other light? (We’ve not seen before.) And strange air, dark and gray and silver and soft and very precise, emerges to pool around every pore and shiver of skin. Beneath our breathy hollers, a river runs dark, sprays of pebble -leaping riffles instantly aloft: Corona crowns the south: Hole edged with brimming sprays of light!...

FLU SECURITY In “A Man-made Contagion,” by Jeneen Interlandi [Advances], Michael T. Osterholm of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity argues, regarding studies creating mutations that would allow the H5N1 virus to readily spread between humans, that “physicists have been doing … classified work for 70 years. We have to find a way to do the same in the health sciences, without compromising our safety and security.” Classified physics work has put the future of our species in question, so not “compromising our safety and security” would require more stringent controls in the health sciences than were applied in the physical ones....

The death toll from Monday’s 8.7 on the Richter scale earthquake near Indonesia reached 1,000 on Wednesday as additional tremors measuring up to 6.4 continued to shake the region, demonstrating the uncertainty and unpredictability of geologic activity. Indeed, scientists are still uncovering details about the devastating earthquake that triggered the deadly tsunami in the vicinity in December. A new analysis published today in the journal Nature indicates that it released more than twice as much energy as previously believed....

Radar and its laser counterpart lidar can detect out-of-sight objects. But fog, rain, smoke and dust throw these tools off by scattering light and radio waves. Now Milad Akhlaghi and Aristide Dogariu, optics researchers at the University of Central Florida, have taken advantage of this property to track a moving object hidden by a simulated haze. By analyzing subtle changes an object creates in a pattern of scattered light, the researchers can instantly obtain the object’s direction and speed....

Early specialization—encouraging kids to focus on mastering a single activity from a very early age—is a striking trend in today’s culture. Replacing Tiger Woods, the current poster child for this approach to training is the skier Mikaela Shiffrin, winner of the Olympic gold medal in the giant slalom earlier this month. Reading books such as Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, which argues that the idea of natural-born talent is a myth, Shiffrin’s parents developed a plan to gradually improve her skill....

Our immune system must recognize a microbe as potentially dangerous before it can react to it as a threat. To help do so, cells use special pattern-recognition receptors that broadly identify classes of microbes based on certain molecular structures. One of these signature structures is lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a long chain of sugars anchored to the cell membranes of numerous bacteria types. Many researchers assumed our bodies could recognize a version of LPS produced by any microbe, except those of a few pathogens that specifically evolved to evade immune detection....

NASA’s top science official, Alan Stern, abruptly resigned his post yesterday as associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. The announcement came two days after NASA Administrator Michael Griffin overturned a directorate budget adjustment that might have meant shutting down one of the twin rovers currently operating on Mars. Stern had held the post just shy of a year but was credited with working to expand the agency’s scientific program despite flat budgets and an increasing focus on manned missions....

In 2009 biological oceanographer Victor Smetacek tried to sink our global warming problem in the sea. The researcher, his scientific team and the crew of the ship RV Polarstern sailed to the Southern Ocean and poured a solution of iron into a small eddy. Iron, a nutrient, triggered a phytoplankton bloom, and the tiny photosynthesizers sucked carbon dioxide from the sky as they grew. When the plankton died, they drifted like snow to the bottom of the ocean, entombing CO2 in their tiny corpses....

The mantra issued by the guides was as clear as the silty Colorado River was opaque: “If you’re hot, you’re stupid.” And so I spent most of my waking hours on and along the river dipping into the 50 degrees Fahrenheit water to counter the 100 degrees F air temperature. I was not hot, but I sure was soaked. Welcome back for the second part of my tale of the July boat trip through the Grand Canyon with the NCSE, the National Center for Science Education—a trip intelligently designed to include discussions of how scientists see the canyon’s formations as billions of years of history written in rock versus how Young Earth creationists see the canyon as evidence for Noah’s flood a week ago Thursday....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Fingerprints have provided key evidence in countless cases of serious crime. But there are still some situations in which it can be difficult or impossible to recover fingerprints and this can cause a headache for forensic investigators. In seeking a solution to this problem, researchers like myself have started to realise that a fingerprint can be used for a lot more than just its unique ridge pattern....

For the girl’s father, the video—A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work—is evidence of a generational transition. In an accompanying description, he writes, “Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives”—that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age, surrounded not only by paper books and magazines but also by smartphones, Kindles and iPads. Whether or not his daughter truly expected the magazines to behave like an iPad, the video brings into focus a question that is relevant to far more than the youngest among us: How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?...

The federal government needs a tailor. At least, that’s how John Balbus sees it. As the interim director of the first-ever Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Health and Human Services, Balbus says the federal government already has many of the pieces it needs to help communities become more resilient to climate change. It also has what it needs to support communities that have been marginalized for too long and seen their health suffer as a result....

Even after being hospitalized for an entire week, my friend Aidan never got an answer to a major question: Who is my doctor? As a healthy 26-year-old, he didn’t know much about the hospital—a place that I work every day. He learned a lot after a lung infection forced him into the infirmary for seven long nights. Aidan now knows the excruciating pain of having plastic hoses inserted into the chest to drain pus from around the lungs; the definition of an empyema (which he still refers to as his lung empanadas); the violation of dignity that occurs when physicians probe into your personal life; how disorienting and lonely the hospital can be....

When we spin—on an amusement park ride or the dance floor—we often become disoriented, even dizzy. So how do professional athletes, particularly figure skaters who spin at incredible speeds, avoid losing their balance? The short answer is training, but to really grasp why figure skaters can twirl without getting dizzy requires an understanding of the vestibular system, the apparatus in our inner ear that helps to keep us upright. This system contains special sensory nerve cells that can detect the speed and direction at which our head moves....

Printing batteries is the future of sustainable energy, according to engineers at PARC, the renowned California-based research and development company owned by Xerox. They recently debuted a cost-saving manufacturing process that could someday squeeze out all the parts of a battery at once—like striped toothpaste from the tube. Today building a battery requires multiple steps. First, two separate machines fabricate electrodes by spreading pastelike layers of energy-storing materials on sheets of metal....

November 1963 Vision in the Brain “In most parts of the nervous system the anatomy is too intricate to reveal much about function. One way to circumvent this difficulty is to record impulses with microelectrodes in anesthetized animals, first from the fibers coming into a structure of neurons and then from the neurons themselves or from the fibers they send onward. Comparison of the behavior of incoming and outgoing fibers provides a basis for learning what the structure does....

If the New York Times or the Las Vegas Review-Journal or Scientific American publishes a false statement that hurts someone’s reputation, that person can sue the publication. If such defamation appears on Facebook or Twitter, however, they can’t. The reason: Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act. Signed into law in 1996, it states that online platforms—a category that includes enormously rich and powerful tech companies such as Facebook and Google, as well as smaller and less influential blog networks, forums and social media start-ups—are not considered “publishers....

For much of its history, the field of neuropsychology strived to understand what was wrong with the human species’ left-handed minority. This effort was eventually abandoned after two key insights emerged. First, experts realized that handedness has a genetic basis, and any attempts to change it can have deleterious developmental consequences. Second, we learned that left-handers have remained a stable 10 to 15 percent of the human population for thousands of years: if lefties were truly weaker in some way, their numbers would have dwindled over time....

On February 16, President Barack Obama announced loan guarantees totaling more than $8 billion for two new light-water reactors in Georgia, part of an initiative to restart the nuclear power industry in the U.S. Just three weeks earlier, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu had announced the formation of a Blue-Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to resolve what to do with the waste produced by those future reactors—as well as the 2,000 metric tons a year produced by the 104 reactors currently in operation in the U....