On a crisp fall New England day during my junior year of college, I was walking past a subway entrance when a math problem caught my eye. A man was standing near a few brainteasers he had scribbled on the wall, one of which asked for the construction, with an imaginary straightedge and compass, of a cube with a volume twice that of a different, given cube. This stopped me in my tracks....
A gold-based catalyst over 30 years in the making is set to help fight the harm China’s polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic industry is causing the country’s environment. The technology’s development was originally initiated in 1982 by Graham Hutchings, now at Cardiff University, UK, to replace a toxic mercury compound used in making vinyl chloride monomer (VCM). Having established a production unit in Shanghai in 2015, UK catalyst vendor Johnson Matthey is ‘in advanced negotiations’ to supply the gold material into commercial operations....
Jet lag is a pain. Besides the inconvenience and frustration of traveling more than a few time zones, jet lag likely causes billions of dollars in economic losses. The most effective treatment, according to much research, is structured exposure to light, although the drug melatonin may also sometimes be helpful at bedtime. Both approaches have been used for more than 20 years, and during that time no viable new interventions have appeared....
In 2015 researchers caused a sensation when they unveiled more than 1,500 human fossils representing some 15 individuals, male and female, young and old, discovered in South Africa. It was an almost unimaginable bonanza, one of the richest assemblages of human fossils ever found, recovered from a chamber deep inside an underground cave system near Johannesburg called Rising Star. From it, the team was able to deduce the bones belonged to a new species, Homo naledi, which had a curious mix of primitive traits, such as a tiny brain, and modern features, including long legs....
WASHINGTON — A House subcommittee’s draft 2018 spending plan would prohibit federal funds from being spent on research that uses fetal tissue, a symbolic win for conservatives who are also taking aim at money for family planning and public health programs around the country. The proposal from the House Appropriations health subcommittee is unlikely to be enacted, and the restriction would impact a tiny portion of the National Institutes of Health’s roughly $33 billion budget — in 2016, the agency spent roughly $103 million on research involving fetal tissue....
Chris Brunet points to the stumps of dead trees throughout his yard. “This whole place looked completely different when I was growing up,” he says. “There’s not much left now.” Brunet’s house on Isle de Jean Charles, a shrinking sliver of an island 80 miles southwest of New Orleans, was surrounded by towering oaks before deadly saltwater encroached on the land. Today his trees—and most of his neighbors—are gone. Brunet, age 55, is a member of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, an Indigenous tribe that has lived on the island for more than two centuries....
Hoarded at the heart of an Arctic mountain, within an archipelago of snow: an ark of seeds. Cocooned against soil, nuclear bodies hunker and wait for some future hungerscape. A gathering of crops, varied faces folded into foil, shuttered from the earth. Lentil, dark and round and pebble-smooth. Barley’s slender husk of an eye. Each wrinkled chickpea the embryonic head of a bird. Sister seeds, in Aleppo, shelter abandoned in the rubble of war....
Key concepts Solid Fluid Viscosity Non-Newtonian fluid Introduction A rabbit is fluffy, mud is squishy, and a balloon is stretchy. What substances can be fluffy, squishy and stretchy at the same time, and are so much fun to play with? Silly Putty, Gak and slime! These substances can be confusing, too. Most substances become harder when cooled and flow much better as they warm up. Think of how honey slowly oozes from the bottle on a cold day and rushes out on a hot day....
By Eugenie Samuel ReichString theory, which some physicists hope may be able to unify gravity and quantum mechanics, may have found a real-world application. A type of black hole predicted by string theory may help to explain the properties of a mysterious class of materials called ‘strange metals’.The electrical resistance of strange metals increases linearly with temperature rather than with the square of the temperature as in normal metals. They also have other excitations of energy that can be thought of as especially short-lived particles....
As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye. That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr....
High economic inequality negatively impacts nearly every aspect of human well-being—as well as the health of the biosphere. Contrary to intuition, it affects the wealthy and the middle classes, not just the poor. Here several leading researchers discuss these wide-ranging effects. Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz explains the origins of U.S. inequality and suggests measures to alleviate it. Political scientist Virginia Eubanks describes how digital systems often hurt, rather than help, the most vulnerable members of society....
A program that grades UK universities on gender equality in science is going global. Versions of the rating scheme have started up in the past two years in Australia and Ireland, and a small-scale pilot begins next month in the United States. The British program, Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network), launched at ten universities in 2005 and has since spread to more than 140 UK institutions. The voluntary scheme relies on universities supplying self-assessments to the Equality Challenge Unit, a non-profit organization that judges the institutions on their inclusiveness and equality in hiring, promoting and retaining female staff....
(Reuters) - The U.S. electric industry knew as far back as 1968 that burning fossil fuels might cause global warming, but cast doubt on the science of climate change and ramped up coal use for decades afterward, an environmental watchdog group said on Tuesday. The California-based Energy and Policy Institute, which opposes fossil fuels, cited documents it obtained. It said its research mirrors reporting conducted by InsideClimate News about Exxon Mobil’s early understanding of climate change, which triggered an investigation by New York’s Attorney General....
Recently, NASA has been working to erase all hints of gender bias lingering from previous generations. The agency even converted the phrase “manned mission” to “crewed mission,” and stood by the change for the recent SpaceX launch, despite the fact that both members of the crew possessed their very own Y chromosomes. Casual English speech is riddled with gender-specific terms like “manned” that we now use without deliberate bias or sexism but that sometimes carry inadvertent shadows of past decades’ antiquated stereotypes....
For most fluids, an increase in pressure should lead to a burst of speed, like squeezing ketchup from a tube. But when flowing through porous materials such as soil or sedimentary rock, certain liquids slow down under pressure. Pinpointing the cause of this slowing would benefit industries such as environmental clean-up and oil extraction, where pumping one liquid into the ground forces another out; however, such movement is challenging to observe directly....
From computers to credit cards to cloud servers, today’s technology relies on magnets to hold encoded data in place on a storage device. But a magnet’s size limits storage capacity; even a paper-thin magnet takes up space that could be better used for encoding information. Now, for a study published in Nature Communications, researchers have engineered a magnet among the world’s thinnest—a flexible sheet of zinc oxide and cobalt just one atom thick....
For the past 50 years or so, chicken eggs have played a vital role in producing the flu vaccine. Now scientists report another application for the breakfast staple: manufacturing fully functional human monoclonal antibodies, molecules that mimic the immune system to fight specific invaders. Among the cells in the immune system’s arsenal are the so-called B lymphocytes, each of which makes a specific antibody. By cloning a single B lymphocyte, researchers can mass produce identical antibody molecules that will attack a single, specific target....
The debate over whether Earth’s climate is changing and if humanity is responsible for that change closed in Paris on February 2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its summary for policymakers—a summation of the salient science in its much longer report due in May—in which it said that climate change is “unequivocal” and estimated the chances of humans being behind it at 90 percent, or “very likely.”...
Psi, or the paranormal, denotes anomalous psychological effects that are currently unexplained by normal causes. Historically such phenomena eventually are either accounted for by normal means, or else they disappear under controlled conditions. But now renowned psychologist Daryl J. Bem claims experimental proof of precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) “of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process,” as he wrote recently in “Feeling the Future” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology....
Increasingly, however, arguments are stirring over the reliability of fMRI findings. This debate, at once technical and philosophical, concerns both fMRI’s accuracy, because it measures neuronal activity indirectly by detecting associated increases in blood flow, and its legitimacy in linking complex mental functions to particular brain regions. Critics feel that fMRI overlooks the networked or distributed nature of the brain’s workings, emphasizing localized activity when it is the communication among regions that is most critical to mental function....
