Posts

I still vividly remember the day, 14 years ago, when a tall and painfully shy sixth grade student named Lisa sat down at my kitchen table for her first math lesson with me. Lisa’s principal had recommended her for a free after-school tutoring program I had started in my apartment with several friends. Although I had asked the principal for students struggling in math, I was not prepared for Lisa. I had planned to boost Lisa’s confidence by teaching her to add fractions....

Our two-legged life may have its roots in the trees. Researchers have witnessed wild orangutans standing straight-legged on slender branches as they grab for fruit, suggesting that bipedalism, or upright walking, may have arisen in the tree-dwelling ancestor of apes and humans and passed down to us—proving, if true, that the biped doesn’t fall far from the tree. The evidence comes from a yearlong field study of Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park....

The spread of a new strain of influenza A H1N1 virus across 50 countries worldwide since last month has helped remind the medical community that it needs to adapt to a virus that continuously reinvents itself. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (R.P.I.) in Troy, N.Y., say they are developing chemical compounds that could be used to create an antiviral weapon that would not only disrupt the work of the neuraminidase proteins (the “N” in H1N1), which allow the virus to escape an infected cell and infect healthy new cells, but also the hemagglutinin proteins (the “H” in H1N1), which bind to sialic acid on the healthy cell’s surface, helping the virus penetrate the cell....

Every object we see is a mirror to some extent. The glassy surface of a lake on a windless day is a perfect mirror when it reflects all light faithfully without scatter. But a red strawberry, too, is a mirror, though an imperfect one. The usual reason strawberries appear red is that they reflect reddish and absorb bluish wavelengths. The problem is, sometimes the light that falls on a strawberry does not have any red at all....

Early cancer detection can save lives, yet, cancer is predicted to become the world’s number one killer because we are still diagnosing most cancers too late. In the United States, we currently screen for only five types of common cancers. The rest are only identified when signs or symptoms appear, often signifying advanced disease when outcomes are poor. We estimate that these five single cancer screening tests collectively detect only 16 percent of the 1....

When I was a 14-year-old in a suburb of Dublin, we were at the height of “the Troubles.” During this period of civil unrest, our school regularly took in girls from Northern Ireland to get them away from the bomb blasts and shootings in Belfast, some two hours’ drive across the border. One of these girls was named Sandra, and she had been at our school for a couple of weeks when one day the two of us decided to walk home for lunch....

An international team of experts reported today that evidence linking hormone-mimicking chemicals to human health problems has grown stronger over the past decade, becoming a “global threat” that should be addressed. The report is a joint effort by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to give policymakers the latest information on chemicals that alter the hormones of people and wildlife. Much has changed since 2002 when WHO and the UN released a report that called the evidence linking endocrine-disrupting chemicals to human health impacts “weak....

On April 30, 2016, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya set fire to the country’s stockpile of confiscated elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn. It was the largest event of its kind—105 tons of ivory worth about $100 million and 1.3 tons of horn worth $67 million went up in flames. In a way, the burn was a funeral for the more than 6,000 elephants and over 300 rhinoceroses that were poached for the contraband....

My alarm woke me early. I was in a hotel room in London, near the headquarters of the BBC. I hadn’t slept well. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I saw someone pale and slightly terrified. I had reason to feel nervous. In just over an hour I would be speaking live to an audience of millions on the BBC’s flagship radio discussion program, Start the Week. As I gazed into the mirror, I was aware that I was talking, silently, in my head....

To fight a respiratory infection, the body needs a two-pronged attack. First, it sends immune cells to the scene to destroy the pathogen. Then the defense system must keep those first responders from spiraling out of control. If this attempt at “peacekeeping” fails, a run-of-the-mill fever and cough can escalate to a life-threatening illness—which happened to the tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients who have succumbed to the global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus....

Farid Benyahia wants to solve two environmental problems at once: excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and excess salt in the Persian Gulf (aka the Arabian Gulf). Oil and natural gas drive the region’s booming economies—hence the excess CO2—and desalination supplies the vast majority of drinking water, a process that creates concentrated brine waste that is usually dumped back into the gulf. Benyahia, a chemical engineer at Qatar University, thinks he may have hit on a neatly efficient way to address the problem....

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Doc. I can barely keep my eyes open as it is, and you want me to pull an all-nighter?” I smiled. “Yes, exactly that. Maybe even two or three.” It started out benignly enough. Jodi (not the patient’s real name) had been feeling more stressed between meeting the growing demands of her high-stakes job in business management and shouldering more chores while her husband was away on business trips....

A few inches separate turgid floodwater from everything Mona Houser owns. Some rooms in her trailer already dip below the water, and her family’s scared to flush the toilet for fear of what might come back up. She has no insurance and feels like nobody’s coming to help. “Us poor people, we’re screwed,” she said. The severity of Hurricane Florence’s destruction caught some residents here by surprise, and they said local officials are overwhelmed, too....

Only children always want to get their way, can’t share and are generally selfish—or so the long-held prejudice goes. According to recent research, however, these claims are overstated. So where did these biases come from? In A Study of Peculiar and Exceptional Children, published in the 19th century, E. W. Bohannon from Clark University in Massachusetts detailed the results of a questionnaire—a new form of data collection at the time—filled out by 200 test subjects....

New York City will be increasingly susceptible to hurricane-triggered blackouts in coming decades, despite the mitigation efforts put into action since Superstorm Sandy slammed into the East Coast two years ago, a new study has found. While the direct impacts of hurricanes, such as loss of life, flooding, slowed or lost wages and infrastructure damage, are punishing to cities recovering from a storm, electrical blackouts represent a grave concern, as well....

The human brain is an amazing computing machine. Weighing only three pounds or so, it can process information a thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer, store a thousand times more information than a powerful laptop, and do it all using no more energy than a 20-watt lightbulb. Researchers are trying to replicate this success using soft, flexible organic materials that can operate like biological neurons and someday might even be able to interconnect with them....

By Chelsea Wald of Nature magazine Vienna, Austria—The leading bird in a European project to develop a method to save a rare species of ibis was killed last weekend by illegal hunters in Italy. Goja, a northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita), was on her way to wintering grounds in Tuscany when she was shot down. The northern bald ibis has been extinct in the wild in Europe for nearly 400 years and is critically endangered in North Africa and the Middle East....

Engineers have long dreamed of building an aircraft that could soar from a runway to outer space and then back again–the way Luke Skywalker’s X-wing fighter does in the Star Wars movies. But one thing has stood in their way: jet engines need oxygen to burn fuel, and the upper atmosphere does not have enough of it to sustain combustion. So flying to space requires rocket propulsion, for which both fuel and oxidizer are carried inside the vehicle....

By Alison Abbott of Nature magazinePrader-Willi syndrome. Fabry renal disease. Spinocerebellar ataxia. Few people have heard of these and the other ‘rare diseases’, some of which affect only hundreds of patients worldwide. Drug companies searching for the next blockbuster pay them little attention. But the diseases are usually incurable – and there are thousands of them.This week, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the European Commission launch a joint assault on these conditions, whose small numbers of patients make it difficult to test new treatments and develop diagnostic methods....

The scientific process, as I have often said, is an engine of human prosperity. For centuries it has been a driving force behind the advances in knowledge and well-being that we’ve enjoyed as a species. But none of us can benefit from that evidence-based engine if we don’t first communicate well with one another. We need to be able to share new ideas and the products of research. The recipients need to be able to trust that the information is true and to understand an innovation’s possible advantages or drawbacks so that we can make sound decisions as a society about what to do with it....