NASA has confirmed that chunks of soil that vaporized on Mars last month after NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander dug them up really were water ice. The space agency announced yesterday that Phoenix detected water vapor in a soil sample fed Wednesday to its gas-analyzing instrument. NASA researchers said readings from the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) indicated that ice in the soil melted at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degree Celsius)....
A new study shows that brain circuitry makes some people more susceptible to becoming addicts. Researchers found that a pocket near the top of the brain stem may be key in determining whether someone is likely to engage in compulsive behavior or become hooked on drugs like cocaine, which is currently abused by an estimated two million Americans. The finding could help prevent addiction by predicting those predisposed to such behavior and could also lead to new ways to treat it....
Adapted from Why Irrational Politics Appeals: Understanding the Allure of Trump, edited by Mari Fitzduff, with permission from ABC–CLIO/Praeger. Copyright © 2017. Editor’s Note: This article was written before Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, which makes its insights all the more remarkable. It is easy and common to dismiss those whose political positions we disagree with as fools or knaves—or, more precisely, as fools led by knaves. Indeed, the inability of even the most experienced pundits to grasp the reality of Donald Trump’s political ascendency in this year’s Presidential race parallels an unprecedented assault on the candidate and his supporters, which went so far as to question their very grasp on reality....
He is one of the world’s best known and most successful entrepreneurs, with hundreds of patents to his name—including the Segway scooter. But you will never see Dean Kamen in a suit and tie: the eccentric inventor dresses almost exclusively in denim. He spent five years in college before dropping out, does not take vacations and has never married. Kamen presides (along with his Ministers of Ice Cream, Brunch and Nepotism) over the Connecticut island kingdom of North Dumpling, which has “seceded” from the U....
Polio, smallpox, hepatitis A and B are all serious viruses humanity learned to subdue with effective solutions. Even the flu, which can shift and mutate each year, has a vaccine. And yet, there’s no remedy for the lowly cold. That’s not for lack of trying, though. The hunt for a cure for the common cold began in the 1950s, shortly after scientists discovered the primary group of pathogens—known as rhinoviruses—behind the sniffles....
Dark chocolate might pack a double positive punch for our health—thanks to the microbes that live in our gut. New research suggests that beneficial bacteria that reside toward the end of our digestive tract ferment both the antioxidants and the fiber in cocoa. In their deep-gut alchemy these microbes create anti-inflammatory compounds that have been linked to the cardiovascular and other benefits from dark chocolate consumption. The findings were presented March 18 at the American Chemical Society meeting in Dallas....
A material inspired by chain mail changes its properties from flexible to hard when it is pressurized. The fabric, developed by Chiara Daraio and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, can become more than 25 times as stiff as its original state, the team reports in Nature. The researchers constructed it from hollow octahedral subunits that interlock but are able to move against one another. Its special properties are based on a process known as “jamming....
Black holes may not be bald after all. In a challenge to traditional models of the universe’s gravitational monsters, new research suggests black holes could be quite “hairy,” with more tangled features than previously believed. The gravitational attraction of black holes is so strong that even light cannot escape their pull, making these super-dense objects invisible to outside observers and almost indistinguishable from one another. “The accepted picture is that black holes are very simple objects that can be fully characterized by only 3 quantities: their mass, their angular momentum (how fast they spin) and their electric charge,” Thomas Sotiriou, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste, told SPACE....
More than five and a half years into the Iraq War, the condition of archaeological sites and antiquities in Iraq remains a frustrating and contentious topic among archaeologists and art historians. Two surveys in the past year—one in northern Iraq in May, the other in the south in June—have persuaded some that the ongoing damage is far less extensive than most observers had believed. Yet with more than 10,000 registered sites and numerous other mounds of earth that may still conceal uncatalogued treasures from the “cradle of civilization,” many archaeologists question whether the surveyed sites are representative of conditions elsewhere....
Overeating has been linked to a litany of health problems—diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke, to name a few. Memory loss, dementia and even Alzheimer’s may someday be added to that list, according to the preliminary findings of a study on aging conducted by the Mayo Clinic. Mayo researchers caution against reading too much into their work thus far correlating caloric intake in the elderly with the onset of mild cognitive impairment (MCI)—the stage between normal age-related memory loss and early Alzheimer’s disease....
People generally spend time with others who are like them, making it easy for data scientists to infer individuals’ attitudes or personality attributes by analyzing their online and real-world social networks. Researchers call this tendency to seek out like-minded people “homophily.” Think of the old adage “birds of a feather flock together,” says Johan Ugander, a management science and engineering researcher at Stanford University, who studies this topic. But in a surprising twist, Ugander and his graduate student Kristen M....
When a Malaysia Airlines flight vanished from the skies in 2014, initial reports characterized the massive undersea search area as mostly flat. But now the first scientific study to emerge from the hunt has revealed a little-explored region of great topographic complexity in the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area includes the point at which the Indian subcontinent and the Australian and Antarctic continents separated during the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana....
Elite-level performance can leave us awestruck. This summer, in Rio, Simone Biles appeared to defy gravity in her gymnastics routines, and Michelle Carter seemed to harness super-human strength to win gold in the shot put. Michael Phelps, meanwhile, collected 5 gold medals, bringing his career total to 23. In everyday conversation, we say that elite performers like Biles, Carter, and Phelps must be “naturals” who possess a “gift” that “can’t be taught....
The blockbuster film Jaws has been a perennial favorite here on Martha’s Vineyard since its release 45 years ago. The epic 1975 feature film, shot on the Vineyard in iconic places like the picturesque fishing village of Menemsha, pits a fictional seaside tourist town called Amity against a villainous great white shark whose fearsome triangular teeth—300 of them—bite and kill unsuspecting townspeople and summer visitors enjoying the local Atlantic Ocean waters....
By Ron Cowen of Nature magazineWhen magnetic fields of opposite polarity collide and merge, they unleash a torrent of energy. The process, known as magnetic reconnection, can cause flares on the Sun and magnetic storms and shimmering auroras on magnetized planets with substantial atmospheres, such as Earth, Jupiter and Saturn.Now scientists have discovered that magnetic reconnection also happens on Venus, a planet with no intrinsic magnetic field. The finding, reported today in Science, suggests that magnetic reconnection may generate auroras on Venus, and could have contributed to the loss of a thick, water-rich atmosphere that scientists believe surrounded the planet during its early history, some 4 billion years ago....
A massive geomagnetic storm stunned Quebec in 1989, triggering blackouts across the province. The storm—a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field caused by a blast of charged particles from the sun—created electric currents that raced through underground power lines and overloaded the grid. Now new research suggests the composition of rock in specific regions could influence the risks from such “superstorms,” which occur about once a century. Geomagnetic storms induce a local electric field in the ground, producing current....
NO MIND BOOST FROM MUSIC? In “Brain-Changing Games,” writer Lydia Denworth stated, “With practice, a violinist can play a Mozart string concerto beautifully, but that will not make her better at much else.” Is she not aware that there are more studies on the benefits of learning musical instruments and art on the mind than on the benefits of video games? Gabriel Newman via e-mail DENWORTH RESPONDS: Although there have been studies showing transfer from music, nearly all of them have been called into question in recent years....
AUSTRALIA An “innovation arms race” may be brewing between humans and trash-can-raiding cockatoos in Sydney’s suburbs. Humans keep trying new defenses, such as placing bricks or rubber snakes on their bin lids, but the birds continue developing strategies to open them. BRAZIL Fossilized teeth revealed Brasilodon, a rodentlike animal that lived 225 million years ago, as the oldest known mammal. Scant fossil evidence had made the animal hard to classify, but new analysis suggests that its teeth are mammalian rather than reptilian....
Of the more than 100 known cancers, glioblastoma, which occurs in the brain and spinal cord, is one of the most difficult to treat. Complete removal by surgery is impossible, while the most commonly used treatments for glioblastoma — radiation therapy and the chemotherapy drug temozolomide — are not very effective over the long term. Luis F. Parada is a developmental biologist and the Director of the Brain Tumor Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center....
Nanoparticles are tantalizing construction blocks for researchers, capable of displaying properties of both tiny atoms and far bulkier conventional materials. They generally behave only like balls, however, which makes it hard to assemble them into solid structures other than those resembling displays of oranges in a grocery store. Now researchers have taken big steps in creating and using nanostructures that have eluded manipulation in the past. In the January 19 Science, materials scientist Francesco Stellacci of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues revealed a way to make nanoparticles act like links in a chain, capable of hooking together into strings of beads....
