Experts say that the steps you should take to shield yourself from swine flu are not much different than those you might take to ward off seasonal flu. Don’t touch your face Above all, keep your hands away from your eyes, mouth and nose, all of which serve as pathways for the virus to enter your respiratory tract, says Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor....
Archaeologists have long wondered exactly how the ancient Egyptians constructed the world’s biggest pyramid, the Great Pyramid. Now, they may have discovered the system used to haul massive stone blocks into place some 4,500 years ago. They discovered the remains of this system at the site of Hatnub, an ancient quarry in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The contraption would have been used to transport heavy alabaster stones up a steep ramp, according to the archaeologists working at the site, from the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (French Institute for Oriental Archaeology)in Cairo and from the University of Liverpool in England....
Scientists have discovered a gene mutation that could up the risk of developing asthma by as much as 80 percent. A study of more than 2,000 children has pinpointed a single gene that may be at the core of the debilitating lung disease, which affects some 20 million Americans. The gene, known as ORMDL3, is located on chromosome 17 (of the 23 chromosome pairs in the human genome); elevated levels of the protein for which it codes were found in the white blood cells of asthmatics....
Most of the people who moved to London, New York City, Chicago, Berlin and other big cities during the 19th century traded away their health to make better wages. Crowding, unsafe drinking water, bad sanitation, harsh working conditions and industrial pollution made them sicker than their cousins back home in the countryside and shortened their life spans. But starting in the middle decades of the 1800s, government reforms and urban leaders began turning the health of these cities around by investing in water, sanitation, waste removal, education and more....
Each time health care workers grab a pint of blood for an emergency transfusion, they make sure the donor and recipient have compatible blood types. But they do not pay attention to the donor’s sex. A new study raises questions as to whether that should change. In the first large study to look at how blood transfusions from previously pregnant women affect recipients’ health, researchers discovered men under 50 were 1....
In this 21st century, science and politics are intertwined to a greater degree than ever before. Global warming poses a long-term challenge with no easy answers. The prospect of terrorism using technology such as dirty bombs and biowarfare looms large on everybody’s radar. Then there is the threat of a bird-flu pandemic, not to mention the issues of embryonic stem cells, energy policy, missile defense, education, voting technologies…. The list goes on and on....
VANCOUVER—“I have a freezer full of dead rats,” says Laurie Wein, project manager at Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve in western Canada. It’s a necessary evil, for the restoration specialist leading Parks Canada’s war on rats in the biodiverse archipelago of Haida Gwaii (or the Queen Charlotte Islands). “Invasive species here on Haida Gwaii are the number-one threat to ecosystem functioning.” After nearly three centuries of rat invasion, islands in the Haida Gwaii archipelago in British Columbia—known as the Galápagos of the North—are being restored to their original rat-free state in a bid to save beleaguered populations of nesting seabirds, whose eggs and chicks are eaten by the introduced rodents....
The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. At Science magazine, Jon Cohen reports on progress made by two companies that are developing treatments called monoclonal antibodies for people infected with SARS-CoV-2. On 9/29/20, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals released early data from its ongoing placebo-controlled experiment showing that its monoclonal antibody “cocktail” reduced symptoms and the amount of virus in the nasal passages of infected patients, Cohen reports....
By launching a tiny, atom-packed chip into space and blasting it with lasers, German scientists have for the first time created an exotic state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate in space. Their findings could lay the groundwork for a new way to search for gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. The Matter-Wave Interferometry in Microgravity experiment (MAIUS-1) launched on a sounding rocket from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden on Jan....
Out of sight (and smell), natural gas slowly bubbled up into Norma Fiorentino’s private water well near the town of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania—in the heart of the new fracking boom in the U.S. Then, on New Year’s Day 2009, when a mechanical pump flicked on and provided the spark, Fiorentino’s backyard exploded. She and many others blame the blast on fracking—the colloquial name for the natural gas drilling process that combines horizontal drilling and the fracturing of shale deep underground with high-pressure water to create a path for gas to flow back up the well....
About 1.3 billion years ago two black holes swirled closer and closer together until they crashed in a furious bang. Each black hole packed roughly 30 times the mass of our sun into a minute volume, and their head-on impact came as the two were approaching the speed of light. The staggering strength of the merger gave rise to a new black hole and created a gravitational field so strong that it distorted spacetime in waves that spread throughout space with a power about 50 times stronger than that of all the shining stars and galaxies in the observable universe....
This week the U.S. Department of State publicly accused Syria’s government of killing prison inmates and systematically destroying their bodies. Citing newly declassified photographs, Washington alleges Syrian forces built a crematorium on prison grounds—just 45 minutes from the capital, Damascus—to eliminate evidence of their human rights abuses. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones told reporters on Monday satellite photos and other evidence suggest, in recent years, a building was modified at Syria’s Saydnaya military prison complex to dispose of bodies....
Physicists have performed the first full simulation of a high-energy physics experiment—the creation of pairs of particles and their antiparticles—on a quantum computer. If the team can scale it up, the technique promises access to calculations that would be too complex for an ordinary computer to deal with. To understand exactly what their theories predict, physicists routinely do computer simulations. They then compare the outcomes of the simulations with actual experimental data to test their theories....
LETTERS ABOUT the December 2005 issue included a down-to-earth query about unearthly black holes for the authors of “An Echo of Black Holes,” Theodore A. Jacobson and Renaud Parentani, and a report of research data complementing Darold A. Treffert and Daniel D. Christensen’s anatomical exploration of savant Kim Peek, “Inside the Mind of a Savant.” Responding to “Running on Empty” [SA Perspectives], letter writers pitched ideas on how the U.S. can kick its oil “addiction” (the now presidentially sanctioned term)....
NASA’s Curiosity rover, for three Martian years—nearly six years to us Earthlings—has been sniffing the air above Mars’ Gale Crater, its near-equatorial exploration site. Using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) portable chemistry lab, the rover has ascertained not only what the surface atmosphere is made of, but also how its gases change with the seasons. Many of Mars’ gases “are very well behaved,” says Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA and a team member on the SAM experiment....
The Obama administration on Friday proposed new rules that would lead to a crackdown on oil and gas wells that vent or flare methane into the atmosphere on public and tribal lands. Methane is about 35 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas driving climate change over the span of a century, and it’s the chief component of natural gas produced in the U.S. Oil and gas companies flared or vented about 375 billion cubic feet of natural gas between 2009 and 2014, enough to supply more than 5 million homes with gas....
From Nature magazine After 18 months of controversy, the official verdict is in: an arsenic-tolerant bacterium found in California’s Mono Lake cannot live without phosphorus. In 2010, a group led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a microbiologist now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, reported online in Science1 that the Halomonadaceae bacterium GFAJ-1 could include atoms of arsenic instead of phosphorus in crucial biochemicals such as DNA. The bacteria were discovered thriving in the arsenic-rich sediment of the shallow saline Mono Lake, famed for its appearance on a picture-postcard insert to Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here....
What was the inspiration for the book? It got started when I noticed a paradox in the lives of some really creative people: people like Charles Darwin, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, who are obsessed with their work. But when you look at how many hours a day they spent working, it’s a surprisingly small number. Living in Silicon Valley and growing up in an era that assumes overwork is the norm, the idea that you could go in the opposite direction and yet still do really amazing stuff was really compelling....
By Barbara CasassusThe idea that poorer countries should catch up economically with wealthier ones before spending heavily on R&D was challenged by a report released last week. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report contradicts theories widely held by development professionals and international organizations such as the World Bank.Although the 34 OECD member countries, which are all industrialized, are likely to dominate much of R&D for the foreseeable future, other nations are starting to make their mark in this area, and will help to redraw the global science, technology and industry (STI) map, according to the analysis....
PRIVATIZATION’S PERIL While S. Alan Stern rightly identifies “the advent of new, reusable suborbital vehicles” and technologies designed “with an eye to simplicity” as keys to cheaper spaceflight in “The Low-Cost Ticket to Space,” he fails to explain why the same revolutions in technology could not be incorporated into traditional, governmental space programs. He ignores the fact that the leaps made by private space companies are largely attributable to inordinate investment by their starry-eyed and deep-pocketed backers....
