Kassie Rose, 30 years old, faces a frightening prospect: if a genetic coin toss fails to go her way, she could lose her mind within a decade or two. A mutation that causes Alzheimer’s disease runs in her family, the DeMoes of North Dakota. The odds of any DeMoe harboring the mutation are 50–50, and if the mutation is present, the chances of developing early-onset Alzheimer’s—the type that erodes memory before age 65—are 100 percent....
IF THE FIGURE of “one in 166” has a familiar ring, perhaps that’s because you recently heard it on a television commercial or read it in a magazine. According to widely publicized estimates, one in 166 is now the proportion of children who suffer from autism. This proportion is astonishingly high compared with the figure of one in 2,500 that autism researchers had accepted for decades. Across a mere 10-year period—1993 to 2003—statistics from the U....
While climate change may increase the occurrence of malaria, the effect can be almost completely offset by adopting control strategies such as bed netting, spraying and anti-malarial drugs, according to a paper published in the journal Nature. “There are many claims about malaria increasing over the future climate change scenario,” said Pete Gething, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford....
Thirty years ago, at 1:24 A.M. on April 26, 1986, explosions blew the lid and roof off the Chernobyl Unit 4 nuclear reactor in Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union, blasting radioactive material into the atmosphere. The outflow, driven by a raging fire within the reactor core, blew in all directions during the following week. Ultimately an area of 3,110 square kilometers was contaminated with cesium 137, to a level requiring evacuation....
Plant-eating dinosaurs usually found plenty to eat, but occasionally they went looking for a nutritional boost. Fossilized dinosaur droppings from Utah now reveal that 75 million years ago, some of the animals were snacking on prehistoric crayfish or crabs. The work suggests that big herbivorous dinosaurs sometimes munched on crustaceans, likely to get extra protein and calcium into their bodies before laying eggs, says Karen Chin, a palaeontologist at the University of Colorado Boulder....
Cosmology was always going to be trouble for particle physics. Traditional quantum theory predicts that the vacuum of space should bubble over with short-lived “virtual” particles, whose combined energy, represented by the so-called cosmological constant, would have long ago blown galaxies far and wide like grease on water at the touch of detergent. Lately, trying to make sense of why the cosmological constant is tiny, physicists have toyed with a concept based on string theory....
Perhaps no other population is as vulnerable during a hurricane as frail, older adults, especially those who are homebound or living in nursing homes. With Hurricane Florence predicted to slam the North Carolina coast Friday, health officials are already scrambling to keep older residents safe. Seniors “are not only the most likely to die in hurricanes, but in wildfires and other disasters,” said Dr. Karen DeSalvo, a New Orleans native who served as health commissioner in that city after Hurricane Katrina and went on to be named acting assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services for the Obama administration....
DURBAN, South Africa—Where Zuma Mabuza lives, in KwaZulu–Natal, getting HIV—the human immunodeficiency virus—can feel inevitable. “If people in the community talk about HIV, the conversation is usually about which treatment options are best,” says Mabuza, a 28-year-old woman who sells used clothes to provide for her young daughter. Mabuza is not her real name; we have changed it to protect her identity because she is part of a large medical test of anti-HIV drugs....
Have you ever told a friend a made-up story to entertain that person or spare his or her feelings? Do you know anyone who confessed to you he or she overreported the number of hours worked to pad a paycheck? Some may think of these “white lies,” or small instances of dishonest behavior, as relatively harmless, a slight ethical lapse, when compared with full-scale corporate fraud. We may consider a white lie to be especially harmless if it is in service of protecting an important relationship....
When it comes to what people think of you, it’s been said that “bad is stronger than good.” In a given day, if you hear ninety-nine compliments and one criticism, you know which one will be running through your head as you try to fall asleep that night. It’s normal to care what people think—most of us care deeply what the people we love and respect think of us. Indeed, it’s hard-wired: not so many hundreds of years ago, banishment was the worst punishment possible....
In September 2017 North Korea tested its largest nuclear bomb yet. It was 10 times the blast strength of any of the five previous underground detonations (map). How do we know? A global network of more than 300 earthquake-monitoring stations stands sentry. After an explosion, seismometers pick up two types of shock waves within minutes and alert intelligence officers. Scientists learn even more afterward. Since the last blast, they have combined the seismic signals with satellite images and other data to pinpoint more details, recently published, such as the precise location and bomb size (chart)....
In reaction to the global COVID-19 pandemic, attention has focused on the potential role of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to further regulate—or ban—various form of the wildlife trade. Banning the wild animal trade, particularly for human consumption, means stopping the movement of some zoonotic diseases—infections that can be transmitted from animals to humans. There have also been suggestions that the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), or the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) could be instructed by governments to collaborate to prevent future zoonotic epidemics and pandemics....
Several hundred million years ago mosses and their kin went one way, evolutionarily speaking, and the lineage of trees and flowering plants went the other. Somehow, in the vast expanse of geologic time that followed, a few members of these distantly related groups in the plant kingdom copied one another in making something of great interest to humans: the psychoactive chemical, or cannabinoid, that gets people high. The recent discovery of another source of a cannabinoid comes from a plant that is a relative of the mosses called liverwort....
Some 18 percent of the human body’s weight is carbon. The simple element is considered the backbone of life, and is also abundant in Earth’s rocks, atmosphere and oceans. Scientists don’t know how carbon first appeared on our planet, but now astronomers have discovered a special molecule in space that could help trace this essential element back to its source. Researchers using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia identified signatures of the molecule benzonitrile (C6H5CN) in a mass of gas and dust called the Taurus Molecular Cloud 1, which lies 430 light-years from Earth....
On what would become the most watched show in the history of PBS, astronomer Carl Sagan opined that “the Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena … our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” The original Cosmos series, which aired nearly 40 years ago, instilled the haunting sense that there is much we don’t understand about our universe. Indeed, the human mind may not even have the capacity to comprehend what gave rise to all matter since we are three-dimensional creatures living in a potentially 10-dimensional world....
When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer edged out world chess champion Garry Kasparov during their celebrated match in 1997, it did so by means of sheer brute force. The machine evaluated some 200 million potential board moves a second, whereas its flesh-and-blood opponent considered only three each second, at most. But despite Deep Blue’s victory, computers are no real competition for the human brain in areas such as vision, hearing, pattern recognition, and learning....
Key concepts Physics Gravity Potential energy Kinetic energy Friction Conservation of energy Introduction Have you ever ridden a roller coaster? Have you ever wanted to design your own? There are plenty of expensive toys and even video games that will let you build your own coasters—but in this project you’ll make one out of paper and tape and learn about roller coaster physics along the way! Background Roller coasters are all about physics!...
Creationist Controversy “The Latest Face of Creationism,” by Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott, details the tactics of those agitating against the teaching of evolution in public schools. Scientists have, to some extent, contributed to creationists’ arguments by using the term “theory” when referring to evolution. It is not a theory but an established law. Robin A. Cox Scarborough, Ontario Simply suppressing the teaching of intelligent design (ID) sends the wrong message to students....
In schools across the U.S., multiple-choice questions such as this one provoke anxiety, even dread. Their appearance means it is testing time, and tests are big, important, excruciatingly unpleasant events. But not at Columbia Middle School in Illinois, in the classroom of eighth grade history teacher Patrice Bain. Bain has lively blue eyes, a quick smile, and spiky platinum hair that looks punkish and pixieish at the same time. After displaying the question on a smartboard, she pauses as her students enter their responses on numbered devices known as clickers....
Unless significant, steady reductions in the emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels begin extremely soon, the Earth might be much closer to potentially catastrophic warming than is widely believed. So argues climatologist James Hansen of the Columbia University Earth Institute and an international team of colleagues in a new analysis published today in the journal PLOS One. Their paper further underscores other recent studies showing that even small delays in shrinking the industrial output of carbon dioxide (CO2) could steeply complicate not only attempts to temper climate change but also any attempts by future generations to adapt to it....
