Why don’t men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. It appeared on cocktail napkins (“Real men don’t ask directions”) and became a staple of stand-up comics as well as jokes that made the rounds: “Why did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years?...
This story was co-published with NPR. To an outsider, the fancy booths at last month’s health insurance industry gathering in San Diego aren’t very compelling. A handful of companies pitching “lifestyle” data and salespeople touting jargony phrases like “social determinants of health.” But dig deeper and the implications of what they’re selling might give many patients pause: A future in which everything you do—the things you buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV—may help determine how much you pay for health insurance....
At about six o’clock in the morning, long before light broke on a cold November day in 2014, I pushed through the Beijing station and fought my way onto a crowded train. I was headed for Jinzhou, a Chicago-sized city in the northeastern fringes of China. I tried to steal back some sleep as we crawled past concrete factories and hazy cornfields, but I was too excited to nod off. Something rumored to be incredible was waiting for me at my destination—a mysterious fossil that a farmer had stumbled on while harvesting his crops....
By Neil Hartnell NASSAU, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Hurricane Joaquin strengthened as it battered the Bahamas with torrential rains, storm surges and heavy winds on Thursday and U.S. officials raced to prepare for possible landfall early next week, three years after Superstorm Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey. Joaquin, the third hurricane of the 2015 Atlantic season, intensified into a major Category 4 storm on a scale of 1 to 5, with maximum sustained winds of 130 miles (209 km) per hour, the U....
In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.” So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda. Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as “inhospitable and generally mean” in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would snatch food from the elderly....
By Reuters Staff (Reuters) - After deliberating for most of the year, Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc said on Friday it would change its name to avoid being confused with the Islamist militant group known as ISIS. The biotechnology company said it would be called Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc from Dec. 22 and also changed its stock exchange ticker symbol to “IONS” from “ISIS”. “It’s been an ongoing discussion for most of this year”, Chief Business Officer Sarah Boyce told Reuters....
Elephant conservation is fraught with difficulty. Though the behemoths are endangered, the land set aside for them is insufficient. When they move beyond their sanctuaries in search of food they inevitably run into trouble, often from farmers trying to protect their crops. A new technique for observing where elephants are going and what they’re eating could inform ways to manage them more effectively, and thereby reduce their conflicts with humans....
The U.S. is lagging in science and math education—on a 2006 international test, American teens scored below the average for developed nations in both scientific and mathematical literacy. But the U.S. has traditionally been a tech haven, bestowing on the world the iPod, Microsoft Word and Google (not to mention the predecessor to the Internet itself). So it is fitting that someone would create a tech-based solution to try to close the education gap, an American approach to an American problem....
Physicists are on the hunt for dark forces. These forces are not as ominous as they sound: “dark” simply refers to the fact that no one has observed them before. In this case, they would act between neutrons and electrons. One path to investigating dark forces involves using lasers to make precision measurements of isotopes (atoms of an element possessing different numbers of neutrons). If there is a dark force working behind the scenes, it could affect an isotope’s energy levels—discrete regions around the atom’s nucleus where its electrons exist....
For most of human history, life revolved around food. hunting, growing and preparing it left little time for anything else. Industrialization of the production process changed all that and made it easy—arguably too easy—to overlook the intimate connection that food has to the health of our body and the health of our planet. But today people are increasingly mindful of that connection, thanks in part to new insights and options from science....
As war envelops Ukraine, Russian sources have strived to create a miasma of disinformation about the invasion. Among ample efforts to distort reality, the Russian Ministry of Defense asserted recently that U.S.-backed labs in Ukraine have been developing bioweapons. Outlandish as this falsehood may be, Fox’s Tucker Carlson gave it credence by arguing that the U.S. government’s response was a “cover-up.” As the Russia-Ukraine war intensifies, so too will the flow of disinformation....
No kidding, McDonald’s Happy Meal fans in the San Francisco area might have to look elsewhere if they want movie tie-in trinkets, along with their fries and burgers. On November 3, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors gave preliminary approval for a ban on unhealthy restaurant meals that include toys as enticement for children to consume their products—the so-called “Happy Meal ban,” named after the popular McDonald’s menu item. The ban dictates that a restaurant cannot provide an incentive item (a trading card, game or other prize) for a menu item that has more than 200 calories or for a meal that tops 600 calories....
The sailing yachts that compete annually in the America’s Cup match races have changed dramatically in the past year due to technological innovation such as multihulls and fixed wings. Join us for a live chat (on the Google+ Hangout platform) with Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti; Kent State University physicist Bryon Anderson, author of The Physics of Sailing Explained; and Adam Fisher, a sailing correspondent for Wired magazine, at noon EDT on Wednesday, September 4, to talk about how these changes make yachts seem to “fly out of the water....
Medicine usually progresses in incremental steps. One antidepressant or cholesterol-lowering drug follows another with only marginally improved therapeutic benefit. Vaccines are different. Disease prevention through immunization, whether for polio or mumps, has the potential to transform medical practice, sometimes eliminating illness altogether. Smallpox is now (we hope) confined to heavily protected freezers in Russia and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Vaccine developers appear to be on the verge of another remarkable achievement....
In late April 2011, a tornado touched down near Tuscaloosa, Ala., and tore its way east toward Birmingham, leaving a gash of wrecked homes and buildings more than a mile wide. Sixty-two tornadoes hit Alabama that day, April 27, leaving 250 people dead and 23,000 homes damaged or destroyed. In the ensuing days, Butch Grimes was on the ground doing damage assessment. The task was something Grimes, an architect with three decades of experience in the public and private sector, was used to....
U.S. states have long designated their own official flowers, birds and mammals, local symbols that fire up affection or pride. Now the Illinois legislature has taken things to the next (microscopic) level by adopting Penicillium rubens —a mold that produces penicillin—as the official state microbe. Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered in 1928 that a fungus called Penicillium notatum produced penicillin, which became the world’s first widely effective antibiotic. But P. notatum could not generate large-scale quantities of the drug, which became especially crucial when World War II broke out....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How can you live the life you want to, avoiding the distractions and manipulations of others? To do so, you need to know how you work. “Know thyself”, the Ancients urged. Sadly, we are often bad at this. But by contrast, others know us increasingly well. Our intelligence, sexual orientation—and much more—can be computed from our Facebook likes....
Big ocean waves whipped up by storms hundreds or even thousands of miles away from Earth’s poles could play a bigger role in breaking up polar sea ice and thus contributing to its melt more than had been thought, a new study suggests. The study, detailed in the May 29 issue of the journal Nature, found that these waves penetrate further into the fields of sea ice around Antarctica than current models would suggest, breaking up the ice well away from the edge of the ice....
When reptile breeder Steve Sykes saw that two particular leopard geckos were up for auction in 2015, he knew he had to have them. The chubby lizards’ bodies were dappled with the black spots that gave their species its common name. And at eye level, they looked to be smiling. But unlike other members of Eublepharis macularius, these were “lemon frost” geckos: they were pastel yellow from the base of their head to the root of their tail, as if they had been dipped in lemon sherbet....
In 2009 singer Susan Boyle’s extremely popular YouTube video of the Les Miserables song “I Dreamed a Dream” racked up 140 million hits in just four days, the equivalent of a digital tsunami that blasted the Internet with gale-force winds. Given that the Internet was created more than four decades ago primarily as a communications network, few content providers other than Google could have successfully managed the storm of requests coming in for access to that video without crashing....
