Adapted from Glow Kids, by Nicholas Kardaras. Copyright © 2016 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. “I’m going to kill you while you are both asleep,” the wild-eyed 13-year-old girl said as she flailed and kicked her father before biting his arm. This was the second time in less than a week that “Heidi” had flown into a violent rage because her parents had taken away her Chromebook and her access to social media....
Myles* was an appealing young man: good-looking, engaging, mild-mannered, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He was also one of my sicker patients, using cocaine, alcohol and the antianxiety drug Xanax in large quantities. He was on a temporary leave of absence from work at a high-profile financial services company. When he was still working, on a typical Friday night, he would go out with colleagues, call his dealer at 8 P....
As much as I enjoy my exercise time, I don’t want to burn all of my daylight hours at the gym. I’ll bet you’re the same. So, when I am interested in building some muscle, I prefer to perform a push-pull strength training workout. This strategy gives me, and many of my clients, muscular and strength results in a lot less time. What is a push-pull workout? In a nutshell, a push-pull workout is one where you choose a single muscle or muscle group and perform a set of exercises that use those muscles in a pushing direction....
Income inequality can cause all kinds of problems across the economic spectrum—but perhaps the most frightening is homicide. Inequality—the gap between a society’s richest and poorest—predicts murder rates better than any other variable, according to Martin Daly, a professor emeritus of psychology at McMaster University in Ontario, who has studied this connection for decades. It is more tightly tied to murder than straightforward poverty, for example, or drug abuse. And research conducted for the World Bank finds that both between and within countries, about half the variance in murder rates can be accounted for by looking at the most common measure of inequality, which is known as the Gini coefficient....
Researchers often describe the battle between the Ebola virus and the humans it occasionally infects as a race—one that people win only if their immune systems manage to pull ahead before the virus destroys too many of their internal defenses. What they may not know is that the virus is a cheat. The Ebola virus gives itself a head start when it first slips into a human body by disabling parts of the immune system that should be leading the charge against the invader....
Editor’s note: This story, from the April 2010 issue, is being posted early to coincide with a journal publication date. Flavor just got some competition. Smell and taste are known to converge to produce the best and worst of culinary experiences, but new research suggests that information received through the nose can also be altered by noise. If confirmed, this newfound union could have potent olfactory and gustatory implications. The discovery of a possible smell-sound sense, or “smound,” came to Daniel Wesson by accident....
Meet “Steve,” a strange, new aurora feature discovered by citizen scientists and verified by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm satellites. Eric Donovan, a researcher at University of Calgary in Canada, first heard of “Steve” while talking to members of a Facebook group called the Alberta Aurora Chasers, who coordinate to track and photograph the northern lights in the Canadian sky (Alberta is a province in western Canada). While the colorful lights of an aurora normally ripple horizontally across the sky, Steve formed a distinctive purplish or greenish vertical streak....
The introduction of a brain scan in a legal case was once enough to generate local headlines. No more. Hundreds of legal opinions every year have begun to invoke the science of mind and brain to bolster legal arguments—references not only to brain scans but to a range of studies that show that areas such as the amygdala or the anterior cingulate cortex are implicated in this response or that. The legal establishment, in short, has begun a love affair with all things brain....
I don’t want to send kids home to die. Perhaps that’s why I struggle to this day with the case of a 16-year-old boy I’ll call Alex, who was my patient on the adolescent inpatient psychiatry unit at a prominent Connecticut hospital. He tried to kill himself, and three weeks later I had to send him home to a house stocked with guns. I’m a psychiatrist. I’m also a soldier in the U....
Although processors have gotten smaller and faster over time, few computers can compete with the speed and computing power of the human brain. And none comes close to the organ’s energy efficiency. So some engineers want to develop electronics that mimic how the brain computes to build more powerful and efficient devices. A team at IBM Research, Zurich, now reports that nanosized devices made from phase-change materials can mimic how neurons fire to perform certain calculations (Nat....
A new drug may protect healthy tissue during cancer-killing radiation treatments or other exposures. Molecular geneticist Andrei Gudkov and colleagues report in Science this week that they protected mice from the cell-damaging effects of radiation by injecting them with a compound that helps cells resist apoptosis, or self-destruction. Previous studies have found that cancerous cells use nuclear factor kappa-beta–a transcription factor, or protein that turns on or off a gene’s protein-making ability–to outlive normal cells and grow out of control....
In March, as COVID-19 was spreading rapidly, and the lives of Americans were turned upside down, the country was deeply worried about ventilators. There did not seem to be enough of the breathing machines to treat the gravely ill. In response, in April the U.S. government allocated nearly $3 billion to build more than 135,000 ventilators and add them to the Strategic National Stockpile by the end of 2020. But even if all those extra ventilators had been on hand in the spring, a group of medical experts recently argued in JAMA, the machines would probably not have meaningfully improved survival rates, because once patients were sick enough to need them, many died anyway (although mortality rates for these patients have been revised downward)....
Electronic pacemakers time the heartbeats of more than three million people in the U.S. For these patients, surgery is a regular occurrence. A pacemaker’s batteries must be swapped out every five to eight years, and the electric leads that connect the device to the heart can wear out, too. In an effort to eliminate the batteries and leads altogether, biomedical engineers at the University of Bern in Switzerland have built a heartbeat-powered pacemaker, assembled from self-winding clockwork technology that is more than two centuries old....
Most people probably view pigs at best as a source of sustenance or, at worst, as filthy, gluttonous animals. But it seems our porcine pals may also prove invaluable in the fight against type 1 diabetes. Researchers are experimenting with new ways of harvesting insulin-producing islet cells from pigs and transplanting them into diabetes sufferers in the hope of one day reducing the need for daily insulin shots and even replacing them with twice-yearly islet-cell treatments....
It’s hard to stand out from the crowd — particularly if you are a single photon in a sea of millions in an optical fiber. Because of that, ultra-secure quantum-encryption systems that encode signals into a series of single photons have so far been unable to piggyback on existing telecommunications lines. But now, physicists using a technique for detecting dim light signals have transmitted a quantum key along 90 kilometers of noisy optical fiber....
A colossal simulation of the past two million years of Earth’s climate provides evidence that temperature and other planetary conditions influenced early human migration — and possibly contributed to the emergence of the modern-day human species around 300,000 years ago. The finding is one of many to come out of the largest model so far to investigate how changes in Earth’s movement have influenced climate and human evolution, published in Nature today....
CLIMATEWIRE | Seville, Spain, has officially launched a new pilot program to address deadly heat waves. The program, unveiled yesterday on the summer solstice, introduces a system for naming and ranking heat waves in much the same way as hurricanes. It’s the first city in the world to implement such a program, according to organizers. And it’s launching just in time for another record-breaking hot season. Spain has been grappling with extreme temperatures for weeks....
By Philip BallShould we be surprised to be here? Some scientists maintain that the origin of life is absurdly improbable–Nobel laureate and biologist George Wald baldly stated in 1954 that “one has only to contemplate the magnitude of [the] task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.” Yet others look at the size of the cosmos and conclude that even such extremely low-probability events are inevitable....
A vacuum might seem like empty space, but scientists have discovered a new way to seemingly get something from that nothingness, such as light. And the finding could ultimately help scientists build incredibly powerful quantum computers or shed light on the earliest moments in the universe’s history. Quantum physics explains that there are limits to how precisely one can know the properties of the most basic units of matter—for instance, one can never absolutely know a particle’s position and momentum at the same time....
Key concepts Nanotechnology Matter Strength Engineering Introduction Have you ever seen a superhero movie where the superhero relies on a superstrong material such as Wolverine’s adamantium claws, Captain America’s vibranium shield or Iron Man’s suit of armor? Whereas scientists and engineers in comic books work on creating fictional materials to help superheroes win the day, real-world scientists and engineers are actually already creating superstrong materials that could have a variety of uses—from improved bulletproof vests to stronger ropes to lighter bikes to better spaceships....
