SpaceX will try again to make history during the launch of its robotic Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station on Monday (April 13). The company aims to bring the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket back to Earth for a soft touchdown on an unmanned “spaceport drone ship” in the Atlantic Ocean after the booster sends Dragon on its way toward the orbiting lab. Liftoff is scheduled for 4:33 p....
After the September 11 attacks, Congress became worried that terrorists targeting the U.S. might explode a radiological weapon—most likely a “dirty” bomb, a kind of weapon that relies on a conventional explosive to spread radioactive materials packed around it. In 2004 Congress funded several research centers to create drugs to protect survivors and first responders from radiation injury. But the biggest beneficiary of this research might be a much different and far larger group of people: cancer patients....
According to preliminary results from a study probing the possible effects of chemical exposure during the Persian Gulf War, soldiers displaying multiple health-related symptoms upon their return from combat have decreased volume in two brain regions intimately linked to learning and memory. This morning at the American Academy of Neurology’s 59th Annual Meeting in Boston the study’s senior investigator, Roberta White, chair of the department of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health, revealed early findings based on brain scans and memory tasks administered to 36 veterans....
There’s a new Tyrannosaurus rex fossil on the block, with a cute nickname and about 20 percent of its former body intact, including a well-preserved skull. The T. rex was found by paleontologists from Burke Museum and the University of Washington (UW) in Montana’s famous dinosaur-fossil haven, the Hell Creek Formation. It has been dubbed the “Tufts-Love Rex,” in honor of the volunteer paleontologists who first noticed bones jutting out of a hillside: Burke Museum’s Jason Love and Luke Tufts....
Scientists fear the Midwest’s new fluctuating weather patterns will exacerbate an old problem: nitrate contamination. In states like Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa and Oklahoma, nitrate — a component in many common synthetic fertilizers that can cause serious illness in infants — has long posed a problem for local water supplies. The Midwest provides the perfect conditions to carry nitrogen into the water table: a relatively shallow groundwater level, porous soils that allow the fertilizers to leach through and more cultivated fields than woodlands....
It is the worst natural disaster in decades. On December 26 a gargantuan undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra rocked the Indian Ocean, sending killer waves racing toward land. Ravaging shores from Indonesia to Somalia, the tsunami claimed the lives of an estimated 150,000 people and left millions of others homeless and vulnerable to starvation and disease. In the hopes that Scientific American’s past coverage may help readers to understand why earthquakes and tsunamis occur–and the efforts scientists are making to predict them–we have pulled together a collection of our articles on these subjects....
The populations of Earth’s wild mammals, birds, amphibians, fish and other vertebrates declined by more than half between 1970 and 2012, according to a report from environmental charity WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). Activities such as deforestation, poaching and human-induced climate change are in large part to blame for the decline. If the trend continues, then by 2020 the world will have lost two-thirds of its vertebrate biodiversity, according to the Living Planet Report 2016....
I watched news coverage of the 2016 presidential election results sitting beside my roommate, a medical student at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. He has been in this country since he was a kid, but he is undocumented. Now, with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on life support, I have a much more intimate understanding of the fear on his face that evening in November....
As salmonella-tainted pistachios and peanuts fuel the latest in a series of foodborne-illness outbreaks, lawmakers are proposing a flurry of bills aimed at strengthening the country’s neglected food safety system. But while food industry giants that have long opposed new regulations are beginning to change their tune, small-scale producers are growing increasingly vocal about their own concerns. The problem, they say, is that small farmers, who are most accountable for their food’s freshness and health, may suffer the heaviest burden under proposed new food rules....
(Credit:Canonical)Last year was a long time ago for Android.That was when Google’s mobile platform was stealing market share from all the other smartphone platforms – winning even against the iPhone – and beating a path toward market dominance.But Android is now facing a renewed challenge from its archrival. Android’s vulnerability against the iPhone can be summed up by looking at the two biggest wireless carriers in the U.S. – AT&T and Verizon....
From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. When Susan Weller traveled to Ecuador to study tiger moths in the 1980s, she found plenty of insects. A decade later, Weller, now director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, returned to conduct follow-up research. But the moths she was looking for were gone. “Just in that time frame, areas I had collected had been transformed. Forests had been taken out....
Humanity has enjoyed an unusual streak of food surplus since the green revolution began in the mid-1960s. These trends sustained economic development and a significant reduction in global hunger and poverty. A sharp reversal is now possible, however, given strong economic growth in the world’s most populous countries and loss of suitable cropland. People with rising incomes consume more meat and livestock products, which in turn requires more grain per unit of food produced....
Older brains do not think as quickly as younger brains do. But does this cognitive impairment arise because processing speeds slacken or because the ability to block out irrelevant information falters? A recent study reconciles these two leading hypotheses: older brains have a harder time ignoring distractions in the initial stages of performing a task, which slows down processing. Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues asked two groups—one made up of 19- to 33-year-olds and the other of 60- to 72-year-olds—to perform a memory task....
COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Denmark could become one of the first countries in the world to completely stop using oil, gas and coal by 2050 if it boosts wind production by as much as six times and hikes taxes on fossil fuels tenfold, a government-appointed commission said. Denmark should increase its wind power capacity to between 10,000 and 18,500 megawatts in 2050 – most of it by installing offshore turbines – from the current capacity of slightly more than 3,000 megawatts, the Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy said in its report....
The human body’s immune system can quickly track down and kill cells that don’t belong. Take certain kinds of bacteria: molecules on their surfaces flag them as foreign invaders, alerting the body’s defenders to the breach and drawing a full-fledged attack on anything waving that molecular flag. But sometimes the system mistakenly attacks the body’s own cells. The result is autoimmune disease, such as type 1 diabetes, in which the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas are attacked and destroyed by T cells....
Eyes are said to be the window to the soul—but researchers at Google see them as indicators of a person’s health. The technology giant is using deep learning to predict a person’s blood pressure, age and smoking status by analysing a photograph of their retina. Google’s computers glean clues from the arrangement of blood vessels—and a preliminary study suggests that the machines can use this information to predict whether someone is at risk of an impending heart attack....
Looking at a globe, one can easily imagine the continents and oceans as eternal, unchanging aspects of Earth’s surface. Geophysicists now know that the appearance of permanence is an illusion caused by the brevity of the human life span. Over millions of years, blocks of Earth’s rigid outer layer, the lithosphere, move about, diverging at mid-ocean ridges, sliding about along faults and colliding at the margins of some of the oceans....
U.S. health officials announced early in December that this year’s influenza season had started early and they predicted it would hit hard. Unfortunately, as reports from around the country make clear, they were right. The flu began spreading on the East Coast by early November and soon worked its way west across the country. On January 9, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas A. Farley asked residents with flu symptoms to call their primary doctor first before traveling to the city’s already crowded emergency rooms....
Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. After all of the fun we’ve had recounting the tales of Knot Dude, Papa Knot, seafaring pyramid builders, and the loads and loads of algebraic goodness they all used in their adventures, it’s time to shift our attention elsewhere for a while and talk about some practical and easy techniques that you can use to do simple math in your head…and to do it fast!...
During 2011’s deadly onslaught of earthquakes, floods and tornadoes, countless buildings had to be evacuated while workers checked to make sure they were stable. The events served as a reminder that most structures are still inspected by a decidedly low-tech method: the naked eye. To speed the process and make it more accurate, investigators are researching electronic skins, evolutionary algorithms and other systems that can monitor the integrity of bridges, buildings, dams and other structures in real time....
