Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Do you have a job in which you’re on your feet all day? A security guard, perhaps? In construction? Sales? You know your heels bear a lot of your job when they ache by the end of the day. But now, imagine having to walk with a small piece of rock stuck in your shoe at the bottom of your heel....
“Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.” So ran a Daily Telegraph headline last November. The story circulated and quickly achieved widespread notoriety (even my dentist asked me about it). The physics blogosphere carried long threads of comments attacking and defending the theory and then attacking the tone of the discussion. The shouting and acrimony have died down, and the mainstream physics community remains largely unconvinced that the theory can stay afloat....
Astronomers have been so keen to use the new James Webb Space Telescope that some have got a little ahead of themselves. Many started analysing Webb data right after the first batch was released, on 14 July, and quickly posted their results on preprint servers—but are now having to revise them. The telescope’s detectors had not been calibrated thoroughly when the first data were made available, and that fact slipped past some astronomers in their excitement....
If a pair of black holes ever hit Earth, you would literally hear them coming: not by sound, which cannot cross the vacuum of space, but by waves of gravitational force, which, as the holes approached, would knead the bones of your inner ear by a perceptible amount, producing a whine like a camera flash charging up. Under normal circumstances, such waves are utterly inaudible, even though astronomers think they reverberate through our bodies all the time....
Astronomers have now found thousands of planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way, and 100 billion more stars in the galaxy presumably host planets of their own. Given the sheer number of worlds out there, scientists find it easy to hope that some of them must be harboring sentient beings. After all, could Earth really be unique among so many planets? It could. Optimism about the possibilities of intelligent extraterrestrial life ignores what we know about how humans came to exist....
By Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - At least 36 people are feared to have died after a Japanese volcano erupted without warning at the weekend, raining ash and stones on hikers, but the search for victims was abandoned on Monday due to fears of rising levels of toxic gases. Rescuers at the peak of Mount Ontake, now an eerie moonscape under a thick layer of grey ash, on Monday found what may be five new victims of the Saturday eruption....
Ukraine is on its own, not least when it comes to energy—and that crimps the country’s ability to respond to Russia’s land grab in the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine relies on Russia for roughly two thirds of its natural gas supplies, suggesting that the current geopolitical impasse will likely continue to fall in Russia’s favor. Even with a few months of natural gas in storage, “they’re in a tough spot if those supplies are cut off,” notes Jason Bordoff, one-time Obama administration policy advisor and now director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, who was a speaker on a panel of experts at Columbia University’s School of International and Political Affairs (SIPA) on March 10....
Almost a month after Stephen Hawking and his colleagues posted a paper about black holes online, physicists still cannot agree on what it means. Some support the preprint’s claim—that it provides a promising way to tackle a conundrum known as the black hole information paradox, which Hawking identified more than 40 years ago. “I think there is a general sense of excitement that we have a new way of looking at things that may get us out of the logjam,” says Andrew Strominger, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the latest paper....
Talk about humble beginnings. Most of our notions about our mammal ancestors portray them as shrewlike critters barely eking out an existence in the shadow of dinosaurs for millions of years. When the hulking giants got felled in the aftermath of environmental changes from a giant meteor impact, the pathetic warm-blooded runts finally got to make their move, eventually blossoming into the wide diversity of successful species we see today, including humans....
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Two earthquakes measuring more than magnitude 5 hit Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano overnight and another quake shook a nearby volcano, with overall seismic activity staying high, the country’s Meteorological Office said on Wednesday. The rumblings at Iceland’s largest volcano system have raised worries of an eruption that could spell trouble for air travel. In 2010, an ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano closed much of Europe’s airspace for six days....
A few years ago geologist Carlos Jaramillo stood in a man-made canyon in Panama staring at rocks he knew to be 20 million years old, and shook his head in confusion. According to conventional geologic theory, the Panamanian Isthmus didn’t emerge from the sea until just a few million years ago. So what was a 20 million-year-old fossilized tree doing there? A new body of data emerging from such questions threatens to upend what geologists thought they knew about our planet....
The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central—a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding—and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the “pit bull” of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature....
An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics—that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second. The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 meters underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy....
As organizations increasingly replace human decision-making with algorithms, they may assume these computer programs lack our biases. But algorithms still reflect the real world, which means they can unintentionally perpetuate existing inequality. A study published Thursday in Science has found that a health care risk-prediction algorithm, a major example of tools used on more than 200 million people in the U.S., demonstrated racial bias—because it relied on a faulty metric for determining need....
Russia is eagerly trying to sell a variety of new nuclear reactors to countries worldwide, and is also expanding its domestic fleet. Skeptics say the state-owned reactor manufacturer, Rosatom, may be speeding ahead too quickly, jeopardizing the safety of those power plants. Company officials are pushing back by holding media interviews, offering reactor visits and even by publishing two free apps for smartphones and tablets. The first, simply called Rosatom, reveals the location of each Russian nuclear facility as well as radiation monitors across the country that would pick up any potential leaks....
By Quirin SchiermeierOcean liners can help keep track of one of the most elusive climate variables, a pilot study suggests. Using data collected by commercial ships, scientists have accurately mapped the carbon dioxide absorbed by the North Atlantic Ocean, and found that it varies enormously from one place to another, and from year to year.Only about half of the CO2 emissions from human activity stay in the atmosphere, and these greatly enhance the natural greenhouse effect....
One day in 1999 former NASA astronaut Duane Graveline, then 68 years old, returned home from his morning walk in Merritt Island, Fla., and could not remember where he was. His wife stepped outside, and he greeted her as a stranger. When Graveline’s memory returned some six hours later in the hospital, he racked his brain to figure out what might have caused this terrifying bout of amnesia. Only one thing came readily to mind: he had recently started taking the statin drug Lipitor....
U.S. EPA today finalized a nationwide system to require large sources of greenhouse gases to report their emissions. The new rule will require about 10,000 facilities that emit about 85 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases to begin to collect emissions data under a new reporting system, EPA said. Suppliers of fossil fuels and industrial greenhouse gases, motor vehicle and engine manufacturers and other facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide equivalent will be subject to the new requirements....
The New Year may also be a year of discoveries for physicists plumbing the deepest mysteries of matter. Since 2013, when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirmed they had discovered the Higgs boson, the particle that lends others mass, physics has been in a kind of limbo. The Higgs was the last missing puzzle piece in the Standard Model, the reigning model to explain the behavior of tiny particles....
Can We Trust Monsanto with Our Food? The real truth about GMOs How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet is Half-Baked [Interactive & Infographic] We are not biologically identical to our Paleolithic predecessors, nor do we have access to the foods they ate What’s Stopping Us from Eating Insects? How many of you watch Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel? And how many of you have said, “I would never eat that!...
