Posts

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Most people are aware they can donate their organs when they die. Doing so is very important: Each deceased donor can save several lives if he donates his organs and tissue and they are used for transplantation. Support for organ donation among members of the public is very high—at over 80 percent in some countries, even if many people have not yet gotten around to registering as an organ donor....

Researchers have prompted mice to grow whole muscles from a normally rare type of muscle fiber, yielding rodents capable of running harder and for longer stretches of time than their unaltered compeers. Such animals may help to determine the role of this poorly understood type of fiber and to identify drugs capable of counteracting muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy in people. Muscle fibers come in two general flavors–“slow-twitch” and “fast-twitch....

Bats are nature’s pest patrol. Every night the winged mammals venture forth from their caves and roosts to chow down on millions of insects, including some that plague farmers. But habitat loss and climate change, as well as infectious diseases such as white-nose syndrome, are hampering bats’ ability to do their job. A new study adds another item to the list: wildfires. But not too many—too few. In California’s Sierra Nevada ecosystem, bats have adapted to occasional blazes....

By Anthony Esposito and Rosalba O’Brien SANTIAGO (Reuters) - A powerful 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck off northern Chile late on Wednesday but there were no reports of damage and a precautionary tsunami alert along the coast and in neighboring Peru was called off. It was the strongest of several aftershocks that followed a huge 8.2-magnitude quake blamed for six deaths in the same region on Tuesday. Chile’s emergency office Onemi said there were no initial reports of casualties or serious damage from the latest quake....

When Unit 3 at the Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan, Canada, switches on later this year after a lengthy refit, it will mark a historic moment for dirty coal power. It will be the first time that a commercial-scale plant supplying electricity to the grid captures and stores a large fraction of its carbon dioxide emissions.“We’re getting interest from all around the world,” says Robert Watson, chief executive of provincial-government-owned plant operator SaskPower Corporation in Regina....

The world is quickly realizing it may need to actively pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to stave off the ill effects of climate change. Scientists and engineers have proposed various techniques, but most would be extremely expensive—without generating any revenue. No one wants to foot the bill. One method explored in the past decade might now be a step closer to becoming practical, as a result of a new computer simulation study....

An unusually intense May wildfire roared into Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on Tuesday, forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in province history. The flames rode the back of hot, windy weather that will continue through Wednesday and could pick up again this weekend. The wildfire is the latest in a lengthening lineage of early wildfires in the northern reaches of the globe that are indicative of a changing climate. As the planet continues to warm, these types of fires will likely only become more common and intense as spring snowpack disappears and temperatures warm....

The eelpout–a shallow water, bottom-dwelling fish–is an indicator species. Zoarces viviparous, or the one that gives birth to live young, rests near the top of its local food chain in the shallow waters of the southern North Sea, an area also known as the Wadden Sea. Although it is not commercially fished, records on its population go back more than 50 years and its health is taken as a general proxy for the overall health of this sea....

Reported cases of sexually transmitted diseases hit an all-time high in 2015, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks the three most common STDs: chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. The CDC attributes the upswing to an erosion of public prevention resources and treatment services, as well as increased screening. An increase in online dating may also contribute, especially for young men who have sex with men, says Eric Schrimshaw, a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health....

You are probably aware that eating plants is good for you. However, what you may not know is that plants can provide benefits even if your taste buds run for cover at the first mention of spinach. New research is beginning to show that just having plants in your workspace may improve how you think. In a study to be published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, researchers show that the mere presence of plants in an office setting boosts one’s ability to maintain attention....

When South Korean pop star Psy released his “Gangnam Style” video in 2012 it spread like wildfire. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington tracked the spreading meme by following how Twitter users shared the video with friends and strangers alike. By the time 200 tweets had linked to the video among the subset of Twitter users studied, “Gangnam Style” had already reached 86 different communities of users (blue nodes). After 3,000 tweets the meme had spread to nearly 1,000 different communities (green)....

AUSTIN, Texas – Feb. 28, 2010, was a banner day for Texas wind to set the clouds – and electrons – flying. In the Panhandle, gusts reached 47 miles per hour and wind generators delivered a record 6,242 megawatts of power to Dallas, Austin and other population centers. At 1 p.m., 22 percent of all the electricity consumed in the Texas grid was coming from wind. To proud Texans like Public Utility Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman, such records document the state’s position as the “epicenter of land-based wind production” in the United States, if not the world, as the chairman put it....

Chairs: we sit in them, work in them, shop in them, eat in them and date in them. Americans sit for most of their waking hours, 13 hours every day on average. Yet chairs are lethal. This grim conclusion may surprise you, but 18 studies reported during the past 16 years, covering 800,000 people overall, back it up. In 2010, for example, the journal Circulation published an investigation following 8,800 adults for seven years....

In 2016, Canada became one of the few countries in the world to legalize voluntary euthanasia. Since the passage of the new rules, people living there with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” can choose to have their lives ended by the administration of a lethal cocktail of drugs. Many medical organizations, including the World Medical Association, are strongly opposed to the practice. But now a further ethical dilemma has emerged: some of the patients seeking physician-assisted death have also expressed their wishes to donate their tissues to science to help researchers treat and cure their illnesses in future generations....

Maddury Somayazulu, an experimental physicist who goes by Zulu, could only hope that being close would be good enough. In an equipment-crammed room at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, he was huddled with postdoctoral researcher Zachary Geballe over a plum-sized cylindrical gadget called a diamond anvil cell. Inside was a dust speck’s worth of the rare-earth metal lanthanum and a bit of hydrogen gas, which theorists had predicted could morph into a novel compound under the enormous pressure of 2....

The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson. Liveright, 2012 The Harvard University naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner angered many colleagues two years ago, when he repudiated a concept within evolutionary theory that he had brought to prominence. Known as kin selection or inclusive fitness, the half-century-old idea helped to explain the puzzling existence of altruism among animals. Why, for instance, do some birds help their parents raise chicks instead of having chicks of their own?...

Wyoming might be in coal country, but it’s also leading the country in renewable energy capacity, a new report finds. Wyoming’s expanding wind sector has placed it at the top of a ranking of states’ clean energy development by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report found that renewable sources account for all of the new power plant capacity added to the state between 2016 and 2019. Wyoming also leads in terms of renewable energy development per capita....

Paul Weissman, lead scientist at the Table Mountain Observatory, part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offers the following answer. The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud of some 1012 comets surrounding the solar system and extending halfway to the nearest stars. We believe that the Oort cloud comets originated as icy planetesimals between the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and were dynamically ejected to their current distant orbits by gravitational interactions with those giant planets....

From Nature magazine Bexarotene, a cancer drug touted as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, may not be the blockbuster remedy scientists were hoping for, according to several analyses published in Science on 24 May. Four independent research groups report that they failed to fully replicate striking results published in the journal last year by Gary Landreth, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, and his colleagues....

Sun seekers and tanning-bed junkies take note: Researchers have induced honest-to-goodness suntans in mice without exposing them to ultraviolet (UV) rays. Instead, they rubbed a lotion into the critters’ skin that activated their tanning machinery, which then protected the mice from UV’s cancer-causing effects. The animals carried a mutation making them fair skinned and unable to tan otherwise, like human redheads, suggesting that a similar tanning trick might help even the pastiest of us bask in the sun without worry....