A little more than two decades ago, no planets had ever been detected outside the solar system. Now, more than 1,000 extrasolar planets have been confirmed, and on Monday the team behind the Kepler Space Telescope announced a haul of 833 more candidate planets to consider adding to the tally. This embarrassment of riches is far beyond what scientists dared to hope for before NASA launched the Kepler mission in 2009....
By Arshad Mohammed JAKARTA (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Indonesians on Sunday that man-made climate change could threaten their entire way of life, deriding those who doubted the existence of “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction”. Kerry described those who do not accept that human activity causes global warming as “shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues”, and said big companies and special interests should not be allowed to “hijack” the climate debate....
The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty By Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014 The Edge of Extinction: Travels With Enduring People in Vanishing Lands By Jules Pretty. Cornell University Press, 2014 Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future By Adam Sobel. Harper Wave, 2014 Conquering the Electron: The Geniuses, Visionaries, Egomaniacs, and Scoundrels Who Built Our Electronic Age By Derek Cheung and Eric Brach....
It is, of course, the most agonizing injury known. The thought of it makes the strong tremble and the weak pass out. Its brutality can be unbounded—a loose page will suffice. It is the paper cut. My thoughts went to the cruelest cut when a friend showed me a particularly vicious one she’d received on her fingertip. Most paper cuts I’d seen or suffered were straight slices less than a centimeter across....
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland’s government approved a long-awaited draft law on Tuesday that lays out new long-term subsidies for renewable energy, aiming to cut costs to consumers as well as help the coal-reliant country meet EU climate targets. Under the draft law, which requires final approval by parliament and the president, developers and owners of new renewable installations can sell their energy at auctions for a fixed price that would be guaranteed for 15 years regardless of market prices....
Don’t Shoot the Prognosticator “After the Crash” [Perspectives] places part of the blame for the current financial crisis on the software models created by the physics and math specialists whom Wall Street refers to as quants to police investment banks after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lifted a rule requiring them to maintain debt ceilings and federal reserves in 2004. Pointing fingers at the quants for their imperfect financial models is like blaming meteorologists for imperfect models of climate change or immunologists for their imperfect models of AIDS....
Tuna, cod, salmon, swordfish—most of the world’s commercial fish species may disappear in the next 50 years as a result of overfishing, pollution and global warming. Timed to coincide with Earth Day and the one-year anniversary of the Gulf oil spill, this beautifully illustrated children’s book explains how fish came to be so imperiled, how their decline affects other organisms, and what people can do about it. Cave of Forgotten Dreams Film by Werner Herzog, opens April 29 in theaters across the U....
By Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib of Nature magazineCancer patients desperate to get into government run clinical trials will be sidelined. Researchers maintaining stem cell lines will lose precious weeks as experiments are abandoned. Oceanographers counting on expeditions to service remote probes will instead risk long gaps in data gathering. And thousands of scientists who work in government labs as well as administrators who keep funds flowing to researchers at universities and institutes across the U....
Editor’s note: We’re posting this story from our September 1999 issue because of the bird strike to US Airways flight 1549 in New York City on Thursday. Airplanes and birds just can’t get along. Every year pilots in the U.S. report more than 5,000 bird strikes, which cause at least $400 million in damage to commercial and military aircraft. Although any airborne encounter is going to be harder on the bird (just ask romance-novel cover boy Fabio, who encountered one while riding a roller coaster), the damage the animals can inflict on aircraft control surfaces or engines can lead to disaster....
Howard Gardner is a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He’s also the author of over 20 books and several hundred scholarly articles. Gardner is probably best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, which is a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. His most recent book, Five Minds for the Future, offers some advice for policy-makers on how to do a better job of preparing students for the 21st century....
By Rory Carroll SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The California state Senate on Thursday unanimously approved a bill requiring oil companies to report how much water they use in their drilling operations and the water’s source, a move that comes amid a severe statewide drought. Oil well operators used more than 80 billion gallons of water in California last year in “enhanced” oil recovery techniques such as steam injection and water flooding, which help bring heavier, thicker crude to the surface....
If you are an astronomer—or, at least, someone interested in the search for alien life—this year’s hottest film may be Clara, a Canadian indie feature that premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. Written and directed by 23-year-old cinema wunderkind Akash Sherman, the film follows a troubled astronomer, Isaac Bruno (Patrick J. Adams), who forms an unlikely partnership with a bohemian artist, Clara (Troian Bellisario), while hunting for Earth-like exoplanets....
CAMBRIDGE, Md. – Evidence is mounting that climate change is transforming Alaska’s boreal forest, an expert said yesterday. “A biome shift is now occurring,” University of Alaska, Fairbanks, forest ecologist Glenn Juday said. “You don’t have to wait for the effects. They’re happening.” The state’s white spruce stands, which according to one recent study contain half of the genetic diversity of all white spruce in North America, are suffering. Empirical studies of forests across Alaska show that North America’s white spruce require at least 280 millimeters (11 inches) of precipitation each year, a number that rises if mean summer temperatures are higher than 15....
Until recently, genetic variation between people, accounting for everything from differences in hair color to predisposition to illness were attributed to flaws in genetic coding known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). But a new study argues that a genetic material’s arrangement—along with changes in that DNA construct, such as insertion, deletion or rearrangement of segments of code within the genome—plays a more important role. “We think SNPs will be responsible for many phenotypes and diseases,” says Michael Snyder, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale University and senior author of the new report published in Science....
Giant swirling masses of seawater known as mesoscale eddies roam the world’s oceans. Whipped up by surface winds and girded by the Coriolis effect (produced by Earth’s rotation), eddies may grow to several hundred kilometers in diameter and are known to transport heat, chemicals and biology throughout the oceans’ shallower depths. A new study published April 29 in Science suggests that eddies may have a deeper reach than previously thought, helping to shape some of the most remote ecosystems on Earth—deep-sea hydrothermal vents....
SAN FRANCISCO – The United States was battered this year by at least 12 natural disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damages, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. The agency said it was adding a June tornado outbreak in the Midwest and Southeast and record-setting wildfires in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to a list that also includes flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, drought in the Southern Plains and southwestern United States, five previous tornado outbreaks in Southern and central states, and a blizzard....
Molecularly imprinted polymer sensor device: Ketamine, Rohypnol and gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) are so-called date-rape drugs that render victims compliant and vulnerable to sexual assault. To easily detect such drugs in a drink, George Murray, now chief scientist for Raptor Detection Technologies, and his colleagues turned to polymer chemistry. Patent no. 8,241,575 details a thin, hollow device lined with polymer molecules cradling dye-tagged versions of the drugs. When the tube is placed in a spiked drink, capillary action draws liquid up, and the dye-tagged molecules swap places with those in the drink....
Arctic sea ice has shrunk to record low levels, and an ice shelf larger than Manhattan, which abruptly broke away from Canada’s northernmost shore, could endanger ships and oil platforms this spring. To investigate these and other unprecedented changes occurring around the poles, more than 30 nations are initiating a global campaign to study the Arctic and Antarctic: an International Polar Year (IPY). “Climate change is predicted to occur earliest and most dramatically at the polar regions, and that’s what the observations seem to be showing,” says Karl A....
Research on wild fish populations is adding to a growing body of evidence that human activities—particularly polluting the environment—can spur rapid evolution in complex life-forms. In the past biologists assumed that the genetic makeup of such organisms changes slowly, over thousands if not millions of years. In the last decade, though, the Atlantic tomcod (Microgadus tomcod) and killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) in New England have been shown to have developed resistance to toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) dumped in lakes, rivers and coastal waters during the 20th century....
The families of the five million Alzheimer’s disease sufferers in the U.S. are all too familiar with the erratic neurodegenerative disorder. “Mom seemed almost like herself this morning and then she drifted away form me,” recounts senior investigator Lennart Mucke, describing a conversation with a patient’s daughters. The root of these heart-wrenching fluctuations between cognizance and confusion has eluded scientists for years. But Mucke, director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues believe they may finally have pinpointed the cause of these puzzling personality twists as well as other cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer’s: petite mal (nonconvulsive) seizures similar to those exhibited in some types of epilepsy....
