Astronomers have pinpointed the location of an enigmatic celestial object that spits out brief, but powerful, blasts of radio waves. Surprisingly, the source of these intermittent signals lies not in a bright galaxy but in a small, dim one, some 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery begins to lift the curtain on the mystery of fast radio bursts, which have puzzled astronomers since they first described the signals in 20071....
A little more than a dozen years ago two researchers came up with a way of thinking about how tumors grow that changed the way most of the scientific community considered the hundred or more different diseases we call cancer. The varied and complex ways that normal cells become malignant, Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg famously wrote in 2000, could be divided into six main steps—ranging from dividing uncontrollably to avoiding self-destruction....
From Our Partner In 2009, Speedo’s research team began to brainstorm innovative ways to help swimmers go faster. The polyurethane bodysuits that contributed to an astonishing number of swimming world records over the previous 18 months had been banned. To think outside the box, the Speedo representatives met outside the lab, joining academics, coaches and research consultants at hotels, conference centers and even an English country house to spawn ideas, ideas inspired more by Captain Avenger than Mark Spitz....
In 1986, while watching a star some 63 light-years away called Beta Pictoris, French astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange and her colleagues noticed something deeply strange. They were watching because, two years earlier, other researchers observing the young, 23-million-year-old star had viewed edge-on the infrared glow of what seemed to be a giant spinning disk of dust and gas, similar to that from which our own solar system was born long ago. Beta Pictoris appeared to be in the latter stages of assembling its own planetary system, and astronomers essentially had a front-row seat....
Japan’s space agency delayed on November 28 the launch of the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft after bad weather was forecast for the planned launch date of November 30. The new launch will be no earlier than December 1. Scheduled to lift off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, Hayabusa-2’s target is a 900-meter-long space rock that is thought to hold chemical secrets from the Solar System’s infancy. Hayabusa-2 is a beefed-up version of the first Hayabusa spacecraft, which touched down on the asteroid Itokawa in 2005 and returned to Earth five years later....
All stars are not created equal, nor are their creators. By far the best-known stellar nursery, the Orion Nebula, has spawned thousands of young stars, large and small. It glows so brightly the naked eye can see it, even though it is 1,350 light-years away. On a clear, dark, moonless night the cloud of gas and dust that makes up the Nebula looks like a fuzzy star south of the highly visible three-star belt of Orion, a constellation prominent tonight in all populated regions of the world....
This year the Doomsday Clock moved forward for the first time since 2012. The theoretical countdown to catastrophe was devised 67 years ago by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a watchdog group created in 1945 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Its contemporary caretakers have inched the clock three minutes closer to midnight based on the threats of climate change and a slowdown in disarmament. But global warming and nuclear malaise are not the only threats facing humanity....
After more than a decade of development, NASA’s new moon rocket will finally attempt to shed the shackles of Earth’s gravity and soar into space. The space agency has officially set August 29 as the launch date for its Artemis I mission. This flight will be the beginning of an intricate series of spaceflights that could send humans back to the moon’s surface—and on a tortuous path to Mars—for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972....
(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday declared a slow-moving lava flow from the Pu’u O’o vent of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii to be a major disaster, the White House said. The declaration frees up federal money to help protect local communities from the lava flow, which began moving toward homes on the big island of Hawaii on June 27 and is threatening Pahoa village. The leading edge of the flow has paused about 185 yards from Pahoa Village Road, the main thoroughfare through an old sugar plantation....
The oceans are in crisis. Next to climate change, disappearing ocean life is probably the world’s greatest environmental calamity. And unlike most of our other global woes, the free-falling populations of sea creatures are not related to pollution or industrialization or development. We are just eating all the fishes. This is not news for most biologists, and neither are the long-proposed solutions: more catch limits on fisheries, new tools to limit by catch, and publicity campaigns to encourage the eating of only sustainable fishes....
FEBRUARY 9–10 Scientific advancement often requires thinking outside the box. At the Subjectivity, Creativity and the Institution conference, experts in sociology, anthropology, history and education, among other disciplines, will discuss how tradition and modernity interact to shape the creative process. Perth, Australia http://subjectivitycreativityandtheinstitution.com 14 Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, you can home in on creativity’s role in science. In a roundtable discussion on Creative Ambiguity in Scientific and Humanistic Thought, panelists including Rockefeller University neuroscientist Donald Pfaff and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C....
BOSTON—If droughts, floods and wildfires are the criminal, climate change is the accomplice. This is how the population must begin regarding global warming, experts said at a session at the annual American Academy for the Advancement of Science meeting here. Although extreme weather events, from the creeping drought that scorched last year’s corn crop to Superstorm Sandy, are worrisome, automatically and simplistically tying them to the scientific phenomenon of climate change could be misleading....
One of the world’s biggest carbon reservoirs is also one of the least glamorous: the dirt beneath our feet. Soil all over the world probably contains more than 2 trillion tons of stored carbon, scientists estimate. That’s at least three times more than there is floating around in the Earth’s atmosphere. Whether it will stay there is a big question. Recent research suggests climate change may play a growing role. As the world grows warmer and wetter, some scientists believe more carbon may exit the soil and move into the atmosphere....
NEW YORK CITY—Amid a panel discussion about string theory and other candidates for the theory of everything—the long-sought system that would unify the four forces of physics—Brian Greene said something that sounded a bit curious. “If you asked me, ‘Do I believe in string theory?’” began Greene, one of string theory’s most famous proponents. “My answer today would be the same as it was 10 years ago: No.” Greene, a Columbia University physicist and author of the new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Knopf, 2011), explained that he only believes ideas that make testable predictions—an area where string theory has fallen short....
It was only in 2006 that researchers discovered the latest of three major viruses known to cause the common cold. Now, a new 3-D model of this pathogen, the nastiest of the rhinoviruses, may help pave the way to more effective cold remedies. Ann Palmenberg, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her colleagues constructed the model of rhinovirus C to better understand how all rhinoviruses (species in the genus Enterovirus) work, grow and react....
Key concepts Chemistry Gases Chemical reaction Thermal decomposition Introduction Baking soda is not only great for cooking, but it is also a useful chemical for science projects. You have probably heard about and maybe even used the baking soda–vinegar reaction to make homemade volcanoes erupt, shoot bottle rockets up in the air or to detect acids and bases. There are many more chemical reactions, however, that you can explore with the help of baking soda....
Anyone who has ever owned an outdoor cat knows that it tends to disappear for hours, sometimes days, at a time. Where do cats go when they are lurking out of sight? The question is of interest not just to pet owners but also to conservation scientists who study the impact of free-roaming cats on wildlife populations. Scientists at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Natural History Survey recently attached radio transmitters to the adjustable collars of 18 pet and 24 feral cats in southeastern Champaign-Urbana and tracked the animals by truck and on foot for more than one year....
A full meltdown has been avoided so far at Japan’s 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Neverless, as far away as Tokyo, 240 kilometers to the south, the city government says small amounts of the radioactive iodine and cesium have been detected in the air. Higher levels of radioactive materials have been monitored closer to the plant, prompting the government to order the evacuation of residents within a 20-kilometer radius. As a precautionary measure against radiation exposure, the Japanese have also distributed 230,000 units of potassium iodide tablets, comprising a stable form of iodine, to evacuation centers in the area around the Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear power complexes, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A dog in Paris has caught monkeypox from one of its owners, both of whom were infected with the virus, according to a scientific paper published on Aug. 10, 2022. This is the first case of a dog contracting the monkeypox virus through direct contact with skin lesions on a human. I am a veterinary pathologist and virologist who has been working with poxviruses for over 20 years....
Oil and coal industries’ reliance on rail to ship their wares may put the squeeze on Western farmers using the same tracks to get their grains to market. Montana growers are looking with concern at plans to crowd the rails even more with coal exports to the Pacific Northwest. As energy commodities are more profitable to ship, already-limited rail capacity will likely tighten and become more expensive for growers, said Gerald Fauth, a Virginia-based transportation economics expert....
