On April 30, I woke up with a deep cough, fever, and an aching body—the symptoms that have dominated the news for months. I had a nasopharyngeal COVID-19 test in a drive-thru at a medical building in Boston, where I work as the CEO of a healthcare company. I got an email 48 hours later, confirming I was COVID negative. I returned to my home office and joined eight Zoom video calls with health system leaders....
Continental jet 516—a two-engine Boeing 737-800—completed a two hour test flight out of Houston today with one engine powered by a 50-50 blend of regular petroleum-based jet fuel and a synthetic alternative made from Jatropha and algae. “The properties of the fuel are fabulous, in fact, the bio part of the blend has a lower freeze point than Jet A,” says Billy Glover, managing director of environmental strategy at Boeing, which is helping organize similar test flights throughout the world....
The last ice age turned the Appalachians into North America’s Noah’s Ark. The mountain peaks provided a last green refuge above the glaciers, drawing species from across the eastern half of continent. Some 10,000 years later, many have stayed, and the mountains are home to one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity – from flying squirrels to freshwater mussels – in the country. Just last month, biologists stumbled across an entire new genus of salamanders in Southern Appalachia, the first new vertebrate genus discovered in the United States in 50 years....
The next generation of particle-collider experiments will feature some of the world’s most advanced thinking machines, if links now being forged between particle physicists and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers take off. Such machines could make discoveries with little human input—a prospect that makes some physicists queasy. Driven by an eagerness to make discoveries and the knowledge that they will be hit with unmanageable volumes of data in ten years’ time, physicists who work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland, are enlisting the help of AI experts....
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A pair of nesting bald eagles have been found on San Clemente Island off the Southern California coast for the first time in more than 50 years, the National Park Service said on Thursday, marking the latest step in their comeback from near extinction. The discovery means that bald eagles, which vanished from the Channel Islands in the early 1960s due to DDT poisoning and once were listed as an endangered species, have now returned to five of the eight islands in the chain....
Every year 10 gigawatts of potential power are squandered as waste heat from industrial processes—enough to light 10 million homes. The thermoelectric effect, in which charges are created by temperature differences, provides a way of transferring this heat into electricity—but only some of it. For decades the temperature differential had to be 500 degrees C or greater to capture any useful amount of energy, explains Yuan Yang, a postdoctoral scholar at M....
The journey of a drug from lab to pharmacy is usually long and pricey, typically taking a decade or more and gobbling up hundreds of millions of dollars. Pharmaceutical and chemical companies are willing to make these major investments in time and money on chemical compounds that promise to become the next Viagra, Prozac or other blockbuster medication. Often, however, these experiments are scuttled late in the game because toxic side effects surface....
Talk about milking an issue. Adding a new twist to the debate over the safety of hormones in milk, a new industry study concludes that injecting cows with a growth hormone known as recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) designed to increase their milk production is environmentally friendly. Why? Because it has the potential of reducing the number of greenhouse gas–emitting dairy cows on the planet without decreasing milk production. “By using rbST, we could produce more or the same amount of milk with fewer cows,” says animal nutritionist Judith Capper of Cornell University, co-author of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA....
When digital activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide January 11 as U.S. prosecutors assembled a criminal case against him, much anger from his peers was aimed at both the government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “This feels like losing a kid brother,” Matt Blaze, the director of the Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, observed on Twitter last week. He, like thousands of others, spoke out in defense of the 26-year-old inventor, venting their wrath at the prosecutors who expected to bring Swartz to trial in April for bypassing security blocks at M....
Hawaii is on the verge of being the first state in the U.S. to set a goal of generating all of its electricity from renewable energy sources. Under a bill the Hawaii Legislature passed this week, 100 percent of the state’s electricity would be generated with renewables by 2045. If Gov. David Ige approves the measure—he has until the end of June to sign it—it will put the state’s climate goals far ahead any other, and extend Hawaii’s Clean Energy Initiative through mid-century....
Editor’s note: A few years ago, researchers began looking for the earliest evidence of Manhattan’s iconic grid plan, which places streets and avenues along mostly horizontal and vertical directions (in contrast to the spoke-and-wheel layouts of cities such as London or Paris). In particular, they were hunting long-lost surveying marks left by a complicated young man named John Randel, Jr., whose maps helped establish the shape of New York City. The following is adapted from the book, The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr....
By Jon Cartwright of Nature magazineThis week, computer chip manufacturer Intel announced that it is preparing to enter a new dimension in transistors–literally. Known as Tri-Gate, its new transistor will be the first to go into mass production with a truly three-dimensional (3D) structure.Intel says that the transistor will offer performance and efficiency benefits over 2D models when becomes production ready in a new range of microprocessors later this year. But with some industry analysts calling it a risky venture, Nature explores what the advantages are of 3D....
In his new book, The Ravenous Brain, Bor takes on the biggest mystery of modern neuroscience: consciousness. Drawing on research published in the past 20 years, including some of his own, he presents a fresh view of consciousness in which chunking is its essential function. He contends that human consciousness evolved to help us learn by extracting relevant information from our surroundings and organizing it into meaningful patterns. According to several studies, we can be aware of no more than four items at any time; chunking is key because it allows us to compress data so we can maximize the information we gather....
To feed an exploding global population, scientists have called for a doubling of food production over the next 40 years. Genetic manipulation might seem the best way to quickly boost characteristics essential to plant growth and crop yields. New findings from different laboratories, however, suggest that fungi, bacteria and viruses could be an exciting alternative to increase agricultural productivity. Scientists have long known that microbes can work symbiotically with plants. For instance, mycorrhizal fungi, which are associated with 90 percent of land plants, extend from roots to bring in moisture and minerals in exchange for plant carbohydrates....
By Erika Check HaydenWounds could allow certain types of mutated cell to migrate to the surface of the skin, triggering tumours in people predisposed to cancer, according to a study.A variety of cancers have been associated with wounds – for instance, battlefield injuries can lead to a type of tumour called Marjolin’s ulcer, and ‘kangri cancer’ afflicts some people from Kashmir at the site of burns caused by personal heaters carried under the clothes....
A trove of skulls and other body parts unearthed in the heart of London may have once belonged to Roman gladiators, war captives or criminals, a new study suggests. The remains, described in the January issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, belonged to about 40 men, mostly ages 25 to 35, and were marred by violence: cheek fractures, blunt-force trauma to the head, decapitation and injuries from sharp weapons, said study co-author Rebecca Redfern, a curator and bioarchaeologist at the Museum of London....
Communities of color in the U.S. have long reported health problems from heavy exposure to polluted air. In recent decades a growing body of data have bolstered these reports by showing that Asian, Black and Hispanic people are exposed to relatively higher concentrations of potentially deadly air pollution on average, compared with white people. But some policy makers have questioned whether these trends hold across sources of such pollution, which can vary regionally and range from tailpipe exhaust on highways to emissions related to construction or commercial cooking....
The amount of carbon dioxide in the tropical Pacific Ocean has increased surprisingly quickly over the past 14 years, according to new research from scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Washington. The reason for the rapid increase in carbon dioxide concentrations is a combination of natural variability and human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, said Adrienne Sutton, a research scientist with NOAA’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington....
In 2012 the remains of 27 hunter–gatherers were unearthed in a remote part of Kenya called Nataruk near Lake Turkana—many of whom, based on the startling state of their bony remnants, died horrifically violent deaths. Skulls were bashed in with blunt objects; knees and hands bound and broken. Razor-sharp obsidian spear tips were found lodged in two of the skeletons. After exhuming and carbon-dating the skeletons, researchers from the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies have published their findings in this week’s Nature, reporting that the remains are estimated to be from between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago, making it the earliest scientifically dated evidence of organized human violence among scavenging humans....
The law is finally catching up to driverless cars. As of September 16, the state of California—home of auto newcomer Google—will require test drivers to have a special license, like a trucker or school bus driver. They will need to be employees or contractors of the car manufacturer, complete safety training, and have clean road records. Carmakers themselves will have to apply for a testing permit annually, install manual controls and override systems in each car, submit incident reports and secure $5 million in insurance....
