In our experience, nothing ever really ends. When we die, our bodies decay and the material in them returns to the earth and the air, allowing for the creation of new life. We live on in what comes after. But will that always be the case? Might there come a point sometime in the future when there is no “after”? Depressingly, modern physics suggests the answer is yes. Time itself could end....
A clutch of fishing villages dot the coast near Kilifi, north of Mombasa in Kenya. The waters are home to parrot fish, octopus and other edible species. But despite living on the shores, the children in the villages rarely eat seafood. Their staple meal is ugali, maize (corn) flour mixed with water, and most of their nutrition comes from plants. Almost half the kids here have stunted growth—twice the national rate....
Editor’s Note: We are posting this feature from our September 2006 issue in light of the Obama administration’s renewed focus on how to use the most abundant–and dirtiest–fossil fuel, coal, without overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. More than most people realize, dealing with climate change means addressing the problems posed by emissions from coal-fired power plants. Unless humanity takes prompt action to strictly limit the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere when consuming coal to make electricity, we have little chance of gaining control over global warming....
SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. A few months ago a venture capital company I consult for asked me to visit the offices of Baker–Calling, a Santa Monica–based start-up trying to build a better microphone for use in smartphones and tablets. Baker–Calling’s founder, Robert Littrell, has been working on this problem for eight years—first while earning an engineering PhD at the University of Michigan, and now as the CEO of his five-person company....
Mutant mosquitoes engineered to resist the parasite that causes malaria could wipe out the disease in some regions—for good. Humans contract malaria from mosquitoes that are infected by parasites from the genus Plasmodium. Previous work had shown that mosquitoes could be engineered to rebuff the parasite P. falciparum, but researchers lacked a way to ensure that the resistance genes would spread rapidly through a wild population. In work published on November 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used a controversial method called ‘gene drive’ to ensure that an engineered mosquito would pass on its new resistance genes to nearly all of its offspring—not just half, as would normally be the case....
More than a year since the start of one of the worst public health crises in recent history, Ebola cases have been tumbling in West Africa. But the epidemic is far from over: the risk of flare ups and further geographical spread will remain until there are no new cases. The ease in case numbers means that public-health countermeasures and resources can be shifted in many places, from curbing runaway outbreaks to aggressively targeting the remaining, often smaller outbreaks....
This is not a bag of blood. Granted, it did begin as a blood donation, drawn from the arm of a volunteer donor in Massachusetts. Within hours of collection, though, that precursory pint of warm whole blood had been centrifuged, fractionated and decanted into a red blood cell concentrate laced with a cocktail of chemical buffers and nutrients. The ruddy yield, shown here, is one chilled unit of processed blood product, suitable for a patient desperately in need of red cells....
Power plant owners and speculators yesterday bid for the right to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) as part of a new multistate government program designed to reduce global warming pollution. Interested parties during an online auction offered at least $1.86 per ton of CO2 emitted; there were 12 million allowances (one per ton) to emit climate change–inducing CO2 from power plants in eastern seaboard states from Maine to Maryland available in a market known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, pronounced “Reggie....
When we read about celestial objects and events, it is sometimes difficult to relate what scientists say happens “out there” in space to life “down here” on Earth. Exotic entities like dark matter do not seem to have any direct impact on terrestrial affairs. But in her new book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (Ecco, 2015), particle physicist Lisa Randall proposes a connection between this dark matter, the mysterious material thought to make up around 27 percent of our universe, and the impact that spelled the dinosaurs’ demise about 66 million years ago....
The conservation of energy is an absolute law, and yet it seems to fly in the face of things we observe every day. Sparks create a fire, which generates heat—manifest energy that wasn’t there before. A battery produces power. A nuclear bomb creates an explosion. Each of these situations, however, is simply a case of energy changing form. Even the seemingly paradoxical dark energy causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate, we will see, obeys this rule....
Dozens of fossilized whales, seals and other marine animals have been discovered piled up in an ancient tidal flat in northern Chile, providing the first fossil evidence of repeated mass die-offs, according to a new report. Four distinct layers of bones appear at the site, suggesting the mass die-offs — also known as mass strandings — occurred repeatedly over the course of thousands of years, some time between about 6 million and 9 million years ago, an international team of scientists report....
The patient had endured 20 years of pain: her calves had turned into two bricks, and she now had trouble walking. A slew of doctors had failed to treat, let alone diagnose, her unusual condition. So when her x-rays finally landed on William A. Gahl’s desk at the National Institutes of Health, he knew immediately that he had to take her case. Gahl is the scientist and physician who leads the Undiagnosed Diseases Program, which tries to unravel the underlying causes of, and find therapies for, mysterious maladies and known but rare conditions....
I’ve been trying out various brain training regimens for a few years now. But lately, I’ve been really digging into a series of games that you play on your computer or mobile device for just a few minutes a day, every day, to boost your cognitive function. Or so it promises. Lumos Labs conducted a randomized study of the Lumosity brain training system, and after ten weeks of training, the users improved their working memory, short term memory, processing speed, and overall cognitive function....
Stars don’t see gender, and now, NASA is working to not see it either when allocating telescope time to scientists, inspired by a successful experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope. That experiment tested the hypothesis that if proposals are evaluated without knowledge of who wrote them and strictly on the merit of the science they proposed to do, the astronomers who received highly coveted observing time would end up being a more diverse group....
A droplet of liquid and a few seconds are all that researchers need to produce neatly spaced ridges of molecules that cover a huge area–at least by the standards of nanotechnology. In a feat of so-called self-assembly, a group reports that disk-shaped molecules can stack themselves by the millions into lines of up to a millimeter in length and covering several square millimeters. The process might help ease the fabrication of sensors such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that register the presence of offending chemicals....
From Nature magazine. An entirely new family of amphibians has been discovered hiding in the soils of northeastern India. In total, seven new species of these limbless, soil-dwelling and rather ugly creatures were unearthed by a team of researchers digging for over 1,000 man-hours. “The discovery adds a major branch to the amphibian tree of life,” note Sathyabhama Das Biju of the University of Delhi, and his colleagues in their paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B....
The US media reported gleefully this month that two real-life sea monsters had hit the beaches of southern California. But the two huge — and dead — giant oafish have prompted an equally delighted reaction among the world’s ichthyologists, who are keen to know more about these little-studied animals. Giant oafish (Regalecus glesne) are generally thought to live below 200 meters of depth and can exceed 10 meters in length, which makes it the world’s longest bony fish....
DISTRUSTED DEVICES David Pogue asks how we can know if privacy switches on the iPhone actually do anything in “In Tech We Don’t Trust” [TechnoFiles]. We could know this if the software were not closed source but open to inspection. By far the biggest advantage of open source software is that people all over the world can review it to see that it does what it says it does—and only that....
Pink salmon populations in Alaska have evolved to migrate earlier in the season, reacting to rising stream temperatures. Fluctuations in water temperature can adversely affect fish populations, leading to an increased risk of disease and mortality. When streamwater began to warm faster than normal, pink salmon populations took the hint, leaving their freshwater homes earlier than usual. Now, migration occurs nearly two weeks sooner than it did 40 years ago, according to a study sponsored by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and University of Alaska Southeast....
LONDON (Reuters) - Solar energy could be the top source of electricity by 2050, aided by plummeting costs of the equipment to generate it, a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the West’s energy watchdog, said on Monday. IEA Reports said solar photovoltaic (PV) systems could generate up to 16 percent of the world’s electricity by 2050, while solar thermal electricity (STE) - from “concentrating” solar power plants - could provide a further 11 percent....
