While balmy hints of spring melt piles of snow in the eastern U.S., the impending end of winter marks peak season for Arctic sea ice. But this year, that winter maximum area is currently on track to hit a record low since satellite records began in 1979. What that low-ice mark means for the spring and summer melting seasons is unclear, but the milestone would still be notable in the global warming-fueled cycle of Arctic sea ice decline....
Telescopes around the world recorded the brightest explosion ever detected in our galaxy, which sent x-rays and gamma rays careening outward at incredible speeds, astronomers announced on Friday. In just two-tenths of a second, the flare, located 50,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, shot out as much energy as our sun gives off in 250,000 years. Scientists detected evidence of the flare, coming from the magnetized neutron star, or magnetar, known as SGR 1806-20 on December 27, 2004....
Having heart transplant surgery is daunting enough. But in the months afterward the body’s immune system sometimes attacks the donor organ, which can have deadly consequences. To check for inflammation (a sign of organ rejection), doctors have to snip and analyze a sliver of tissue from the recipient’s new heart—typically about 16 times in the first year. “There is a risk of damage during the procedure, and the results are far from reliable, yet [such] biopsies are the current gold standard,” says cardiovascular medicine researcher Hannah Valantine of Stanford University....
Since the Soviet Union launched the first space station, Salyut 1, 50 years ago, humans have lived on a total of 11 such facilities in Earth orbit. China will soon add one more to that list. With the core module of the Chinese Space Station (CSS) scheduled to lift off at the end of April, the culmination of a project the nation’s government initially envisioned in 1992 is finally entering the construction phase....
As the planet and oceans continue to heat up, sites where coral has recently thrived are becoming less and less habitable. For instance, thanks to extreme ocean temperatures, much of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef suffered mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 that turned parades of colorful coral into dull, white masses. But paleontologists have now discovered a haven to which one region’s reefs might relocate—via oceanic currents when corals are still in their free-floating larval stage—to escape overheating....
Patients who suffer a major ischemic stroke—the narrowing or blocking of arteries that chokes off blood flow to the brain—often experience prior symptoms that do not result in injury. In most cases, these transient ischemic attacks preceded major strokes by no more than a week, according to a recent study of 2,416 patients. Physicians should begin preventive treatment within hours of a mini stroke rather than taking weeks to assess a patient, as some studies have found....
Editors note: This story is part of a Feature “The Doping Dilemma” from the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. A game theory model of doping in cycling applies to other sports as well, particularly baseball. For expert insight, I spoke with Lance Williams, an investigative reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle and co-author (with Mark Fainaru-Wada) of Game of Shadows, a revelatory book about how BALCO, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, supplied baseball players and other athletes with performance-enhancing drugs....
From polyester shirts, plastic milk jugs and PVC pipes to the production of high-grade industrial ethanol, the contribution of the chemical feedstock ethylene can be found just about everywhere around the globe. But ethylene’s ubiquity as a building block in plastics and chemicals masks an underlying environmental cost. The cheap hydrocarbon is made using petroleum and natural gas, and the way it is produced emits more carbon dioxide than any other chemical process....
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Monsanto Co’s biotech seed patents on Monday, dealing a blow to a group of organic farmers and other activists trying to stop the biotech company from suing farmers if their fields contain a few plants containing the company’s genetically modified traits.The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and a group of dozens of organic and conventional family farmers, seed companies and public advocacy interests sued Monsanto in March 2011....
NASA’s Artemis 1 mission fired its engines close to the moon today (Nov. 21), finishing the maneuver successfully out of communication with Earth. Artemis 1’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft has been cruising toward the moon since Wednesday morning (Nov. 16), when it launched atop NASA’s gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The burn “sent Orion close enough to the lunar surface to leverage the moon’s gravitational force, and swing the spacecraft once around the moon toward entry into a distant retrograde orbit,” NASA’s Sandra Jones said during an Artemis 1 livestream Monday (Nov....
Number theorist Peter Scholze, who became Germany’s youngest ever full professor aged 24, and geometrician Caucher Birkar—a Kurdish refugee—are among the winners of this year’s Fields Medals, the most coveted awards in mathematics. The medals, which are given out every four years, were also awarded today to Alessio Figalli, a network-analysis researcher and Akshay Venkatesh, who also works on number theory. Their names were announced in Rio de Janeiro, at the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians....
Sean M. Carroll does not mince words. On October 17 he also did not cube them, dice them or thinly slice them, even when he was seriously discussing the theory that the moon is made of green cheese. Just to be clear, the discussion was serious, not the theory, when Carroll spoke at the ScienceWriters2011 conference in Flagstaff, Ariz. A noted theoretical physicist, Carroll is not to be confused with noted evolutionary biologist Sean B....
Most photovoltaic solar cells have an inherent efficiency cap, limiting how much useful energy they can extract from the sun. But scientists are finding ways around this obstacle with new research that could make solar energy more efficient and more cost-effective. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., researchers are investigating how to get a unit of light to push more than one electron at a time. Meanwhile, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working on getting the right type of light to hit solar cells to make sure its energy doesn’t go to waste....
Stem Cell Sciences must be the most global of any stem cell company. SCS has corporate research and development centres in the UK, Japan and Australia and plans to set up a US operation this year. Its bold business plan is based on commercialising human embryonic stem cells, first to sell as a research tool to the pharmaceutical industry and later to develop cell-based therapies. Peter Mountford, the chief executive, set up SCS in his native Australia as a “virtual company” in 1994, shortly after returning home from a productive period working in Scotland with Austin Smith, the Edinburgh stem cell pioneer....
Last week Subway, the world’s biggest fast food chain, became the latest in the industry to announce it was adopting a stronger antibiotic-free policy—serving chicken and turkey raised without medicines intended to fight bacterial infections starting next year. The announcement came shortly before a petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures was about to be delivered to Subway’s headquarters in Connecticut calling for an end to antibiotic use in the sandwich maker’s food supply chain....
By Aditya Kalra PANDARI India (Reuters) - Tainted or sub-standard drugs probably led to the deaths of 13 Indian women after sterilization surgery at a family-planning “camp”, and owners of the factories that produced them have been summoned for questioning, a senior official said on Thursday. Meanwhile, the doctor who carried out the sterilization of 83 women in less than three hours at a hospital in the eastern state of Chhattisgarh denied reports the equipment he used was rusty or dirty and blamed adulterated medicines for the tragedy....
Everyone over 50 should take statins to lower their cholesterol, an editorial argued last week in The Lancet. The piece based its recommendation on a meta-analysis of 27 clinical trials published in the same issue that concluded statins significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events in healthy people without posing substantial risks. Subsequent articles heralding the meta-analysis’s findings were published in the Guardian, Forbes and the U....
Carbon emissions are driving the biosphere toward a three-degree-Celsius rise in average temperature, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently noted in its Sixth Assessment Report. Intense and frequent droughts, flooding, wildfires and food insecurity are already devastating parts of the world. The usual “clean technology” solution to reduce carbon emissions has serious ecological and social costs, however. Renewable energy threatens to generate mountains of waste and destruction. Just replacing fossil-fuel-powered cars with fleets of electric vehicles, for example, requires vast amounts of new materials....
The Great Lakes share a surprising connection with Wisconsin’s small lakes and aquifers — their water levels all rise and fall on a 13-year cycle, according to a new study. But that cycle is now mysteriously out of whack, researchers have found. “The last two decades have been kind of exceptional,” said Carl Watras, a climate scientist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Water levels have been declining since 1998, Watras told Live Science....
Editor’s Note (2/24/22): This week Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to investigate gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth as “child abuse.” This editorial from June 2021 is being republished to highlight the ways that anti-trans legislation is harmful and unscientific. On April 6, the Arkansas state legislature passed a law that would prohibit transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming medical care. It was not alone: before 2021 had even reached the halfway point, at least 35 similar bills—all of them in Republican-controlled states—had been proposed or passed, setting a regrettable record....
