The spaceflight company SpaceX aborted the planned launch of a long-awaited space weather satellite on Sunday, as well as a novel rocket landing test, due to problems with a U.S. Air Force ground radar tracking system. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was less than 3 minutes from launching the Deep Space Climate Observatory into the sunset sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida when the radar issue forced the delay....
Calculus does not have to be made easy—it is easy already. That banner used to grace the Los Angeles classroom of someone once called the best teacher in America. Jaime Escalante, the unconventional calculus teacher who was depicted by Edward James Olmos in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, died last year of cancer at the age of 79. The year before the film, more students from Garfield High School took the AP calculus exam than at all but three other public schools in the country, with two thirds passing....
Many people swear by the so-called spelunker’s illusion, in which they think they can see their own hands moving even in the total absence of light. You don’t have to see it to believe it: in a recent article in Psychological Science, cognitive scientists based at Vanderbilt University and the University of Rochester have demonstrated that this spooky illusion is real, and some individuals are more prone to these visions than others....
[Updated Oct. 7, 2011] Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and inventor of the Web (from his blog, with permission): A big thing Steve Jobs did for the world was to insist that computers could be usable rather than totally infuriating! The NeXT was brilliant. The NeXT had (arguably too) many things introduced at once—removable optical storage, Objective C, DSP for sound and movies, Mach kernel, unix for a PC, display Postscript, InterfaceBuilder and so on....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Some 20 years ago, my colleague Dr. Chau Tran and I developed a way to simulate the trajectories of millions of basketballs on the computer. We went to the coaches and assistant coaches at North Carolina State University, where we are based, and told them we had this uncommon ability to study basketball shots very carefully....
Revving Up Fuel Cells Progress toward hydrogen-powered cars depends on less expensive but greater capacity fuel-cell systems [see “On the Road to Fuel-Cell Cars”; SciAm, March 2005]. Researchers have taken big steps on both the cost and storage challenges. A team from Quebec came up with a recipe that uses iron instead of expensive platinum to catalyze the electricity-making reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. The key was carbon structures containing microscopic pores, which were filled with iron to provide plenty of active sites for chemical reactions....
For the first time, telescopes have captured the light spectra emitted directly from planets outside of our solar system. Researchers trained the infrared-sensitive Spitzer Space Telescope on two extrasolar gas giant planets, called HD 209458 b and HD 189733 b. The atmospheres are most notable for what they lack: “We find no evidence for water in the spectrum, and all the theorists will tell you that there should be water (in the form of vapor) in the atmosphere[s] of these planets,” says astrophysicist Jeremy Richardson of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a member of a team that analyzed HD 209458 b....
In the Torque and Center of Mass episode of NBC Learn’s “The Science of NFL Football” you see that a linemen lowers his center of mass in order to overpower an opponent. A human being’s center of mass is somewhere around the navel, as explained in the video. If people could stay completely rigid, you could balance them on a single point by placing their center of mass directly above that point....
Forget Jaws. The scariest thing about sharks is their tenuous future. Though often misperceived as villainous denizens of the deep, these top predators play an important role in preserving the balance of the ocean’s ecosystems by keeping their prey’s populations in check. And so, much to the chagrin of biologists and environmentalists, the decimation of some 1,200 species of sharks and their closest relatives, including skates and rays, is likely to have negative ecological and economic consequences....
When winter in Missouri went straight to summer, practically skipping spring, Brent Sandidge worried about his pigs. “Then May felt like June and June felt like July,” says Sandidge, a pig farmer whose family owns a 3,000-sow farm in Marshall, Mo. Hotter-than-normal weather means farmers like him will have to sell lighter pigs, because heat slows the animals’ muscle growth. Although high temperatures reduce meat production in a number of livestock animals, pigs are especially vulnerable because their sweat glands are inefficient....
President Obama announced the first federal nuclear-power loan guarantee, $8 billion for Southern Co. to build two new reactors in Georgia. In a speech at a job-training center at the IBEW Local 26 headquarters in Lanham, Md., Obama said the loan guarantee will help “build a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in America” as part of a White House effort to create a “clean energy” economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions....
The Department of Energy is terminating financing of the FutureGen 2.0 project, ending construction plans for one of the most expensive and high-profile carbon capture proposals in the world. In a statement yesterday, FutureGen Alliance CEO Ken Humphreys said that DOE decided to suspend planned funds for the “clean” coal plant because there is not enough time to complete the project before a required deadline under the 2009 federal stimulus package....
Those who find satisfaction in the crunch of a hard apple have reason to be worried about climate change: a 40-year study of Japanese apple orchards has found that global warming is producing softer — but sweeter — apples. The work, published today in Scientific Reports, joins a growing body of research that describes how changes in climate are affecting iconic foods. The findings mean that Japan’s beloved Fuji apples join the ranks of other plants that are likely to have their harvests altered by warming temperatures, such as wine grapes and the sugar maple trees used to make maple syrup....
Fewer than 200 global companies are leading the world in responding to climate change, including U.S. technology giants Apple, Google and Microsoft, and three domestic energy firms—electric utilities Entergy Corp. and Pepco Holdings Inc., and Spectra Energy Corp., an oil and gas pipeline firm. Those firms are among 34 American companies that the British nonprofit CDP, formerly the Climate Disclosure Project, included in its 2014 “Climate Performance Leadership Index,” released Wednesday....
Residents of just 100 cities account for 20 percent of humanity’s overall carbon footprint, according to a new estimate of carbon dioxide emissions. This share is comparable to worldwide industry-related emissions, showcasing how individual consumption is a major contributor of excess carbon dioxide. The analysis calculated emissions in 13,000 cities, making it the most wide-scale look at cities’ carbon footprints to date. The results, the international research team says, illuminate the degree to which residents of just a few cities can contribute to a country’s overall footprint....
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - HIV was the third leading cause of natural deaths in South Africa in 2013, up three places from the previous year, and the second highest killer of young people, a survey by the national statistics agency showed on Tuesday. The survey, based on 458,933 deaths that occurred in 2013, showed that HIV was responsible for 11 percent of deaths in the 15 to 44 age group, Statistics South Africa said....
Galileo could be, let’s say, prickly. “Look, he was a genius, and he was a truly unusual person, but he wasn’t exactly nice,” astrophysicist and author Mario Livio, whose latest book is Galileo and the Science Deniers, said by phone. “He was nice to his family, he supported the members of his family … and he had a few extremely good friends. But he could be nasty to his enemies. His sharp pen was just incredible....
By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Hypothermia is common among patients during the first hour of anesthesia, despite the use of forced air warming to maintain core temperature, a study in nearly 60,000 surgical patients shows. And the longer patients were hypothermic, the more likely they were to require transfusion, Dr. Daniel Sessler, of the Department of Outcomes Research at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and colleagues found. “Most patients become hypothermic during the first hour of anesthesia and then temperature slowly returns toward normal, so that by the end of the surgery most patients are normothermic,” Dr....
A HAVEN AT HOME Rachel Nuwer writes in “No Workplace Like Home” that people might work more productively in such a setting, but I would like to point out an additional benefit: if you experience environmental stressors such as sensitivity to fluorescent lighting, high-contrast patterns and background noises, you can control your environment at home and maximize concentration and focus and minimize visual and auditory sensory stress. And you can take breaks as needed and work according to your own time frame and circadian rhythm....
Whether it’s drug scandals, pollution problems or sheer curiosity at the incredible capabilities of the athletes, the Olympic Games have long fascinated researchers as well as the general public. In recent decades, research has increased on the selection of Olympic sites, environmental issues and the Games’ ability to encourage people to participate in sport, says sports-medicine specialist Lars Engebretsen, who heads science and research for the International Olympic Committee. The Olympics don’t typically inspire researchers to start new fields—instead, they tend to feed into ongoing studies, says Vanessa Heggie, a historian of science and sports medicine at the University of Birmingham, UK....
