Posts

MAHUAYANI, Peru—A full moon hangs in the frosty sky as hundreds of dancers file in darkness toward the top of the Sinakara valley high in the Andes. Footsteps crunch frozen tundra, and dancing shoes step gingerly over ice-covered rivulets. Musicians blow on numb fingers as sunlight tips the hills to the west and creeps up the valley. High above, ice fields on the eastern peaks remain in shadow. Suddenly dancers and musicians turn eastward and kneel, baring their heads....

The astronomers who this spring announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun because they did not take into proper account a confounding effect of galactic dust, two new analyses suggest. Although further observations may yet find the signal to emerge from the noise, independent experts now say they no longer believe that the original data constituted significant evidence. Researchers said in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the Big Bang’s afterglow, using a South Pole-based radio telescope called BICEP2....

A campaign to vaccinate people at risk of developing Ebola in the latest outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could begin by the end of this week, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said Sunday. Tedros said the government of the DRC has formally asked to use an experimental vaccine being developed by Merck. The WHO has a stockpile of 4,300 doses of the vaccine in Geneva; the company also has 300,000 doses of the vaccine stockpiled in the United States....

Having finally joined the rest of the world in severely restricting medical testing on chimpanzees, the U.S. is currently relocating hundreds of government-managed chimps to sanctuaries. One reason for these changes is that the animals are not as essential to biomedical research as they used to be—we have learned to use genetically engineered mice and cell cultures instead. For many people, an even more persuasive argument is that performing medical research on chimpanzees is inhumane because, like us, they are highly intelligent, emotional and self-aware....

Dear EarthTalk: I hear the term “greenwashing” a lot these days but am still not sure exactly what it means. Can you enlighten?—Ruth Markell, Indianapolis In essence, greenwashing involves falsely conveying to consumers that a given product, service, company or institution factors environmental responsibility into its offerings and/or operations. CorpWatch, a non-profit dedicated to keeping tabs on the social responsibility (or lack thereof) of U.S.-based companies, characterizes greenwashing as “the phenomena of socially and environmentally destructive corporations, attempting to preserve and expand their markets or power by posing as friends of the environment....

The next time Caribbean snorkelers peer down into the water, there may not be much for them to see, new research finds. Due to local pressures such as overfishing and excessive coastal pollution, coral cover in the Caribbean has declined by more than 50 percent since the 1970s, according to a comprehensive study released today by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the U....

This sidebar belongs to the feature story Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus’s Tomb or Is It Just a Statistical Error? Christopher Mims: When I saw that there was a statistician involved in gathering evidence for the documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, I was very intrigued. Andrey Feuerverger, professor of statistics and mathematics at the University of Toronto: When they asked me to run some numbers for them, that consultation came as a surprise....

Our planet is home to many radioactive substances—not just in its geologic innards or its weapons caches but also in its hospitals, at its industrial sites and in its food processing plants. In Colorado, for instance, 27 buildings house scary-sounding elements such as cesium 137, cobalt 60, americium 241 and iridium 192. These materials are not there for risky purposes, though. They play a part in cancer therapy, blood irradiation, medical and food sterilization, structure and equipment testing, geologic exploration and instrument calibration....

Standing atop a 16-foot-high seawall on South Korea’s western coast, Chris Purnell and his colleagues slide mesh bags stuffed with empty oyster shells down onto the sandy mudflats of the Geum Estuary. They then clip the heavy bags to ropes and drag them into the gently lapping waters that run into the Yellow Sea. Purnell’s aim is for these bags, attached to foam floats and lashed together in clusters up to 80 feet wide, to act as artificial roosting sites for the tens of thousands of migratory shorebirds that traverse the East Asian-Australasian Flyway....

PBS recently debuted its newest science series for preschoolers, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! Children’s television may be educational in many ways, but can it really teach kids science? Research on how children learn provides a useful guide for determining whether this show and others are worth watching. Because preschoolers have a limited capacity for processing information, they are more likely to comprehend educational content that links directly into a narrative, says Shalom Fisch of MediaKidz Research & Consulting....

When Susan Handy moved to Davis, Calif., in 2002, she immediately bought a commuting vehicle: a wheeled trailer, for toting her kids behind her bike. Handy, an environmental policy analyst at the University of California, and her husband frequently pedal to work, with two preschoolers in tow. Among locals, their commute is common. Fifty miles of bike lanes ribbon Davis, which is only about 10.5 square miles in area. Handy calls Davis a small town that really works....

By Duncan Graham-Rowe of Nature magazineFlexible, transparent lithium-ion batteries have been made by a team of researchers at Stanford University in California, a technological leap that could spawn see-through electronic gadgets such as translucent iPads.Many electronic components can be fabricated to be transparent, but so far this hasn’t been possible for the power supply, says materials scientist Yi Cui, who led the work, which is published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

This video might change the way you look at quail eggs. A scientist who made a stunning time-lapse video of a growing quail embryo took home top honors in Nikon’s 2013 Small World in Motion Competition, a contest that treats photomicrographs — pictures often used by scientists — as objects of art. The winners were announced Wednesday (April 23). Using a technique known as optical tomography, Gabriel G. Martins, a researcher at Portugal’s University of Lisbon, stitched together 1,000 separate images to create a 3D reconstruction of the whole embryo, which measures just less an inch (23 millimeters) in length....

The Jazz Age Lawn Party, which usually occurs twice a summer on Governor’s Island, in New York, has become a delightful tradition. Typically, it features live music, social dancing, dance performances and many gorgeous 1920s-style dresses and dapper suits on two weekends in June and August. This year, it became an inadvertent example of why we need better health communication and policy on COVID-19. Because it had been canceled last year, many folks at this year’s June event were especially eager to do the Charleston, the Peabody and otherwise swing their way into the 2020s, which are already echoing the 1920s in eerie ways....

Gender is so fundamental to the way we understand the world that people are prone to assign a sex to even inanimate objects. We all know someone, or perhaps we are that person, who consistently refers to their computer or car with a gender pronoun (“She’s been running great these past few weeks!”) New research suggests that our tendency to see gender everywhere even applies to abstract ideas such as numbers....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichFour pages in 648 days. At that rate it would have taken Leo Tolstoy centuries to write War and Peace. But to get to this point, John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, may have battled through the bureaucratic equivalent of the Napoleonic Wars.On 17 December, Holdren finally released a long-promised set of guidelines for scientific integrity in US government departments and agencies....

In May of this year the pro-life/pro-choice controversy leapt back into headlines when Ireland overwhelmingly approved a referendum to end its constitutional ban on abortion. Around the same time, the Trump administration proposed that Title X federal funding be withheld from abortion clinics as a tactic to reduce the practice, a strategy similar to that of Texas and other states to shut down clinics by burying them in an avalanche of regulations, which the U....

Distant planets tell all: A new analysis uses alien worlds’ orbital treks to peek inside their stars. NASA’s ever-watchful Kepler space telescope has identified thousands of exoplanets by noting the tiny brightness dips caused when these worlds “transit,” or cross the face of, their host stars. The length between dimmings tells scientists how long the planet takes to orbit—how long its year is—and the level of dimming shows how much smaller the planet is than the star....

Editor’s Note: This edited version of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin,” published in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American, was originally published on SciAm.com as part of our series “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Scientific American’s Take.” “Should I be worried about the Crips and the Bloods up here?” These were the first words out of the mouth of Ben Stein as he entered my office at Skeptic magazine, located in the racially mixed neighborhood of Altadena, Calif....

Kevin Everett’s playing career ended in the first game of the 2007 NFL season. At the beginning of the second quarter, the third-year Buffalo Bills tight end swooped in to tackle Denver Broncos kick returner Domenik Hixon. Their helmets collided. Everett, 26, stiffened and fell to the ground. As medics attended to the injured player, thousands of Bills fans crammed into Ralph Wilson Stadium, and the 50-plus members of the team’s playing and coaching staff waited for a signal from the fallen player—a thumb’s up or a wave....