Traveling outside your own body is as easy as a video illusion, according to new research. Simply sit in front of two cameras filming your back. Place a special headset over your eyes; it will display the images from the left camera to your left eye and the right camera to your right eye. Then enlist a friend to simultaneously stroke your chest and perform a similar motion just below the cameras’ fields of view....
For much of its brief history, robot-assisted surgery has been synonymous with Intuitive Surgical, Inc.’s da Vinci system. It’s the only robot with U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to help surgeons perform a number of laparoscopic soft-tissue procedures, including hysterectomies, gall bladder and kidney removals, prostate cancer treatment and heart valve operations. Da Vinci has improved vastly since Intuitive introduced it more than a decade ago. Like many new technologies, however, it has experienced growing pains, leading some engineers and medical professionals to question whether a single company can meet growing demand while still delivering a safe product....
Key concepts Mathematics Statistics Probability Prediction Introduction Have you ever wondered what outcomes are predictable? For example, if you’re randomly picking a chocolate out of a box of mixed selections, can you predict how likely it is that you’d end up with a specific type of chocolate, such as a caramel-filled candy? To investigate this tasty topic, in this activity you’ll determine the frequency of different color M&M’s in a package of M&M candies....
In 1968 an exhibit entitled Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The first major event of its kind, Cybernetic Serendipity’s aim was to “present an area of activity which manifests artists’ involvement with science, and the scientists’ involvement with the arts,” wrote British art critic Jasia Reichardt, who curated the exhibit. Even though it was an art show, “most of the participants in the exhibition were scientists,” Reichardt said in a 2014 video....
One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true....
Remote as it is, the region has been threatened for centuries by colonizers who sought its riches. In response, the Ashaninka joined Indigenous alliances to fight off the invaders or fled into ever deeper forests to escape them. In the 1980s, however, technological advances made it far quicker and easier for outsiders to cut through the jungle for logging, ranching, industrial agriculture, and drug production and trafficking. The Apiwtxa, along with members of regional nongovernmental organizations, had been working with the Sawawo people, first in the line of invasion, to prepare to resist the loggers....
For hundreds of years, the Mazatec people of Oaxaca in southern Mexico have conducted rituals that combine their own ancient beliefs with those of Catholicism. Healers use herbs and other plants, incense, and chanting in order to learn the cures for illness, seek out lost objects and people, and travel to spiritual or astral dimensions. The most famous component of their rituals is the “magic” mushroom, which contains the psychedelic chemical psilocybin....
In Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge, a 2006 science-fiction novel set in the near future, modern medicine brings a talented Chinese-American poet, Robert Gu, back from end-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Before treatment, Gu is bedridden and can neither talk nor remember his children. After the therapy, his memory returns, although he develops a different set of talents. Flowers for Algernon, the 1959 short story by Daniel Keyes, entertains a related fantasy in which a futuristic treatment transforms Charlie, a mentally retarded man, into a genius....
A repeated warning about cannabis use in the post-hippie era is to be aware that what you’re smoking or ingesting isn’t your grandparents’ cannabis. Humans have worked hard in recent decades to produce strains with powerful doses of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive component of the plant. The result is a surprisingly intense high that famously sent New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd into a spiral of paranoia after she ingested a cannabis-laced chocolate edible one fateful evening in Colorado....
Just about every dog owner is convinced that their dog is a genius. For a long time scientists did not take such pronouncements very seriously, but research now suggests that canines are indeed quite bright and, in some ways, unique. Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, is one of the leading figures in the quest to understand what dogs know....
How fast is the universe expanding? How much does matter clump up in our cosmic neighborhood? Scientists use two methods to answer these questions. One involves observing the early cosmos and extrapolating to present times, and the other makes direct observations of the nearby universe. But there is a problem. The two methods consistently yield different answers. The simplest explanation for these discrepancies is merely that our measurements are somehow erroneous, but researchers are increasingly entertaining another, more breathtaking possibility: These twin tensions—between expectation and observation, between the early and late universe—may reflect some deep flaw in the Standard Model of cosmology, which encapsulates our knowledge and assumptions about the universe....
America is set to vote for a new president on 8 November, and the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will have to be able to address complex issues at the intersection of science and politics. As voting day nears, it is clear that the chemistry of this election is quite different from those of past years. In recent history, the chemical industry has been pro-Republican come election time, but in the current face-off between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican challenger Donald Trump, the sector appears to favour Clinton, while the reverse may be true for the biotech industry....
A burgeoning area of nanotechnology research is the development of tiny drug delivery systems that can target diseased cells specifically, leaving healthy ones untouched. New results suggest a novel synthetic approach could cut the manufacturing time for one type of nanoscale delivery system in half. Scientists at the University of Michigan have been working with branched polymers just nanometers long called dendrimers, which can carry many different types of molecules attached to their ends....
Everyone knows that cigarettes are bad for you. Yet 45 million Americans smoke, a habit that shaves a decade off life expectancy and causes cancer as well as heart and lung diseases. Nearly 70 percent of smokers want to quit, but despite the deadly consequences, the vast majority of them fail. Going cold turkey works for fewer than 10 percent of smokers. Even with counseling and the use of aids approved by the U....
Concerns over energy security are spurring branches of the military to get more electricity from renewable sources, inching the Pentagon toward governmentwide climate goals. But environmental concerns are not a key driver for the Defense Department, the nation’s largest consumer of energy. Instead, military officials say that safer sources of power are needed to enhance national security. That’s a bigger motivation than reducing emissions. “Our tag line is expeditionary energy. We don’t do green,” said Col....
By David CyranoskiIt was meant to be a new dawn for Japanese planetary missions, but the disappointing reports from the country’s Venus probe Akatsuki are all too familiar. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) reported December 8 that Akatsuki (Japanese for “dawn”) failed to enter the orbit of the searingly hot, rocky planet. Now orbiting the Sun, the probe will have to wait another six years before it has another chance....
The fate of the Affordable Care Act is again on the line Tuesday, as a federal appeals court in New Orleans takes up a case in which a lower court judge has already ruled the massive health law unconstitutional. If the lower court ruling is ultimately upheld, the case, Texas v. United States, has the potential to shake the nation’s entire health care system to its core. Not only would such a decision immediately affect the estimated 20 million people who get their health coverage through programs created under the law, ending the ACA would also create chaos in other parts of the health care system that were directly or indirectly changed under the law’s multitude of provisions, such as calorie counts on menus, a pathway for approval of generic copies of expensive biologic drugs and, perhaps most important politically, protections for people with preexisting conditions....
The mosquito-borne Zika virus has been declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” by the World Health Organization. The virus not only appears to severely harm unborn children but is also hurting the economies of many Latin American and Caribbean countries. The World Bank estimates Zika will cost the world US$3.5 billion in 2016. Three and a half billion dollars is a huge amount of money. How did the World Bank calculate this figure?...
The global economy will pump $90 trillion into infrastructure development over the next 15 years, sparking a series of investment decisions that will make or break the Earth’s climate, a sweeping new study out today finds. A choice to spend that money on low-carbon measures—things like building more compact cities, restoring degraded land and increasing renewable energy sources—will spark jobs and economic growth in rich and poor countries alike. The high-carbon alternative, the report warns, will lock the world into dangerous levels of climate change that will upend economies for the foreseeable future....
The pandemic is sweeping through India at a pace that has staggered scientists. Daily case numbers have exploded since early March: the government reported 273,810 new infections nationally on 18 April. High numbers in India have also helped drive global cases to a daily high of 854,855 in the past week, almost breaking a record set in January. Just months earlier, antibody data had suggested that many people in cities such as Delhi and Chennai had already been infected, leading some researchers to conclude that the worst of the pandemic was over in the country....
