Tarzan had a chimpanzee, Cheeta, in the movies and a monkey, Nikima, in the source novels. Of course, Tarzan had been raised by apes, and he lived in a jungle, so perhaps his pets were a special case. Then again, Clint Eastwood made a pair of movies about a California trucker with an orangutan, Clyde. On television’s Friends, the hapless Ross owned a spider monkey named Marcel for a season or so....
Every six months or so Doug Cox washes his roof so he can make more electricity. The 16 solar panels on the southern face can produce nearly four kilowatts of electricity in the strong Phoenix sunshine—enough to offset much of the power required to cool his home in this hot climate. But the two-year-old system gets dusty, which slows the current flow. “My wife is up there, hosing the soap off as I’m scrubbing,” says Cox, a 37-year-old high school math teacher....
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 that left 130 dead and more than 350 wounded, Alain Fuchs, president of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), announced a fresh call for proposals for research on terrorism. Acknowledging that any effort with no immediate effect may seem “derisory”, Fuchs said that science can help to open up avenues of analysis. The Islamist terror group ISIS also carried out deadly attacks this year in Tunisia, Lebanon, Bangladesh and other countries, and downed a Russian airliner in the Sinai Peninsula....
Which came first: the electric car or the infrastructure needed to power the electric car? That’s one of the key questions that carmakers will have to answer if they ever hope to fill up the freeways with their plug-in vehicles. Finding an answer won’t be easy. Most drivers are hesitant, for the time being, to buy electric vehicles for a number of reasons. For one, even when these cars roll out in volume next year, they’ll cost $7,000 to $20,000 more than comparable vehicles with internal combustion gas engines, according to business consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers....
What’s known about the fungus Candida auris confounds the scientists who study it, the doctors who struggle to treat the persistent infections it causes, and the infection control teams that endeavor to clear it from hospital rooms after infected patients leave. But the list of what’s not known about this highly unusual fungus is longer still — and fascinating. Experts say there’s an urgent need for answers and for funding with which to generate them....
Dear EarthTalk: Why are there stretches of thousands of miles of interstate systems in this country with barren medians? What are the obstacles to planting trees or other vegetation in those areas? — James Logan Cockerham, Middletown, OH The idea of beautifying highway medians with plantings goes back five decades when Lady Bird Johnson pushed the Highway Beautification Act through Congress in 1965. Today, Americans are starting to think about undeveloped land alongside and between roadways as a low cost and widely dispersed strategy for carbon sequestration....
The first Patrick Feng knew about a cyberattack on his university was when one of his colleagues told him that her computer had been infected by hackers and rendered unusable. Feng, who studies technology and sustainability policy at the University of Calgary in Canada, immediately checked the Dropbox folder that he was sharing with that colleague — and found that it, too, had been compromised. “The hackers had created encrypted copies of all my Dropbox files and deleted the originals,” he says....
Military leaders have long known that marching in unison makes for a tight-knit platoon. Past research by psychologist Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business suggests that this cooperation emerges when the group members’ emotions are aligned. Now he finds such synchrony can also encourage aggression, according to a study published in January in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Wiltermuth and his colleagues assigned subjects to groups....
After reflexively reaching out to grab a hot pan falling from the stove, you may be able to withdraw your hand at the very last moment to avoid getting burned. That is because the brain’s executive control can step in to break a chain of automatic commands. Several new lines of evidence suggest that the same may be true when it comes to the reflex of recollection—and that the brain can halt the spontaneous retrieval of potentially painful memories....
The promise of a gold star can get grade school students to read more and even take on extra-credit projects. But encouraging positive behavior in adults is more complex, right? Not necessarily, according to recent studies of a mobile phone application called UbiFit. The program, designed by researchers at Intel Research Seattle and the University of Washington, taps into the psychology of motivation by offering seemingly insignificant rewards—graphics of flowers—that people end up striving to attain....
HAVANA, June 30 (Reuters) - The World Health Organization on Tuesday declared Cuba the first country in the world to eliminate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to child. The WHO said in a statement that an international delegation that it and the Pan American Health Organization sent to Cuba in March determined the country met the criteria for the designation. In 2013, only two children in Cuba were born with HIV and five with syphilis, the statement said....
Flu season has officially started, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Flu activity around the country is high enough that health officials announced today (Dec. 3) the season is under way. It’s the earliest start to the season since the 2003-2004 flu season, excluding the 2009 pandemic, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC. States in the southeast — including Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana — are seeing particularly high rates of flu cases....
Editor’s note: This is the introductory article for the September 2010 special issue “The End”. Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva....
Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran. Posted on June 17 on the bioRxiv preprint server, the research supports archaeological evidence about the multiple origins of farming, and represents the first detailed look at the ancestry of the individuals behind one of the most important periods in human history—the Neolithic revolution....
In Indonesia’s Komodo National Park the world’s largest lizard takes down prey with bacteria-laden toxic saliva and jaws that can snap a person’s leg in half. Yet for all their ferocity, Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) face hardships of their own. Especially the females: new research shows that the struggle to usher in the next generation of dragons most likely costs these monitor lizard mothers years of their lives. “We were surprised to find the sex-specific differences, especially in longevity, between males and females,” says Tim Jessop, a zoologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and one of the co-authors of the PLoS One paper....
The overseers of international figure skating scoring instituted a new system in 2004, designed to reduce the chances of vote fixing or undue bias after the scandal during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. Under the old rules eight known national judges scored a program up to six points with the highest and lowest scores dropped. Under the new rules, 12 anonymous judges score a program on a 10-point scale....
Fred Kavli has always followed the road less traveled. The Norwegian engineer came to the U.S. in 1956, shortly after earning a degree in engineering physics from the Norwegian Institute of Technology. Two years later he launched his own company, Kavlico Corporation, which, on the basis of his designs, patents and leadership, grew into one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sensors for the aeronautics and automotive industries. “I could not, as a foreigner just three years out of college, have started my own business in any other country than the United States,” he has said....
“Does ‘accommodate’ have one ‘m’ or two?” asked an editor in our open workspace. Almost before I could say “two,” the boss flew at us from her office. “Why aren’t you working?” she demanded. She seemed mollified by my explanation. She stalked back to her office chair, periodically watching us through the glass window in the wall. None of us focused too well for a while after that. But her whipsaw behavior was only part of the reason....
Eric Schiff, chair of the department of physics at Syracuse University, provides this explanation. Image: Courtesy E. SCHIFF/Syracuse UniversityGAS DISCHARGE TUBES emit different colors depending on the element contained inside. Neon signs are orange, like the word physics above. By definition, the atoms of inert gases such as helium, neon or argon never (well, almost never) form stable molecules by chemically bonding with other atoms. But it is pretty easy to build a gas discharge tubesuch as a neon lightwhich reveals that inertness is a relative matter....
Matt Kasson, a forest pathologist and mycologist at West Virginia University, has spent the past week chasing cicadas across northern Virginia. Each night he has watched pale nymphs emerge from the earth like ghostly apparitions and then make their way into trees, where they will soon molt to become a winged adults. Both the cicadas and Kasson have been waiting for this moment—but not for the same reason. After 17 years underground, billions of Brood X periodical cicadas, as the insects are known, are emerging into the light across the eastern U....
