Posts

By Mark Schrope of Nature magazineThe director who once jokingly proclaimed himself the “king of the world” is about to become the master of the depths. If all goes to plan, James Cameron, director of the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, will soon use his own unique submersible to become the first person since 1960 to reach the deepest place in the ocean. But although most attention will be focused on the boldness of the engineering feat, his expedition includes a substantial scientific component aimed at better understanding one of the world’s most extreme and least studied environments....

Linking a human genome in an anonymous sequencing database to its real-world counterpart wasn’t supposed to be possible. Yaniv Erlich, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, apparently never got the memo. In the end all it took him and M.I.T. undergraduate student Melissa Gymrek to decipher the identity of 50 individuals whose DNA is available online in free-access databases was a computer and an Internet connection....

Stanford university physicist leonard susskind revels in discovering ideas that transform the status quo in physics. Forty years ago he co-founded string theory, which was initially derided but eventually became the leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. For years he disputed Stephen Hawking’s conjecture that black holes do not merely swallow objects but grind them up beyond recovery, in violation of quantum mechanics. Hawking eventually conceded. And Susskind helped to develop the modern conception of parallel universes, based on what he dubbed the “landscape” of string theory....

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Scientific American’s Take.” In the new science-bashing movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein and the rest of the filmmakers sincerely and seriously argue that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution paved the way for the Holocaust. By “seriously,” I mean that Ben Stein acts grief-stricken and the director juxtaposes quotes from evolutionary biologists with archival newsreel clips from Hitler’s Reich....

CHONGQING, China—At a 27th-floor apartment at a high rise of this southwestern Chinese city, Zhan Li is making lunch for her family. She steamed fish and fried pork ribs, and took a pot of bubbling duck soup off the gas stove. “When I was a child, I used to eat meat once or twice a month,” Zhan said while turning on the fire for the next dish. “Now, I am cooking meat daily, trying to catch up with what I missed years ago,” the 43-year-old added....

The next steel shipping container you see being hauled by a truck or train might not stow the usual mass of lumber, textiles or foodstuffs. It might hold 10 tons of finely interlaced computer servers, ready to be deposited in a parking lot to serve 10,000 employees at a corporate headquarters—or 10,000 people on the Internet. Sun Microsystems has just started delivering these data-centers-to-go, taking the concept of portable computing to a whole new level....

Fire has long played a role in myth—from Prometheus in ancient Greece, who stole fire from the heavens and earned the wrath of the gods, to Raven in the Pacific Northwest, whose feathers turned black as he brought fire to the world. But even though fire has been pivotal in human history, much remains unknown about the steps by which our ancestors learned how to use it. A new study suggests this may have been catalyzed by a prolonged pattern of climate change that occurred as humans were first evolving, and made their habitats more prone to wildfire....

In the 2016 season finale of the late-night show “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver called last year “the worst.” The Oxford dictionaries declared “post-truth” word of the year and Donald Trump won the US presidential election with a campaign that stressed that American society is in decline. Opinion polls conducted in the final months of the campaign showed that 47% of Americans thought life for people like them in the country today is worse than it was 50 years ago; and 49% thought the future would be worse compared to life today....

In table tennis matches, marital spats and job negotiations, you are advised to get inside the other person’s head. But that can mean one of two things: to cognitively take that person’s perspective or to emotionally empathize. New research reported in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explores these two approaches and shows that there is a time and a place for each. In a complex war game, players decided in each round whether to disarm or attack....

Vita means “life” in Latin, and vitamins are essential for life. The World Health Organization calls them the “magic wands” used by the body to synthesize enzymes, hormones and other chemical necessities. Unable to create vitamins from scratch, the body must fetch them from outside sources—typically food. But do the pills many pop for health deliver the same benefits? Humans need 13 vitamins to survive. Vitamins, also called “micronutrients” because they are required in minute quantities, can be grouped in two categories....

What is a fate as bad as death? Many contemporary and ancient societies considered banishment at least equal. After all, in the past, estrangement from family or friends, along with the corresponding exile away from the campfire or town gates, meant literally getting thrown to the wolves. Not surprisingly, our brains are wired with circuitry so that we can scrupulously avoid such fates, whether that means expulsion to the desert as in the Biblical tale of Hagar and Ishmael or the heartbreak of not getting that long-awaited invitation to the high school prom....

By Laura Onita LONDON, Sept 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Almost 22 million people were forced to flee their homes due to natural disasters last year and the numbers uprooted could increase as urban populations grow, a refugee agency said on Wednesday. The majority were in Asia, where 19 million were displaced by floods, storms and earthquakes, according to the report from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council....

On August 5, 2016, Cathay Pacific Flight 905 from Hong Kong was heading for an on-time arrival at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport when something unexpected occurred. The pilots radioed air traffic controllers and said they had lost GPS (Global Positioning System) guidance for the final eight nautical miles to “runway right-24.” Surprised, the controllers told the pilots to land the wide-body Boeing 777-300 using just their own eyes. The crew members pulled it off, but they were anxious the whole way in....

By Sharon Bernstein (Reuters) - The Trump administration is considering a proposal that could effectively let some plants and animals become extinct so cash-strapped agencies can use more of their funds to save others. At a closed-door meeting last month, Arizona State University ecologist Leah Gerber presented a plan to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials that would use a mathematical formula to direct government money away from endangered and threatened species she calls “over-funded failures” and toward plants and animals that can more easily be saved....

PROFILE Eric Kaplan TITLE Co–executive producer, The Big Bang Theory LOCATION Los Angeles Is science education an important part of The Big Bang Theory, which revolves around two physicist roommates and their friends? It bears a family resemblance to science education. What we try to do is to make people feel that scientists are real people and that science is something that real people, like themselves, could do. How do you balance scientific discourse with character development?...

By exposing mice that had been closeted in complete darkness for days to light, Italian researchers have determined why adult brains lose the plasticity of younger brains. Their findings, published in this week’s issue of Neuron, provide further evidence that a certain class of drugs may one day be used to successfully treat degenerative nerve diseases like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s. The researchers primarily focused on the plasticity of the visual cortex, because there is a wealth of evidence that this part of the brain can be rewired more easily in children than in adults....

From Simons Science News (find original story here). At first glance, designing wallpaper can seem as simple as a kindergarten art project. Designers can start with any combination of colors and forms for the first small patch, and then just replicate it again and again in two independent directions. Depending on the patterns in the original patch, and the choice of the two directions, additional symmetries may emerge — for example, the six-fold rotational symmetries of Figure 1, or the reflection symmetries of Figure 2, both created by the mathematician Frank Farris, of Santa Clara University in California....

Recently coined words such as “selfie” and “hangry” reflect humans’ evolving language. The communication patterns of other social animals, including whales, also vary over time. The “songs” adult male humpback whales produce during the breeding season, for example, are constantly changing. But in a new study, researchers investigated the permanence of nonsong whale vocalizations known as calls and found that the majority have remained stable over multiple decades. This surprising result suggests that calls may function as important tools for conveying information about foraging, social behaviors and whale identity....

Questions answered in this episode: " If you were standing near the event horizon of a black hole and someone pointed a beam of gamma rays at you, would they remain gamma rays or turn into something else?" - ciaran mccormick “If the universe is expanding, and galaxies are moving farther apart, then why is it that the Milky way and Andromeda galaxies are on a collision course?” —theinsanity3 “Why do the planets, asteroids (in general) and our solar system orbit the sun in a flat orbit with all the planets in the same plane ?...

But what you may not know is that you also have helped archivists decipher distorted characters in old books and newspapers so that they can be posted on the Web. You might think that computer scientists would have figured out a way to get computers to decipher those characters. But they haven’t, so instead they’ve figured out a way to harness all that effort you’re making to protect your security. “When you’re reading those squiggly characters, you are doing something that computers cannot,” says Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (C....