Posts

Professional wrestler Chris Benoit’s powerful build and muscular grappling maneuvers helped to make him a crowd favorite and propelled him to a world heavyweight championship in 2004. No one was prepared for the shocking turn this past June when he killed his wife and son, then hanged himself in their home near Atlanta. The subsequent announcement by the state medical examiner’s office that Benoit’s body showed he had been taking injections of testosterone (along with an antianxiety drug and a painkiller) seemed all too predictable, given how often anabolic steroids such as testosterone have been linked to violent behavior....

Kate Evans majored in English during college in 1990s Britain while she perfected the art of getting arrested for trying to prevent the U.K. government and industry from cutting down too many trees. A fan of science, she gradually turned her artistic talents and environmental passions to crafting comics about climate change. In 2006 she published a fully referenced graphic novel based on peer-reviewed science, Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Should Probably Find Out....

Some 28,000 years ago in what is now the British territory of Gibraltar, a group of Neandertals eked out a living along the rocky Mediterranean coast. They were quite possibly the last of their kind. Elsewhere in Europe and western Asia, Neandertals had disappeared thousands of years earlier, after having ruled for more than 200,000 years. The Iberian Peninsula, with its comparatively mild climate and rich array of animals and plants, seems to have been the final stronghold....

From Nature magazine Bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico were hit by a triple whammy of events, leading to an unusually high death rate in early 2011, a paper published in PLoS ONE suggests. Between January and April 2011, 186 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) washed ashore in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Of these, 86 were near-term or newborn, nearly double the historical average. Dolphin deaths are being monitored by an ongoing Unusual Mortality Event (UME) survey, which began in response to high numbers of adult dolphins dying during a period of sustained cold weather in early 2010....

By Quirin Schiermeier of Nature magazineNatural disasters around the world last year caused a record $380 billion in economic losses. That’s more than twice the tally for 2010, and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005, according to a report from Munich Re, a reinsurance group in Germany. But other work emphasizes that it is too soon to blame the economic devastation on climate change.Almost two-thirds of 2011’s exceptionally high costs are attributable to two disasters unrelated to climate and weather: the magnitude-9....

If you want to be a professional football player, you’d better start practicing your 40-yard dash. It’s the gold standard for assessing a player’s speed and ability to accelerate, as NBC Learn’s segment on kinematics, motion, speed and acceleration shows. Human beings need about 10 yards to reach maximum velocity, so the 40 is really a test of both acceleration and speed—unlike a longer sprint, such as the 100, which is more about a runner’s ability to maintain maximum speed....

When Pixar screened a computer-animated short film called “Tin Toy” in 1988, test audiences hated the sight of the pseudo-realistic baby named “Billy” who terrorized the toys. Such a strong reaction persuaded Pixar to avoid making uncannily realistic human characters — it has since focused its efforts on films about living toys, curious robots and talking cars to win Academy Awards and moviegoers’ hearts. Today, the “uncanny valley” phenomenon remains almost as mysterious as when Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori first coined the term in 1970....

America’s next president must declare war on climate change in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt fought the Axis powers during World War II, climate activist Bill McKibben said in an article published today in The New Republic. McKibben argued that the next president should harness the nation’s industrial might in exactly the same way Roosevelt did in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and in the years following the U....

A powerful storm that resembles a hurricane with snow, a “snowicane”, continues to pound western Alaska. “The potentially historic ‘superstorm’… is making ’landfall’ in Alaska today with a pressure equivalent to a Category 4 Hurricane,” said AccuWeather.com’s Jesse Ferrell. Part of this fierce storm will dive into the contiguous United States on Friday, once again revving up the Northwest’s storm train. “For people in the Bering Sea region, including shipping and fishing interests, this is considered to be a life-threatening storm situation,” warned Accuweather....

March 1962 Red Shift “A recent paper by French astronomers has apparently laid to rest a skeleton that has been rattling in the closet of physics for more than 40 years. In a measurement of unprecedented accuracy they found a gravitational red shift in light from the sun almost exactly equal to that predicted by the general theory of relativity. The prediction is a consequence of Albert Einstein’s principle of equivalence, which states that the effects of accelerated motion are indistinguishable from those of a gravitational field....

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses. Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers....

Dolphins are swimming in waters tainted with germ-killing soaps, but they aren’t winding up squeaky clean. Triclosan, an antibacterial chemical found in everyday bathroom and kitchen products, is accumulating in dolphins at concentrations known to disrupt the growth and development of other animals. Scientists have found that one-third of the bottlenose dolphins tested off South Carolina and almost one-quarter of those tested off Florida carried traces of triclosan in their blood....

The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle of General Relativity by Pedro G. Ferreira Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 University of Oxford professor Ferreira begins this “biography of general relativity” with a profession of his “lifelong love affair” with Albert Einstein’s grandest theory. He writes this almost apologetically because despite its revolutionary linkage of gravity with space and time and its remarkable success in explaining the universe’s evolution, general relativity has not always been a popular research topic....

Coal-fired power plants produce more than 70 percent of China’s electricity—and its infamous smog and child health issues—recently vaulting China past the U.S. as the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter. In response, the government has launched work on a pilot plant dubbed GreenGen that would eventually capture and permanently store CO2 emissions. As a first step, a consortium of power and coal companies will fund the construction of an integrated gasification combined-­cycle power plant, in which coal is converted into gas and the pollutants are removed before the gas is burned....

February 17, 2009, is D-day– when the term “digital divide” will take on a whole new meaning unrelated to computer access. That is when the nation’s 1,700 analog television stations will shut down in the long-promised changeover to all-digital broadcasting. Cable and satellite viewers or those whose TV has a digital tuner will be able to watch CSI and American Idol unaware that anything has changed. But the 21 million households using a conventional set with rabbit ears or a rusty roof antenna–typically people who are poor, elderly or living in rural America–will turn on their TVs and see … nothing....

In 1997, a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Sue shattered auction expectations when Sotheby’s sold it to The Field Museum in Chicago for an unprecedented $8.36 million. That remains the highest price anyone has ever paid for a dinosaur fossil at a public auction. But Sue’s record could be broken Tuesday (Nov. 19) when the so-called Montana Dueling Dinosaurs — a coupled tyrannosaurid and ceratopsid that look as if they died in combat — go under the auction hammer in New York....

By Carey Gillam (Reuters) - The Environmental Protection Agency gave final approval on Wednesday to a new herbicide developed by Dow AgroSciences that has faced broad opposition, ordering a series of restrictions to address potential environmental and health hazards. EPA said it was applying “first-time-ever restrictions” on its approval of the herbicide, called Enlist Duo, which is designed to be used with new genetically modified crops developed by Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical....

President Franklin D. Roosevelt admonished in a 1932 commencement address that “it is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.” FDR had the revival of a depressed U.S. economy in mind, but scientists experimenting with treating brain disorders with fetal cell transplants have taken his aphorism to heart. New methods are transforming past failures, and the results seem far more promising this go-round....

FINALIST YEAR: 1947 HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Growing penicillin-resistant bacteria WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Leon Cooper always loved hands-on science. As a child in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he set up labs in basements and closets of his various homes in New York City, trying the patience of his father. Cooper mixed chemicals for developing photos, bought what he could at chemical supply stores—which actually sold concentrated acids and the like to children in those days—and, like many little boys, showed an affinity for things that went “boom....

The idea for gene therapy—a type of DNA-based medicine that inserts a healthy gene into cells to replace a mutated, disease-causing variant—was first published in 1972. After decades of disputed results, treatment failures and some deaths in experimental trials, the first gene therapy drug, for a type of skin cancer, was approved in China in 2003. The rest of the world was not easily convinced of the benefits, however, and it was not until 2017 that the U....