In “What Makes You Fat: Too Many Calories, or the Wrong Carbohydrates?” Gary Taubes argues that avoiding carbohydrates, rather than an excess of calories, will lead to weight loss. The right nutrition question instead should be “What should we eat to have the longest, healthiest life?” There are many ways to lose weight and still become sick and die. I know this firsthand after losing 25 pounds and then suffering a cardiac arrest....
Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own by David Toomey W. W. Norton, 2013 ($25.95) Life, researchers have learned, can sometimes thrive in places that would kill most organisms. The strangest life bathes in acid (multihued bacteria growing in Yellowstone National Park), floats through clouds (microbial algae, fungi and bacteria), and flourishes around boiling hydrothermal vents (giant clams and tube worms sustained by heat-loving bacteria)....
The adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” does not quite capture the following pair of situations. It’s more like “damned if you could (but you can’t), damned if you couldn’t (but you kind of did).” First, the “damned if you could (but you can’t)”. On April 4 at 3:40 p.m., a magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocked Baja, Mexico, and was felt well north. The event elicited the following post on Twitter 16 minutes later from New Age lifemeister Deepak Chopra: “Had a powerful meditation just now—caused an earthquake in Southern California....
The U.S. has less stringent privacy laws than do many other countries. The desire to shield people’s private lives on the Internet has prompted new thinking about how to balance openness with a need to restrict release of personal details. Appropriation Tort A name or likeness—Angelina Jolie’s face, for example—cannot be used for financial benefit in an advertisement without consent. To deal with online abuses, this common-law tort could be expanded to protect against the posting of photographs online without consent....
In the often cloudless American Southwest, the sun pours more than eight kilowatt-hours* per square meter of its energy onto the landscape. Vast parabolic mirrors in the heart of California’s Mojave Desert concentrate this solar energy to heat special oil to around 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius). This hot oil transfers its heat to water, vaporizing it, and then that steam turns a turbine to produce electricity. All told, nine such mirror fields, known as concentrating solar power plants, supply 350 megawatts of electricity yearly....
Downward Revision The number of people living with HIV/AIDS globally has dramatically dropped—not because of an actual drop in the HIV burden but because of better counting methods in India. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization announced last November that the disease’s prevalence in India is 2.5 million—down by more than half from a previous estimate of 5.7 million. A commentary in the December 1, 2007, Lancet explains that previous official counts extrapolated data from large public hospitals....
As the public and policy makers anxiously await the arrival of a preventive treatment for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, researchers are racing to apply what they know about how coronaviruses stimulate the human immune system to create a barrier to prevent them from invading cells. The catch is the virus is tricky. It can co-opt the very molecules sent to disable it and launch a destructive immune reaction in the patient (see “COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Search for Antibodies That ‘First Do No Harm’”)....
People cry to express a range and degree of emotions—from happiness after acing a tough exam to grief after the death of a friend. Some wear their hearts on their sleeves and shed tears at the slightest provocation; others clam up and remain dry-eyed in emotional situations. Crying can even evoke seemingly contradictory behaviors—think “tears of joy.” What provokes this complex behavior in the first place? Two key factors can help explain why we cry....
BERLIN—When a Panavia Tornado blasted into the clouds above the Berlin Air Show before swooping back down toward the Earth, the grounds below shook from the roar of the fighter bomber’s twin engines. When the next aircraft took to the sky, the air show went eerily quiet. The fully electric E-Fan aircraft, engineered by Airbus Group, made one of its first public demonstrations here last week following it’s first-ever flight in France on March 11....
Can one town’s solution to flooding be another town’s nemesis? The question goes to the heart of a long-running debate in suburban St. Louis, where a half-dozen communities along the lower Meramec River are grappling with the worst back-to-back floods in recent memory. One of the towns, Valley Park, has a high earthen levee protecting its downtown from rising water. It stayed dry during the epic Meramec floods of 2016 and 2017....
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Thousands of people evacuated from Chile’s low-lying coastal areas returned home on Wednesday morning after authorities called off a tsunami alarm as damage from a massive overnight earthquake seemed mostly limited. The major earthquake, with a magnitude 8.2, struck off the coast of northern Chile on Tuesday, killing six and triggering a tsunami that pounded the shore with 2-meter (7-foot) waves. Mines in Chile, the world No. 1 copper producer, appeared to be undamaged....
After nearly 14 years in limbo, an Earth-monitoring spacecraft built by NASA is finally set to fly. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), scheduled to launch as soon as January 29, will constantly observe Earth’s sunlit side from a distance of 1.5 million kilometres. It will track daily weather patterns and seasonal vegetation changes, monitor atmospheric pollution and make the most precise measurements yet of how much energy Earth throws out into space—crucial data for the improvement of global climate models....
Key concepts Physics Balance Gravity Center of mass Introduction Did you ever come across a challenge that looked almost too easy to try—but turned out to be surprisingly difficult, if not impossible? This activity challenges you in a fun way. Something as simple as picking up a piece of candy can be way harder than it looks. Find out why some movements are harder than you’d expect, and then trick your friends into trying them....
It all begins with a cough or a simple rash. Then a note from school may be sent home with students that says someone in the fifth grade class has been diagnosed with measles, a highly infectious disease that could have been prevented with a vaccine. If another child in class has not been vaccinated, by that point it’s too late—there is nothing to do but wait and see what happens....
Whether this is good news or bad news depends on where you are: For Californians, the prospect of a top-tier El Niño boosts the hopes for a wetter-than-average winter, which is desperately needed after four years of record-setting drought. For the Pacific Northwest, also mired in drought, El Niño usually means drier weather, though it could still be an improvement on last year. El Niño is a cyclical climate phenomenon rooted in the tropical Pacific that features a buildup of warmer-than-normal waters in the central and eastern portions of the basin....
Construction of large dams in the U.S. mostly came to a halt in the 1970s. Many are now unsafe, inefficient or no longer needed, requiring removal—events that geologists and biologists alike will follow closely to observe how these unimpeded rivers and their wildlife respond. by the numbers 538 Dams removed in the 90 years before 2005. 548 Dams removed from 2006–2014. 10 million Cubic meters of stored sediment released on removal of two dams (64- and 32-meter-high structures) in Washington State last year, the largest release to date....
Unusual weather across the U.S. and other parts of the world just became more likely for this summer and autumn. That’s because the chances have gone up that El Niño—an atmospheric pattern driven by water temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean—will develop during that time, according to the nation’s leading climate experts. When El Niño settles in, it has major effects on weather conditions nationally and globally. Scientists speaking at a press conference yesterday afternoon said the odds that El Niño will develop during the summer have risen from 65 to 70 percent....
What’s scarier, a deadly snake slithering across your path during a hike or watching a 1,000-point drop in the stock market? Although both may instill fear, researchers disagree over the nature and cause of this very powerful emotion. “When you see the stock market fall 1,000 points, that’s the same as seeing a snake,” says Joseph LeDoux, professor of neuroscience and psychology the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety based at New York University....
U.S. EPA’s addition of oil, gas and coal methane emissions to its online greenhouse gas tracking tool revealed an 82.6-million-metric-ton increase in carbon dioxide equivalents over numbers from the previous year, when those figures were not available. EPA published data yesterday for 2011, adding 12 new sources from the reporting program since last year’s 2010 figures. Although carbon dioxide is a much more abundant greenhouse gas than methane, the latter makes a far bigger impact on climate change with more than 20 times the global warming potential of carbon....
One of the persistent questions about sustainable development is how to help the world’s poorest people. Their incomes are so low that they lack access to the most basic goods and services: adequate nutrition, safe drinking water and sanitation, and life-saving health interventions. One strategy, which I have long favored, is to provide targeted financial support to help the poor to meet their basic needs and thereby to escape from the poverty trap....
