Posts

As any new parent knows, infants are notoriously susceptible to bacterial infections. A study now suggests that the body engineers this vulnerability deliberately, allowing beneficial microbes to colonize the baby’s gut, skin, mouth and lungs. Learning to manipulate this system could lead to treatments for infections in newborns, and perhaps even improve the way babies are vaccinated. In the womb, a fetus is sterile. But from the moment that a baby travels down the birth canal, bacteria and fungi begin their colonization....

The dream of intelligent mobile robots that assist people during their day-to-day activities in homes, offices and nursing facilities is a compelling one. Although a favorite subject of science-fiction writers and robotics researchers, the goal seems always to lie well off in the future, however. Engineers have yet to solve fundamental problems involving robotic perception and world modeling, automated reasoning, manipulation of objects, and locomotion. Researchers have produced robots that, while falling far short of the ideal, can do some remarkable things....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Each year, in the final few hours of the last day of December, many people all across North America gather with friends to raise a glass and sing Robert Burns’ famous ballad, “Auld Lang Syne.” Standing at the brink of a New Year, arms around each other, they ask: “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?...

Climate change. Energy independence. Air pollution. There are countless arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels for our energy needs. Unfortunately, there are just as many hurdles that must be cleared before we can feasibly count on other sources to supplant oil, coal and natural gas, which currently provide the lion’s share of U.S. electricity generation and transportation fuels. To illuminate the scope of the task, Scientific American recently surveyed a number of top executives at firms engaged in developing and implementing energy technologies—solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, biofuels—that could reduce our global dependence on fossil fuels....

Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineAfter generating considerable attention with a preview on Capitol Hill last spring, an independent team of scientists has formally released their analysis of the land surface temperature record. Led by Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study takes a different and more comprehensive approach than earlier assessments, but reaches the same basic conclusion: global warming is happening....

Everetts colleague Peter Gordon, professor of speech and language pathology at Columbia University, also carried out speech tests in the Pirah villages. He found the members had a quantification system with terms for one, two and many. He has argued that the Pirah have only a few numerical words because they cannot count higher. Everett takes a very different view, which he outlined during an interview with Annette Lessmoellmann. Annette Lessmoellmann: How does a Pirah mother count her children?...

Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was arrested and charged with sexual abuse and harassment on Friday, according to the New York Police Department. Frieden, who led the CDC from 2009 to 2017, is accused of grabbing a woman’s buttocks without her permission in October at Frieden’s Brooklyn home, according to an NYPD spokeswoman. The woman reported the incident in July, the spokeswoman said....

The scale of mankind’s impact on the globe is becoming more and more apparent: We have achieved a species extinction rate to rival great extinction events of all geologic time as well as a rapidly acidifying ocean, dwindling ice caps, and even sinking river deltas, a new study from scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveals. No wonder then that some geologists and other scientists have dubbed the modern epoch the Anthropocene....

Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the big bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today. The finding is direct proof of the theory of inflation, the idea that the universe expanded extremely quickly in the first fraction of a nanosecond after it was born. What’s more, the signal is coming through much more strongly than expected, ruling out a large class of inflation models and potentially pointing the way toward new theories of physics, experts say....

This polarization map, which is reminiscent of the way iron filings arrange themselves on a surface under the effects of a magnetic field, was found to have particular vortex-like, or curly, patterns known as B modes. The presence of B modes is a tell-tale sign of the passage of gravitational waves generated during inflation, a brief period during which the Universe underwent an exponential expansion, right after its birth. If the findings stand up, they will put the current preferred picture of cosmology on solid foundations, and could have significant implications on fundamental physics as well....

Recent reports of a mountain lion or cougar stalking the campus of the University of Iowa prompted campus jokesters to tweet their surprise that Michelle Bachman was in town. A cougar, colloquially, is an attractive older woman who seeks out trysts with younger men, and to some, it seems that Bachmann fits the bill. This emphasis on appearance is nothing new for high-profile women who are anything but homely, and feminist scholars are quick to point out its potential detrimental effects on perceptions of female competence....

Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it really be done? Is it possible to build a machine that would transport a human being into the past or future? For decades, time travel lay beyond the fringe of respectable science. In recent years, however, the topic has become something of a cottage industry among theoretical physicists....

A recent study is bringing scientists a step closer to determining how plants regulate their cell wall thickness and strength, an advance that could make biofuel production more efficient. Two groups of researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the University of California, Davis, have found the gene regulatory networks that are responsible for the synthesis of the secondary cell wall components, cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana....

When a friend hits her thumb with a hammer, you don’t have to put much effort into imagining how this feels. You know it immediately. You will probably tense up, your “Ouch!” may arise even quicker than your friend’s, and chances are that you will feel a little pain yourself. Of course, you will then thoughtfully offer consolation and bandages, but your initial reaction seems just about automatic. Why? Neuroscience now offers you an answer: A recent line of research has demonstrated that seeing other people being touched activates primary sensory areas of your brain, much like experiencing the same touch yourself would do....

By Sam Strangeways HAMILTON Bermuda (Reuters) - Hurricane Gonzalo is set to hit the island of Bermuda on Friday, one of the strongest storms ever to threaten the Atlantic island, forecasters said. Hurricane Gonzalo was swirling about 295 miles (475 km) south-southwest of the British territory, with sustained winds of up to 140 miles per hour (220 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The Category 4 storm is on track to start bringing heavy rain and winds to the island by Friday morning, with full hurricane conditions to follow, forecasters said....

A molelike mammal nicknamed the “grave robber” survived the event that killed the dinosaurs, new research finds. Necrolestes patagonensis, whose name translates in part to “grave robber,” was among the mammals that lived through the dinosaur mass extinction. The new study finds that the creature lived 45 million years longer than paleontologists realized. Necrolestes was first discovered in fossil form in the Patagonia region of South America in 1891, but little was known about the animal, study researcher John Wible, a mammalogist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said in a statement....

In the ancient society of Machudo, families wanted no more than three kids. Their eldest son had a chance of becoming king, so they would stop having children after they had their first boy. A family that had three children or had a boy was said to be “complete.” Assume boys and girls had an equal probability of being born. (In reality, boys are slightly more likely, but it’s undignified for puzzle masters to deal with slight exceptions to basic rules....

Glaciers at the earth’s poles are melting, calving and surging toward the seas at alarming speeds. With few exceptions, global glaciers have been getting smaller since the early 20th century, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. The suspected cause of all this shrinkage, of course, is warming temperatures. The consequences are not surprising: a warmer world could mean melting ice, rising seas and flooded coastlines....

“Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape,” Stephen Hawking said in his keynote address via telecast. “We have to boldly go where no one has gone before,” Hawking said. He hailed the current era of spaceflight as the most exciting since the Apollo era, and fittingly, the glitzy gala honored today’s vanguards in the field. Elon Musk, who founded the commercial spaceflight company SpaceX, took the stage later in the evening to accept the Explorers Club President’s Award for Exploration and Technology....