Online voting sounds like an idea we should be able to make work. After all, we do so much online already, and we routinely transmit sensitive data such as financial or medical records by encrypting them. Further, there are cryptographic methods, called end-to-end verifiability, that promise citizens that their votes are recorded as they intended; that each vote is tallied; and that the final tally is the sum of all the ballots....
By Carey Gillam Aug 2 (Reuters) - Zimbabwe has linked a Pennsylvania doctor to an investigation into illegal lion hunting, naming him on Sunday as a client of a safari operator accused of breaching regulations, a week after an American dentist was accused of illegally killing the country’s most famous lion, Cecil. Dr. Jan Seski, who runs a women’s health practice in Pittsburgh, was named by Zimbabwe as a client of Nyala Safaris, owned by a landowner who has been arrested on accusations of conducting an illegal hunt....
Congress is under pressure to subsidize flood insurance costs for low-income households after the federal government announced last week that it would increase flood insurance premiums for millions of homeowners. Of the 5 million properties insured by the National Flood Insurance Program, about 3.9 million soon will see a hike in premiums—and 200,000 substantially so. The new rates will go into effect in October for new policyholders and April 2022 for homeowners renewing policies (Climatewire, April 2)....
The numbers are in, and the month of May broke a number of records across the U.S. Alaska had its warmest May by a wide margin. California continued to see its warmest year-to-date. And thanks to staggering rains that swamped the Southern Plains, May was the wettest month on record for the contiguous U.S. Total precipitation for the Lower 48 in May was nearly 1.5 inches above normal, according to figures released Mondayby the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, boosting the month to the No....
Winds of Change I found it surprising that in “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030,” Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi do not mention the effects of the suggested energy sources on climate. The authors propose to absorb about six terawatts of energy from about 60 terawatts available in the wind, or about 10 percent of its total energy. Because the winds, at least near the U.S., usually flow around highs or lows, where the speed and related Coriolis force tend to maintain the pressure difference, I can easily envision that absorbing the energy will change the rate at which the pressure centers collapse....
What would spring be without the gentle drone of fuzzy bumblebees, lazily dipping in and out of flowers in the warm sunshine? Unfortunately, research suggests, much of the country may be at risk of finding out. And climate change is at least partly to blame. Bumblebee populations have plunged in both Europe and North America over the last few decades, a new study suggests. The likelihood that a given location is populated by bumbles has dropped by a whopping 46% in North America, compared with what it was prior to the 1970s....
Concluding that nearly everybody is exposed to a mix of chemicals that could be damaging male reproductive health, a national panel of scientists on Thursday advised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to shift its focus and group them together when judging how much of a danger they pose. The committee, assembled by the National Academy of Sciences, looked specifically at phthalates, controversial compounds widely found in consumer products. Phthalates soften plastic to make vinyl for toys, building materials, medical devices and other items, and they also are used in fragrances and other beauty products....
“Judge me by my size, do you? Size matters not.” — Yoda, Jedi master AS BOTH the midget in the country of Brobdingnag and the giant on the island of Lilliput, Lemuel Gulliver—the protagonist of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—experienced firsthand that size is relative. As we cast a neuroscientific light on this classic book, it seems clear to us that Swift, a satirist, essayist and poet, knew a few things about the mind, too....
China’s smoke-belching coal plants and heavy traffic may be signs of a bustling economy but health experts fear the country’s dirty air is hurting its babies. Evidence is mounting that coal and car emissions in China, as well as other developing countries, are raising the risks of premature babies, low birth weights and neural tube defects. “Their cities are in big trouble and so are their babies,” said Richard Finnell, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who has studied birth defects in North China....
Emily writes: “My boyfriend is obsessed with these meal replacement shakes by Huel. He has anywhere from 1 to 3 a day because he hates cooking, and he and his friends even plan to do an entire week of consuming nothing but Huel. How often should we be consuming meal replacement shakes, and can it truly provide all of the nutrients we need?” Years ago, my friend Chris told me he wished that someone would invent People Chow—some sort of food product that would supply all his nutritional needs without him having to make any decisions....
Like haute couture, cosmology has its own fads, fashions and fallacies. Gone are the heydays of galaxy surveys and quasar discoveries; now searches for the universe’s first stars and for the nature of dark energy are all the rage. But like miniskirts and bell-bottoms, some castoffs experience a resurgence. In particular, cosmic strings, which fell out of favor in the late 1990s, are making a comeback thanks to observations that may have actually detected them....
Backpacks are a mainstay of soldiers, hikers, firefighters and others who have to lug heavy loads, often over rough terrain where wheeled vehicles cannot traverse. But hauling them can be quite the chore, limiting wearers’ mobility, especially over long distances. Take heart, human pachyderms. Scientists at M.I.T. Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group have, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), developed an exoskeleton that promises to not only lessen the load of weary travelers but also to advance research that will ultimately lead to robotic limbs that improve the strength and mobility of amputees....
One of the challenges of understanding large amounts of data is to characterize them using a few numbers that somehow reflect the whole. Statistics such as the minimum, maximum and the various kinds of averages tell you global properties of your data set. Sometimes they are enough to reveal information about individuals. This is why even databases that contain only statistical information about people are a privacy issue: enough statistical questions can reveal personal data....
Among the many things that can shatter when Alzheimer’s disease tightens its grip is the steady rhythm of the body’s sleep-wake cycle. The problem is so common that one New York City nursing facility—the Hebrew Home at Riverdale—ran an all-night program for many years that took in afflicted community members for a dusk-to-dawn schedule of games, snacks, arts and crafts, and other activities so that their exhausted families could get some shut-eye....
Despite his brief nine-year reign, Tutankhamen is probably the most famous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. Because his tomb had not been robbed at the time of its discovery in 1922, historians have been able to piece together aspects of the boy king’s 19-year life. More than 100 walking sticks and “pharmacies” (medicinal seeds, fruits and leaves) found mingled among funeral offerings and other treasures within the tomb suggested that the pharaoh was frail, and two mummified fetuses implied that his offspring might have suffered from lethal genetic defects....
On September 5 the Web site Mashable published an article entitled “9 Cultural Icons Who Have Written for ‘The New York Times.’” The vanity piece was sponsored by and written by, you guessed it, the New York Times. The preamble to the list of nine iconic figures pointed out that “most people can name at least one Times writer.” Nah, but I don’t mean to be a pedant, so I’ll move on....
Cookies, cakes, brownies, muffins, ice cream, gelato, pudding. You name it, I love it. And based on how many daily tempting encounters I have with sweets, I know I’m not the only one. But if our bodies actually suffer from eating too much sugar, then why do we crave it? And why don’t we have such strong cravings for food like, say, broccoli, which is a great source of vitamin C, vitamin K, iron, and potassium, all things our body actually needs?...
Everyone is familiar with the complaints of a hungry stomach. For years, scientists attributed the gnawing increase in appetite before a meal to ghrelin, a hormone which is secreted in the gut and circulates in the blood, playing a role in food intake and storage. Researchers have found that levels of ghrelin, dubbed the “hunger hormone,” peak before meals and recede after eating. Given its association with appetite, ghrelin is a tempting drug target for potential obesity treatments—but findings thus far have not lived up to expectations....
Visiting the White House is not unlike preparing to board a plane. Bags pass through x-ray machines and visitors through metal detectors. The White House, though, benefits from some augmentation: specifically, so-called backscatter x-ray technology, in which devices capture the radiation bounced back from objects. It can generate more detailed images than conventional x-ray machines and can even call out organic materials, such as liquid explosives. Such technological fixes have rapidly come to the fore in the wake of recent terrorist revelations–and not for the first time: backscatter was widely touted as a solution to hijackings and other air travel incidents as long ago as the 1980s....
By Quirin Schiermeier Climate change is affecting the world in many ways. But attempts to directly link local changes in species distribution and biodiversity to climate warming hold little promise, ecologists warn in Nature Climate Change. First author Camille Parmesan, a population biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, explains why. You argue that attempts to attribute the degree of local changes, for example declines in individual plant and animal species, specifically caused greenhouse warming are misguided....
