Posts

Previously, I’ve addressed the top five symptoms that no woman and no man should ever ignore. These articles include symptoms that can be benign, but have a potential for consequences, such as chest pain, passing out, bleeding through any orifice, and more. But some of you may have been wondering: what are a few of those symptoms that don’t necessitate a visit to the primary care doctor’s office? Who wants to pay that extra co-pay when it’s unnecessary, right?...

Once upon a time there was a world in mortal danger. Some people tried to stop it; others claimed it was ≈all a hoax. They squabbled on the Internet, calling one another terrible names, until they were swallowed up by the rising sea. Once upon a time there was a polar bear. It died. And it was all your fault. You are to blame for the drought in California and the impending disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet....

Through a May 2021 article he wrote in the Independent, we learned about Steve Shorney, who lived with depression for most of his life despite years of psychotherapy, medication, yoga and many other attempts at holistic treatments. With his decision to enroll in a psilocybin clinical trial at Imperial College London, his life “radically changed.” Psilocybin was different from every other treatment or experience he had had. As he recalled in the Independent article, “I had seen an alternative reality, another way of being, and knew beyond anything I’d known before that day that life is extraordinary....

We learn from our personal interaction with the world, and our memories of those experiences help guide our behaviors. Experience and memory are inexorably linked, or at least they seemed to be before a recent report on the formation of completely artificial memories. Using laboratory animals, investigators reverse engineered a specific natural memory by mapping the brain circuits underlying its formation. They then “trained” another animal by stimulating brain cells in the pattern of the natural memory....

AccuWeather’s 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season forecasts 12 named tropical storms, five named hurricanes and two major hurricanes. The 2012 hurricane forecast is near-normal for the Atlantic Basin. Potential Impact This Year Predicting exactly where storms will make landfall in the U.S. would be extremely difficult, but there are some indications of areas where storms may brew and coasts that may be vulnerable based on weather patterns anticipated this summer. “Home-grown” storms in the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, near the U....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California water regulators on Friday said they had approved a plan by some of the state’s most senior water rights holders to voluntarily cut back water use by 25 percent in exchange for assurances that they would not face further cuts during the growing season. So-called riparian growers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta who participate in the program have agreed to either reduce water diversions by 25 percent or fallow one-quarter of their land, the State Water Resources Control Board said....

In August 1977 popular mathematician Martin Gardner introduced the concept of RSA cryptography in the pages of Scientific American. Developed by three researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the new algorithm would go on to dominate the securing of transactions over the Internet. Nearly four decades later, with cryptocurrencies and smart-device communications adding to a growing list of online transactions, the search is well underway for an even more secure and scalable replacements for RSA....

Citizen scientists have flagged four objects for follow-up study in the hunt for the hypothetical Planet Nine. The four unknown objects were spotted in images of the southern sky captured recently by the SkyMapper telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. More than 60,000 people from around the world scoured these photos, making about 5 million classifications, said researchers with the Australian National University (ANU), which organized the citizen-science project. Astronomers will now use Siding Spring and other telescopes around the world to investigate the four objects to determine if they’re viable Planet Nine candidates....

For the Anishinaabe people at the southernmost tip of Lake Huron, cedar is not just a tree – it is sacred. Used in medicines and teas, the tree’s roots, bark and sap have been central to their physical, mental and cultural wellbeing for centuries. “We smudge with it, as singers we inhale it, as a medicine we bathe in it,” said Ron Plain, an Anishinaabe tribe member and environmental policy analyst at the Southern First Nation Secretariat....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. One week after Pfizer and its partner BioNTech announced early results of more than 90% effectiveness in its candidate vaccine against the new coronavirus, competitor Moderna announced an even higher level of protection — 94.5% effectiveness — in early, large-scale Phase 3 study results for its coronavirus vaccine candidate....

The devastating explosion at a fertilizer-blending facility in West, Texas, on April 17 called attention to the risks of ammonia-based fertilizer production and storage. Between 1984 and 2006, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration reported 224 accidents, resulting in 50 fatalities, at ammonia plants around the U.S., and ammonia-based fertilizers and explosives were involved in a variety of intentional attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Now, a different kind of boom in the fertilizer business—no explosives required—could also spell trouble....

SHANGHAI—When President Obama last year proposed a “historic commitment” to empower Americans with a clean energy education program, his speech appeared to have reminded Chinese leaders of their own educational needs. A few months later, China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, gave a speech in Beijing, calling for creating more world-class scientists here to work in cutting-edge fields. And clean energy topped Wen’s list. But their similar pitches had different outcomes: The proposed $170 million American energy education program, called “RE-ENERGYSE,” is still on the launching pad in Congress, which rejected it last year and appears to be in an even more tightfisted mood this year....

Researchers originally assumed the body contained but a single molecular clock (buried deep within the brain) that was responsible for synchronizing key physiological functions with the 24-hour cycle of a day on Earth. But as Keith Summa and Fred Turek write in the February Scientific American, the body actually has many cellular clocks scattered throughout its tissues—in the liver, pancreas and elsewhere. Disruptions in any of the secondary clocks may increase an individual’s risk of developing heart disease, diabetes or depression, among other conditions....

Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famed “hierarchy of needs” says people seek food, shelter and safety before esteem and self-actualization. So what explains foolish dares and violent sports, in which people risk grave injury to pursue respect? New research suggests the hierarchy may be more fluid than we think—many individuals will undergo disgusting or painful ordeals to save their reputations. Andy Vonasch, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his colleagues conducted an online survey of 111 Americans about the value of reputation....

In 2005 the American Dialect Society’s word of the year was “truthiness,” popularized by Stephen Colbert on his news show satire The Colbert Report, meaning “the truth we want to exist.” In 2016 the Oxford Dictionaries nominated as its word of the year “post-truth,” characterizing it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In 2017 “fake news” increased in usage by 365 percent, earning the top spot on the “word of the year shortlist” of the Collins English Dictionary, which defined it as “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting....

On February 7, 2004, the body of Traci Johnson, a 19-year-old college student, was found hanging by a scarf from a shower rod in a drug company laboratory. Johnson had no apparent signs of depression, and the reason she killed herself was a mystery. What made her death different from other such tragedies is that she was a subject in a trial of an experimental antidepressant. The company, Eli Lilly, noted that four other patients given the drug in earlier trials had also committed suicide....

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine. We are posting it because of related news regarding swine flu.) The 1918 pandemic flu virus is back, at least in the lab. After fishing out the virus’s genes from preserved tissue samples, Jeffery Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and his colleagues report in the October 6, 2005, Nature that the virus was not a combination of human and avian flu strains, as was the case for other, milder pandemics....

Last October the White House announced a pause in federal funding for so-called gain-of-function experiments that increase the contagiousness or virulence of influenza viruses or of the coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). With the announcement began a yearlong “deliberative process”; in the coming months a committee led by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the National Research Council must advise the U....

Under the night sky deep in a northern New Zealand forest, doctoral student Cory Toth is listening. The sound he is searching for—so high-pitched that Toth’s older colleagues can’t hear it—belongs to a whiskered creature local to the area: the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. After a few months’ searching in the remote forest and a distracting discovery of tinnitus, Toth found the burrows and tunnels where the bats spend their nights....

Nichols recognized the skipjack tuna at the bottom of his boat from his time fishing the balmy waters off Southern California and Hawaii. His fish-out-of-tropical-water joined a growing list of examples of locally exotic wildlife showing up in the unusually warm waters that have recently been coursing past the West Coast: A green sea turtle — that venerable visitor to equatorial atolls — was accidentally snagged by fishermen off Northern California....