Posts

U.S. deaths from drug overdoses have skyrocketed since 2010 (line graph). Entire towns in states such as Ohio are being ravaged. In August an interim report from a Presidential Commission on the crisis described the toll as “September 11th every three weeks.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two trends are driving the epidemic: “a 15-year increase in deaths from prescription opioid overdoses” and a recent surge in “overdoses driven mainly by heroin and illegally-made fentanyl....

Fourth and fifth graders in El Paso, Texas, are more likely to have lower grade point averages if heavily exposed to contaminated air at home, according to a new study. The study is the first to look at kids’ exposure to air toxics at home and its impact on their school performance. It bolsters a growing body of evidence that air pollution can impair success in school. “This is an interesting paper that deals with a serious problem affecting millions of children around the world,” said Dr....

In science, often the grandest revolutions are triggered by the smallest discrepancies. In the 16th century, based on what struck many of his contemporaries as the esoteric minutiae of celestial motions, Copernicus suggested that Earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. In our own era, another revolution began to unfold 15 years ago with the discovery of the accelerating universe. A tiny deviation in the brightness of exploding stars led astronomers to conclude that they had no idea what 70 percent of the cosmos consists of....

Prescription drugs are contaminating Lake Michigan two miles from Milwaukee’s sewage outfalls, suggesting that the lake is not diluting the compounds as most scientists expected, according to new research. “In a body of water like the Great Lakes, you’d expect dilution would kick in and decrease concentrations, and that was not the case here,” said Dana Kolpin, a U.S. Geological Survey research hydrologist based in Iowa. It is not clear what, if any, effects the drugs are having on fish and other creatures in Lake Michigan....

Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab, the U.S.’ largest Large Hadron Collider research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent “The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow Your Mind” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). You can follow him on Facebook. Lincoln contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights....

By Lisa Rapaport NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Even though nine out of 10 nurses are women, men in the profession earn higher salaries, and the pay gap has remained constant over the past quarter century, a study finds. The typical salary gap has consistently been about $5,000 even after adjusting for factors such as experience, education, work hours, clinical specialty, and marital and parental status, according to a March 24 online report in JAMA....

You’re entering a train car, a restaurant, a local store. As you step inside, you scan the people there. You don’t know any of them, yet in seconds you register impressions of them all. He looks friendly, she appears evasive, that teenager seems threatening. Even as you’re assessing the factual cues of their bodies–gender, skin color, height, age–you already seem to know whom you perceive as likable and whom you should avoid....

The Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security will host a two-day conference launching the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report and exploring its consequences for U.S. strategy moving forward. The high-level conference will convene more than 150 participants from the policymaking, business, media, and technology communities in the United States and from around the world in an unprecedented gathering to discuss global futures, the potential for disruptive change, and a U....

Twenty years ago this month, astronomers announced the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The hellish gas giant orbits just beyond the searing heat of its parent star, and it opened astronomers’ eyes to the astonishing range of alien worlds that exist throughout the Galaxy. The tally of known extrasolar planets now stands at 1,978, with nearly 4,700 more candidates waiting to be confirmed....

Residents of Manhattan will not just sweat harder from rising temperatures in the future, says a new study; many may die. Researchers at Columbia University estimate deaths linked to warming climate may rise some 20 percent by the 2020s, and, in some worst-case scenarios, 90 percent or more 70 years hence. Higher winter temperatures may partially offset heat-related deaths by cutting cold-related mortality, but even so, scientists say annual net temperature-related deaths might go up a third....

PRETEND YOU ARE a member of an audience watching several people dribbling and passing a basketball among themselves. Your job is to count the number of times each player makes a pass to another person during a 60-second period. You find you need to concentrate, because the ball is flying so quickly. Then, someone dressed in a gorilla suit ambles across the floor (left). He walks through the players, turns to face the viewers, thumps his chest and leaves....

Hints of a new subatomic particle at the world’s most powerful atom smasher have inspired theoretical physicists to write more than 300 papers in the past four months. Now, a journal has published four of them, forming a condensed guide to what has become a zoo of possible explanations for a mysterious anomaly in the data collected by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). “We think that this set gives readers a sense of the kind of new physics that would be required to explain the data, if confirmed,” wrote Robert Garisto, editor of Physical Review Letters (PRL), which published the four papers on 12 April, in an accompanying editorial....

A new kind of lake monster has been found, in the depths of Lake Tahoe: gigantic goldfish. Researchers trawling the lake for invasive fish species scooped up a goldfish that was nearly 1.5 feet long and 4.2 pounds. “During these surveys, we’ve found a nice corner where there’s about 15 other goldfish,” environmental scientist Sudeep Chandra of the University of Nevada, Reno, told LiveScience. “It’s an indication that they were schooling and spawning....

The discovery of additional bones in an Indonesian cave supports a stunning claim made last year that a new species of a very small hominid existed at the same time as modern humans. When Michael Morwood and Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and their team announced last October that they had found the partial skeleton of a meter-tall human in the cave of Liang Bua on the island of Flores, they raised a few eyebrows....

End or No End? In “Squeezing More Oil from the Ground,” Leonardo Maugeri, director of strategies and development of an international oil company, expresses the conventional view of his profession, assuming a world of near-infinite oil resources to be produced under market forces. Maugeri is particularly dismissive of our Scientific American article “The End of Cheap Oil” [March 1998]. It is difficult to find fault with at least its title, considering that the average price of oil over the preceding 10 years was $28 a barrel but rose to $45 over the ensuing decade to reach a peak of almost $150 in 2008....

For more than 30 years Flip Nicklin has been photographing the world’s whales—from humpbacks in Hawaii to narwhals in the Northwest Passage to sperm whales in Sri Lanka. Equal parts coffee-table book and memoir, the gorgeous volume transports readers to the underwater realm of these most mysterious mammals. EXCERPT The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers by Scott Carney. HarperCollins, 2011...

Editor’s Note: This story is part of the Feature “Regulating Evolution: How Gene Switches Make Life” from the May 2008 Issue of Scientific American. One of the main limits on the pace of discovery of human enhancers has been the difficulty of identifying where they reside in the human genome’s vast noncoding regions. Biologists are now using the preservative power of natural selection to sniff out stretches of noncoding DNA that have been unusually well conserved over long stretches of evolutionary time in the hope of detecting enhancers....

Three new books reveal how we deal with suffering and trauma. A child who is bullied by her playmates may kick her kitten in retaliation. Passing pain to others is not just a human trait—payback can also be seen in many animals. In Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge (Oxford University Press, 2011), husband-and-wife team evolutionary biologist David Barash and psychiatrist Judith Lipton explain how we evolved such vengeful behavior, why it occurs (it turns out our brains are hardwired to redirect hostility), and how we can prevent it....

In our fossil-fuel age, oil spills remain a major problem. From the Exxon Valdez to the recent Prestige disaster in Spain, several million tons of oil soils the world’s seas every year, causing ecological catastrophe. Scientists developing cleanup strategies have looked to the microbes that thrive in the wake of such spills as one solution. Now, thanks to a detailed breakdown of one of the most effective of these oil-eaters, they are closer to having biologically based remedies for such environmental disasters....

The notorious Antarctic “ozone hole” sparked worldwide concern after its discovery in the 1980s, and for good reason — declining ozone allows harmful ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth’s surface, a major threat to public health. But the ozone hole had another effect on the planet: It caused major atmospheric changes in the Southern Hemisphere. With less ozone trapping solar radiation higher in the atmosphere, the stratosphere began to cool. The jet stream shifted toward the South Pole....