If there is any political issue that could use a dose of scientific rigor, it is migration. U.S. immigration policy is widely regarded as a total mess, the European melting pot produces pelting mobs, and all over the world tall fences have been constructed to keep facts from entering the debate. One of the most far-reaching aspects of migration often gets ignored altogether: remittances–the money and gifts that migrants send back to families and friends....
Americans have celebrated the fact that the Biden administration is embracing science and returning the country to evidence-based policymaking. We agree that science should guide policy—except in cases where it wouldn’t assist people to live their lives but would, instead, exclude them. The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology, for which biochemists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has the potential to do just that. So do other forms of scientific technologies....
By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - The U.S. Forest Service adopted a rule on Wednesday that requires managers of the nation’s nearly 200 forests and grasslands to formally designate where snowmobiles can be operated on the 193 million acres of public land the agency oversees. The rule, which takes effect on Feb. 27, comes after years of legal fights between groups advocating for non-motorized winter sports like cross-country skiing on federal lands and organizations that promote snowmobiling....
By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineWhen the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced this month that it did not have the authority to oversee a new variety of genetically modified (GM) Kentucky bluegrass, it exposed a serious weakness in the regulations governing GM crops. These are based not on a plant’s GM nature but on the techniques used for its genetic modification. With changing technologies, the department says that it lacks the authority to regulate newly created transgenic crops....
There’s a reason the term “physical distancing” hasn’t been used much during the coronavirus pandemic: Though it’s a more accurate description of what public health experts are trying to achieve than “social distancing,” it fails to capture the loss that many of us feel as a direct result of being separated from other people. Young Americans might be the loneliest of all. As a cognitive scientist and college president, I’m worried about that....
By Gayatri Suroyo and Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA/PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia, Jan 7 (Reuters) - The tail of a crashed AirAsia jet has been found upturned on the sea bed about 30 km (20 miles) from the plane’s last known location, Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said on Wednesday, indicating the crucial black box recorders may be nearby. Flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens over the northern Java Sea on Dec. 28, less than half-way into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore....
For my March feature on a disease that is threatening the U.S. citrus industry (“The End of Orange Juice”), I spent time with researchers and growers who are working to stop this bacterial illness, which leaves fruit green and bitter and kills trees. Known as huanglongbing (HLB) – Chinese for yellow dragon disease – it is caused by bacteria that hide in the salivary glands of invasive insects known as Asian citrus psyllids....
The U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Corps wants to equip its field operatives with a pocket-size tool they can use to locate and identify adversaries, and then disseminate that information to nearby troop commanders as quickly as possible. Their tool of choice—a modified Google Android smartphone with specialized apps, a setup none too different from the ones so many civilians use for multitasking in their daily lives. Military Intelligence, which has issued basic Android smartphones to a small number of its operatives in the past two years, is testing new Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Android sets loaded with software—known collectively as Windshear—that could send and receive biometric, GPS and other data via a secure mobile “cloud” network....
Caffeine boosts blood pressure in the short term, but habitual drinkers may not face the same risk. Researchers followed 155,594 American women over 12 years (from the ongoing Nurses Health Study) and found an inverted-J-shaped relation between high coffee intake and hypertension risk. Colas, however, demonstrated a linear correlation. Caffeinated soft drinks may harbor unidentified risk-boosting compounds, or perhaps the antioxidants in coffee protect the cardiovascular system. Number in study who developed hypertension: 33,077...
Back in 2012 some of Ed Boyden’s synthetic neurobiology graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology made a joke: Instead of struggling with slow, bulky and expensive imaging technologies to magnify the tiny neurons in their mouse brain samples, why not make the brains themselves bigger? Such musings proved prescient when Boyden and his students later stumbled on a polymer that swells (similar to a substance found in the cores of baby diapers), and is able to absorb 200 to 300 times its mass in water....
Some people are better at fighting off seasonal flu when the strain of influenza virus is similar to the first one they encountered in childhood—a phenomenon evocatively dubbed ‘original antigenic sin’, or OAS. Now, there is increasing evidence that people’s immune responses to COVID-19 could be shaped in a similar way by previous infections with common-cold coronaviruses. The effect could have implications for the design of future COVID-19 vaccines. However, to what extent it affects people with COVID-19—and whether it provides enhanced protection or, in fact, hampers the immune response—is still unclear....
My girlfriend, “Emily,” often tells me her dreams, and I, less often, tell her mine, which are usually too murky and disjointed to share. We try to make sense of our dreams, to find meaning in them. What do they reveal about our fears and desires? Interpreting dreams is an imperfect, highly subjective art, as Sigmund Freud, in his rare moments of humility, would surely have granted. Dreams are entirely private, first-person experiences, that leave no traces beyond the dreamer’s fallible memory....
Last year’s drought increased the spread of a carcinogenic mold called aspergillus (Aspergillus flavus), a fungal pathogen that poisons cattle, kills pets and has infected the 2012 corn crop, rendering significant portions of the harvest unfit for consumption. Whereas the deadly organism mainly affects countries like China and developing African nations, many U.S. states have experienced an increase in corn contamination since 2011. Farmers are likely to see more of the carcinogen as temperatures continue to rise and droughts become more frequent....
Like a slow-motion car crash, the Indian subcontinent is colliding with Eurasia. This impact, along a fault known as the Main Himalayan Thrust, is the force driving the rise of the Himalayas. In April 2015 it triggered Nepal’s magnitude 7.8 Gorkha earthquake, which destroyed villages and parts of Kathmandu, killing thousands. Nepal is no stranger to such temblors—but in the western part of the country, no significant earthquakes have been recorded since 1505....
#1 Let your kids get bored. As the mother of two girls younger than four, sometimes I feel like a cruise director. It takes dozens of play ideas to keep them busy for an entire rainy day here in Portland, Ore., and by the end of it I’m wrecked. Yet scheduling our kids with tons of classes and activities may backfire, according to a 2014 study in Frontiers in Psychology. The more structured activities such as soccer lessons or dance classes the six-year-old subjects had, the less “self-directed executive function” they showed....
Excerpted with permission from Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark. Available from Random House/Knopf. Copyright © 2014. What’s the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? In Douglas Adams’ science-fiction spoof “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the answer was found to be 42; the hardest part turned out to be finding the real question. I find it very appropriate that Douglas Adams joked about 42, because mathematics has played a striking role in our growing understanding of our Universe....
The island of Key Biscayne, Fla., sits in the Atlantic Ocean 10 miles southeast of Miami. Its 10,000 residents depend on the Rickenbacker Causeway, a four-mile-long toll bridge connecting the island to the mainland, for all their supplies. Right now all vehicles passing through must pay a set toll—$1.50 for cars, $9.00 for three-axle cargo trucks, and so on. But what would happen if a bridge owner decided to charge a toll based not on the size of a vehicle but on the cargo it was carrying?...
Big cats similar to today’s snow leopard have prowled the Himalayas for the last 6 million years, an analysis of newly described fossils reveals. The remains of Panthera blytheae extend the known lineage of pantherine cats by at least 2 million years and bolster the notion that this group of carnivores originated in Asia. Researchers unearthed bones representing at least three individuals in southwestern Tibet. The most complete remnants include a partial adult skull with several teeth still embedded in the upper jaw, says Jack Tseng, a vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York....
Yes, we were cold, but others were warm. Now We Know What a Polar Vortex Is, but Do We? If someone had told me a couple of weeks ago that “polar vortex” (also called a “polar low”) would become a household name, I would have thought they were crazy. But for a few days this past week, with its record-breaking deep freeze* over large swaths of the Midwest, Northeast and even parts of the South, the “polar vortex” was a main topic of conversation around town and topped many a headline and newscast....
Scientific American partnered with grassroots organization ScienceDebate.org earlier this summer to encourage the two main presidential candidates–Barack Obama and Mitt Romney–to answer 14 questions on some of the biggest scientific and technological challenges facing the nation. Pres. Obama and Gov. Romney have now answered these Top American Science Questions, which you can read below. Editors will grade the candidates’ answers for SA’s November issue, which will be available on the iPad and in print in mid-October....
