Posts

The first case of Zika virus in Brazil was confirmed in May 2015. Since then the virus, which is mainly transmitted via the bite of Aedes mosquitoes (the same ones that transmit dengue and chikungunya), has spread and is already present in 26 countries in the continent. Those infected usually are afflicted with fever, skin rashes, joint pain and conjunctivitis. More worrisome, however, is the likely link between the virus in pregnant women and microcephaly—children born with smaller heads and insufficient brain development....

By Chris VellacottLONDON (Reuters) - The 2013 Atlantic storm season has proved one of the quietest in decades with the lowest number of hurricanes since 1982 and none of them considered ‘major’, according to insurance broker Willis Re.An unusually quiet hurricane season is significant for the insurance industry not only because there are fewer pay-outs for damage but also because it drives down reinsurance prices.The Atlantic hurricane season is closely watched by insurers because a destructive storm can hit prosperous, heavily insured areas such as Miami, costing the industry billions in claims....

The United States first stepped out into the void of space 50 years ago today (June 3). On June 3, 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White left the safety of his Gemini 4 spacecraft equipped with a spacesuit, a tether and a small gas gun for maneuvering. Video of that first American spacewalk shows White enjoying the excursion, even as he made spaceflight history. For about 23 minutes, White floated near the spacecraft with Earth backdropped behind him....

Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies. smart contracts. Many people have now heard of the rapidly changing ecosystem of financial technology, but few have wrapped their heads around it. Hundreds of central banks and corporations are incubating a game-changing technology called blockchain—and investors are betting billions on it. Yet only 24 percent of global financial services professionals surveyed in 2017 by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) described themselves as “extremely” or “very” familiar with it. Much of the public is unsure if any of this is legal, if they understand it at all....

PARIS—From “clean coal” evangelists to solar power enthusiasts, most experts at the U.N. climate talks here agree that solving climate change means transforming how the world produces and uses energy—and as quickly as possible. Such a transformation would be unprecedented. It would require enormous investments. To help make it happen, the U.S. Department of Energy, which for decades has spent billions of dollars to develop and deploy advanced energy technologies (not always clean), will play a major role in the new “Mission Innovation....

Stress has long been thought to trigger heart attacks, but the mechanism is unknown. Now, researchers think that bacteria could play a role. A study published today in mBio suggests that stress hormones can break up mats of bacteria growing on the fatty plaques in arteries, releasing the plaques and causing strokes or heart attacks. Researchers have suspected for years that bacteria infect the plaques of hardened arteries. The plaques form a surface on which bacteria can attach and grow in masses called biofilms, held together in a scaffold....

Top 10 Overall Performances San Francisco Washington, D.C. Seattle Boston New York City Minneapolis Denver Portland, Ore Los Angeles Chicago These cities earned the highest combined scores. In order to earn a spot on this list, cities had to rank highly on positive lists (such as “best public transit”) and rank low or not at all on negative lists (such as “worst allergies”). Top 10 Most Frequent List Appearances New York San Francisco Washington, D....

James L. Rudolph, acting clinical chief of the division of aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, provides an answer: To date, no study has adequately examined whether heart surgery can change a person’s personality, mainly because personality is difficult to define and measure. When recovering from heart surgery, some patients report trouble remembering, slower mental processing and difficulty focusing. Although this condition, often referred to as “pumphead,” is usually short-lived, one study of bypass patients has suggested that the associated cognitive changes might worsen over time....

Climate change is on track to cause a lot of problems for the world’s farmers, and the worst hit will be those who are the least able to recover. Though rising global temperatures are expected to negatively affect agricultural production and food security in regions all over the world, poor farmers and those living in the tropics will be most affected. But if countries take steps to adapt to environmental changes, much of the food security risk could be offset, according to a new joint report by the U....

Editor’s Note: Beryl Lieff Benderly, a fellow of the American Associaton for the Advancement of Science, writes about scientific labor force and early career issues in the Science Careers section of Science. In this rough-draft article, she argues that the scientific labor market is broken, that the U.S. educational system actually produces too many qualified researchers for too few positions, and that a perverse funding structure perpetuates the problem, among other points....

Peter A. Ubel is professor of medicine and psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he explores the quirks in human nature that influence our health, happiness and society. He is author of the book Free Market Madness (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), which investigates the irrational tics that lead people to overbid on eBay, eat too much ice cream and take out mortgages they cannot afford. In an interview with Jonah Lehrer, Ubel explains how innate optimism, greed and ignorance can depress financial and physical well-being—and how individuals can commit to change....

In early 2006 a self-styled “naturopathic” doctor, Chad Livdahl, pleaded guilty in Arizona to mail fraud and conspiracy to engage in mail and wire fraud, to misbrand a drug and to defraud the U.S. He was sentenced to nine years in prison. His wife and business partner in Toxin Research International, Inc., in Tucson, Zarah Karim, pleaded guilty to the same charges and received a six-year sentence. Both also paid heavy fines and restitution because, according to prosecutors, the couple had made at least $1....

As in the warm-up, you would need only one for a total of 101 bits. You could add an odd parity of bits 1, 21, 41, …101. That is, arrange it so bits at those positions have an odd number of 1s. Any burst of 20 errors would have to overlap one of those bits, but no more than that. The burst would flip that bit, revealing an error. 2....

There may not be too many fish in the sea, to paraphrase the old song, but there are certainly a lot. Scientists don’t have a good idea of just how many fish—or crustacean, sponge, squid, plankton, and even mammal—species there are in the ocean, but they estimate as many as one million. The Census of Marine Life aims to record as much of that as possible by 2010, cleaning up the species registers and expanding them where necessary....

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Strains of listeria bacteria found inside a California apple processing plant are believed to be the same ones associated with an outbreak that killed seven people and sickened dozens of others last year, federal officials said. Two strains of Listeria monocytogenes were confirmed in the Bidart Bros. apple processing plant near Bakersfield, California, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said. “Those same strains were also found in Bidart Bros....

One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability it gives us to catch up on films and television that we missed the first time around. Recently I watched the Up series, a remarkable documentary project by filmmaker Michael Apted that has tracked the lives of 14 British people since 1964, when they were children, revisiting them every seven years as their lives have unfolded. (The “children” turned 63 last year....

On February 11, 2016, scientists announced that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) had discovered ripples in spacetime created by merging black holes. About 1.3 billion years ago two black holes swirled closer and closer together until they crashed in a furious bang. Each black hole packed roughly 30 times the mass of our sun into a minute volume, and their head-on impact came as the two were approaching the speed of light....

Terrorist bombings garner a lot of news coverage—but gun assaults are often more coldly efficient. Although firearms are used in only a small fraction of terror strikes, a recent study found that on a per-attack basis, guns are four times deadlier than other methods in high-income countries. “What was surprising was the lethality of firearm attacks compared with other things like explosions and vehicles,” says lead author Robert Tessler, a senior fellow at the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center in Washington State....

As Hurricane Rita bore down on the bayous of southeastern Texas in 2005, Caitlin Eaves’s family made the wrenching decision to evacuate and leave their longtime home to an uncertain fate. After they returned, they spent several months sleeping on what was left of their floor and repairing the extensively flood-damaged house bit by bit, hampered in part by the long delay in restoring power. The storm also destroyed the local high school, leaving then-16-year-old Eaves and her peers in their 200-person rice-farming community without any formal schooling for weeks....

On a research vessel in the waters off Greece’s Amvrakikos Gulf, Joan Gonzalvo watched a female bottlenose dolphin in obvious distress. Over and over again, the dolphin pushed a newborn calf, almost certainly her own, away from the observers’ boat and against the current with her snout and pectoral fins. It was as if she wanted to nudge her baby into motion—but to no avail. The baby was dead. Floating under direct sunlight on a hot day, its body quickly began to decay; occasionally the mother removed pieces of dead skin and loose tissue from the corpse....