Jeff Harris was on a beach in The Outer Banks, N.C., with friends, kicking a soccer ball in the surf. Diving for the ball in shallow water, he hit his head on the sand with such force that he couldn’t move. He kept trying to lift his head but it became so tiring that he just let it dangle in the surf. He eventually passed out. A nurse sitting on the beach nearby administered CPR, even after she was told to give up because he had no pulse....
A population of nerve cells crucial for proper brain wiring may serve a completely different function in adult and fetal brains, according to a new study in The Journal of Neuroscience. Previously, most of these cells, known as subplate neurons, were thought to die off shortly after development, leaving behind 10 to 20 percent of the original fleet as nonfunctional remnants. Several tests conducted by a pair of researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, however, revealed that the leftover neurons are not just vestiges but electrically active messengers that can send and receive signals to and from any of the six layers of the cerebral cortex (the brain’s outermost layer, which is essentially the brain’s central processing unit)....
Astronomers who announced in March that they had evidence of waves originating from the Big Bang have now adopted a more cautious stance as they published their results in a peer-reviewed journal — just as new independent data cast additional doubt on the original findings. In a paper published on June 19 in Physical Review Letters, the BICEP2 collaboration, named after the South Pole telescope they used to look at a patch of the microwave sky, acknowledges that the foreground effect of dust in the Milky Way may account for a larger fraction than previously estimated — and possibly all — of what had appeared to be a signal from the dawn of time....
Some are as large and fast as commercial airplanes. Some are blimps that sit in the sky, surveying broad swaths of territory. Others flit around imperceptibly, like birds or insects, recording videos and landing themselves. Unmanned aircraft have transformed the way the U.S. wages war, making it possible to gather unprecedented amounts of aerial imagery using nearly undetectable platforms and to strike at targets without putting pilots at risk. But it would be naive to assume drones will only be used to safeguard U....
The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. On the one side are scientists who have been unable to find any causal link between the symptoms of autism and the vaccine preservative thimerosal, which in the body breaks down into ethylmercury, the culprit du jour for autism’s cause. On the other side are parents who noticed that shortly after having their children vaccinated autistic symptoms began to appear....
There’s nothing like a wave of wacky weather to spark discussions about climate change. In the last few weeks, temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast have swung wildly from bone-chilling cold to unseasonably warm, in some places jumping more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the span of just a few days. It’s a case of “weather whiplash”—a sudden shift from one set of weather conditions to another. And now, experts are questioning whether the changing climate may affect some kinds of winter whiplash events....
CANADA Edmonton International Airport tested a drone with flapping wings called the Robird, which is intended to scare real birds away from aircraft. The prototype was modeled on a peregrine falcon; its developers are now working on a mechanical bald eagle. GEORGIA Scientists excavated eight ancient jars, the oldest one dating back to 5980 B.C., from two Georgian villages. The vessels bore chemical footprints of grape fermentation, making them the earliest known evidence of wine making....
For decades, a divisive debate has raged among biologists over the evolution of eusocial insects—those that thrive in cooperative societies of queens, workers and drones. On one side is the argument for “kin selection,” a theory asserting that the nonreproducing members pass on their genes by helping relatives reproduce. The members of a colony should therefore be closely related. Yet those on the other side—most notably, renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University—contend that eusocial insects work together in colonies because it is to their individual advantage; their cooperative spirit is simply a consequence....
By Julia Symmes Cobb More than 2,100 pregnant Colombian women are infected with the mosquito-borne Zika virus, the country’s national health institute said on Saturday, as the disease continues its spread across the Americas. The virus has been linked to the devastating birth defect microcephaly, which prevents fetus’ brains from developing properly. There is no vaccine or treatment. There are 20,297 confirmed cases of the disease in Colombia, the national health institute said in a epidemiology bulletin, among them 2,116 pregnant women....
A global groundswell is rising from Beijing to Berlin, according to a new study Senate Democrats will release today that indicates nations are establishing domestic climate legislation at a rapid pace. The analysis of 66 countries, including E.U. member states, accounting for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions finds that 61 have passed climate and clean energy laws. All told, there are now more than 500 laws addressing climate change worldwide – compared to less than 40 when the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first global warming treaty, went into effect nearly two decades ago....
For thousands of years generals such as Caesar and Napoleon have molded citizens into soldiers en masse by using the same drills and training techniques for everyone. A recent study suggests how genetic testing could enable more personalized training for today’s drone operators who remotely control missile-armed Predators and Reapers. The small study, funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, looked at how different variants of the catechol-O-methyltransferase, or COMT, gene affected people’s multitasking performances....
Related stories Netflix tweak lets families split up viewing profiles Next Netflix binge? All ‘Breaking Bad’ episodes before the final 8 Next iPhone could read your fingerprints Netflix user profiles pop up on Apple TV ‘Breaking Bad’ to show on Netflix UK each Monday post-broadcast Looking at traditional TV tuning behaviors of self-identified Netflix subscribers, TiVo Research and Analytics found that the amount of viewing was basically the same as non-Netflix households....
By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazineBabies who were exposed to certain organic pollutants in the womb are at a highly increased risk of neural tube defects leading to conditions such as spina bifida, according to researchers in China.Neural tube defects, in which the spinal cord, the brain or their coverings fail to develop completely, arise very early in pregnancy and affect more than 320,000 infants worldwide every year. They can lead not just to spina bifida, in which the spinal covering does not close completely, but also to severe cranial abnormalities such as anencephaly, which often leads to stillbirth, and other conditions....
About a year ago, a 42-year-old male gorilla named Fubo living in the Bronx Zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest suffered a seizure for no apparent reason. Concerned about his condition, zoo veterinarians put him on several seizure-controlling medications, which seemed to work, because he didn’t have any more occurrences on the meds. But they were worried about the cause: Did Fubo have a brain tumor, a stroke or perhaps some kind of injury?...
Tardigrades, or water bears, are pudgy, microscopic animals that look like a cross between a caterpillar and a naked mole rat. These aquatic invertebrates are consummate survivors, capable of withstanding a host of extremes, including near total dehydration and the insults of space. Now, a paper published on September 20 in Nature Communications pinpoints the source of yet another tardigrade superpower: a protective protein that provides resistance to damaging X-rays. And researchers were able to transfer that resistance to human cells....
The human heart endures a lot in a lifetime. Sophisticated imaging can give insight into what it tolerates and what ails it, but the most direct information comes from an autopsy. Photographer Angela Strassheim spent days at an undisclosed morgue in 2000, capturing the organ moments after its removal. She left with a series of images that show hearts pierced by a gunshot wound, damaged by obesity, affected by cancer and weakened by a drug overdose....
Editor’s note: This article appears in print with the title “Inside the Meat Lab.” It is not unusual for visionaries to be impassioned, if not fanatical, and Willem van Eelen is no exception. At 87, van Eelen can look back on an extraordinary life. He was born in Indonesia when it was under Dutch control, the son of a doctor who ran a leper colony. As a teenager, he fought the Japanese in World War II and spent several years in prisoner-of-war camps....
To be cost-effective, any source of power has to produce more energy than it consumes. Oil companies would hardly turn a profit, for example, if extracting a barrel of oil required the energy output of a second barrel of oil. The same holds true of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Though renewable projects pay the lion’s share of both their energetic and financial costs up front, they still have to recover those costs over a lifetime of service and continue to produce value if they are to yield a net-energy surplus....
One of the tragedies of aging is the slow but steady decline in memory. Phone numbers slipping your mind? Forgetting crucial items on your grocery list? Opening the door but can’t remember why? Over half of adults aged 64 years or older report memory complaints. For many of us, senile moments are the result of normal changes in brain structure and function, instead of a sign of dementia, and will inevitably haunt us all....
“So then they roll me over on my back, and the examiner has a long needle in his hand. And I see the needle. And it’s bigger than any needle that I’ve ever seen.” So testifies Betty Hill, of her experience inside a flying saucer near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, in 1961. Betty and her husband, Barney Hill, are the earliest known victims of alien abduction, and the 1966 bestseller The Interrupted Journey describes how they recalled the event under hypnosis....
