Posts

Five U.S. states have adopted science education standards that recommend introducing two highly charged topics—climate-change science and evolution—into classrooms well before high school. Released in April, the Next Generation Science Standards are the first effort in 15 years to overhaul U.S. science education nationwide. Twenty-six states, working with non-profit science and education groups, developed the guidelines on the basis of recommendations from the U.S. National Research Council. And the measures are being adopted, even in states where climate change and evolution tend to be avoided in the classroom....

Abigail Burroughs was only 21 when she died. If her father and his supporters get their wish, however, she will attain a kind of immortality, joining Brown, Griswold, Roe and Miranda in the band of ordinary citizens whose personal travails have permanently changed the way Americans live. A lawsuit, Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Andrew von Esch­en­bach, contends that government regulations kept Burroughs from obtaining potentially lifesaving experimental cancer medicines that her doctor recommended, violating her constitutional right to defend her life....

Dr. Tom Frieden is tired of the lack of progress in reducing the global burden of cardiovascular disease and of infectious disease outbreaks. So Frieden, who resigned as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after eight years at the end of the Obama administration, says he wants to do something about it. With significant contributions from some top-drawer funders, Frieden is launching a new initiative that he hopes will partner with existing players in the global health sphere — the World Health Organization, the CDC, the World Bank, and others — to persuade more countries to ban trans fats and lower the salt content in foods and shore up defenses against disease outbreaks....

In the 1950s prizewinning biologist and doctor Jonas Salk was working on a cure for polio in a dark basement laboratory in Pittsburgh. Progress was slow, so to clear his head, Salk traveled to Assisi, Italy, where he spent time in a 13th-century monastery, ambling amid its columns and cloistered courtyards. Suddenly, Salk found himself awash in new insights, including the one that would lead to his successful polio vaccine. Salk was convinced he had drawn his inspiration from the contemplative setting....

Dear EarthTalk: What is currently being done in the U.S. to ensure the wise use and safety of our nation’s groundwater?— Kevin Orr, Baton Rouge, La. Keeping fresh water safe and abundant is a challenge for all societies. In the U.S., about half of the country’s drinking water comes from groundwater sources. Many rural areas derive all of their drinking water from groundwater, which also provides 40 percent of the irrigation needs of American farmers....

In physics, some hypotheses can take more than a lifetime to confirm—as happened in 2019, when researchers saw the first image of a black hole, a cosmological phenomenon whose existence was theorized by Albert Einstein a full century before but never observed directly. Other ideas in physics have endured decades of debate, without resolution or further clarity. In this issue, reporter Davide Castelvecchi profiles the fascinating history of a landmark experiment from 1922 that recorded the quantum spin of an elementary particle, the interpretation of which is still ongoing (see “Hundred Years Ago a Quantum Experiment Explained Why We Don’t Fall through Our Chairs”)....

On Thursday, May 19, EgyptAir flight MS804, traveling from Paris to Cairo, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea. All 66 passengers and crew members aboard were killed. Terrorism is suspected. This is the fifth major airline crash since the beginning of this year, a fact that may cause some people to wonder if flying is as safe as we’ve been taught to believe. As a criminologist who studies security and safety leadership, I have reviewed how the airline industry measures its safety record and examined four different kinds of threats – airport security, flight safety, regulations violations and cybersecurity – in order to depict a more accurate picture of the risks that face travelers....

Earth’s stratosphere is a cold, dry place, above the troposphere—the bottom layer of the atmosphere we breathe on a daily basis. Ruled by winds and hosting everything from bacteria to long-distance jet travel, about the only way that water gets into this high-altitude layer 10 kilometers above the Earth’s surface is when it billows up from the humid tropics, rising from the troposphere via the atmospheric interface known as the tropopause....

The last week of September was a big deal for Jupiter. On September 26 the planet made its closest approach to Earth since 1963, delighting sky watchers around the globe. Then, on September 29, NASA’s Juno probe swung past Jupiter’s icy moon Europa—the closest approach to that natural satellite by any probe since 2000. The flyby produced wonderfully detailed images of the frosty surface of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon. And in addition to the images, Juno collected a trove of data that scientists will pore over in the months ahead to look for signs of watery plumes that might periodically erupt from an enormous briny ocean concealed beneath the crust....

Excerpted from The Spine of the Continent: The Most Ambitious Wildlife Conservation Project Ever Undertaken, by Mary Ellen Hannibal. Copyright © 2012, by Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press. Reprinted by permission. One five-star general in the campaign to save nature is Dr. Mary O’Brien, and she has a thing for beaver, the championing of which she has completely converted me to. In the first place, the quest for beaver has arguably had more impact on American history than the pursuit of any other single natural resource, its influence lasting well over 200 years....

A trip to Mars will cost the human body more than time. After the initial days of motion sickness, an out-of-this-world physiological transformation sets in. Without gravity’s downward pull, muscles atrophy. The heart shrinks. The skeleton weakens. The immune system falters. Blood and other bodily fluids slosh headward, pressing on the eyes and impairing vision. Ninety-minute days disrupt an astronaut’s circadian rhythm, as radiation scrambles their DNA. “That’s the price you pay,” Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques tells Nature Medicine....

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A NASA call for novel ideas on how to tackle its ambitious mission to capture an asteroid and park it near the moon has paid off in spades, with the agency receiving hundreds of proposals from potential partners. NASA has received more than 400 proposals from private companies, non-profit groups and international organizations in response to a call for asteroid-retrieval mission suggestions released last month, agency officials announced Friday (July 26)....

NASA’s next vehicle designed to carry astronauts to space is set to launch early next month atop a trusty Delta 4 rocket for a crewless test flight. Current plans call for a piloted flight in the new Orion spacecraft in the mid-2020s, when the vehicle will ride atop a new NASA heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time in a half-century. What’s far less certain in the post–space shuttle era is where they’ll go from there....

Every month, Scientific American—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Key information from this month’s issue: ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES • Engineering the Supergrid The U.S. transmission grid needs to be revamped in order to switch from fossil fuels to renewable power....

Just after sunrise in early January, a delivery van trundled along a suburban street in Queensland, Australia. Inside were tubs filled with a type of mosquito that carries dengue fever, the flulike illness that annually sickens 50 million to 100 million people worldwide. Workers inside the van stopped at every fourth house, took out what resembled a small Chinese food container and released 40 mosquitoes into the wild. After a week, they had filled the air with 6,000 insects....

Solutions: The lowest-energy way to go is to use: a) The slowest speed on the lake (water speed = 5 kmh; energy = 6 kWh); b) The slowest speed on the 18-km portion with a 2-kmh downstream current (water speed = 5 kmh, land speed = 3 kmh and energy = 6 kWh); c) The fastest speed on the 24 km portion (water speed = 15 kmh, land speed = 8 kmh and energy = 15 kWh)....

Eighteen months ago the massive Costa Concordia cruise liner crashed onto the tiny island of Giglio, 12 miles off Italy’s western coast. Within minutes the 950-foot vessel tipped sideways, tossing passengers into the sea. In the end, 32 people died and 64 were seriously injured. In the very near future, engineers will attempt to pull the battered ship upright and float it away. The hulk is snagged on jagged outcroppings of rock in 60 feet of water, groaning and swaying precariously with each incoming wave on the edge of a steep slope that drops 200 feet to the bottom of the sea....

When SpaceX launches its first Falcon Heavy rocket this week, the company is going to attempt something never done before: a rocket-landing triple play. SpaceX representatives confirmed over the weekend that the Falcon Heavy test flight on Tuesday (Feb. 6) will also include landings for its three first-stage core boosters, which are based on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT) from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida....

In recent years much has been written about the rise of the “nones”—people who check the box for “none” on surveys of religious affiliation. A 2013 Harris Poll of 2,250 American adults, for example, found that 23 percent of all Americans have forsaken religion altogether. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 34 to 36 percent of millennials (those born after 1980) are nones and corroborated the 23 percent figure, adding that this was a dramatic increase from 2007, when only 16 percent of Americans said they were affiliated with no religion....

Much has been written about how the militarized response of local police made matters worse in Ferguson, Mo., following the Michael Brown shooting on August 9. Many point to the antiterrorism push to arm cops with military-grade weapons and gear following 9/11. But critical changes in community–police interactions—changes made as early as the 1800s—may have contributed to the tragedy with the creation of a permanent “siege mentality” on the part of police officers....