Explorers attempted and mostly failed over the centuries to establish a pathway from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the icebound North, a quest often punctuated by starvation and scurvy. Yet within just 40 years, and maybe many fewer, an ascending thermometer will likely mean that the maritime dream of Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook will turn into an actual route of commerce that competes with the Panama Canal....
Next week brings a milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life with the scheduled launch Friday of NASA’s Kepler satellite. The mission, named for 16th- and 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, will study a group of stars for three-plus years in search of subtle, periodic dips in stellar brightness—the telltale signs of planetary orbits. Although more than 300 planets outside the solar system have already been found using this method, among other techniques, Kepler’s strength will lie in its instruments’ sensitivity to smaller, cooler planets more hospitable to life and more like our own....
In the aftermath of the United Nations’ annual climate conference earlier this month, scientists have a sobering message: The world still is not on track to meet its international climate goals. A new paper, published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the latest study to drive the point home. It finds that even if nations around the world live up to their climate promises, the planet will still likely warm by more than 2 degrees Celsius....
SEATTLE – In the long rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains, where dryland wheat farmers have eked out livings for more than a century, climate change is very much an issue of the present. The rain gauge is always in the back of the mind for Mike Nichols, a wheat farmer cultivating 20,0000 acres across two counties in south-central Washington state. It has to be: Nichols doesn’t irrigate, and with less than six inches of precipitation a year, his wheat crop is already on the edge of what’s considered possible for dryland farming....
When Ebola came to Dorcas’s home on the outskirts of Freetown in Sierra Leone, the virus spared no one. Her mother brought it home from the clinic where she worked, caring for an Ebola patient who ultimately died. Her mother, in turn, gave the virus to Dorcas’s father and older sister who had helped clean up copious vomit and diarrhea while tending to the sickened mother. Then Dorcas’s turn came, when the 17-year-old young woman transported her ailing mother and father to the hospital on the family’s motorbike....
Small island states and environmentalists say the devastating cyclone that lashed Fiji on Saturday illustrates why the world must get serious about helping climate-vulnerable countries cope with warming. Cyclone Winston was the most damaging storm ever to hit the small Pacific nation. The death toll was at 36 yesterday. Fiji’s representatives spent yesterday assessing the damage and securing aid. “The government of Fiji’s first concern is to provide humanitarian emergency assistance, food, water, sanitation and shelter to people in dire need,” said the country’s U....
Researchers for decades have been developing polymers and other materials they hope to someday use to create artificial muscles that, when given an electrical charge, mimic the real thing more cheaply and effectively than the hydraulic systems and electric motors used today. A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute reports in Science today that they have demonstrated a fundamentally new type of artificial muscle, consisting almost exclusively of carbon nanotubes, which can operate at extreme low temperatures that would cause other artificial muscles systems to freeze and at very high temperatures that would cause other muscle systems to decompose....
By Geoff BrumfielPhysicists have rooted through a morass of collisions to find the heaviest antimatter nucleus yet inside one of their particle accelerators.Collisions between gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York, have yielded heavy isotopes of antihydrogen that include a subatomic particle known as an antistrange quark, which is heavier than less unusual up or down quarks. The extra mass of the exotic antiquark is enough to make this antihydrogen isotope heavier than the previous record-holder, antihelium....
Researchers say they have figured out how a mysterious clutch of massive stars could have come into existence a few trillion miles from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This group of stars—about 100 of them in an elongated disk—has posed a challenge to theories of star formation, which predict that stars emerge when clouds of hydrogen molecules coalesce under their collective gravitational attraction. The gravity around a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times more than the sun should have shredded such a cloud like paint dropped on an eggbeater before it got a chance to make stars....
READERS RESPONDED with great passion to our January issue. Although Bill Gates’s vision of the developing robotics industry instigated much debate, the majority of letters centered on Matthew L. Wald’s article and its pessimistic view of corn-based ethanol fuel. Correspondents argued from all sides of this issue, although a large number echoed Joyce Ferree of Salida, Colo.: “Ethanol may not be the perfect fuel, but it is showing Americans that there are alternatives to foreign oil that stimulate rural economies across the U....
The impressive display known as the northern lights is one example of Earth’s auroras, which occur around the planet’s poles. Now scientists have discovered that the Red Planet puts on its own dazzling light show–one that is powered in a unique manner. Auroras on Earth and four other planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) result from the interaction between charged particles from the solar wind with the planets’ magnetic fields, which subsequently excites atmospheric molecules....
California’s largest utility company shut off power to more than a million people across the northern part of the state on 9 and 10 October. The outage sent scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, scrambling to save specimens and experiments. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), based in San Francisco, California, planned the outages to reduce the risk of wildfires. The utility cited forecasts of warm, strong winds of the sort that have fanned devastating blazes across the region in recent years....
There is a new record holder for “most distant known object orbiting the sun”—an icy world nicknamed FarFarOut. The finding is preliminary, but researchers are now performing follow-up observations to nail down this object’s exact distance and the details of its orbit. Like so many of its far-flung siblings in the sun’s dark hinterlands, eventually FarFarOut could provide astronomers with vital new insights about our solar system’s outer frontier. For the last six years, astronomers Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Chad Trujillo, of Northern Arizona University, have been probing the heavens in the deepest all-sky survey ever performed for solar system bodies....
They may be less dramatic than the events in which icebergs break off, but everyday interactions with warm ocean currents could cause more than half of the ice melt along Antarctica’s coastline. Ice shelves are portions of the larger ice sheet that extend over the ocean, floating on seawater. Conventional wisdom once held that calving, the break off of large chunks of ice, was the main factor driving ice-shelf dynamics, but recent research has underscored the role of melting from below, or ‘basal’ melting....
God may or may not exist, but His followers certainly do. Nearly every civilization worships some variety of supernatural power, which suggests that humans are hard-wired to believe in something that, by definition, is not of this world. But why? Evolutionarily speaking, how could belief in something in the absence of physical evidence have aided the survival of early Homo sapiens? Evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of Harvard University proposed that religious thinking is a side effect of tendencies that more concretely help humans to thrive....
On October 1, Rob Carlson drove his Tesla Model S down Route 167 outside Seattle. He accidentally ran over a piece of metal, likely a fender or other curved piece of metal from a truck. That metal somehow punctured the quarter-inch thick armored undercarriage of the vehicle and penetrated its battery pack. Within 30 minutes, the car was in flames—the first fully electric vehicle fire on the road in the U....
Today, renewable energy sources generate 12 percent of electricity in the U.S. But wind, wave, sunshine and others represent more than 93 percent of the energy the country could be producing, according to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. If renewable energy is going to be a bigger player and have a significant impact in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that are driving climate change, it’s going to have to grow quickly....
SEATTLE – For eons, powerful tides have raged through Puget Sound, ripping along at 11 feet per second at their peak, predictable as the phases of the moon. Three years from now, a local utility hopes to begin converting a portion of that raw energy to electricity, part of a growing effort to harness the tides to power homes and businesses miles from the smell of salt air. The Snohomish County Public Utility District’s pilot project is small – two turbines with 500 kilowatts of total capacity and an average output of 50 kilowatts – hardly a panacea for all that ails the United States’ energy portfolio....
SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Editor’s Note: This essay was produced in coordination with the World Economic Forum. In the past four decades technology has fundamentally altered our lives: from the way we work to how we communicate to how we fight wars. These technologies have not been without controversy, and many have sparked intense debates that are often polarized or embroiled in scientific ambiguities or dishonest demagoguery....
Felix Michl and Philipp Stahl huddle over a gleaming new three-armed robot in the sprawling laboratory at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The robot picks up tiny patches of carbon fiber, each less than a tenth of a millimeter thick but containing 24,000 filaments, and quickly assembles them into a triangular shape. The trickiest task, the investigators say, is to write the software that translates a 3-D computer model of any part—in this case a bicycle seat, but it could also be a medical prosthesis or an automobile component—into instructions for the robot’s intricate movements, including the exact position at which the fibers will have their maximum strength and durability....
