Posts

There is no market yet for turbines that turn the tides into a source of energy from deep beneath the sea. But that has not stopped mechanical engineers at the University of Strathclyde’s Energy Systems Research Unit (ESRU) in Scotland from developing one that will ride the tide while latched to the seabed by a cable—like a kite flying on a windy day. The ESRU team’s goal: create a device that literally goes with the flow rather than resting on the sea bottom like an underwater windmill—a model already being developed by a handful of companies....

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressed doubt about the science behind global climate change during a contentious Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, but added he would be obliged for now to uphold the EPA’s finding carbon dioxide poses a public danger. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, 48, sued the agency he intends to run more than a dozen times on behalf of his state....

One of North America’s most iconic rivers is about to undergo an unprecedented experiment in ecological engineering. On 23 March, operators at the Morelos Dam along the US–Mexico border near Yuma, Arizona, will open the gates and begin releasing water downstream. The goal is to dampen broad swathes of the arid Colorado River delta for the first time in decades, allowing new cottonwood and willow trees to germinate and restore small patches of riparian habitat....

Physicists and astronomers have determined that most of the material in the universe is “dark matter”—whose existence we infer from its gravitational effects but not through electromagnetic influences such as we find with ordinary, familiar matter. One of the simplest concepts in physics, dark matter can nonetheless be mystifying because of our human perspective. Each of us has five senses, all of which originate in electromagnetic interactions. Vision, for example, is based on our sensitivity to light: electromagnetic waves that lie within a specific range of frequencies....

Starting in 2007, Dr. Daniel Budnitz, a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Medication Safety Program, began tracking an obscure but unsettling statistic about children’s health. Each year, more and more kids were being rushed to emergency rooms after swallowing potentially toxic doses of medication. By 2011, federal estimates put the figure at about 74,000, eclipsing the number of kids under 6 sent to ERs from car crashes....

The “mole” aboard NASA’s InSight Mars lander has encountered stiff resistance on its first subsurface sojourn beneath the surface of the Red Planet. In a major mission milestone, InSight’s Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument burrowed underground for the first time on Feb. 28. After 400 hammer blows over the course of four hours, the instrument apparently got between 7 inches and 19.7 inches (18 to 50 centimeters) beneath the red dirt—but obstacles slowed its progress, mission team members said....

There are so many news stories about antibiotic resistance these days that you may be tempted to ignore them all just to preserve your sanity. But there is a kind of hierarchy of danger when it comes to figuring out which stories are most deserving of your attention. Anytime you hear that a particular bacterium has become resistant to a “drug of last resort,” that is bad. Drugs of last resort—such as vancomycin for Staphylococcus infections—are usually the last line of safe, dependable defense for certain kinds of infections....

It’s the beginning of the year and that means there’s a new crop of diet books out. You’d think we’d have learned by now that the next diet gimmick is not going to be the answer to our weighty woes. Believe me, the reason 2/3 of the population is overweight is NOT that no-one has yet written the right diet book. But hope springs eternal, as does the January crop of New Year New You offerings....

OLD CARS THAT FOUL THE AIR WITH DIRTY exhaust are a valuable commodity in Texas. If you own a clunker at least 10 years old and live near a major city like Houston, the state will give you a voucher worth more than the car’s value. Drive the car to a dealer, sign a few forms, hand over the voucher—worth up to $3,500—and drive off in a newer vehicle, no soot trailing you down the road....

I know National Diabetes Month is all but over but I couldn’t let it pass completely without taking a look at one potentially easy way to aid in the fight against this troublesome condition. In a new study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, health scientists at the Universities of Bath and Birmingham set out to assess the acute and chronic effects of exercise performed before versus after nutrient ingestion (or breakfast, as us non-scientists call it) on whole-body and intramuscular lipid utilization (or fat burning), and postprandial glucose metabolism (or insulin sensitivity)....

Adapted from The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, by David Biello. Published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2016 by David Biello. Reprinted with permission. The search is on for technologies that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air, thanks to a global push to limit such pollution and thus to limit global warming. The air we all breathe now boasts more than 400 parts per million of the colorless, odorless gas—more than at any point since Homo sapiens became a species....

Hundreds of global warming skeptics are in Washington to hear attacks on mainstream climate science and responses to it, like renewable energy programs and federal initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For Geofrey Greenleaf, the Heartland Institute’s conference is an opportunity to gather compelling details to be used against climate change believers during political discussions in the Cleveland area, where he works as an investment adviser. “You basically can’t discuss this in polite cocktail society because everyone knows global warming is here and growing,” Greenleaf said....

GIGLIO, Italy—The 114,000-tonne Costa Concordia cruise liner, which had been lying on its side off the coast of Giglio since January 2012, has been uprighted in an unprecedented salvage maneuver that engineers hope they will never have to repeat. Rotating the 290-meter-long ship up to vertical, performed by salvage firm JVC Titan-Micoperi, took 19 hours—almost twice as long at the experts who designed the plan predicted. The ship had to be painstakingly raised 65 degrees to reach center, and it took eight hours to complete the first 10 degrees, nudging the ship off the rocks on which it was impaled....

I decided to become a comet hunter on a bright, clear morning 50 years ago in Montreal. It was a bit of an impromptu decision. I had a French test coming up and knew that the examiner, a Mr. Hutchison, would ask me about my career plans. I had to come up with something that was both credible and easily translated into French. About six years earlier I truly had become passionate about the night sky, but to stand up and say, “Astronomie!...

The familiar teardrop eggplant, with its deep purple luster, is but one member of a large and diverse botanical family. Some eggplants are long, lean and pendulous, like smooth-skinned cucumbers. From a distance, ripening kumba eggplants are indistinguishable from miniature pumpkins. And oblong white cultivars that look like they were plucked from beneath chickens and ostriches explain the etymology of “eggplant." Nowhere is the entire spectrum of eggplant shapes and colors more apparent or celebrated than India—the vegetable’s birthplace and its second-largest producer worldwide....

The United States frequently cites fear of liability to explain why it has so far been reluctant to support creating a new international fund for climate victims. But some experts say that fear is misplaced. Signing onto an U.N. agreement that creates a fund for “loss and damage” related to climate change won’t open a Pandora’s box of litigation for past greenhouse gas emissions, they say. Saleemul Huq, who directs the Bangladesh-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, dismissed the U....

Key concepts Physics Temperature Earth science Introduction Have you ever thought about where the vegetables you eat are coming from when it is too cold to grow them outside? They might have been shipped from a different country to your town—or they may have been grown locally in a greenhouse. Greenhouses are large houselike structures that are usually made mostly of glass (or clear plastic). How can they protect plants from the cold?...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt—Delegates agreed in a late-night negotiating blitz to hold a formal discussion on compensation for irreparable climate damages, marking a first for the annual U.N. climate summit following decades in which rich nations blocked the topic from being tabled. The highly contested issue hinges on getting wealthy countries—who have contributed most of the emissions warming the planet—to provide money to poorer ones that most often bear the consequences in the form of extreme storms, heat, drought and rising seas....

Fibonacci Fandango The Fibonacci sequence—in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, . . .)—appears all over the biological realm, describing, for example, how seeds spiral on strawberries and nautilus shells curve. Now researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their colleagues have created Fibonacci spirals in purely inorganic materials. The scientists tinkered with microstructures consisting of silver cores and silica shells....

Scientific Whydunit A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought by Stephen Kern. Princeton University Press, 2004 ($29.95) Did you forget to take “Quantum Physics and the Murder Novel” your senior year? If so, Kern’s book on causality will guide you through a daunting yet enlightening survey of how science has affected literature. By “murder novels,” Kern does not mean whodunits. His focus is on the “whydunits” written by Victorian and modern writers: books that revolve around murder but dwell on their characters’ motives, not crime solving....