The microeconomic law of diminishing marginal utility states that while accumulating a good—pretzels, pencils, nickels, whatever—each successive unit of that good will be less satisfying to acquire than the one before it. Finding a shiny quarter on the street is a real thrill. But, if you are carrying around a bag of coins, acquiring another one does not seem nearly as exciting. In fact, would you even bother to pick it up?...
From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Spaghetti-thin shoelaces, sturdy hawsers, silk cravats—all are routinely tied in knots. So too, physicists believe, are water, air and the liquid iron churning in Earth’s outer core. Knots twist and turn in the particle pathways of turbulent fluids, as stable in some cases as a sailor’s handiwork. For decades, scientists have suspected the rules governing these knots could offer clues for untangling turbulence—one of the last great unknowns of classical physics—but any order exhibited by the knots was lost in the surrounding chaos....
It’s not just craters purportedly dug by aliens in Russia, it’s also megaslumps, ice that burns and drunken trees. The ongoing meltdown of the permanently frozen ground that covers nearly a quarter of land in the Northern Hemisphere has caused a host of surprising arctic phenomena. Temperatures across the Arctic are warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the globe, largely due to the reduction in the amount of sunlight reflecting off of white, snow-covered ground....
We have long known that ravens are no birdbrains. They have been spotted caching food for later, gathering string to pull up hanging food and even trying to deceive one another. A study published today in Science adds an especially impressive twist: Ravens can plan for future needs that they never encounter in nature, suggesting intelligence may arise predictably from conditions that occurred multiple times across the tree of life. The new study was led by Mathias Osvath, a cognitive zoologist at Lund University in Sweden, and graduate student Can Kabadayi....
Two methods may dramatically increase the availability of embryonic stem cells. Using biochemical techniques, three independent teams reprogrammed mouse skin cells into cells nearly indistinguishable from the embryonic kind. Using a virus as the messenger, the researchers inserted into adult mouse skin cells four key genes that are expressed in embryonic cells, effectively turning back the clock on the skin cells. When injected into a blastocyst (an embryo just a few days old), they contributed to the development of its layers—and mixed in with the mature animals’ germ cells....
More than 1 billion sea creatures along the Vancouver coast were cooked to death during a record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, according to preliminary data. The maritime massacre surprised even the experts. Christopher Harley, a professor at the University of British Columbia, said the death toll kept climbing as his team investigated area beaches. “I was on a shore just as the tide was falling on the first of the three hot days....
If the stars hadn’t aligned, two of the most remarkable spacecraft ever launched never would have gotten off the ground. In this case, the stars were actually planets—the four largest in the solar system. Some 60 years ago they were slowly wheeling into an array that had last occurred during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in the early years of the 19th century. For a while the rare planetary set piece unfolded largely unnoticed....
By Megha Rajagopalan TIANJIN, China, Aug 16 (Reuters) - Chinese soldiers and rescue workers in gas masks and hazard suits searched for toxic materials in China’s port of Tianjin on Sunday as Premier Li Keqiang arrived to offer condolences, days after explosions flattened part of a national development zone. The goal is to clear the chemicals before any rain falls, which could create further toxic gas. The death toll rose to 112 from Wednesday’s disaster, which sent massive yellow and orange fireballs into the sky, hurled burning debris across a vast industrial area, crumpled cars and shipping containers, burnt out buildings and shattered windows of nearby apartments....
By Ronnie Cohen (Reuters Health) - Every year, an estimated 2 million people diagnosed with mental illness are jailed in the U.S., and soon after they’re released, many wind up behind bars again. But specialized supervision on probation for people with mental illness can radically reduce the odds they’ll be re-arrested within five years, a new study suggests. Those who were supervised on specialty probation were nearly three times less likely to return to jail within two years after their release than those on regular probation, researchers reported in JAMA Psychiatry....
Little Jonah once radiated pain. The 12-year-old Maltese dog’s body was curled and stiff from the effort of walking with damaged knees. But after Kristi Lively, Jonah’s veterinary surgeon, enrolled him in a clinical trial of a therapeutic antibody to treat pain, his owner returned to the Village Veterinary Medical Center in Farragut, Tennessee, with tears in her eyes. Her tiny companion trotted easily alongside her. “I got my dog back,” she said....
Like wall-hugging geckos, tree frogs are capable of gravity-defying feats of the feet. But new research shows that the two species cling to surfaces in markedly different ways. The “dry” grip of geckos relies on molecular bonds—firm but easily broken—between tiny fibers in the animal’s toe pads and the surfaces on which they stand. But scientists found that frogs use a different approach to hold on. Biologist Jon Barnes of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who led the research, used an atomic force microscope (AFM), which can provide images on the scale of billionths of a meter, to scan the feet of White’s tree frogs....
The periodic table of elements in Justin Urgitis’s office is unusual. It contains the same notations for all the elements, including carbon, silicon and germanium, in the same positions, as does any other. But his table at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc., also boasts lavish pictures of his own samples of carbon, silicon and germanium on it, thanks to a large (and growing) collection at his home in Uncasville, Conn. In fact, it allows him to use that age-old line: “Want to come upstairs and see my barium?...
No organ in the human body is as resistant to study as the brain. Whereas researchers can examine living cells from the liver, lung and heart, taking a biopsy of the brain is, for many reasons, more problematic. The inability to watch living human brain cells in action has hampered scientists in their efforts to understand psychiatric disorders. But researchers have identified a promising new approach that may revolutionize the study and treatment of conditions such as schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder....
Teen sex was rarely talked about in the 19th century, but that changed in the 20th with the coming of new sexual mores and the growth of public high schools, which brought girls and boys together in an institutional setting that fostered greater contact and intimacy than ever before. In 1900 probably less than 10 percent of Americans ages 15 to 18 were in public high schools, but by 1940 the proportion had grown to about two thirds....
By Mark Guarino CHICAGO (Reuters) - As colder-than-average temperatures locked large swaths of the United States into a deep freeze Tuesday, snow was likely in an unlikely place - Las Vegas. The National Weather Service (NWS) said cold air pressure from the northern High Plains would move south starting Tuesday, producing light snow and sleet over parts of western Texas that will expand into parts of the Southwest Tuesday night into Wednesday....
Giant galaxies such as the Milky Way and Andromeda consist mostly of exotic dark matter. But even our galaxy’s ordinary material presents a puzzle since most of it is missing and remains undiscovered by scientists. Now, however, by watching a galaxy plow through the Milky Way’s outskirts, astronomers have estimated the amount of gas surrounding our galaxy’s bright disk, finding that this material outweighs all of the interstellar gas and dust in our part of the Milky Way....
Earth’s first life-form, floating in the proverbial froth of the primordial seas that eventually gave rise to trees, bees and humans, is not just a popular Darwinian conceit but also an essential biological premise that many researchers rely on as part of the foundation of their work. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin went beyond others, who had proposed that there might be a common ancestor for all mammals or animals, and suggested that there was likely a common ancestor for all life on the planet—plant, animal and bacterial....
View slide show Exactly 100 years ago today, on the morning of June 30, 1908, Russian villagers near the river Podkamennaya Tunguska in central Siberia reported a dark column of smoke and bright fiery flashes in a cloudless blue sky. Other eyewitnesses described tremors that damaged homes and powerful, hot winds that literally knocked people out of their chairs. The atmospheric effects of what was almost certainly an explosion estimated at about five miles (eight kilometers) above the remote Siberian taiga were noted as far away as London....
South Bend, Ind., avoided $120 million in upgrades and conserved millions of gallons of water by becoming one of the first cities on the globe to use cloud computing to manage its water systems. In Oregon, local officials cooled down water from wastewater plants by planting trees near riverbanks rather than using cooling equipment, lowering investment costs at the same time. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is working with governors and transmission officials in Texas and the western United States on a multi-year computer project to find the best locations for new power plants faced with growing scarcity in nearby water resources to cool down their operations....
By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - More than 20,000 deaths might be prevented every year in the United States alone if naloxone, used to counter drug overdoses, was more widely available, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday. Few countries have such good data as the United States, but the WHO estimates about 69,000 people around the world die each year from overdoses of heroin or other opioids, with Iran, Russia and China known to have high numbers of opioid users....
