The arid badlands of Ethiopia’s Afar region have long been a favorite hunting ground for paleoanthropologists. The area is perhaps best known for having yielded “Lucy,” the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor known as Australopithecus afarensis. Now researchers have unveiled another incredible find, from a site called Dikika, just four kilometers from where Lucy turned up. It is the skeleton of an A. afarensis child who lived 3.3 million years ago....
The advent of the artificial heart has spurred scientists to pursue synthetic kidneys and pancreases as well. Still, one key obstacle to realizing such devices is powering them after they have been implanted. Instead of having to constantly recharge them by hooking them up to some external system—or, worse, periodically removing them and replacing their batteries—researchers would prefer that these machines somehow harvest energy from their hosts. Now there is hope that future implants might be powered not by batteries but by the fuels in our bodies that are used for energy....
Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless....
By Ed StoddardMADIKWE GAME RESERVE, South Africa (Reuters) - New infantry-style tactics of concealment and ambush by armed park rangers are credited with turning the tide in the war against poachers of the endangered rhino on one front, in South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve.The slaughter of rhinos - a creature regarded as an icon of African wildlife - for their horns to meet soaring demand in Asia has raised alarm bells among conservationists....
The giant panda has become a symbol of both China itself and—more so internationally—the entire enterprise of protecting the planet’s rarest wildlife. Now one of the world’s major conservation institutions has stripped the iconic bears of their longtime “endangered” status. But rather than resting on their laurels for bringing the treasured animals back from the brink, Chinese officials and a number of scientists there are calling the status change premature, and want pandas back on the list....
For the second time in about a month, a malfunction on United Airlines’ Web site is letting customers buy tickets on the cheap. Passengers can take advantage of the error by setting up a “MileagePlus” account and tricking the site into getting them a ticket with frequent-flyer miles they don’t have, according to Mashable. The news site said that it was able to reserve a roundtrip ticket from Newark, N.J., to Dublin, Ireland for $49....
When Mars orbiters decades ago spotted valleys and other fluvial landforms on the surface of the Red Planet, a tantalizing idea came to the fore. Perhaps, planetary scientists ventured, ancient Mars was blanketed by a thick atmosphere that kept the planet much warmer and wetter than it is now, with flowing water, lakes and maybe even an ocean covering at least part of its surface. And if Mars had water some three billion to four billion years ago, they wondered, why not life?...
Electronic health records (EHRs) have received a lot of attention since the Obama administration committed $19 billion in stimulus funds earlier this year to encourage hospitals and health care facilities to digitize patient data and make better use of information technology. The healthcare industry as a whole, however, has been slow to adopt information technology and integrate computer systems, raising the question of whether the push to digitize will result in information that empowers doctors to make better-informed decisions or a morass of disconnected data....
Bacteria in ocean sediments appear to string together nanowires to connect complementary but spatially separated chemical processes, according to a new study. The finding is the first example of a natural electrical circuit bridging a macroscopic gap, in this case more than a centimeter across, to mediate a biogeochemical process on either side. Below the sediment surface there is plenty of hydrogen sulfide and carbon for bacteria to consume via oxidation, or removing electrons, but the electron acceptor is up at the sediment surface, in the form of dissolved oxygen in the overlying water....
Technologies to detect brain activity — fine, we’ll come right out and call it mind reading — as well as to change it are moving along so quickly that “a bit of a gold rush is happening, both on the academic side and the corporate side,” Michel Maharbiz of the University of California, Berkeley, told a recent conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here are three fast-moving areas of neuroscience we’ll be watching in 2018: Neural dust/neurograins Whatever you call these electronics, they’re really, really tiny....
Creativity is a sought-after commodity among employers and those seeking personal or professional fulfillment. It comes in handy not only while concocting works of art and literature but also in planning a corporate event or devising a new business strategy. Some people seem more naturally open to new ideas and able to put them to innovative uses. Many of these individuals also tend to be a little…well…different, as Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson wrote in the May/June 2011 Scientific American MIND....
Still-life artists know that to make an image of an object look like the real thing, they must account for the way light reflects off it. The appearance of these glimmers—their color, position and brightness—is influenced by the item’s surroundings. And this effect means an object can, in turn, reveal key aspects of its environment. Researchers have now found that by filming a brief video clip of a shiny item, they can use the light flashing off it to construct a rough picture of the room around it....
Proof: The Science of Booze by Adam Rogers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 Wine lovers, beer hounds, whiskey connoisseurs and even teetotalers are all likely to find something to interest them in this look at the science of liquor. Journalist Rogers follows “a sip of booze on a birth to death journey via your tummy,” delving into the biochemistry of fermentation and distillation, the history of alcohol production, and the physiological and psychological effects of drinking....
RICHLAND, Wash. – In an experimental control room at the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), small blips dart left and right on a display screen, recording distant signals from key points on the Western high-voltage grid at 30 times each second. Should the blips migrate past a security boundary on the display, an alarm would immediately warn that the grid was in jeopardy. Such an early alert could have helped operators avoid the 1996 Western power blackout, which knocked out 30,000 megawatts of power – equivalent to darkening 30 cities the size of Seattle....
By Laila Kearney (Reuters) - U.S. animal rights groups are offering a $10,000 reward for information on a person who apparently mutilated a California brown pelican this month in a case that has drawn widespread public attention. California brown pelicans are a threatened species that is protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The pelican, named Pink after the colored band on its leg, was found in the city of Long Beach with a severed throat pouch, the International Bird Rescue (IBR) organization said in a statement....
California’s entire economy should go “carbon neutral” by 2045, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said in an executive order that aims to hit the most ambitious climate target in the nation. Some experts said the order is purely aspirational, as it doesn’t include any mandates. Others said it tells state agencies to make it happen. As well, it leaves open the possibility of future technological developments, they said. “It’s going to create momentum toward that end goal, even if it doesn’t specify how to achieve that end goal,” said Tim O’Connor, senior director of Environmental Defense Fund’s energy program in California....
BEIJING (Reuters) - China will look into establishing a nation-wide trading system for pollution permits as part of efforts to use market mechanisms to help clean up its environment, the country’s top environment official said.In remarks published on the website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (www.mep.gov.cn) on Friday, minister Zhou Shengxian said China was working on new regulations for pollution permits and would also publish proposals for new pilot trading projects as soon as possible....
By Bill Chameides How a recent report on climate change put me toe to toe with Congressional climate refudiaters. Released on May 12th and representing the culmination of two years’ work and the study of decades of research, “America’s Climate Choices” was written by a group of scientists formed at the behest of Congress to offer advice on how to respond to global warming. In the wake of its release, the report by the National Academies’ Committee on America’s Climate Choices has engendered some interesting repartee....
GUWAHATI India (Reuters) - At least 43 people have died and many are missing in floods and landslides caused by heavy rains that lashed India’s remote northeast, officials said on Wednesday, in the second flood tragedy to strike the subcontinent this month. Officials in the mountainous state of Meghalaya said at least 25 people had been drowned or died in landslides, with 24 more reported missing in the Garo Hills district of the state....
When artist Ad Reinhardt’s painting arrived at New York City’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2000, it was damaged beyond repair. Cracks in the original paint, combined with ill-conceived restoration attempts, had conspired to turn this once vital example of 1960s minimalist art into a black slab devoid of Reinhardt’s original monochromatic vision. But its sorry state also made the piece, part of Reinhardt’s “Black Square” series painted between 1960 and 1966, the perfect specimen for art conservators at the Guggenheim, and its Manhattan neighbor, MoMA–The Museum of Modern Art, eager to test out the latest restoration technologies....
