The story was tucked on the bottom of page A4 in last week’s New York Times. Most readers probably passed on it. Another piece about how fast the ice is melting. So what’s new. And few would have reacted to the name of the scientist behind the study, which found the world’s largest tropical glacier is retreating at a geologic sprint. Among climate scientists, though, Lonnie G. Thomson’s exploits are the stuff of legend....
John Sottery, president of IMS, Inc., and a leading sunscreen researcher, offers the following explanation: Natural sunlight contains, among other things, ultraviolet (UV) photons. These photons are shorter in wavelength and higher in energy than visible light. Because they fall outside the visible spectrum, the human eye cannot perceive them. When it comes to sun exposure, however, what you can’t see will hurt you. When these high-energy photons strike your skin, they generate free radicals and can also directly damage your DNA....
PERU A 6,000-year-old human skeleton found in the ancient coastal village of Paloma might be part of the oldest-known shark-attack victim. The skeleton’s left leg is missing, and its right arm bears deep, distinctive bite marks. ANGOLA A desert plant called Welwitschia sports only two leaves—but can grow them continuously for millennia, with some specimens more than 3,000 years old. New research shows the species has many copies of metabolism- and cell-growth-related genes, helping it persist through periods of environmental stress....
Lacking a sense of humor might not just be bad for your social life, it might also be harming your cardiovascular health. A new study shows that laughter actually increases blood flow in the body, proving right the old adage that laughter is the best medicine, at least when it comes to the heart. Cardiologist Michael Miller and colleagues at the University of Maryland tested blood flow in 20 healthy men and women after they watched 15-to-30-minute clips of the comedy movies Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary and a stressful film, the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. You may be familiar with the idea that your gut and skin are home to a collection of microbes—fungi, bacteria and viruses—that are vital for keeping you healthy. But did you know that your eyes also host a unique menagerie of microbes? Together, they’re called the eye microbiome. When these microbes are out of balance—too many or too few of certain types—eye diseases may emerge....
Three years ago, at my class’s white coat ceremony during the first week of medical school, the photographer told us to smile and yell “Tuition-free!” rather than “Cheese!” We were horrified: The notion of tuition-free medical school—admittedly something that had been circulating in the pre-orientation rumor mill—seemed imaginative at best, delusional at worst, and thoroughly inconsiderate on day four of probably the most debt-accumulating pursuit in our adult lives. The following week, the photographer issued an apology....
View a slideshow of the robotic technology NASA is testing this week. As NASA sets its sites on manned missions back to the moon and as far away as Mars, the space agency is participating a series of tests this week to determine if robotic technology is the key to providing adequate medical care for its astronauts during such extended spaceflights. On board a military C-9 aircraft flying in parabolic arcs over the Gulf of Mexico, four surgeons and four astronauts are performing simulated surgery by hand and using a robotic device developed by SRI International to determine if the robot’s software can compensate for errors in movement that can occur during turbulence and under varying gravitational conditions....
Few physicists have had the privilege of bringing a new elementary particle into the world. When Wolfgang Pauli hit on the idea of the neutrino in 1930, however, internal misgivings tempered his response. “I have done a terrible thing,” Pauli later told his colleagues. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.” The neutrino is indeed elusive—its ghostly nature allows it to slip through almost all physical barriers, including the materials that physicists use in their particle detectors....
Why do humans see colors? For years the leading hypothesis was that color vision evolved to help us spot nutritious fruits and vegetation in the forest. But in 2006, evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi and colleagues proposed that color vision evolved to perceive oxygenation and hemoglobin variations in skin in order to detect social cues, emotions and the states of our friends or enemies. Just think about the reddening and whitening of the face called blushing and blanching....
Along with red blood cells, white blood cells and a panoply of hormones, every drop of your blood contains tiny shards of DNA spewed out of various cells in your body as they die. Recent massive increases in the speed and efficiency of the instruments used to analyze these fragments of genetic information have led to some impressive advances in the development of so-called cell-free DNA (cfDNA) tests—particularly when it comes to prenatal testing of a developing fetus....
Pushing against the receding darkness of basic science, researchers are looking at the physics behind capturing and producing light—work that could illuminate breakthroughs in clean energy. In the fight against climate change, governments and private companies are focusing much of their attention on engineering devices like light bulbs and solar cells, chasing single-percentage-point efficiency gains. These marginal improvements could have major effects: The U.N. Environment Programme estimated that 19 percent of the world’s electricity goes toward lighting, accounting for up to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions....
By Anthony Esposito SANTIAGO, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Strong aftershocks rippled through Chile on Thursday after a magnitude 8.3 earthquake that killed at least eight people and slammed powerful waves into coastal towns, forcing more than a million people from their homes. The government ordered evacuations from coastal areas after the powerful quake hit on Wednesday evening, seeking to avoid a repeat of a quake disaster in 2010 when authorities were slow to warn of a tsunami that killed hundreds....
For years researchers have been trying to figure out the best ways of making plants produce biofuels. But there is a fundamental problem: photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into stored chemical energy, is highly inefficient. Plants turn only 1 to 3 percent of sunlight into carbohydrates. That is one reason why so much land has to be devoted to growing corn for ethanol, among other bad biofuel ideas....
Earth’s robust magnetic field protects the planet and its inhabitants from the full brunt of the solar wind, a torrent of charged particles that on less shielded planets such as Venus and Mars has over the ages stripped away water reserves and degraded their atmospheres. Unraveling the timeline for the emergence of that magnetic field and the mechanism that generates it—a dynamo of convective fluid in Earth’s outer core—can help constrain the early history of the planet, including the interplay of geologic, atmospheric and astronomical processes that rendered the world habitable....
You are on a plane, thirty thousand feet above ground. Four hundred and fifty snakes crawl into the passenger cabin. You think this is terrifying? Hollywood producers certainly gambled on that when they released the 2006 summer blockbuster “Snakes on a Plane.” Israeli scientists, however, have come up with an even creepier scenario. You are in an MRI machine. Your head is fixed in a round cage. Your body is rolled into a narrow tube....
By Toni Clarke The U.S. government announced plans on Monday to invest $200 million to help shorten the waiting list for patients waiting for organ transplants. The investment, to be led by the Department of Defense, was announced at a White House summit to discuss the role of science and technology and innovation in organ transplantation. It is designed to support technologies aimed at repairing and replacing cells and tissues, Jeff Zients, director of the White House National Economic Council told the meeting....
Editor’s note: The following is an early release of the Antigravity column to be published in the April 2015 issue. As I write these words in early February, the nation is watching a measles outbreak caused by parents opting out of vaccines for their children. Meanwhile presidential hopefuls have been making news via their strong pro-choicey opinions, which are somehow about whether to get your kids vaccinated. I was going to pass on commenting, so weary did I become upon hearing the retrograde absurdities that came out of the mouths of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) and Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI)....
Once a common medical procedure, the standard autopsy is passing out of use. In the 1970s bodies underwent postmortem examination in nearly 20 percent of deaths in the U.S. By 2007 the rate had fallen to 8.5 percent of all deaths and to only 4.3 percent of deaths caused by disease. The reasons for the decline are well documented. Autopsies reveal medical mistakes, making doctors and hospitals uncomfortable. Medicare and private insurance do not reimburse providers for the procedures, so families must pay in full....
Six days from now, every one of the billions of phytoplankton alive today will be dead—eaten by zooplankton or having drifted to the bottom of the sea. In fact, some of these microscopic plants, which collectively perform as much as photosynthesis as all of Earth’s land-based plants, live for just two days. But these microscopic plants have an outsize effect on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—both by sucking it up during photosynthesis and by helping to drive the natural circulation of the ocean that lets denser, cooler water that has absorbed CO2 drop to the bottom of the sea in places like the North Atlantic....
From family feuds to corporate conflicts, when people find themselves in difficult disputes, they often turn to mediation. Manuals on effective mediation suggest that a mediator should listen attentively to each person involved and express empathy with their viewpoints, no matter how different from one another they are. Mediators are advised to avoid appearing to favor the ideas of one side, and to make each person involved feel at ease and confident that they are being understood....
