Posts

In the action blockbuster Escape Plan, out October 18, Sylvester Stallone plays a “security structure expert” who is wrongly incarcerated in one of the futuristic ultraenclosures he helped create. He’s forced to (you guessed it) escape—with a little help from a hardened criminal (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a whiz computer analyst (50 Cent). The makeshift team uses low- and high-tech tricks to craft an improbable escape. Turns out that much of this lock-down tech is already in use in the real world....

On November 2, 2000, a Russian Soyuz capsule docked with the fledgling International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft carried on Expedition 1 two Russians and an American—Sergei Krikalev, Yuri Gidzenko and Bill Shepherd—the three of whom would spend more than four months on the station as its first crew. Ten years on, the ISS is now the longest continually manned orbiting outpost in spaceflight history, having remained occupied with replacement crews since Krikalev, Gidzenko and Shepherd first arrived....

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) received its utilitarian name in 1982, a year after U.S. doctors recognized an epidemic of pneumonias, rare cancers and assorted bacterial infections among mostly male, mostly young and mostly previously healthy adults. The next year French researchers isolated the cause of the immune system collapse that defined the syndrome: a virus that selectively infects and destroys immune cells themselves. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which today resides in more than 30 million people and seemed to come out of the blue in the early 1980s, is now known to have been infecting humans for at least a century....

The F-150 notwithstanding, Americans are choosing more efficient cars. George Will has been described as an “intellectual,” as “erudite,” “brilliant,”even “brainy.” If you’ve ever heard him on television, you’d have to admit that his opinion of his own intellect seems to be quite high. And yet for such an erudite and brainy fellow, it’s amazing how often he gets it wrong when it comes to things environmental. (No comment on his other positions....

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced an initiative last week aimed at bolstering municipal renewable procurements nationwide. By working together to purchase large amounts of renewable energy, Walsh hopes cities can cut the costs of wind and solar, stimulate the economy, and meet the terms of the Paris climate accord. “We can do more than just address the problem of climate change, we can build a healthy, thriving future by working together,” Walsh said in a statement announcing the initiative....

Refugee workers in the Sahel region where thousands of Malian refugees are fleeing violence in their country said this week they are witnessing firsthand the knotted challenges of food security, climate change and conflict in Africa. Alice Thomas, climate displacement manager for Refugees International, said tens of thousands of destitute Malians are pouring into countries already hit hard by starvation, lack of water and crop failures. Speaking from Dakar, Senegal, after two weeks assessing camps in Niger and Burkina Faso, Thomas said communities have opened up their villages to Malian refugees....

Molecules released by trees can seed clouds, two experiments have revealed. The findings, published on May 25 in Nature and Science, run contrary to an assumption that the pollutant sulphuric acid is required for a certain type of cloud formation—and suggest that climate predictions may have underestimated the role that clouds had in shaping the pre-industrial climate. If the results of the experiments hold up, predictions of future climate change should take them into account, says Reto Knutti, a climate modeller at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)....

The day Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji, a 23-year-old technician at the University of California, Los Angeles, undertook what would be her last task, she wore a sweatshirt and no lab coat. That late December afternoon in 2008, she started working with a liquid called t-butyl lithium. The chemical requires careful handling, because as a pyrophoric, it catches fire when exposed to air. But equipment malfunctioned, and the fluid spilled, setting the synthetic fibers of her clothing ablaze....

By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazineNow that’s precision measurement: the electron is a perfect sphere, give or take barely one part in a million billion.The result comes from the latest in a long line of experiments to probe the shape of the fundamental particle that carries electrical charge. “If you imagine blowing up the electron so that it is the size of the Solar System, then it is spherical to within the width of a human hair,” says physicist Edward Hinds at Imperial College London, who led the team responsible for the minuscule measurement....

An experimental gene therapy has restored functioning immune systems to seven young children with a severe disorder that would have sentenced them to a life of isolation to avoid potentially deadly infections. They are now with family at home, and an eighth child is slated to be released from hospital at the end of this week. The children have mutations in a gene that is crucial for immune-system development, causing a disorder called X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID-X1)....

Malawi is a landlocked country in southeastern Africa, primarily known for its tobacco. At least 90 percent of the more than 12 million Malawians are farmers, typically with small spreads of less than one hectare (roughly 2.5 acres). At least one in five adult Malawians are infected with HIV/AIDS, often rendering them incapable of heavy farm work. Researchers discovered, though, that they could boost the farmers’ health—and double their income—by simply digging a 200¿square-meter (about 2,000-square-foot) pond on the property and stocking it with fish....

by Barbara CasassusThe world will be able to feed the predicted 2050 population of nine billion people, according to two French agricultural research organizations. In a joint report published today, they lay out findings gleaned from 2006 to 2008 that could overturn some current assumptions about the state of global farming.The report, titled Agrimonde1, is published by the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and the Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development (CIRAD), both headquartered in Paris....

By Natasha GilbertThe World Health Organization recommends that mothers exclusively breastfeed for the first six months of their infants’ lives. The advice, issued in 2001, has since been adopted by national governments, including the British government. But a new review of the existing evidence, published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, contradicts this guidance. Instead, it suggests that breastfeeding for four months is best for babies. Nature unpicks the evidence.What are the findings of the new study?...

During their formation, many planetary bodies in our solar system melted significantly, allowing denser materials to sink to their centers in a process known as differentiation. But how widespread this process was when it came to another class of early solar system body, asteroids, remains unclear. New findings published in the latest issue of the journal Nature suggest that for at least two of our solar system’s major asteroids, melting was dramatic....

Camping enthusiasts and aspiring modern sculptors take heed: researchers have achieved a breakthrough in understanding and controlling overcurvature, which is found in such disparate settings as pop-up tents, DNA plasmids and curved origami. Overcurvature occurs when a ring is too curved to lie flat in a plane the way a normal circle does. For example, if you detached a segment of a Slinky and connected its ends to make a closed loop, you would have a hard time getting the whole thing to lie flat on the floor....

To save any of his marching bandmates, Steve Marx says, he would run into onrushing traffic with no hesitation. It’s the kind of language often heard from former army buddies, not musicians, but Marx brings up the scenario to show the strength of his feelings about this group. The marching band director at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania has been participating in musical ensembles for more than 20 years, since he was in high school, and says that “the sort of bonding that you form is extremely strong....

On Maine’s rugged coast, just north of the tourist town of Boothbay, an underground seismometer is listening for earthquakes. Engineers activated it on 26 September, completing the $90-million Transportable Array, an ambitious effort to blanket the contiguous United States with a moveable grid of seismic monitors (see ‘On the march’). Since 2004, the set of 400 seismometers, loaded on trucks, has marched gradually eastwards across the continent, from the Pacific coast across the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains to reach the eastern seaboard....

President Obama laid out his timeline and destinations for manned space exploration during a speech Thursday, a blueprint that includes a trip to Mars orbit and back in the 2030s. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Obama pledged his commitment to the space agency and to manned exploration of the solar system, at a time when his controversial budget proposal for NASA awaits approval from Congress. “As president, I believe that space exploration is not a luxury, it is not an afterthought,” Obama said....

The government of St. Kitts and Nevis has launched an investigation into the clinical trial for a herpes vaccine by an American company because it said its officials were not notified about the experiments. The vaccine research has sparked controversy because the lead investigator, a professor with Southern Illinois University, and the U.S. company he co-founded did not rely on traditional U.S. safety oversight while testing the vaccine last year on mostly American participants on the Caribbean island of St....

Composer Robert L. Alexander was sitting in front of his laptop computer about three years ago, listening to a sound file that would have put most people to sleep: it was a faint flapping, like a distant flag waving in a stiff breeze, repeated over and over, sometimes a little louder, sometimes quieter. Alexander is a patient man, however. Forty-five minutes into his listening session, the flapping stopped, replaced by a sound like a wind roaring through a forest....