Posts

For more than 50 years fossil fuels and fertilizers have been the key ingredients in much greater global food production and distribution. The food-energy relationship has been a good one, but it is now entering a new era. Food production is rising sharply, requiring more carbon-based fuels and nitrogen-based fertilizers, both of which exacerbate global warming, river and ocean pollution, and a host of other ills. At the same time, many nations are grappling with how to reduce energy demand, especially demand for fossil fuels....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. As you may know, the quadrennial World Cup was recently played in Brazil. As you may not know, each of the 32 teams in this year’s tournament had 23 players on their roster. This week’s Math Dude episode has absolutely nothing to do with soccer or the World Cup, so why have I mentioned this fun fact?...

In a corner of Sequoia National Park in California, Sierra redwoods stick out like colossal cinnamon sticks among the more common pines, firs and incense cedars. Nate Stephenson, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist, makes his way up a hill, stepping over fallen logs. He stops in front of a small, dead red fir, which a hanging metal tag identifies as “189.” Stephenson points out a section of its trunk where the USGS field crew cut away the bark, revealing the squiggly signature of the fir engraver beetle scrawled across the brown sapwood....

At a small ceremony in February, Johnson & Johnson executives were handed a scroll of 30,000 signatures from consumers. But, in an unusual twist, these consumers weren’t complaining; they were thanking the company. One of the world’s largest producers of personal care products, Johnson & Johnson has vowed to remove many chemicals from its baby products. “Smart companies that are marketing to children are in a footrace to phase out chemicals of concern,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental group that presented the signatures to the corporation....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883....

Regular family meals have been touted as a preventive for all kinds of problems, including teen pregnancy, smoking and obesity. Recent research in the Journal of Marriage and Family, however, found that most of the benefits of regular family meals were not actually the result of eating together. Rather, social scientists Kelly Musick and Ann Meier found, they stemmed from other factors in the family environment that facilitated regular meals, such as sufficient income, strong family relationships and authoritative parents....

For more than a generation, astronomers have been waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. On Tuesday they learned they will have to wait even longer, as agency officials revealed Webb’s launch date has slipped from spring of 2019 to approximately May 2020—a delay that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, breaching the $8.8-billion telescope’s Congressionally mandated cost cap and requiring legislators to either provide more funding or abandon the project....

Throughout the pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has laid bare weak points in the world’s health care systems. This has been true in arguably every country and every community, but the fractures have been especially apparent in rural areas, where poor access to health care long predated the pandemic. In this three-part story, Undark explores the gaps in rural health care systems around the world, following the daily work of a village health worker in a small township in central Zimbabwe; a newly graduated rural doctor on a required year-long stint at a remote clinic in northern Ecuador; and a family doctor at a private practice in upstate New York....

By Shelby Sebens PORTLAND Ore. (Reuters) - An Oregon wolf which became the subject of a documentary after making a monumental trek from Oregon to California and back may have finally found what he’s been searching for: love. Oregon wildlife officials said on Tuesday they believe the gray wolf, dubbed OR 7 because he was the seventh wolf collared for tracking in 2011, may have found a mate. If the pair have pups, it would be the first known wolf breeding in the Oregon Cascades since the early 20th century....

By Will Boggs MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A spiral series of self-sustaining cycles of excitation underlies the puzzling condition known geographic tongue, physicists suggest. “Geographic tongue” refers to the red patches that appear when filiform papillae on the tongue are lost (they subsequently regrow). The condition affects about 2% of the population, but its exact cause is unknown. “Utilizing a dynamical systems approach (i.e., a mathematical description of the dynamical aspect of the condition) allows one to get an insight regarding the evolution and severity of the geographic tongue (GT) condition,” Dr....

Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird by Tim Birkhead. Walker & Company, 2012 Birds are more like humans than many realize: they are bipedal, they rely primarily on sight and hearing, and most are monogamous. Birkhead, a professor at the University of Sheffield in England, has spent his career studying bird behavior and fills his book with evocative stories and observations about numerous species, including flamingos, parrots and his beloved long-tailed sylph hum­mingbird....

In the wake of Angelina Jolie Pitt’s announcement that she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to reduce her risk of ovarian cancer doctors are urging women to proceed cautiously before following her example. She shared her story in an op–ed piece published in The New York Times on Tuesday. The procedure makes sense for relatively few women, says Noah Kauff, director of Ovarian Cancer Screening and Prevention at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center....

Imagine the perfect ocean wave: a wall of water swells and curls in on itself before breaking dramatically near the shore. Catching such a wave would be any surfer’s dream—and the physics underneath its churning surface is just as mind-blowing as the ride. As an ocean wave coils, it creates a hollow tube made of spinning water. If you could peek under the surface, you would see numerous small, thin twisters known as rib vortices looping around this primary vortex....

Editor’s Note: This story was originally printed in the December 2007 issue of Scientific American and is being reposted from our archive in light of a new documentary on PBS, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. Hugh Everett III was a brilliant mathematician, an iconoclastic quantum theorist and, later, a successful defense contractor with access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets. He introduced a new conception of reality to physics and influenced the course of world history at a time when nuclear Armageddon loomed large....

“It is not often that a measure of such a startling character as the Daylight Saving Bill is introduced into the English House of Commons. The fact that the momentous changes advocated are proposed by William Willett, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that the measure may not be so chimerical as might be supposed. It is proposed during part of the spring and autumn, and the whole of the summer, to advance the clocks throughout the country, with a view to including within the working hours a longer stretch of daylight....

EarthTalk® E - The Environmental Magazine Dear EarthTalk: Might another possible source for ethanol be discarded pastries from bakeries? For that matter, wouldn’t fermenting unsold bananas, oranges and apples from grocery store produce departments be able to provide an ample supply of fuel?— Curious in Warren, Pa. Food waste is indeed an untapped resource with great potential for generating energy. Some one third of all food produced around the world gets discarded uneaten, and environmentalists, energy analysts and entrepreneurs are beginning to take notice....

“We’re just going to walk up the ridge,” Don Leopold tells me, leading me along a trail through Whiskey Hollow, a 14-hectare nature reserve about 20 minutes outside Syracuse, N.Y. “It’ll be a good stretch of the legs.” It’s a chilly, slightly cloudy September day. Leopold and I have traveled here hoping to find a rather elusive species—one that used to be so abundant it was impossible to take a walk in these woods without seeing dozens of its kind, if not several hundred....

By David CyranoskiResearchers mapping a massive array of genomes across Asia say they have found evidence that humans covered the continent in a single migratory wave, and share a common ancestry.The findings were released by the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) Pan-Asian SNP Consortium which looks at single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or variations at individual bases that make up the genetic code. The results challenge the view that Asia was populated by at least two waves of migration....

Doses of a human gut microbe helped to reverse behavioral problems in mice with autism-like symptoms, researchers report today in Cell. The treatment also reduced gastrointestinal problems in the animals that were similar to those that often accompany autism in humans. The work builds on previous research by Paul Patterson, a neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. In 2012, he and his team created mice with autism-like symptoms by injecting a chemical that mimics viral infection into pregnant mice; those animals then bore offspring that were less sociable and more anxious than wild-type animals....

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest particle accelerator in the world. But, after 10 years of operation, it’s time to think about the next steps. With one approved upgrade—the High-Luminosity LHC—and design studies for possible future colliders on the table, intense efforts are being directed to the development of new technologies. In September 2008, the champagne corks popped in the CERN control room as physicists and engineers celebrated the first beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)....