Think about your kitchen counter. Ignore the stack of papers by the light switch, and pay no mind to the food crumbs left over from your breakfast this morning. Instead, there exists a spot which, if you’re like many people, is devoted to a very particular kind of snack. This spot is your own personal shrine to sweetness. What’s occupying that spot right now? A plate of peanut butter cookies? Or maybe a box of chocolate-covered pretzels?...
The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest chapter in the “Tale of Two Health Systems” saga that has played out in the U.S. during every public health crisis dating back centuries. The pandemic has disproportionately devastated communities of color, proving that we can no longer ignore the need to address health inequities in a real way. This threat is so existential in nature that according to a recent CDC study, African Americans lost 2....
One of wind power’s drawbacks is its variability: sometimes the breeze is weak; other times it is strong. To convert the rotation of wind turbines into electricity efficiently, however, generators require a single turning speed. Faster or slower than this “sweet spot” and efficiency falls off fast. To compensate, engineers design turbine hardware to have adjustable blade angles to shed surplus wind energy or to capture more. Wind turbines often also employ a transmission to gear the shaft speed up or down to the sweet spot....
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler says the use of an inappropriately pessimistic climate modeling tool is driving bad press around climate change, and he’s pledged to halt its use. While he was still acting EPA chief, Wheeler blamed overly dire assumptions for the National Climate Assessment, released by the Trump administration last Black Friday—a launch that seemed calculated to bury the congressionally mandated report, which highlighted the findings of experts at 13 federal agencies that harmful man-made climate change is underway and growing worse....
The Trump administration says the Tongass National Forest is America’s best carbon warehouse—so it’s fine to increase logging there. The Forest Service last week released a draft environmental impact statement for building new roads through the Tongass, a precondition for feeding more old-growth trees into southeastern Alaska’s struggling timber mills. Every 21st-century president has fought over whether to expand or curtail logging in the massive forest. Trump has gone the furthest; his Forest Service last week said the time had come for a final resolution and recommended opening almost the entire area to development....
By Ewen CallawayA sperm’s path to an egg is more a deadly obstacle course than a track sprint. The one ejaculated sperm cell in a million that is lucky enough to reach the fallopian tubes, where eggs await fertilization, must conquer thick, gelatinous layers of mucus and cells surrounding the egg to reach its prize.Fortunately for the sperm, there is help. Two studies published today in Nature show how sperm sense progesterone, a female sex hormone, that has been released by cells surrounding the egg....
A winter heat wave is spreading inland from the West Coast and could bring unseasonable warmth spanning from coast-to-coast by the weekend. Southern California is on track to continue setting hot temperature records, Phoenix will have its earliest first 90°F day of the year, and parts of the South could see temperatures 20°-30°F above normal. While the heat is unusual in its magnitude, warmer winters in the U.S. are becoming the rule, not the exception....
Uber is onboard with NASA, at least. The company announced at its Elevate aviation conference in Los Angeles on May 8 and 9 it had signed an agreement to provide NASA with details and data about the inaugural uberAIR service it has planned for Dallas–Fort Worth. In return, the agency will use Uber’s data to make computer simulations of small passenger-carrying aircraft flying over the Texas Metroplex during peak air traffic times....
Dust devils — small, rotating columns of air that we can see because of the dust and debris they pick up from the ground — aren’t a common feature of New York City’s weather, and sparked a surge of local media coverage. “It’s an item of curiosity,” said Bill Goodman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s New York office. “These things don’t happen very often, especially not in the middle of New York....
California grows more than 90 percent of the tomatoes, broccoli and almonds consumed in the U.S., as well as many other foods. These crops require a lot of water. In the spring of 2015, after four years of little winter rain, the state was in a severe drought. Reservoirs were far below capacity, and underground aquifers were being heavily tapped. Mountain snowpack, an important source of meltwater throughout the spring and summer, was nearly gone in many areas....
We live in a world full of echoes. Sounds reverberate, bouncing off walls, buildings, rocks and any other nearby surface. These sound waves pile on one another and hurtle down your ear canals from different angles, the echoes from one noise jumbling together with new sounds and their echoes. In spite of that barrage, the neurons in the auditory midbrain, an area that responds before the auditory cortex does, are able to sort out which were the original sounds and where they came from....
Early life may have emerged from a mixture of RNA and DNA building blocks, developing the two nucleic acids simultaneously instead of evolving DNA from RNA. According to the RNA world hypothesis, early life used RNA to carry genetic information and perform biochemical catalytic reactions. Over time, DNA developed from RNA as the carrier of genetic information and proteins appeared as biochemical catalysts. As RNA gave way to DNA, some think a mixture of nucleotide building blocks would have been inevitable....
Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Scientists analysing the latest data from Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko have discovered molecules that can form sugars and amino acids, which are the building blocks of life as we know it. While this is a long, long way from finding life itself, the data shows that the organic compounds that eventually translated into organisms here on Earth existed in the early solar system....
The United Kingdom’s Beagle 2 Mars lander, which mysteriously disappeared during a landing attempt over Christmas in 2003, has finally been found by a NASA spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet. The Beagle 2 Mars lander is clearly visible in new photos from NASA’s sharp-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in orbit around the Red Planet. The discovery shows that the probe landed successfully, but failed to unfold itself properly on the Martian surface, UK Space Agency officials announced today (Jan....
By Issei Kato JOSO, Japan, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Unprecedented rain in Japan unleashed heavy floods on Friday that tore houses from their foundations, uprooted trees and forced more than 100,000 people from their homes. Helicopters hovering over swirling, muddy waters rescued many people from the roofs of their homes. Seven people were missing and at least 17 were injured, one seriously. Some areas received double the usual September rainfall in 48 hours after tropical storm Etau swept across Japan’s main island of Honshu....
New standards to reduce sulfur levels in gasoline, which will produce significant benefits in terms of public health and local air pollution, are also part of President Obama’s strategy to mitigate climate change, according to U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. “Tier 3 is an important part of a series of common-sense steps that the Obama administration has taken to protect public health, to address the threat of climate change through the president’s action plan, and to grow the economy through the continued revitalization of the auto industry,” McCarthy said on a call with reporters....
By Marty Graham SAN DIEGO, Jan 28 (Reuters) - California sea lions - mainly pups - are turning up stranded and starved on Southern California beaches in record numbers this year, leaving experts worried that this winter may be the worst season ever documented for the marine mammals. The precise cause is not clear, but scientists believe the sea lions are suffering from a scarcity of natural prey that forces nursing mothers to venture farther out to sea for food, leaving their young behind for longer periods of time....
With millions of scientific papers published every year and more than $2 trillion invested annually in research and development, scientists make plenty of progress. But could we do better? There is increasing evidence that some of the ways we conduct, evaluate, report and disseminate research are miserably ineffective. A series of papers in 2014 in the Lancet, for instance, estimated that 85 percent of investment in biomedical research is wasted. Many other disciplines have similar problems....
To access new mates and food sources, wild mammals must often venture between protected areas. Conservationists have long advocated designating “wildlife corridors” to make this easier and safer—but the most crucial routes’ locations, and whether conditions within them support or hinder these journeys, have been largely unknown until now. A recent study in Science found that more than 65 percent of such passages where movements are most concentrated remain unprotected. Reducing certain human pressures, the study authors note, could be even more effective at boosting connections than adding protected territory between existing refuges....
In the peculiar neurological condition known as synesthesia, a person’s senses meld together, so that a synesthete might “hear” colors or “taste” shapes. Now scientists have stumbled on a previously unknown form of synesthesia in which visual flashes or movements trigger perceptions of sound. California Institute of Technology neuroscientists Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch confirmed the existence of hearing-motion synesthesia, as they dubbed it, by creating a task at which the synesthetes would have an advantage....
