On the night of my 32nd birthday, my husband and I enjoyed a delicious dinner while on vacation in Orvieto, Italy. To complement my pasta, I drank a single glass of red wine, my first since learning I was pregnant four months earlier. Even now my indulgence that evening inspires periodic pangs of guilt: Did I stunt my son’s potential by sipping that Sangiovese? Nobody questions the notion that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful....
Dear EarthTalk: It seems like more products are being packaged in #5 rather than #2 plastic today, and my local recycling agency won’t take #5. I’ve also heard that #5 plastics are more toxic, which concerns me more than the recyclability issue. Which plastic is the better choice? – Janice Shaffer, Chillicothe, MO Polypropylene, which is marked with #5 inside the “chasing arrows” symbols on the bottom of plastic containers, is a lighter-weight plastic resin commonly used in dairy and deli packaging....
The public health workers behind the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are struggling to combat an outbreak of the deadly virus in what is effectively a war zone. Repeated rebel attacks on the city of Beni—the outbreak epicenter and the headquarters of the response operation—have given the virus an advantage over the humans trying to contain it, acknowledges Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general. The most recent attack, on Friday, targeted a military encampment close to a hotel in Beni where some Ebola responders are housed....
Nations are rivals in soccer and international relations, but science is a unifying force. Many of our biggest achievements seem to come from international collaborations. A team from 11 laboratories in nine countries identified the SARS coronavirus in 2003 with unprecedented speed. Scientists come from all over to chase the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Centers of excellence dot the globe. The world of science is getting flatter....
We all know anger is bad… right? Generally, it’s unpleasant to feel and it often leads to undesirable outcomes. After all, when was the last time you lost your temper with your boss and was pleased with the outcome? However, perhaps you can also think of times when anger wasn’t so bad. Perhaps, in some contexts, feeling angry was actually beneficial. This counterintuitive idea was pursued by researchers Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in a series of studies recently published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology....
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released its latest report on global fisheries and aquaculture with no new 2008 catch and production figures, as the agency continues to piece together 2007 data. Nevertheless, FAO is sounding an alarm on gradual declines in wild catch fishing production and depletion of stocks, while being careful to note that growth in the global aquaculture industry is largely making up the difference and seems poised to overtake capture fishing as the world’s leading source of seafood....
Photographer Nick Brandt spent months on dry lake beds and dusty plains, waiting to capture images of African wildlife in what he calls their “state of being”. The animal assemblages that he saw through his lens are now revealed in A Shadow Falls, Brandt’s book of stunning, sepia-toned portraits and panoramas released this month by Abrams. It is the second installment, after On This Earth: Photographs from East Africa, in his trilogy of books that Brandt hopes will memorialize “the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa....
It is unusual for TV news to open with a story about physics, but it happened on July 4, 2012, when all around the world stations chose to devote prime time to breaking news from Geneva: a search of almost 50 years had ended with the discovery of the Higgs boson particle by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN physics laboratory. For experimentalists, the Higgs was the last and most important missing piece in the trophy cabinet of the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory describing all the known particles in the universe and the forces between them....
Comparing the relative sizes of bird species has long seemed an impossible task—too many species simply lack reliable counts. A recent influx of citizen science data, however, allowed researchers to make global abundance estimates for 9,700 species, about 92 percent of all birds on Earth. Biologists Corey T. Callaghan, Shinichi Nakagawa and William K. Cornwell, all at the University of New South Wales in Australia, combined scientific data for 724 well-studied species with counts from the app eBird, where people around the world can submit bird sightings....
FORT COLLINS, Colo. – For the last few years, this northern Colorado city (population 160,000) has been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and growing its businesses at the same time. Since 2005, its population has risen by 13.5 percent, but emissions have dropped by 14.7 percent. Last year’s drop, according to the city, was the equivalent of taking 71,000 passenger cars off the road. How can a city do this? Within the last six weeks, experts from Russia, India, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Japan have come here to find out....
The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. A 5/5/21 post by Katelyn Jetelina at her site Your Local Epidemiologist lays out the case for getting a COVID-19 vaccine even if you’ve tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 or recovered from the disease it can cause. The vaccines strengthen our immune response to the virus by giving us another “dose” of virus protection (the vaccine), she writes....
Men exposed to certain banned but long-lived chemicals at high levels as teenagers are more likely to have defective sperm later in life, according a new study. Researchers report today that organochlorine chemicals—specifically DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—may affect how testicles mature and function. It is the first study to examine men’s exposure to the chemicals during the teenage years and abnormal sperm later in life, and suggests that the chemicals—banned in the United States but still lingering in soil, water and people—may contribute to male infertility....
Disgust, in its most familiar form, is our response to something vile in the world—spoiled food, a dirty floor or rats cavorting in the subway. It is a contamination-avoidance mechanism that evolved to help us make biologically adaptive decisions in the heat of the moment. Yet disgust has also come to have powerful symbolic elements. When left unchecked, these symbolic qualities can have devastating impacts on our mental states. Consider, for example, the often dramatized, heartbreaking image of a woman crouched in the corner of a shower and frantically trying to scrub her body clean after being raped....
Bill Johnson is a utility executive, not a climate scientist. That didn’t stop the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. CEO from wading into California’s complex climate conditions. Noting that Northern California’s wildfire risk has grown exponentially in recent years, Johnson placed much of the blame on climate change, not PG&E’s compromised electricity grid. “As late as 2017, most people didn’t think [wildfire] risk was very high in Northern California, including the regulators,” Johnson said Wednesday during a briefing on PG&E’s latest intentional blackout to prevent wildfires....
We often attribute our key characteristics to one of our parents: “I get my perfectionism from my dad and my impatience from my mom.” In most such cases, though, we do not really know what combination of nature and nurture led to the family resemblance. Now a study has found that the structure of emotion-regulating regions in the brain may be passed down from mother to daughter, which could have implications for mood-disorder risk....
A minor chemical difference between Earth and Moon rocks could have big implications for theories about how the Moon was born. Moon rocks contain a tiny bit more of the rare isotope oxygen-17 than do the rocks on Earth, say geochemists who measured oxygen using very precise methods. “It changes the nature of the debate,” says Robin Canup, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved in the study....
Philosopher Eddy Nahmias from Georgia State University conveys to Scientific American readers in the January issue his ideas and research in support of the idea that free will exists. Our ability to choose left versus right, he thinks, prevails—even when, unbeknownst to all of us, our brains sometimes appear to be grinding away behind the scenes immediately before we actually take a step or utter the first word of a sentence....
Twelve grams of the moon arrived at Robert Ferl’s laboratory in an undecorated UPS box. Ferl, a horticulturist at the University of Florida, had waited more than a decade for that moment. The small box of dirt, postmarked from NASA, held some of the last remaining unopened samples of moon dust, called regolith, collected by astronauts on the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions. Despite months of practice, Ferl recalls, he lifted the sample with trembling hands....
Pyrex baking dish, approximately two quarts in size Dried thyme or other dried leaf spices Teaspoon measuring spoon Measuring cup About three cups of vegetable oil Spoon or whisk for stirring Two sturdy ceramic coffee mugs, equal in height Small candle (This should be much shorter than the coffee mugs.) Lighter or matches (Have an adult assist handling the lit candle and lighter or matches.) Surface that can handle oily spills, such as the kitchen counter—or towel to protect surface...
The discovery of stone axes in the same sediment layer as cruder tools indicates that hominins with differing tool-making technologies may have coexisted. The axes, found in Kenya by Christopher Lepre, a palaeontologist at Columbia University in New York, and his team are estimated to be around 1.76 million years old. That’s 350,000 years older than any other complex tools yet discovered. The finding, published August 31 in Nature, includes another important discovery: the hand axes, usually associated with the emergence around 1....
