Posts

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not have the power to regulate power plant emissions will seriously hamper U.S. efforts to slow climate change. So says Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under George W. Bush for three years, and was New Jersey’s first woman governor. Whitman says the ruling will also kill worldwide confidence in U.S. climate action—which could lessen the resolve of other big polluters, such as India and China, to cut their own emissions....

By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari SaitoTOKYO (Reuters) - Two and a half years after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the operator of Japan’s wrecked Fukushima plant faces a daunting array of unknowns.Why the plant intermittently emits steam; how groundwater seeps into its basement; whether fixes to the cooling system will hold; how nearby groundwater is contaminated by radioactive matter; how toxic water ends up in the sea and how to contain water that could overwhelm the facility’s storage tanks....

Be warned: Apple’s comeback in the world of personal computing brings with it a heightened level of security risks for its customers, not unlike those Microsoft Windows devotees have faced for years. Reports surfaced earlier this week of a malicious new Trojan horse–like piece of software found on several pornography Web sites that has the potential to let cyber thieves take control of infected Mac computers so they can steal personal information....

“It has passed the point of no return,” said Eric Rignot, lead author on one of the studies and a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been of concern to climate scientists because it contains enough ice to add 10 to 13 feet to global sea level rise were it all to melt. (Because the ice sheet’s ice is bound to land, it increases the volume of the ocean as it flows into it, like ice cubes added to a glass of water; sea ice, on the other hand, doesn’t change the ocean’s volume as it melts because it is already displacing that volume, just as a melting ice cube doesn’t add volume to the glass....

Ever had trouble reading the display on your cell phone or handheld video game? Don’t worry, researchers are on it: a group has devised an improved method of creating bendable circuitry by slicing a thin, floppy piece of material from one surface and stamping it onto another. The technique combines multiple types of semiconductors into the same device with ease, its developers report. Mixing and matching materials this way may pave the way to brighter displays for cell phones and handheld games, spherical light-sensitive “eyes” that take in a wide field of view, and flexible communications devices that can be folded and stuffed into a backpack, says materials scientist John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest animal of them all? The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror has been touted as a hallmark of higher cognition — present in humans and only the most intelligent of animals — and the basis for empathy. A study published this week in Current Biology controversially reports that macaques can be trained to pay attention to themselves in a mirror, the first such observation in any monkey species....

In the 2020s, NASA’s human spaceflight program will revolve around sending astronauts to high lunar orbit to study a small boulder robotically plucked from the surface of a large asteroid, agency officials announced yesterday. The announcement is a crucial milestone for the agency’s nascent Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which is intended to set the stage for future missions sending humans to Mars and other deep-space destinations. NASA’s decision comes after months of delays as two separate teams investigated how to best achieve ARM’s objectives....

After another transformer fire at the Indian Point nuclear facility on May 9, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo would like to see the power plant shut down for good. The aging nuclear power plant is in the midst of its application to the federal government for a license renewal, which would allow the two reactors on site to continue to harness fission to boil water for electricity generation for another 20 years....

He wore pajamas and a bathrobe, and a swollen bare foot was propped up on an ottoman. That was the figure cut by the revered science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke the one time that I, along with a few other Scientific American editors, met him. It was October 1999, and he was in New York City for a few days while on an extremely rare trip outside of his adopted home country, Sri Lanka, for medical reasons....

In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology’s rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies. Yet a closely related goal has remained stubbornly elusive. In stark contrast to the largely unanticipated explosion of computers into the mainstream, the entire endeavor of robotics has failed rather completely to live up to the predictions of the 1950s....

By Eric Hand and Nature magazine Venus would seem to be a tempting destination for planetary probes: conveniently close, and an extreme laboratory for atmospheric processes familiar on Earth. So why won’t NASA send a mission there? That was the frustrated question coming from scientists at the annual meeting of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG) near Washington, D.C., on August 30-31. They perceive an agency bias against Venus, a planet that hasn’t seen a U....

An odd dense spot in the universe populated by a surprising amount of matter has been puzzling scientists since it was revealed in March in an all-sky map made by the European Planck satellite. This feature and other mysteries in the observations may point the way toward new theories of physics, say scientists who met recently to discuss the implications of the findings. Three Planck team members will answer public questions about the Planck data during a Google+ Hangout on Wednesday (July 31) at 3 p....

Even before last night’s Democratic presidential debate, it was unlikely that former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper was going to get the Green New Deal vote. Now he’s all but slammed the door. On an evening in which there were mostly “meh” moments on climate change, Hickenlooper stood out for his vocal criticism of the Green New Deal and its vision of fighting global warming with a government-led jobs program. The most notable instance came early in the two-hour debate when Hickenlooper was asked if any of the policies supported by his Democratic rivals veered toward socialism....

Get inside, stay inside and stay tuned—that’s what the New York City Emergency Management team asked citizens to do last July in case of a thermonuclear attack. “All right? You got this,” assured the upbeat announcer in a video clip. The reaction was swift and scathing. “The reality is, if this comes to pass, you don’t ‘got this,’” tweeted the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “In the hours and days to follow there will be no way to respond....

Key concepts Music Emotion Musical instruments Tempo Introduction Do you enjoy watching scary movies at Halloween, or going to haunted houses? In whatever way you might want to have a thrilling experience this time of year, spooky sounds and music will likely play an important part. One of the things that makes a haunted house or a mysterious movie so eerie is the soundtrack that goes along with it—all the noises orchestrated to raise the hair on your arms, make you shiver and leave you with little doubt that there are things unknown lurking about....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – Flapping and flitting butterflies have long inspired poets, singers and even boxers. Now their motions are inspiring researchers to understand how winged insects get from place to place. “As the phrase ‘float like a butterfly’ shows, butterflies elegantly fly around,” said study author Naoto Yokoyama, an assistant professor in aeronautics and astronautics at Kyoto University in Japan. “We would like to understand how they fly in the viewpoint of the fluid dynamics....

It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Of course, many experiences in daily life reflect the physical stimuli that send signals to the brain. But the same neural machinery that interprets inputs from our eyes, ears and other sensory organs is also responsible for our dreams, delusions and failings of memory....

Nuclear power supplies a sixth of the world’s electricity. Along with hydropower (which supplies slightly more than a sixth), it is the major source of “carbon-free” energy today. The technology suffered growing pains, seared into the public’s mind by the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents, but plants have demonstrated remarkable reliability and efficiency recently. The world’s ample supply of uranium could fuel a much larger fleet of reactors than exists today throughout their 40- to 50-year life span....

A lot of things happened in 2012, including scientific breakthroughs, a presidential re-election, and a tragic school shooting. But a lot of things didn’t happen this past year. We realize it’s a little strange to discuss things that never occurred — after all, countless things didn’t happen in 2012, from an asteroid hitting Earth, to Justin Bieber marrying a supermodel, to Abraham Lincoln climbing out of his grave to praise Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” as being more historically accurate than “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter....

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday that he would try to bring a global warming bill to the floor before the end of summer, another indication that both sides of Capitol Hill want to send major climate legislation to President Obama during his first year in office. “We have to take a whack at it,” the Nevada Democrat told the Associated Press in an interview, explaining that failure to act “would be neglectful....