Posts

JUDY WOODRUFF: President Trump has pledged to revive the coal industry, and has already begun rolling back some government regulations. In one case, that means boosting so-called mountaintop mining. But even as many in coal country applaud those moves, there’s concern over what it means for the environment. That is the focus of this week’s report from Miles O’Brien. It’s part of our weekly series on the Leading Edge of science and technology....

The Colorado River, the life vein of the Southwestern United States, is in trouble. The river’s water is hoarded the moment it trickles out of the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado and begins its 1,450-mile journey to Mexico’s border. It runs south through seven states and the Grand Canyon, delivering water to Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego. Along the way, it powers homes for 3 million people, nourishes 15 percent of the nation’s crops and provides drinking water to one in 12 Americans....

A decision by the drug maker Novartis to put a $2.1 million price tag on its latest product, a one-time treatment for a rare and fatal childhood disease, has sparked a national debate about just how much society should pay for the medicines it needs. But for Tina Anderson, whose son will soon celebrate his fourth birthday thanks to the Novartis treatment, there is no debate. Her son, Malachi, was born with the most severe form of spinal muscular atrophy....

COURTESY OF ALAN L. BAUER, WWW.ALANBAUER.COM (Fagin) Mount Everest presents endless challenges to the adventurer who dares to seek its summit: treacherous overpasses, tumbling house-sized blocks of ice and hypoxic conditions, to name a few. Weather, too, poses an acute danger on the world’s highest peak. In 1996, for example, a now infamous blizzard overtook the mountain, costing eight climbers their lives. Although heart attacks, falls and avalanches cannot be anticipated, weather—at least to some extent—can....

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the book The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Brink of an Anti-Aging Revolution, by David Stipp. We are presenting it in conjunction with Stipp’s article “A New Path to Longevity” in the January 2012 issue of Scientific American. Additional information can be found in “What Unusually Long-Lived Animals Say about Human Aging.” The study of aging tends to raise the kind of deceptively simple questions children ask, such as, “Why did Spot, who was the same age as me, get old and die before I grew up?...

The builders of the Axiom International Commercial Space Station aim to enlarge the landscape of low-Earth orbit, to create what they view as a “historic shift” in human spaceflight. Making a space outpost available to nations, organizations and individuals could help make living and working in Earth orbit commonplace and support the exploration of deep space, Axiom representatives said. [6 Private Deep Space Habitats Paving the Way to Mars] A busy 2017 Amir Blachman, vice president of strategic development for Houston-based Axiom Space, said the company is shaping its plans to build the International Space Station’s (ISS) international, privately owned successor....

Tigers can indeed change their stripes—and in the Similipal Tiger Reserve in India, many have done just that. So-called black tigers, genetic mutants that sport unusually wide and merged stripes, were extremely rare even when tigers were plentiful centuries ago. But in Similipal today, one in three are black. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA pinpoints the peculiar pattern’s genetic cause and reveals evolution at work among these endangered cats....

Health care spending grew at a slower pace in 2005 than it did the year before, continuing a three-year downward trend, according to government researchers. Weaker growth in prescription drug spending largely drove the overall decline. But hold the celebrations. Researchers cannot say whether the dip portends a longer-term slowdown. And even if the growth holds steady, “it’s still the fact that we’re spending more and more of our dollar on healthcare,” says health economist Gerard Anderson of Johns Hopkins University, who was not part of the new analysis....

Drive through pounding rain or a snowstorm at night, and you will notice that your headlights illuminate the drops or flakes more than they shed light on the road ahead. New “smart” headlights may reduce this hazard by shining light into the spaces between the precipitation. The headlight is actually an array of bulbs, and the key to its success is that even a sheet of heavy rain is mostly empty space....

Key concepts Aerodynamics Forces Physics Lift Drag Introduction Are you good at tossing a Frisbee? Have you ever wondered how a Frisbee is able to fly through the air so well? If you can throw a perfect, arcing curve right on target, you’ve already trained your arm to aid in the aerodynamics of Frisbee flight! In this activity, you’ll investigate how the angle at which you throw the Frisbee affects its flight direction and distance....

Comparing yourself to others happens at every age, from noting who has the best toys in the preschool sandbox to whose grandkids got into what college. But comparing oneself to others is especially rampant among young adults. Life-changing milestones happen quickly and often—graduations, engagements, career advancement—and it’s all on display on social media, the motherlode of FOMO-inducing social comparison. The technical term for “comparing yourself to others” is upward comparison. This means comparing ourselves to someone we perceive to be better off or more proficient than ourselves....

In 2009 the San Francisco police arrested Lily Haskell when she allegedly attempted to come to the aid of a companion who had already been taken into custody during a peace demonstration. The authorities released her quickly, without pressing charges. But a little piece of Haskell remained behind in their database. Haskell is one of hundreds of thousands who have had their DNA extracted as part of an enormous expansion of what were once categorized as criminal data banks....

IN 2007 a Palestinian youth named Tareq attended an unusual summer camp. Organized by the foundation Seeds of Peace, the camp is designed to facilitate closeness between Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, who spend a week together canoeing, hiking and—more important—discussing their experiences of the conflict in which their two nations are entrenched. Tareq’s reactions were not what he expected, however. In this idyllic setting, hearing his Israeli counterparts bare their thoughts and feelings, he knew he should come to see them as people just like himself....

Jupiter’s rings, its moons Amalthea (bright point at left) and Adrastea (faint dot at left tip of rings), and even background galaxies are visible in this image from JWST’s NIRCam instrument. Whiter areas on the planet represent regions with more cloud cover, which reflects sunlight, especially Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot; darker spots have fewer clouds. Perhaps the most stunning feature is the blue glow of the planet’s auroras at the north and south poles....

If you were one of millions of children who completed the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or D.A.R.E., between 1983 and 2009, you may be surprised to learn that scientists have repeatedly shown that the program did not work. Despite being the nation’s most popular substance-abuse prevention program, D.A.R.E. did not make you less likely to become a drug addict or even to refuse that first beer from your friends. But over the past few years prevention scientists have helped D....

WASHINGTON—The U.S. government will begin screening passengers arriving at five airports from West African countries affected by the Ebola outbreak, the White House announced this afternoon. The five airports – John F. Kennedy International in New York, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta and Washington Dulles—account for 94 percent of the passengers arriving each day from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. And there are only about 150 such passengers each day at those airports, making it more feasible to screen people more intensively who come from or recently visited the affected countries....

Undersea vents are providing researchers with a possible view of the future as seawater becomes more acidic due to carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers at the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University looked at near-shore volcanic vents on the seafloor off the coast of Italy as a microcosm of how oceans may react to carbon dioxide, investigating how life changed in these localized environments. “The most important outcome from this research is documenting how whole communities will respond to ocean acidification,” said Fiorenza Micheli, one of the researchers on this project and a professor at the Hopkins Marine Station....

When a sweeping power failure blacked out 700 million people in India last July, the cell sites that connect nearly one billion mobile phone users in the country were largely unaffected. The vast majority of Indian cell-phone base stations, which each include a tower and radio equipment attached to it, had backup diesel power because the electricity goes out frequently, and many run on diesel entirely if there is no power grid in the area at all....

Editor’s note: Catherine Spong’s title was changed to reflect her position as acting director of an NIH institute on May 16. For most people, a Zika virus infection brings little more than a slight fever or a mild rash. But when the mosquito-borne illness strikes during pregnancy, it can set off a slew of devastating birth defects that include microcephaly (a dangerously small head and brain) as well as hearing and vision loss....

Children, like adults, use three visible cues—race, gender and age—to arrange their social world. They prefer to make friends with kids similar to them on these traits. New research shows that verbal accents may be equally important in guiding youngsters’ social decisions—in fact, accents may be even more important than race. Working at Harvard University, developmental psychologist Katherine D. Kinzler and her colleagues first showed American five-year-olds photographs of different children paired with audio clips of voices and asked which ones they preferred as a friend: a child who spoke English, one who spoke French, or one who spoke English with a French accent....