Posts

Long before musty old paper volumes and Google Book Search, most tomes in medieval Europe were written on animal skins—a practice which might now hold the key to tracing their origins. Timothy Stinson, an associate English professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, has started using DNA testing to track the history and age of medieval manuscripts. His goal: to create a DNA database from the books with known publication dates and places (such as calendars and histories) in an effort to use the genetic information gleaned from them as a baseline to date those manuscripts whose backgrounds are unknown....

On Sunday morning a wall of thick, concrete-gray water rushed down India’s Dhauliganga river valley, sweeping dams, houses and people along with it. The official death toll has reached 38, but nearly 200 people remain missing. Flood debris filled a 12-by-15-foot tunnel at a hydroelectric dam project, where more than 30 construction workers remain trapped despite six days of rescue efforts by nearly 600 responders. The deluge also wiped out five bridges, some of which ran 40 feet above typical river levels....

A survey of more than 4,000 researchers in the United States suggests that better coordination at an institutional and national level could make hundreds of thousands more tests for coronavirus available. The survey was prompted by a Nature investigation published on 9 April, revealing that several top university laboratories that have received regulatory approval to process tests for SARS-CoV-2 are operating at half their potential capacity. Testing is urgently needed. Hospitals continue to face delays in providing test results, and nursing homes, homeless shelters and other shared-living facilities report a lack of tests for screening at-risk residents....

Motherhood typically entails sacrifice, but for most species, the altruism is temporary. Eggs are laid, the young leave the nest, life goes on. Not so for Stegodyphus lineatus, a velvet spider that inhabits Israel’s Negev Desert. S. lineatus practices the most extreme—and permanent—form of maternal devotion: matriphagy, in which offspring consume their mother. Entomologists have wondered about the gory details of this caregiving strategy for years. Is the mother simply eaten as is, or does she prep her innards to make them go down easy?...

When coated onto a lithium-ion battery electrode, a new composite material protects the battery from bursting into flames if it is overcharged or develops an electrical short. The material, which may lead to safer designs of Li-ion and other types of batteries, was reported by Stanford University researchers in the inaugural issue of Nature Energy (2016, DOI:10.1038/nenergy.2015.9). Li-ion batteries, which power devices including smartphones, electric cars, and hoverboards, rarely catch fire....

President Obama today unveiled new national auto standards that will accelerate increases in auto fuel economy and impose the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standard on cars and trucks. “In the past, an agreement such as this would have been considered impossible,” the president said in a Rose Garden speech. “That is why this announcement is so important, for it represents not only a change in policy in Washington, but the harbinger of a change in the way business is done in Washington....

WILLISTON, N.D. – In the spring of 1805 Lewis and Clark and their expedition paddled up the Missouri River’s middle valley, terra incognita to Americans then and still largely unknown to Americans today. As they worked against the current, a dramatic panorama unfolded, as Meriwether Lewis would write in his journal on April 25, 1805: I had a most pleasing view of the country, perticularly of the wide and fertile vallies formed by the missouri and the yellowstone rivers, which occasionally unmasked by the wood on their borders disclose their meanderings for many miles in their passage through these delightfull tracts of country....

Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller’s formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses. But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region’s land and into its waterways with increasing regularity....

As arguments about climate change heat up, don’t underestimate your opponent. It turns out that people who are the furthest apart in their views on a scientific issue are often the most educated and informed, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Looking at a nationally representative survey of views on stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution, nanotechnology, genetically modified views and climate change, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that respondents with the most education and the highest scores on scientific literacy tests had the most polarized beliefs....

Years ago Don Komarechka was at his mundane advertising agency job when it started snowing outside. He happened to have brought a new camera lens that takes sharp, close-up photographs to work, so he took his gear outside. Not long after, Komarechka was venturing into his backyard every winter to take images of snowflakes and made nature photography his full-time job. The flakes Komarechka captures can fall anywhere in the world, though factors such as temperature, humidity and wind speed change which designs dominate a snowfall....

If Venus’s pass across the sun earlier this week yields a bounty of information for hunters of transiting worlds in other planetary systems, it’s because Venus is a known entity. Studying the June 5 Venus transit as if it were a faraway exoplanet “gives us a reality check,” says planetary physicist Colin Wilson of the University of Oxford. “We can check on all those exoplanet techniques to see how accurate they really are....

Seaweed holds promise as more than an ingredient in a purifying face mask or a maki roll. So say researchers at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., which alongside Seattle-based Bio Architecture Lab (BAL) has secured $9 million from the Department of Energy to explore seaweed’s potential as a feedstock for biobutanol, an advanced biofuel. Their venture appears to have largely cornered the current market. Though more than 200 companies have looked into algae-based biofuels, DuPont and BAL say most others have shied away from using macroalgae, like kelp....

By Ian Simpson(Reuters) - West Virginia’s top law enforcement officer on Wednesday vowed a full investigation of a chemical spill that contaminated tap water for hundreds of thousands of people.Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said there was a lot of speculation surrounding the spill into the Elk River at Charleston, the state capital, on Thursday that shut off water to more than 300,000 people.“We had an absolute unmitigated disaster here for six days now where people are without water....

Editor’s Note (8/4/21): On August 4, 2020, the Lebanese capital Beirut experienced a massive explosion caused by more than 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate improperly stored near the city’s cargo port. It was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, which killed 218 people, injured 7,000 and displaced over 300,000. This story from August 5, 2020 is being republished on the one year anniversary of the disaster. The Lebanese capital Beirut was rocked on Tuesday evening local time by an explosion that has killed at least 78 people and injured thousands more....

An accidental discovery could pave the way to one day coaxing stem cells to develop into human eyes in the lab. A team of scientists at the University of Warwick in England studying the development of motility in frogs found that a certain ectoenzyme (a cell-surface protein) injected into a tadpole embryo triggered the development of tissues that eventually form eyes. Further experimentation led the researchers to conclude that the surface protein is, in fact, an early player in the cellular cascade that leads to eye formation....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Just as predicted, there have been a huge number of hacks this year, including very notable ones like Lastpass, Kaspersky, and the White House’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Here are some lessons learned from those hacks in order to help you stay more secure, as well as tips for what to do if you’ve been hacked....

GENEVA (Reuters) - An effort by the World Health Organization to measure pollution in cities around the world has found New Delhi admits to having the dirtiest air, while Beijing’s measurements, like its skies, are far from clear. The study of 1,600 cities found air pollution had worsened since a smaller survey in 2011, especially in poorer countries, putting city-dwellers at higher risk of cancer, stroke and heart disease. Air pollution killed about 7 million people in 2012, making it the world’s single biggest environmental health risk, the WHO, a United Nations agency, said last month....

Outside Freehold, N.J.—The water is icy cold and the stone is slippery as I wade in up to my calves. Along the banks of this slow-flowing stream, guarded by prickly brambles, lies one of the richest caches of fossils dating back to the extinction that claimed the dinosaurs. The remains of marine creatures buried here, kept secret to prevent looting, tell an unusual tale: rather than dying off 65 million years ago, these creatures lived on afterward, albeit briefly....

Despite some recent regional reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and other industrial nations, the total concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues its upward march at an unprecedented rate, the World Meteorological Organization announced today. Compared to the preindustrial era of the 1750s, the Earth’s atmosphere is now choked with 142 percent more carbon dioxide, 253 percent more methane and 121 percent more nitrous oxide, the WMO reported in the release of its annual bulletin on greenhouse gas....

One could argue that Christiana Figueres, a 61-year-old Costa Rican diplomat, warded off global catastrophe. As former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change, she orchestrated the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which, for the first time, got virtually all nations to take action on greenhouse gas emissions. Figueres achieved unprecedented cooperation not by flexing her authority (the position carries very little) or fixating on the most powerful players but by inviting a massive number of diverse voices into a weblike conversation on solutions....