The Australia-based Galileo Movement touts a series of “basic facts” on carbon dioxide that attempt to explain why the greenhouse gas can’t contribute to climate change. John Smeed, the movement’s co-founder, says the case against carbon dioxide as a global warming culprit is simply a matter of “junior school physics.” “If you show this to any scientist and say to them, ‘Disprove to me any of these points,’ they can’t,” he said in an interview....
On my 10th birthday, I got a puppy. I was so shocked—I had wanted a dog for as long as I could remember—and so overwhelmed with happiness that I burst into tears. For the next 14 years, Happy, a beagle, charmed everyone he met. And when he passed, all of us who had known him mourned, as we would for any loved one. More than half of American households have a pet—that is, an animal kept primarily for companionship....
Everybody needs a break. Two great inventions that speak to that need are the weekend and the vacation, both of which have a distinct beginning and end. But a break in the middle of the workday is a more elusive challenge. Deadlines, demanding bosses, guilt, and sheer workload often make us power through. We eat lunch while catching up on email and consider a walk to the bathroom a luxury. On the other hand, even if we value and prioritize breaks, sometimes they go off the rails, unintentionally shape-shifting into a momentum-killing two-hour rabbit hole of online shopping, one more round of Snake vs Block, or BuzzFeed quizzes (We Can Guess Your Eye Color Based On The Trip You Plan To Michigan, anyone?...
About 600 million people suffer food poisoning every year, according to the World Health Organization, and 420,000 die. When an outbreak occurs, investigators can spend days or weeks tracking its source. Meanwhile more people can sicken, and massive amounts of uncontaminated food may be discarded along with the tainted items. Finding the source can be slow work because food travels a complex path from farm to table, and the records of those journeys are kept in local systems that often do not communicate with one another....
Growing older may be inevitable, but getting Alzheimer’s disease is not. Although we can’t stop the aging process, which is the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s, there are many other factors that can be modified to lower the risk of dementia. Yet our ability to reduce Alzheimer’s risk and devise new strategies for prevention and treatment is impeded by a lack of knowledge about how and why the disease differs between women and men....
When Sergio Jorge Pastrana has big files to download he waits until he leaves his island nation. As foreign secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences he has a front-row seat to cutting edge research, but the country’s limited bandwidth capability is a constant reminder of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba which has hobbled the import of computer technology along with modern medical research tools. The embargo, dating back to the Kennedy-era, is still in place but scientists in both nations are carefully tracking Pres....
When purchasing a new phone or tablet, it is common practice to select the best technology that fits your needs within the available budget. This is also the strategy adopted by our research team at the Galileo Project, a new initiative to image unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) like those reported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to the U.S. Congress on June 25, 2021. To my amusement, I recently came across an online retailer that would allow us to “add to cart” a one-meter telescope for half a million dollars....
The much-ballyhooed human embryonic stem cell apparently may share a problem with transplanted organs: a high probability of rejection. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that mice mounted an immune response after being injected with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). The result: all the transplanted stem cells—which hold the promise of maturing into several different types of tissue—were dead within a week. Wu says that the fact that the hESCs could not survive in the mouse, coupled with previous work showing that the animals also reject mice ESCs, suggests that if human stem cells were transplanted to a patient, they would very likely provoke an immune response....
In fact, however, positivity is not all it is cracked up to be. Although having an upbeat attitude undoubtedly has its benefits, gains such as better health and wealth from high spirits remain largely undemonstrated. What is more, research suggests that optimism can be detrimental under certain circumstances. Pluses of Pessimism Despite the popular emphasis on positive thinking, academic psychology was for many decades centered on the negative. Even today a perusal of the typical psychology textbook reveals a predominance of topics dealing with the dark side of life—mental illness, crime, addiction, prejudice and the like—probably reflecting an aim to remediate these personal and social problems....
By David Stanway and Benjamin Kang Lim BEIJING (Reuters) - China could grant its undersized environment ministry new powers over resources, possibly allowing it to veto future projects, and more muscle to punish polluters as part of a government shake-up to tackle decades of unchecked growth. Sources with ties to the leadership told Reuters that the government was considering a sweeping reorganization of cabinet ministries next month that will dissolve the Ministry of Land and Resources and transfer some powers to the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), long regarded as too weak to punish law-breaking polluters....
From Nature magazine In an ordinary year, a flat budget for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be considered dire news. This year, it is far from the worst possible outcome. Hanging over the effective decrease in support proposed by the House of Representatives last week is the ‘sequester’, a pre-programmed budget cut that research advocates say would starve US science-funding agencies. A sharply divided Congress is showing few signs that it can defuse the situation before the self-imposed fiscal time bomb explodes, in less than six months’ time....
By Richard A. LovettCharles Darwin was puzzled by the odd arrangement of boulders on the South American coast.In June 1833, Charles Darwin asked the captain of the HMS Beagle to delay his departure from Tierra del Fuego so that he could study a strange group of granite boulders he had found on the coast at Bahía San Sebastián."[O]ne of these, shaped somewhat like a barn, was forty-seven feet in circumference and projected five feet above the sand beach," he later wrote....
Heading into the summer holidays, many people like to have a big, consuming hobby to while away the time. This issue’s features lend themselves to several such do-it-yourself endeavors, if you are suitably ambitious. Build a solar system (difficulty: 9). The great thing about this project is that although it requires considerable setup and the outcome is uncertain, it involves essentially no intervention later—just sit back and watch what happens. Take a gigantic cloud of hydrogen laced with traces of heavier elements, let a star or two coalesce in the center and stir the remainder just enough for a protoplanetary disk to form....
Virtually every health-conscious person can quote the recommendation: Drink at least eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day. Other beverages—coffee, tea, soda, beer, even orange juice—don’t count. Watermelon? Not a chance. There’s no denying that water is good for you, but does everyone really need to drink 64 ounces or more every day? According to Heinz Valtin, a retired professor of physiology from Dartmouth Medical School who specialized in kidney research and spent 45 years studying the biological system that keeps the water in our bodies in balance, the answer is no....
By Gene Emery (Reuters Health) - Transplanting a mismatched kidney from a living donor may lower the risk of death more than not doing a transplant at all, according to a new study that could open the door to more operations. A long-term study found that patients who received kidney transplants from HLA-incompatible live donors were more likely to be alive eight years later than people who did not receive a transplant or waited to get an organ from a deceased donor....
In 1911, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk discovered what was behind a then-mysterious neurological condition known as beriberi, common in regions where people’s main source of calories came from de-husked, or ‘polished’, rice. He fed a group of ill pigeons a substance he had isolated from rice polishings, and within 12 hours, they had recovered. Funk went on to propose that a handful of puzzling ailments including beriberi and scurvy arose because of deficiencies in nutrients like the one he had found in the rice husks....
Nations around the world have responded to President Trump’s decision last year to leave the Paris Agreement by upping their ante on climate action, but the U.S. decision still casts a shadow over long-range efforts to address the problem. When Trump made his announcement one year ago tomorrow, he parted ways with 194 other countries that support the deal finalized in December 2015. Parties to the agreement range from the European Union to North Korea and include major developing nations that Trump criticized that day in a fiery Rose Garden speech for expecting the United States to fix the world’s warming problem....
We humans are many, but we are also one. Species, that is. For much of our evolutionary history, however, members of our family of ancestors, the hominins, trod the planet at the same time. Piecing together how and where these different species arose and lived from fragments of bone has always seemed an astonishing challenge to me. This issue’s cover story, “Mystery Human,” by senior editor Kate Wong, explores a recent puzzle from a cache of enigmatic fossils found in a cave in South Africa outside Johannesburg, called Rising Star....
Male, but not female, experimenters induce intense stress in rodents that can dampen pain responses, according to a paper published today in Nature Methods. Such reactions affect the rodents’ behaviour and potentially confound the results of animal studies, the study suggests. The authors discovered this surprising gender disparity while investigating whether the presence of experimenters affects rodent pain studies. For years, anecdotal reports have suggested that rodents show a diminished pain response when a handler remains in the room....
TOKYO (Reuters) - The operator of Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant took the first step on Monday in the long and hazardous process of decommissioning the facility, extracting four fuel rods from their container for later removal.Tokyo Electric Power Co, known as Tepco, said it transferred the rods to a steel cask within the same cooling pool in a badly damaged reactor building, beginning the delicate and unprecedented task of removing 400 tonnes of highly irradiated spent fuel from that reactor....
