Cancer cells that break away from a tumor and metastasize lead to 90 percent of all cancer deaths. Researchers have spent decades trying to develop blood tests that can effectively detect these circulating tumor cells. Finding them, however, can be like searching for a particular needle in a stack of needles. One milliliter of blood contains about five billion red blood cells and nearly 10 million white blood cells but only 10 tumor cells....
It looks like Apple won’t be bragging just yet about the early sales of its iPad Air. Apple, which has made it a routine to release first-weekend sales figures after the launches of new iPads and iPhones, this morning did not release a statement, which typically comes out at 5:30 a.m. PT the first Monday after a launch. Related stories Jimmy Kimmel gives prodigy Sony tablet; kid prefers iPad International Apple stores to close early on upcoming days Samsung’s OLED display push poses challenge to Apple Apple to offer in-store iPhone repairs, says report Samsung to develop its own 64-bit mobile chip...
It’s one of the great paradoxes of television sitcom history: How did Alex P. Keaton—a character in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties portrayed by actor Michael J. Fox—the son of mellow hippie parents, become an uptight Republican who idolizes both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan? “In the past, people thought that [political leanings were] all environmentally influenced, a combination of biological dispositions as well as cultural shaping,” says David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University....
European Birders, Rejoice! In April 1979 the member governments of the European Community (E.C.) launched the Bird Directive. The bureaucratic name conceals a broad effort to help threatened avians recover in their natural habitat (hence a subsequent E.C. Habitat Directive in 1992). Now a new analysis by biologists, statisticians and birders reveals that the two directives have worked exactly as intended. First and foremost, the most threatened birds on the list—including several species of falcons and divers as well as the Slavonian grebe, Eurasian bittern and barnacle goose—did better once listed than those species that were not....
The proposed Xiaonanhai Dam would stand athwart the mighty Yangtze River some 30 kilometers upstream of the industrial metropolis of Chongqing. The dam represents the single largest project in that municipality’s 11th five-year plan, costing roughly $3.5 billion. The growing city hopes to harvest 1.7 gigawatts of electricity from the river current of the Chang Jiang, as the Chinese call the third longest river on Earth. The dam is just one of 19 proposed dams on the upper reaches of the Yangtze, upstream from the massive Three Gorges project near Yichang—and one of nearly 200 proposed dams on the Yangtze and its tributaries....
Solutions: 1. If the advisors’ vote is two against one, then bet x on the majority. If you lose, then the advisor in the minority must be the truth-teller so you can bet everything on the next two bets by following the advice of the truth-teller. This strategy gives you winnings of 4 * (100 - x). If you win by following the majority the first time, then disregard the advisor in the minority and you’ll have (100 + x) after the first bet....
Bionic Limbs, Rewired The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s report on a robotic lower leg they’ve developed for patients in need of prosthetic limbs was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Looking for a Flu Killer An extended version of this Q&A with Google Science Fair winner Eric Chen appeared online. You can read more about the Google Science Fair here. Bugs, Yes. Spiders, No This piece on arachnophobia in entomologists originally ran in its entirety online....
Americans know mass shootings like the ancient Greeks knew tragedy. It’s a narrative, played out in stereotyped acts. Confusion begets horror. Rescue teams arrive. We tally the dead. Reporters introduce us to the face of evil. And in a final, protracted scene, a dazed killer sits subdued before a judge as we search his demeanor for answers. When police officers shot down Wade Page at the site of his rampage this Sunday in Oak Creek, Wis....
The steeply inclined layers of this Precambrian sandstone were distorted by concertinalike folds. I took several photographs. As we rounded the cliff, another came into view. Resting on top of the sandstone was a thin capping of rock almost as white as the background: Cambrian limestone. “Fascinating,” I thought as I raised my camera again. “The basic geology here is very similar to that of western North America.” My colleagues and I had come to the Pensacola Mountains of Antarctica to study how the two geologic subdivisions–East and West–of the icy continent relate to each other....
On Oct. 12, 1979, Super Typhoon Tip’s central pressure dropped to 870 mb (25.69 inches Hg), the lowest sea-level pressure ever observed on Earth, according to NOAA. Peak wind gusts reached 190 mph (306 kph) while the storm churned over the western Pacific. Besides having unsurpassed intensity, Super Typhoon Tip is also remembered for its massive size. Tip’s diameter of circulation spanned approximately 1,380 miles (2,220 km), setting a record for the largest storm on Earth....
Among athletes who obsess about their weight, we cyclists are second to none. Training rides are filled with conversations about weight lost or gained and the latest diet regimens and food fads. Resolutions are made and broken. We all know the formula: 10 pounds of extra weight on a 5 percent grade slows your ascent by half a mile an hour. It has a ring of Newtonian finality to it. F = MA....
“I, too, have been assigned months of futility, long and weary nights of misery. When I go to bed, I think,`When will it be morning?’ But the night drags on, and I toss till dawn…Depression haunts my days. My weary nights are filled with pain as though something were relentlessly gnawing at my bones.” Job suffered badly. And his Old Testament woes are considered by many to be one of the earliest descriptions of fibromyalgia, a painful, puzzling disorder that still has experts bickering and patients frustrated, bereft of relief....
New sunscreen labeling regulations were issued by the federal government last week for the first time in more than 30 years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) new regulations attempt to ban sunscreen manufacturers from labeling their products with misleading information. Starting next year—two years for smaller companies—products that protect the skin from burning but not from long-term damage must indicate so on the bottle, and they cannot hint that they have greater durability and strength than they actually possess....
Saying words such as punt, tackle and kick produces a puff of air that helps the listener distinguish words with similar letter sounds, even though the puffs are so subtle that they go unnoticed. Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia set out to determine if these puffs enhance auditory perception. They had 66 participants listen to recorded sounds while receiving light, imperceptible bursts of air from thin tubes placed either over their hand or neck or in their ear....
So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package, which was passed a year ago today....
An enormous pyramid-like structure in Indonesia that may represent the remains of an ancient temple hid underground for thousands of years. Scientists presented evidence of the remarkable construction Dec. 12 here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Located atop Mount Padang in West Java, the structure is topped by an archaeological site that was discovered in the early 19th century and holds rows of ancient stone pillars....
Anyone lucky enough to have visited the Okavango Delta in the southern African nation of Botswana will recall the comforting and oddly familiar sensation of looking out from the shelter of a stand of trees at the panorama of wildlife—from elephants and African wild dogs to lilac-breasted rollers—moving across the lush surrounding floodplains. That sense of familiarity may run deeper than we imagine, a new study suggests—back to a time when early modern humans also wandered there....
The journal Science is adding an extra round of statistical checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced on July 3. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are contributing to the irreproducibility of many published research findings. “Readers must have confidence in the conclusions published in our journal,” writes McNutt in an editorial today. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has appointed seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors (SBoRE)....
NEW YORK — In times of dwindling government budgets, the U.S. military, NASA and other federal agencies are increasingly looking to commercial companies for help getting satellites to space. There is a growing movement among government agencies to start hitching more rides for space instruments aboard commercial spacecraft, rather than building their own completely autonomous satellites. Such a deal is known in satellite circles as a “hosted payload,” because a commercial communications spacecraft might “host” an instrument for a Department of Defense (DOD) Earth-observation satellite, for instance....
The ability of some animals to regenerate tissue is generally considered to be an ancient quality of all multicellular animals. A genetic analysis of newts, however, now suggests that it evolved much more recently. Tiny and delicate it may be, but the red spotted newt (Notophthalmus viridescens) has tissue-engineering skills that far surpass the most advanced biotechnology labs. The newt can regenerate lost tissue, including heart muscle, components of its central nervous system and even the lens of its eye....
