Belle, our tiny owl monkey, was seated in her special chair inside a soundproof chamber at our Duke University laboratory. Her right hand grasped a joystick as she watched a horizontal series of lights on a display panel. She knew that if a light suddenly shone and she moved the joystick left or right to correspond to its position, a dispenser would send a drop of fruit juice into her mouth....
The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Canada has pre-ordered more doses per person of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 than have any other countries and purchasing groups, reports freelance science journalist Asher Mullard for Nature (11/30/20). The U.S. and UK come in 2nd and 3rd. The story includes 2 graphics that illustrate the pre-ordering landscape....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. During large disasters, like hurricanes, wildfires and terrorist attacks, people want emergency responders to arrive quickly and help people deal with the crisis. In order to do their best, police, medics, firefighters and those who manage them need lots of information: Who is located where, needing what help? And what equipment and which rescuers are available to intervene?...
A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets, given its nondescript name. But the new addition to the catalogue of 800-plus exoplanets stands out in at least one major respect—it is far smaller than any planet yet discovered outside of our solar system. In fact, it is just a shade larger than Earth’s moon. “What makes this very interesting is this is a planet smaller than anything we see in our own inner solar system,” says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif....
In 1983 while exploring a small forest called Malundwe on the edge of the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, one of us (Wasser) came across two elephant skulls lying side by side. One, from a female, was big, and the other was small—it had molars just a quarter the size of the female’s and they had not yet been used enough to show any signs of wear. The poachers had first shot the young elephant, a ranger explained, so that they could draw its grieving mother close enough to kill her for her enormous tusks....
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of online exclusives about natural phenomena and human endeavors we’d like to see come to an end. They are connected with the September 2010 special issue of Scientific American called “The End”. Mosquitoes that carry the Plasmodium parasite cause some 300 million cases of malaria every year, claiming one million lives. That’s a lot of carnage generated by an insect smaller than a pinky fingernail—but if enterprising researchers have their way, their blood-thirsty assault won’t continue much longer....
We can walk and chew gum at the same time without bumping into utility poles. So what is the big deal about driving while talking on a cell phone? Plenty. Investigators from the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va., recently analyzed accident data and cell phone records of 744 drivers in Perth. They concluded that yakking drivers are four times more likely to crash their cars....
As coronavirus cases reach new peaks, surpassing 200,000 cases a day in the United States, public health departments are overwhelmed. Departments are racing to hire yet more contact tracers and some are even asking people to do their own contact tracing and notification. Other states are just now pushing out big tech’s solution to the pandemic: mobile contact tracing apps. Initially, the hope was that contact tracing apps would be a silver bullet for contact tracing....
Strange, bright flashes observed on the moon for centuries and often dismissed as the lunar equivalent of UFOs may in fact be emissions of volcanic gas. A researcher says he has reviewed the evidence for so-called lunar transients and found them to occur only in areas of the moon that belch radon gas, suggesting that the flashes could be the result of dust stirred up by such emissions—possibly volcanic in origin....
The rare ships that have ventured through the harsh, icebound Arctic Ocean require reinforced hulls and ice-breaking bows that allow them to plow through dense ice as much as two meters deep, and face hazardous conditions in remote locations for long periods of time. Arctic sea ice now is melting so rapidly each summer due to global warming, however, that ships without ice-breaking hulls will be able to cross previously inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean by 2050....
Geologic data does not come cheap, especially when you are using it to build a multimillion-dollar geothermal power plant. Just ask Susan Petty, president and chief technology officer at AltaRock Energy. Her company is part of a $43.8-million pilot project to tap thermal energy from Oregon’s Newberry Volcano. Engineers are injecting water deep underground to fracture superheated rocks and create a geothermal reservoir. Their eventual goal is to recirculate pressurized steam back to the surface to test a new kind of technology called an enhanced geothermal system (EGS)....
People can detect flashes of light as feeble as a single photon, an experiment has demonstrated—a finding that seems to conclude a 70-year quest to test the limits of human vision. The study, published in Nature Communications on July 19, “finally answers a long-standing question about whether humans can see single photons — they can!” says Paul Kwiat, a quantum optics researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The techniques used in the study also open up ways of testing how quantum properties—such as the ability of photons to be in two places at the same time—affect biology, he adds....
A team of physicists has made what might be the first-ever detection of an axion. Axions are unconfirmed, hypothetical ultralight particles from beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles. Theoretical physicists first proposed the existence of axions in the 1970s in order to resolve problems in the math governing the strong force, which binds particles called quarks together. But axions have since become a popular explanation for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the mass of the universe, yet emits no light....
Special Report: Pollution, Poverty, People of Color Communities across the US face environmental injustices Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the Special Report EAST OROSI, Calif. – Jessica Sanchez sits on the edge of her seat in her mother’s kitchen, hands resting on her bulging belly. Eight months pregnant, she’s excited about the imminent birth of her son. But she’s scared too. A few feet away, her mother, Bertha Dias, scrubs potatoes with water she bought from a vending machine....
By Fergus Jensen JAKARTA, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Countries around Asia on Tuesday stepped up the search for an AirAsia plane carrying 162 people that is presumed to have crashed in shallow waters off the Indonesian coast, with Washington also sending a warship to help find the missing jet. Soelistyo, head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told local television the search area between the islands of Sumatra and Borneo would be expanded....
Mars’ atmosphere is so puny, it amounts to less than one percent of Earth’s. Yet the Red Planet at one time apparently had rivers and lakes, which suggests a much larger layer of insulation. Where did this thick Martian atmosphere go? Solving that mystery is the first order of business for NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which arrived in orbit around Mars Sunday evening (September 21). “One of the really overarching questions about Mars is whether there was ever life,” Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told reporters last week....
Maybe antimatter is finally ready for its close-up. A team of physicists has succeeded in producing rudimentary atoms of antimatter and holding on to them for several minutes, an advance that holds hope for detailed comparisons of how ordinary atoms of matter compare with their exotic antimatter counterparts. The researchers, from the ALPHA antimatter experiment at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, reported last year the first trapping of antihydrogen, the simplest antimatter atom....
Last summer the esteemed naturalist E. O. Wilson told the Huffington Post that he fears a nuclear conflagration as a clear and present danger to the planet. A similar-sounding fear has been shared by Donald Trump. “The global warming we should be worried about is the global warming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the hands of crazy or incompetent leaders!” read a Trump tweet, fired off in 2014 and echoed during his candidacy for president....
This season Hurricane Harvey slammed Houston and surrounding southeastern Texas with torrential rains that broke records and created what felt to many like biblical-scale flooding. Harvey was an unusually wet and potent storm by today’s standards—and it may provide a glimpse of North America’s future. A new study predicts the continent will experience more storms that dump similarly huge volumes of rain by the end of the century, thanks to climate change....
The head of the city department that drafts many of San Francisco’s greenest rules and regulations uses one word to explain her greatest fear for the environment during Trump’s presidency: “preemption.” If some of the deepest concerns of climate-focused bureaucrats from San Francisco to Massachusetts and New York come true, the Trump administration will preemptively prevent them from acting to slow global warming. With Trump and Republicans in Congress widely expected to unite to undermine federal environmental protections, progressive states and cities are making plans to fight global warming within their borders without being helped or required to do so by the U....
