One of the most important tasks for a forensic scientist investigating a death is to determine when the person died. Up to 48 hours postmortem, those investigators can use medical methods such as the stiffness or temperature of the body. Longer than that, and they have to turn to the beetles and flies that take up residence in cadavers, using their age and natural succession to estimate the time of death....
Sit down with an anthropologist to talk about the nature of humans, and you are likely to hear this chestnut: “Well, you have to remember that 99 percent of human history was spent on the open savanna in small hunter-gatherer bands.” It’s a classic cliché of science, and it’s true. Indeed, those millions of ancestral years produced many of our hallmark traits—upright walking and big brains, for instance. Of course, those wildly useful evolutionary innovations came at a price: achy backs from our bipedal stance; existential despair from our large, self-contemplative cerebral cortex....
The following is an excerpt from The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy and Sane, by Matthew Hutson (Hudson Street Press, 2012). There are certain laws of nature everyone accepts. The surest way to bring about rain on an overcast day is to leave your umbrella at home. Is your line at the grocery store moving too slowly? Switch lines. That will definitely speed it up (minus you)....
MARRAKECH, Morocco—The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has the world holding out for a climate hero, and parties here are determined that it be China. The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and second-largest economy is not backing away from the challenge—or the Paris Agreement, as Trump has vowed to do. Xie Zhenhua, China’s top special envoy, reiterated yesterday that his country’s stance on the climate deal will “remain the same and unchanged,” no matter what the world’s other economic superpower chooses to do....
Making cement, which requires heating to 1,450 degrees Celsius a mass of limestone and other ingredients, caused the release of nearly 46 teragrams (roughly 50.7 million tons) of greenhouse gases in the U.S. in 2005, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It is the basic ingredient in concrete (first used by the Romans), which paves our walks, supports our walls and even is used in our furniture in some cases....
A high-profile case of alleged scientific censorship ended Friday when the National Park Service published a long-delayed report outlining how rising seas could damage parks across the country. The report includes references to mankind’s role in climate change—something federal officials had tried scrubbing from the study, according to documents released under a state open records request. The study had languished under administrative review since early 2017. Although National Park Service officials say the report was handled properly, the study’s lead author says the administrative review process has morphed from a “rubber stamp” into a tool for the government to suppress inconvenient science....
Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity’s closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism, after all. Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for years, and serve as evidence of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens)....
Cryotherapy is a recovery method that some pro athletes and biohackers use nearly every day. The benefits touted by cold exposure enthusiasts include faster recovery time, an enhanced immune system, increased cell longevity, decreased levels of inflammatory molecules (like interleukin 6), and, of course, an increased tolerance for exercising outdoors in the winter, especially north of the 49th parallel. Aside from slapping an ice pack on a sore ankle after a misstep during a morning trail run, the majority of the population has never dunked themselves into a 20-minute ice bath or a hot-cold contrast shower, or stepped into a sci-fi looking cryotherapy chamber....
U.S. politics increasingly looks like a savage battle between left and right. Consistent with closing ranks in a battle, Americans are expressing policy opinions that align more and more with their political groups. Of all conflicts between groups in America, partisanship is one of the most divisive, with 86% of Americans seeing strong conflicts between Republicans and Democrats. Yet, political differences are not always cause for alarm. Increased sorting could reflect identification with groups that better match our values....
When I purchased my latest vehicle, I was astonished to get the license plate 6NWL485. What are the chances that I would get that particular configuration? Before I received it, the odds were one in 175,760,000. (The number of letters in the alphabet to the power of the number of letters on the plate times the number of digits from 1 to 10 to the power of the number of digits on the plate: 263 × 104....
In the womb, a ball of identical cells gives rise to varied cell types that ultimately form highly ordered structures and then the full panoply of organs in the human body. The process advances according to an internal biological script that directs each fold and crease of tissue to assume exactly the proper shape and dimension. Scientists familiar with this progression from simple parts to a complex system have never stopped contemplating embryonic development with a sense of muted wonder and a concomitant desire to replicate early development on top of a laboratory bench—both to understand the biology better and to translate the information into ways of repairing and replacing damaged tissues....
U.S. A hospital in Boise, Idaho, paid $300,000 to move the state’s largest sequoia tree two blocks down the street. Grown from a seedling sent by famed naturalist John Muir more than a century ago, the 10-story behemoth had to be moved with its surrounding soil. SWEDEN Starting in 2019, automaker Volvo announced plans to build only electric and hybrid vehicles, with a goal of selling one million such cars by 2025....
By Mari Saito and Kentaro Hamada TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan put two reactors on a shortlist for a final round of safety checks on Thursday, moving a step closer to a revival of the country’s nuclear industry, three years after the Fukushima disaster led to the shutdown of all plants. No timing for a potential restart was decided and the next stage of checks incorporates a period of public hearings, which may be a fraught process given widespread skepticism nationally about a return to nuclear power....
It is a summer night, and the moths are all aflutter. Despite being drenched in moonlight, their eyes do not reflect it—and soon the same principle could help you see your cell-phone screen in bright sunlight. Developing low-reflectivity surfaces for electronic displays has been an area of intensive research. So-called transflective liquid-crystal displays reduce glare by accounting for both backlighting and ambient illumination. Another approach, called adaptive brightening control, uses sensors to boost the screen’s light....
By Sid Perkins of Nature magazineEvidence of historical irregularities in the motions of both the Indian and African tectonic plates bolsters the contention that plumes of hot rock rising from deep within Earth’s mantle can drive the planet’s tectonic plates.About 68 million years ago, the tectonic plate that includes the Indian subcontinent–which, at that time, had yet to slam into southern Asia–lay northeast of Madagascar and was moving north-eastward at a tectonically typical few centimeters per year....
Key concepts Physics Friction Solids Liquids Introduction Have you ever tried to squeeze honey or syrup out of a bottle at breakfast on a chilly winter morning? Do you notice that it’s harder to do that than on a hot summer day? As the liquid gets colder, its viscosity, or resistance to flow, increases. Viscosity is a properly of liquids that can be very important in very different applications—from how the syrup flows out of your bottle to how blood flows through the human body to how lava flows out of a volcano....
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City—known worldwide and hereinafter as “the Met”—is the largest art museum in the United States, and one of the ten largest in the world. Founded in 1870, it holds two million works of art, from antiquity to today, from all around the world. We propose here a guided tour of the Met’s hidden math. The Met’s collections include works of art with surprising mathematical content....
March 1966 The Race to the Moon “The surface of the moon appears to be quite solid and unexpectedly low in radioactivity. These are the two chief scientific findings to come out of the successful Soviet ‘soft landing’ of an unmanned spacecraft on the moon on February 3. According to Academician Nikolai Barabashov, a leading Soviet selenologist, the Luna 9 photographs ‘proved beyond doubt that the upper layer of the lunar soil is a spongelike, rough-textured mass scattered with individual sharp-edged fragments of various sizes....
Two years after Sandy, the Hutchisons have been rescued again. Their finances were bailed out by federal taxpayers under an urban retreat program called Blue Acres. The $300 million property buyout is aiding some inland Garden State neighborhoods affected by Sandy. But the benefits that it promised for coastal regions are not coming to fruition. The state government bought the Hutchisons’ trashed house in February using an appraisal that turned a blind eye to the property damage, and to the federal flood insurance rate hikes, that Sandy’s storm surge left behind....
The United States, Mexico and Canada will make a joint pledge tomorrow to draw half the continent’s power from non-emitting sources by 2025. President Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will announce the ambitious target at the North American Leaders’ Summit in Ottawa, Ontario, which will also address security issues and other concerns to the continent’s three governments. White House climate adviser Brian Deese described the pact as a sign of the growing bonds between the nations on climate and energy policies....
