Posts

Some North Carolina lawmakers have accused scientists of using “made up” estimates of sea-level rise. But a top researcher says some of the world’s best evidence for climbing oceans comes from the ground beneath their feet. Stefan Rahmstorf, a German climatologist whose research led scientists to reconsider accelerated sea-level rise, said an embattled report by North Carolina experts, recommending that the state prepare for a 39-inch rise by 2100, is a reasonable policy when building homes and infrastructure....

If the British oil giant BP PLC were a country, its emissions would roughly equal those of Australia. So when newly installed BP CEO Bernard Looney told an audience in London Wednesday that his company would try to eliminate or offset all its emissions by 2050 — about 415 million metric tons — it marked a significant moment in the world’s efforts to tame the release of planet-warming gases. Looney offered no details for how BP planned to meet its goal....

A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin. Known as the “iron man,” the 24-cm high sculpture may represent the god Vairavaa and was likely created from a piece of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across the border region between Russia and Mongolia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Elmar Buchner of the University of Stuttgart, and his colleagues....

Carbon pollution from California’s 2020 wildfires erased 16 years of the state’s greenhouse gas emission cuts, according to a new UCLA study. The fires were the state’s most destructive on record, burning 4.2 million acres, killing dozens of people and destroying thousands of homes. The study—published in Environmental Pollution—adds another statistic: the fires released roughly 127 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or about twice California’s total emission cuts from 2003 to 2019....

Chemists around the world are being called on to donate samples of novel compounds they have synthesised to a crowdsourcing project that aims to find new antibiotics. The Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) was set up by scientists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in response to the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. ‘Pharmaceutical companies are finding it harder and harder to find new drugs,’ says CO-ADD director Matt Cooper, ‘partly because everyone’s screening the same type of compounds....

Even as industrial civilization reaches into the farthest corners of the globe to extract resources such as oil, timber and fish, environmentalists are striving to mitigate its deleterious effects on the biosphere. Projects to reduce pollution, prevent climate change and protect biodiversity, however, are drawing criticism that they could drive indigenous people off their lands and destroy their livelihoods. Conservationists have historically been at odds with the people who inhabit wildernesses....

A drug targeting dopamine receptors might be able to “kick-start” an injured brain, enabling certain kinds of vegetative and minimally conscious patients to recover faster. Esteban Fridman of the FLENI hospital in Buenos Aires thinks the crux of the problem for such patients lies in their neuron-connecting axons. They are so badly damaged that they have a difficult time carrying chemical signals, or neurotransmitters, from neuron to neuron. Axons get disrupted when they are subject to stresses such as cranial impact—as when a fighter gets hit in the head or a driver smacks into the steering wheel in a car accident....

Banned in Delhi for a decade, smog-spewing combustion engine–powered rickshaws are fading away in India and in many other countries, thanks not only to inroads by minivans, but also to improved rickshaw motor designs coupled with laws to mothball dirtier models. In January, for example, Jakarta officials seized 30 unlicensed rickshaws. Because such transport often lacks catalytic converters and is poorly maintained, lightweight two-stroke gasoline-powered three-wheelers (also known as tuk-tuks and tricycles) cough up roughly 13 times more lung-damaging particulates than other engine types....

Adapted from Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds, by John Pickrell. Columbia University Press, September 16, 2014. Copyright © 2014, John Pickrell. All rights reserved. A hotly anticipated press conference was held by National Geographic magazine in Washington DC on 15 October 1999. With much fanfare, they announced the discovery of a new feathered fossil from China that was a chimera with a fascinating mix of characters. A team of paleontologists, enthusiastic amateurs and editorial staff were behind the naming and description of the species, dubbed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis....

The classic nightmare of suddenly realizing you’re naked in public could soon get a futuristic twist: it might involve the horror of losing not just your modesty but also your pass codes. Scientists recently created magnetic garments that they say can store data, automatically unlock doors or control a nearby smartphone with gestures. The concept of interactive “smart clothing” has drawn attention in the past couple of years. For example, Google and Levi’s created a touch-sensitive denim jacket that can operate a smartphone....

When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903, he famously admonished the attending crowd to avoid meddling with the landscape. “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it,” he said. True to Roosevelt’s message, America’s conservationists have since focused on maintaining the status quo, or at least restoring ecosystems to their natural state. But due to the growing impacts of climate change, this can no longer continue, according to a new guide for land managers backed by multiple state and federal agencies....

The reigning darling of nanotech, and researchers’ favorite form of carbon for the past decade, has been the nanotube. Lauded as an easy conduit for electricity, this slender, chicken wire–like roll of atoms had conjured dreams of ultraminiature circuitry that might someday stand in for silicon as the workhorse of computer technology. But nanotubes always had their drawbacks: difficult to arrange precisely, they are also hard to wire to the outside world without losing much of their vaunted electrical conductivity....

Researchers in Sweden have developed a new camera that can visualise the flow of methane—a key greenhouse gas—as it emanates from its source. In one piece of footage the team has shown a plume of methane spilling from a window in a barn housing cows. The camera, which uses a technique called optimal infrared hyperspectral imaging, can also quantify the amount of gas being produced and could be useful in producing accurate audits of the sources of methane....

In most people, the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is as clear as day. But in many people with brain injuries who can neither talk nor move, the differences can be harder to spot. Neuroscientists have now devised a single metric of brain activity that could help to distinguish between different states of consciousness and guide medical treatment for people with brain injuries. The work is reported today in Science Translational Medicine....

When US President Barack Obama released his budget proposal on February 2, he gave scientists and engineers a ray of hope—albeit one that is almost certain to be dimmed, if not extinguished. Obama’s US$4-trillion plan for fiscal year 2016 includes $146 billion for scientific research and development, a healthy 6% increase for a portfolio split roughly evenly between defence and civilian programmes. The proposal, which seeks to turn back years of fiscal austerity, is the opening salvo in what is likely to be a long war with the Republican-controlled Congress over government spending....

People with schizophrenia often experience the unnerving feeling that outside forces are controlling them. Other times they feel an illusory sense of power over uncontrollable events. Now scientists find these symptoms may arise from disabilities in predicting or recognizing their own actions. The findings suggest new therapies for treating schizophrenia, which afflicts an estimated 1 percent of the world population. To see where this confusion might stem from, researchers tested two ways people are known to link actions and their outcomes....

By Geoff Brumfiel By pushing a cluster of just 60 ions with a tiny electric field, researchers have measured the most minuscule force ever. The result, measuring mere yoctonewtons (10^-24 newtons), beats previous record lows by several orders of magnitude. The group behind the measurements, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, hopes that the technique can eventually lead to new tools for measuring the minuscule features of materials’ surfaces....

By all accounts, NASA’s long-awaited return to flight has not gone as smoothly as hoped. Shortly after Tuesday’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery–the first since the Columbia shuttle’s re-entry disaster in February of 2003–large chunks of insulation foam from the external fuel tank broke off and hit the wing. Discovery appears to have emerged from the event without significant damage, but the same problem was responsible for the Columbia accident....

Do we really need to keep on making circuits smaller? The miniaturization of silicon microelectronics seems so inexorable that the question seldom comes up–except maybe when we buy a new computer, only to find that it becomes obsolete by the time we leave the store. A state-of-the-art microprocessor today has on the order of 500 million transistors; by 2015 it could have nearly five billion. Yet within the next two decades this dramatic march forward will run up against scientific, technical and economic limits....

So much for clean coal—at least for now. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it has canceled plans to build a prototype 275-megawatt power plant, its first so-called FutureGen facility, in Mattoon, Ill., which was designed to burn coal to produce electricity, and then sock away 90 percent of the resulting climate change–causing carbon dioxide safely underground. Amid spiraling costs due to rising prices for concrete and steel, among other factors, the DOE said it was pulling the plug to save money and to restructure the agency’s clean coal effort to be less centralized and more effective....