|  The World's Most Powerful Atom Smasher Restarts With a Big Bang  | The world's most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, which provides a window into the universe just milliseconds after the Big Bang, came back to life this morning, after more than two years of maintenance and upgrade work, and it's stronger than ever. Then at 12:27 p.m. Geneva time, another proton beam trekked around the ring in the opposite direction, officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) reported today (April 5). In the first run of the restart, the LHC hit energies of 450 GeV, where one GeV is equivalent to the mass of a proton. In the coming days, LHC operators plan to amp up the energy of the proton beams to the highest ever achieved.
| Read More » Breast Milk Sold Online May Not Be 100% Human Milk Buying breast milk online in order to nourish a baby with important nutrients that are not available from formula may not always be the safest choice, a new study suggests. Researchers found that one in 10 samples of breast milk that they bought over the Internet and tested contained genetic material from cow's milk. They said it was likely that the cow's milk was intentionally added to human milk, to stretch its volume. Giving babies breast milk that contains even small quantities of cow's milk could be harmful because some infants may have problems tolerating cow's milk, or they might have an allergy to cow's milk protein. Read More » Huge Colorado Floods Helped Sculpt Mountains  | In 2013, heavy rains unleashed devastating slurries of rock, soil and water on cities and towns along the Colorado Rockies. "While it strikes us as very random, our research suggests this is one of the formative processes in this landscape," said lead study author Scott Anderson, a geomorphologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tacoma, Washington. The 2013 Colorado floods triggered more than 1,100 landslides and debris flows in the Front Range after several days of unusually heavy rain in September. The resulting debris flows carried huge volumes of rock and sediment down mountain valleys, scouring out river channels like sandpaper.
| Read More » Junk Food Is Making NYC Ants More Like Humans  | If you were in New York City recently and you saw a man sucking stuff off of the sidewalk with a weird contraption that resembled a water bong, you may have inadvertently witnessed serious biological fieldwork in action. To study the diet of urban ants, Clint Penick, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, went to Broadway, aspirator in hand, to collect specimens. "Nobody ever talked to me," Penick said.
| Read More » Here Be Dragons: 3 Spiky Lizard Species Found in Andes  | The three new species were found in the cloud forests of Peru and Ecuador, an international research team reported today (April 6) in the journal ZooKeys. The team, led by Omar Torres-Carvajal of the Museo de Zoología QCAZ in Ecuador, also ferreted out the five other woodlizard species recorded in recent years.
| Read More » Zap! New Map Charts Every Lightning Bolt  | "It's taking very rapid updates," said Daniel Cecil, a member of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center's lightning team. Roughly 90 percent of the lightning strikes on Earth occur between the 38th parallel south and 38th parallel north latitudes, said Cecil. But even on equatorial land, lightning strikes vary with different types of thunderstorms. The number of lightning strikes per storm, however, is relatively low, with only a few flashes per minute, Cecil said.
| Read More » Ghostly Faces and Invisible Verse Found in Medieval Text  | "It's easy to think we know all we can know about a manuscript like the 'Black Book,' but to see these ghosts from the past brought back to life in front of our eyes has been incredibly exciting," Myriah Williams, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. In 1904, Sir John Williams, the founder of the National Library of Wales, bought the book, which measures 6.7 by 5 inches (17 by 12.5 centimeters). Only recently did Myriah Williams and Paul Russell, a professor at Cambridge's department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC), examine the pages of the book.
| Read More » Pluto Weather Forecast: Probe Likely to Find It Gusty and Gassy  | Wondering how the space weather will be around Pluto this summer? Scientists working with NASA's New Horizons mission are predicting gusts of charged particles with speeds up to 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h) that will slow as they interact with the dwarf planet's atmosphere. New Horizons, which will make a highly anticipated flyby of Pluto on July 14, has already been sampling the space weather environment in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. "Results from those measurements are being radioed to the ground, and our team is already learning new things about the distant environment near Pluto's orbit, 3 billion miles [4.8 billion kilometers] from Earth," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, said in a statement.
| Read More » Want to Live Longer? Optimal Amount of Exercise Revealed Doing a few hours of exercise every week will probably help you live longer, but doing a whole lot more exercise doesn't provide much extra benefit, according to a new study on physical activity and longevity. Still, doing as much as 10 times the recommended amount of exercise was not linked with an increased risk of dying during the study period. In the study, researchers analyzed information from more than 660,000 people ages 21 to 98 in the United States and Sweden who answered questions about how much time they spent doing physical activity, including walking, running, swimming and bicycling. People who got some exercise, but not enough to meet the physical activity recommendations were still 20 percent less likely to die over a 14-year period than those who did not do any physical activity. Read More » | |
