|  July was hottest month recorded worldwide: U.S. scientists  | July was the warmest month ever on record worldwide and 2015 has been so far the hottest year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday, just over three months to go before world leaders seek to reach a climate agreement in Paris. In its monthly global climate report released online on Thursday, NOAA said many countries and the world's oceans experienced heatwaves, with the Earth's oceans temperature also hitting record highs last month. This July was the all-time highest monthly temperature in the records that date back to 1880, at 61.86 degrees Fahrenheit (16.61 degree Celsius), according to NOAA.
| Read More » Ghostly Particles from Outer Space Detected in Antarctica  | Buried deep in the Antarctic ice, an observatory has spotted ghostly, nearly massless particles coming from inside our galaxy and points beyond the Milky Way. Finding these cosmic neutrinos not only confirms their existence but also sheds light on the origins of cosmic rays, the researchers said.
| Read More » Bad Habits Put Many Contact-Lens Wearers at Risk of Eye Infection Most Americans who wear contacts have bad hygiene habits with their lenses that could increase their risk of eye infection, according to a new report. About 99 percent reported engaging in habits known to increase their risk of eye infections. For example, 85 percent said they showered with their contact lenses, 61 percent reported swimming with their lenses and 35 percent reported rinsing their lenses with water, according to the report, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read More » European Rocket Launches 2 Communications Satellites Into Orbit  | A European rocket launched into space from a South American spaceport Thursday (Aug. 20) on a mission to deliver two new communications satellites into orbit for a pair of telecommunications giants.
| Read More » Massive Aztec human skull rack found in Mexico City  | Archeologists have discovered a massive ceremonial skull rack from the heyday of the Aztec empire in the heart of Mexico City, a find that could shed new light on how its rulers projected power by human sacrifice, the team said on Thursday. The skull rack, known as a tzompantli in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, was used to display the bleached white craniums of sacrificed warriors from rival kingdoms, likely killed by priests atop towering temples that once stood nearby. Dug up behind the capital's colonial-era cathedral, the as yet partially uncovered skull rack was likely built between 1485 and 1502 and may have been about 112 feet (34 meters) long and 12 meters (40 foot) wide, lead archeologist Raul Barrera said.
| Read More » Wormhole Created in Lab Makes Invisible Magnetic Field  | Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space. "This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. The idea of a wormhole comes from Albert Einstein's theories.
| Read More » 'The Martian' Lands at NASA's Mars Mission Control (Photos)  | This week, the people behind the upcoming sci-fi blockbuster "The Martian" got a little taste of how real Red Planet exploration works. "The Martian" star Matt Damon, director Ridley Scott and Andy Weir, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, on Tuesday (Aug. 18) — the same day a new trailer for "The Martian" was released. The special "Martian Day" featured a talk by Jim Green, head of NASA's Planetary Science division, and a Q&A discussion involving Green, Damon, Scott, Weir and astronaut Drew Feustel.
| Read More » Lake Mead's Water Sinks to Lowest Level Since 1930s  | Years of unrelenting drought are straining a large reservoir of water between Nevada and Arizona, new satellite images reveal. Images taken July 25 show that Lake Mead's water level has dropped by about 120 feet (37 meters) from where the water reached 15 years ago, on July 6, 2000. The Landsat 8 satellite, jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, captured both photos of the sprawling reservoir.
| Read More » Can You Trust Wikipedia on Science? That kind of flux isn't unusual: Wikipedia pages on hot-button issues such as global warming and evolution may change much more frequently than pages on less controversial subjects, according to a new study. The findings raise the question: Which science pages on Wikipedia can be trusted? Wikipedia relies on the wisdom of the crowds, allowing anyone to create or edit any Wiki page while others go in and tweak, update or delete revisions. Read More » Science will prevail in doping firestorm - WADA chief  | By Nick Mulvenney BEIJING (Reuters) - Science will ultimately put out the doping firestorm that has engulfed athletics in the run-up to the world championships, Craig Reedie, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), said on Friday. The governing body of athletics, the IAAF, has been in crisis since data from thousands of blood samples was leaked to two media organisations this month. Three weeks of further leaks and allegations that the IAAF has been soft on dopers have overshadowed the run-up to its biennial showpiece, which opens in Beijing with the men's marathon on Saturday.
| Read More » Are Vitamin E Supplements Healthy or Harmful? Dr. John Swartzberg is an internist and specialist in infectious disease and chairman of the editorial board of the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter and berkeleywellness.com. It's been nearly a century since researchers at the University of California, Berkeley discovered vitamin E, and since then, many studies have looked at the potential health benefits of this antioxidant. Over the years, supplement makers and some researchers predicted that vitamin E would help prevent cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease, as well as help maintain eyesight and keep skin glowing. Read More » Why Magnetars Should Freak You Out  | Paul Sutter is a research fellow at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and a visiting scholar at The Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. They're easy enough to make — if you're a massive star.
| Read More » Parents, Choose the Shot: Every Newborn Needs Lifesaving Vitamin K  | What do vitamin K and immunizations have in common? There has been much discussion about immunizations in the past few years, and here is one dangerous unintended consequence: When parents refuse vaccines after a child's birth, they unwittingly also refuse vitamin K. For more than half a century, giving newborn infants an injection of vitamin K within the first few hours of life has been the standard of care.
| Read More » Science will prevail in doping firestorm - WADA chief  | By Nick Mulvenney BEIJING (Reuters) - Science will ultimately put out the doping firestorm that has engulfed athletics in the run-up to the world championships, Craig Reedie, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), said on Friday. The governing body of athletics, the IAAF, has been in crisis since data from thousands of blood samples was leaked to two media organisations this month. Three weeks of further leaks and allegations that the IAAF has been soft on dopers have overshadowed the run-up to its biennial showpiece, which opens in Beijing with the men's marathon on Saturday.
| Read More » Why California's Droughts are Just Going to Get Worse (Op-Ed)  | California is now well into its fourth consecutive year of drought. Tensions in the state have mounted as urban and agricultural water users become increasingly stressed by water shortages — but we can't blame the almond farmers. There are many factors at play here, notably a complex water cycle and conveyance network, as well as a somewhat archaic legal landscape.
| Read More » 3 Critical Fixes for the US Health Care System (Op-Ed) Anmol Madan is co-founder and CEO of Ginger.io, which provides digital mental health support for people with depression and anxiety. Madan has published extensively on modeling large-scale human behaviour using statistical models and pattern recognition, and is a frequent speaker on behavioral analytics, machine learning, data privacy and health care entrepreneurship. Read More » Women's Libido Pill Faces Skepticism After Approval  | Some health professionals are reacting with more enthusiasm than others about the first approved drug aimed at increasing women's sexual desire. Many have compared Addyi to Viagra, the medication for men with erectile dysfunction that increases blood flow to the penis. The problem with focusing solely on neurotransmitters' role in sex drive is that a woman's desire to have sex isn't linked only to chemicals in the brain, said Kristen Carpenter, a psychologist and director of Women's Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center.
| Read More » Breast-Fed Babies Show Buildup of Potentially Harmful Chemical Scientists have found that a widespread and potentially harmful class of industrial chemicals accumulates easily in human breast milk and can build up to worrying levels in infants who are breast-fed. For human infants, protein-rich breast milk appears to be the major source of PFAS exposure. In the new study, scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and Danish institutions found that in children exclusively breast-fed, PFAS concentrations in their blood increased by about 20 to 30 percent each month. Read More » Plague Cases in California: What's Behind the Rise? After nearly 10 years without any cases of plague, California has seen two people contract the age-old illness already this summer. Experts say it's hard to know why there are more cases of plague in California this year than in recent years. A number of factors — including the behavior of people or rodents, or even the California drought — could play a role in the cases of this bacterial infection. Read More » German scientists find rare dinosaur tracks By Josie Le Blond BERLIN (Reuters) - German scientists have found an unusually long trail of footprints from a 30-tonne dinosaur in an abandoned quarry in Lower Saxony, a discovery they think could be around 145 million years old. "It's very unusual how long the trail is and what great condition it's in," excavation leader Benjamin Englich told Reuters at the site, referring to 90 uninterrupted footprints stretching over 50 metres. Englich said the elephant-like tracks were stomped into the ground sometime between 135 and 145 million years ago by a sauropod - a class of heavy dinosaurs with long necks and tails. Read More » Spot Has Your Back: Dogs Avoid People Who Slight Owners "So far, it is not clear what dogs understand about human interactions," said Marie Nitzschner, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who was not involved in the study. As many dog owners know, the animals eagerly watch people all the time, said the study's senior author, Kazuo Fujita, a professor of psychology and comparative cognition at Kyoto University in Japan. Read More » | |
