|  Crop Failure and Fading Food Supplies: Climate Change's Lasting Impact (Op-Ed) Now, scientists have assessed the global scale of food crop disasters for the first time — and the news is not good. Studies from Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Niger have shown that children have increased wasting and stunting rates after a flood or drought, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. For example, children in Niger born during a drought are more than twice as likely to be malnourished between the ages of 1 and 2. Read More » What Are the Odds? Temperature Records Keep Falling (Op-Ed)  | Michael Mann is a distinguished professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and author of "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines" (Columbia, 2013) and the recently updated and expanded "Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change" (DK, 2015). With the official numbers now in 2015 is, by a substantial margin, the new record-holder, the warmest year in recorded history for both the globe and the Northern Hemisphere. One might wonder: Just how likely is it to see such streaks of record-breaking temperatures if not for human-caused warming of the planet?
| Read More » Crowdsourcing the Universe: How Citizen Scientists are Driving Discovery (Kavli Roundtable)  | Just last November, a citizen science project called Space Warps announced the discovery of 29 new gravitational lenses, regions in the universe where massive objects bend the paths of photons (from galaxies and other light sources) as they travel toward Earth. Automated computer programs have identified most of the 500 gravitational lenses on astronomer's books. The Kavli Foundation spoke with three researchers, all co-authors of two papers published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (SPACE WARPS – I. Crowdsourcing the discovery of gravitational lenses SPACE WARPS– II. New gravitational lens candidates from the CFHTLS discovered through citizen science) describing the Space Warps findings.
| Read More » Wearable Sweat Sensors Could Track Your Health  | Blood tests allow doctors to peer into the human body to analyze people's health. Sweat is a rich source of chemical data that could help doctors determine what is happening inside the human body, scientists explained in a new study. "Sweat is pretty attractive to target for noninvasive wearable sensors, since it's, of course, very easy to analyze — you don't have to poke the body to get it — and it has a lot of information about one's health in it," said study senior author Ali Javey, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.
| Read More » Autism App? iPhone Tool Could One Day Spot the Disorder  | An app that can study people's facial expressions and emotional responses could one day be helpful in detecting autism signs in children, new research found. The iPhone app, called "Autism & Beyond," was developed by scientists and software developers at Duke University in North Carolina and uses mathematical algorithms to automatically detect people's expressions and emotional cues, based on muscle movements in the face. Children in the study will be presented with a short video clip designed to elicit emotional responses and social interactions.
| Read More » Great Wall of White: Epic Snowfall Visible from Space  | A massive winter storm that slammed the U.S. East Coast last weekend dumped so much white stuff on the ground that the extensive snow cover was clearly visible from space. The winter storm, dubbed Jonas, dropped snow from Tennessee north to Massachusetts on Jan. 23, leaving millions of Americans shoveling driveways and sidewalks, and digging their cars out.
| Read More » Proton rocket blasts off with part of European space 'data highway' FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A Russian Proton rocket blasted off in Kazakhstan on Friday night to put into orbit both the first part of Europe's new space "data highway" and a Eutelsat communications satellite. The 19-story tall Russian-built rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 1720 ET (4:20 a.m. local time). The EDRS-A node that it is carrying is the first building block of the European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS), a "big data" highway costing nearly 500 million euros ($545 million) that will harness new laser-based communications technology. ... Read More » Obama wants $4B to help students learn computer science  | WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Saturday he'll ask Congress for billions of dollars to help students learn computer science skills and prepare for jobs in a changing economy.
| Read More » Mantis at the Movies: Tiny Specs Reveal Bugs' 3D Vision  | By fitting praying mantises with teeny, tiny glasses, scientists have proved that these insects have 3D vision. To determine whether insects use 3D vision to hunt, Read and her colleagues had to come up with a way to show mantises both two- and three-dimensional images. Modern 3D glasses, like the ones people might wear to go see "The Force Awakens" in 3D IMAX, didn't work, because the mantises were too close to the screen.
| Read More » Stone Age Horror! Pit Filled with Severed Limbs Uncovered  | The nearly 6,000-year-old pit was found near the village of Bergheim, which sits near the border with Germany. "The discovery of Bergheim is the witness of a very violent event, which took place at a specific time," said study co-author Fanny Chenal, an archaeologist at the University of Strasbourg in France. An archaeological surveying company was overseeing excavations in advance of property development in Bergheim when they uncovered a 5-acre (2 hectares) area pockmarked with ancient pits called silos.
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