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Saturday, January 30, 2016

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ...

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.

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.

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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Friday, January 29, 2016

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Mysterious Sonic Boom Reported Over New Jersey

At least 10 sonic booms have been reported this afternoon (Jan. 28) from southern New Jersey along the East Coast to Long Island, New York, say scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The first sonic boom was recorded at 1:24 p.m. EST (18:24:05 UTC), about 2 miles (3 kilometers) north-northeast of Hammonton, New Jersey, and 37 miles (60 km) south of Trenton, New Jersey. In the following hour and a half, seismometers picked up at least nine other sonic booms along the Eastern Seaboard all the way to Long Island, according to the USGS.

Knowing all the angles: Ancient Babylonians used tricky geometry

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ancient Babylonian astronomers were way ahead of their time, using sophisticated geometric techniques that until now had been considered an achievement of medieval European scholars. "No one expected this," said Mathieu Ossendrijver, a professor of history of ancient science at Humboldt University in Berlin, noting that the methods delineated in the tablets were so advanced that they foreshadowed the development of calculus. The methods were similar to those employed by 14th century scholars at University of Oxford's Merton College, he said.

Mexican researchers fit dog with 3D printed prosthetic leg

A six-year-old dog named Romina, who was injured in a lawnmower accident, is fitted with an articulated prosthetic leg made with 3D printing technology. Santiago Garcia, UVM's great species coordinator and specialist in prosthetics, said being able to print out the model in 3D made the process easier and enabled him to adjust it quickly.

Publisher Zuckerman announces US-Israel science initiative

NEW YORK (AP) — Real estate magnate and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has announced a scholarship program to pay for American graduate students in the sciences to study in Israel.

Europe to launch first part of space-based data highway

Europe plans to launch on Friday night the first part of a new space data highway that will pave the way for faster than ever monitoring of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The EDRS-A node 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. The EDRS will considerably improve transmission of large amounts of data, such as pictures and radar images, from satellites in orbit to Earth as they will no longer have to wait for a ground station on Earth to come into view.

The Real 'X-Files'? CIA Reveals Weirdest UFO Stories

The real-life stories of UFOs would be enough for the fictional "X-Files" FBI agents Mulder and Scully to spend a lifetime investigating. With a nod to the new "X-Files" reboot (which airs on Fox on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET), the Central Intelligence Agency has released a trove of once classified documents on several real-life unidentified flying objects. The space race was on, the Cold War fears had reached a fever pitch, and science-fiction movies like "The Flying Saucer" (1950) catapulted schlocky depictions of aliens and their flying machines into the popular consciousness.

Octopuses Are Surprisingly Social — and Confrontational, Scientists Find

Octopuses are well-known masters of camouflage and skillful escape artists, but they aren't exactly famous for their social skills. Scientists have long thought that this many-armed denizen of the deep was strictly solitary and didn't interact much with its fellows, reserving its color-shifting ability for intimidating predators — or hiding from them. But a new study reveals that both male and female octopuses frequently communicate with each other in challenging displays that include posturing and changing color.

Babylonians Tracked Jupiter with Fancy Math, Tablet Reveals

The brown clay tablet, which could fit in the palm of your hand, is scrawled with hasty, highly abbreviated cuneiform characters. "It sounds minute for a layperson, but this geometry is of a very special kind that is not found anywhere else, for instance, in ancient Greek astronomy," Ossendrijver said. The tablet has long been in the collection at the British Museum in London, and it was likely created in Babylon (located in modern-day Iraq) between 350 and 50 B.C. Ossendrijver recently deciphered the text, and he described his discovery in an article that's featured on the cover of the journal Science this week.

Decapitated Gladiators Reveal Roman Empire's Genetic Influence

DNA from seven decapitated skeletons thought to be gladiators is helping researchers unravel the gruesome origins of the ancient remains. The new findings suggest that the Roman Empire's genetic impact on Britain may not have been as large as researchers had thought. The headless skeletons were excavated between 2004 and 2005 from a Roman burial site in Driffield Terrace in York, England, the archaeologists said.

Limited Zika Virus Outbreaks 'Likely' in US

It's likely that the United States will face small outbreaks of Zika virus, but widespread transmission of the virus here is not expected, health officials said today. Zika virus is spreading rapidly in Central and South America, and there have been a few cases in the United States among travelers who caught the virus overseas. Although the virus isn't spreading locally in the United States yet, it is possible that it will, because the mosquitoes that transmit the virus are common in some parts of the country, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Important First-Aid Move: What to Do If a Child Loses Consciousness

If a child passes out, parents can help them by performing a simple first-aid technique known as putting them in "the recovery position," a new study suggests. Children in the study who became unconscious because they fainted or had a seizure — but were still breathing — and were placed in the recovery position were almost 30 percent less likely to be hospitalized compared with children whose parents did not perform this first-aid method, researchers in Europe found. The finding shows that putting kids on their sides during a seizure really does help, and it works to keep kids from needing to be hospitalized, said Dr. David Mandelbaum, a pediatric neurologist at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the research.

F-35 Fighter Jet Likely Caused Sonic Booms That Rocked New Jersey

The sonic booms that rattled residents of New Jersey up to Long Island, New York, yesterday may have been the result of fighter jet flight tests at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland. At 1:24 p.m. EST (18:24:05 UTC) about 2 miles (3 kilometers) north-northeast of Hammonton, New Jersey, and 37 miles (60 km) south of Trenton, New Jersey, a sonic boom was detected at nearby seismometers in the ground. At least nine others were picked up in the following hour and a half along the Eastern Seaboard up to Long Island, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

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Thursday, January 28, 2016

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Artificial Intelligence Beats 'Most Complex Game Devised by Humans'

An artificial intelligence system has defeated a professional Go player, cracking one of the longstanding grand challenges in the field. What's more, the new system, called AlphaGo, defeated the human player by learning the game from scratch using an approach known as "deep learning," the researchers involved say. Ever since IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in their iconic chess match in 1997, AI researchers have been quietly crafting robots that can master more and more human pastimes.

Go figure! Game victory seen as artificial intelligence milestone

In what they called a milestone achievement for artificial intelligence, scientists said on Wednesday they have created a computer program that beat a professional human player at the complex board game called Go, which originated in ancient China. The feat recalled IBM supercomputer Deep Blue's 1997 match victory over chess world champion Garry Kasparov. "Go is considered to be the pinnacle of game AI research," said artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the British company that developed the AlphaGo program.

Challenger accident shapes new wave of passenger spaceships

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Thirty years after the space shuttle Challenger exploded during liftoff, a new generation of spaceships continues to build on changes made after NASA's fatal accident. Challenger blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the frigid morning of Jan. 28, 1986. The disaster exposed shuttle design shortcomings and operational problems in the U.S. space program.

How to Tell If Conspiracy Theories Are Real: Here's the Math

A faked moon landing or a hidden cure for cancer are just a couple of large-scale conspiracies that, if true, would have come to light within five years following their alleged cover-ups, according to a mathematical formula put together by one physicist. David Robert Grimes, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford who studies cancer, is familiar with conspiracy theorists. "The charge that there is a scientific conspiracy afoot is a common one," said Grimes, in an email interview with Live Science, "and almost inevitably those making these charges will descend into accusing one of shilling or being an agent of some malignant entity." In response to his work, conspiracy theorists have threatened him, even tried to get him removed from his academic position.

Ice-Age Mammoth Bones Found Under Oregon Football Field

Oregon State University might want to consider changing its mascot after a monumental find yesterday (Jan. 25): The discovery of bones belonging to an ice-age mammoth within throwing distance of the school's football field. A construction crew working on an expansion and renovation of the OSU Beavers' Valley Football Center uncovered the remains of the beast while digging in the north end of Reser Stadium. "There are quite a few bones, and dozens of pieces," Loren Davis, an associate professor of anthropology at OSU, said in a statement.

Addiction Changes Brain Biology in 3 Stages, Experts Say

Experts who research addiction have long argued that it is a disease of the brain. Now, in a new paper, they present a model of addiction, broken down into three key stages, to illustrate how the condition changes human neurobiology. Understanding what's going on in the brain of someone with an addiction is essential for medical professionals to better treat people with this disease, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the lead author of the new review.

'Schizophrenia Gene' Discovery Sheds Light on Possible Cause

Researchers have identified a gene that increases the risk of schizophrenia, and they say they have a plausible theory as to how this gene may cause the devastating mental illness. After conducting studies in both humans and mice, the researchers said this new schizophrenia risk gene, called C4, appears to be involved in eliminating the connections between neurons — a process called "synaptic pruning," which, in humans, happens naturally in the teen years. It's possible that excessive or inappropriate "pruning" of neural connections could lead to the development of schizophrenia, the researchers speculated.

Young Women's Cancer Risk Linked to Tanning Beds

Young women who use tanning beds or booths have up to a sixfold increase in their likelihood of developing melanoma, a new study found. The study also suggests that indoor tanning has likely played a role in the rise in melanoma rates among young U.S. women in recent years. The findings indicate that the "melanoma epidemic … seems likely to continue unabated, especially among young women, unless exposure to indoor tanning is further restricted and reduced," the researchers, from the University of Minnesota, wrote in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal JAMA Dermatology.

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