Known for its unusual varietals and millennia-old wine traditions, the Republic of Georgia may also be where viniculture was born. (Credit G. Tarlach)
Where are the roots of the earliest wine? Countries in southwestern Asia have long contested who was first to ferment grapes. To date, the oldest widely accepted evidence for viniculture came from the Zagros Mountains of Iran.
But now new research from the Republic of Georgia — a perennial and fierce challenger for the title ...read more
When multiple specialists can’t solve the mystery of a toddler’s persistent rashes, grandma offhandedly offers a clue.
The toddler wriggled across the exam table, laughing as he crinkled its paper covering. His grandmother JoAnne scooped him onto her lap, rubbing his back as he sucked his thumb. She lifted his hospital gown and unfastened his diaper, showing us the raw skin beneath. Teary-eyed, she told me and another pediatrician the story of his rash. About a year earlier, JoA ...read more
North America, as seen by the GOES-16 weather satellite on Nov. 10, 2017. The sun had already set on about three quarters of the continent. (Source: CIRA/RAMMB/Colorado State University)
With a month and a half to go until year’s end, it’s looking like 2017 will go down in the books as the warmest on record – that is, among years that received no temperature boost from El Niño.
Overall, 2017 is likely to be either the second or t ...read more
Will La Niña help bring a warmer or colder winter to your neck of the woods? And will it be wetter or drier? Read on.
Cool sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are part of La Niña’s fingerprint. According to the latest advisory from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, La Niña conditions are now in place and stand a 65 percent to 75 percent chance of persisting into April. (Image: earth.nullschool.net)
Before I delve into the substance of this post, ...read more
If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know about the battle of the thermostat. This futile clash costs quite a bit of energy: some 12 percent of the United States’ total energy consumption goes to regulating building temperature with air conditioning.
Now, a new fabric could end that war and save energy at the same time. The textile, described Friday in the journal Science Advances, offers wearers dual heating and cooling, allowing individuals to control their perso ...read more
Tending to a nursing newborn is hard enough, but sea lion moms have an extra challenge. To consume enough calories for themselves and their pups, they have to repeatedly leave their babies behind and swim out to sea to hunt. Each time the mothers return, they have to find their pups again. Australian sea lion moms use a pup’s smell and the sound of its calls to recognize it. They also use sight—which scientists learned by creating fake, stuffed sea ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
If you speak to someone who has suffered from insomnia at all as an adult, chances are good that person has either tried using marijuana, or cannabis, for sleep or has thought about it.
This is reflected in the many variations of cannabinoid or cannabis-based medicines available to improve sleep – like Nabilone, Dronabinol and Marinol. It’s also a common reason why many cannabis users seek medical marijuana cards.
I am a sleep psychologist who has treated hun ...read more
Society has long misunderstood these spineless swimmers. Now they could unlock the keys to regeneration.
Hiroshima’s downtown is a garden of modern architecture interspersed with swaths of lovely green parks. In the center is a single structure, in ruins, capped by a skeleton of curved iron. This is the Atomic Bomb Dome, located at the destruction’s epicenter, the sole building that managed to remain standing amid the massive force that flattened everything else for miles in all ...read more
In all the early chaos, a thousand Plutos may have formed in the distant part of the solar system where Neptune orbits today, including a nascent Ceres. Then the shifting gas giants scattered those bodies everywhere. “In the great rearrangement of the solar system, Pluto went outward, Ceres came inward,” says planetary scientist and New Horizons co-investigator William McKinnon. He proposed Ceres’ migration in 2008 — the first hint of a potential sibling relationship betw ...read more
