Last month brought scant relief from global warming, and there’s a chance that 2017 could turn out to be the warmest year on record
Global map of temperature anomalies for February 2017. (Source: NASA GISS)
Even though the warming influence of El Niño is long gone, and 2017 was expected to offer some relief from record temperatures set last year, February saw very little letup in global warming.
And now there’s at least a chance that 2017 as a whole could ...read more
Many cultures swear by the benefits of a hot bath. But only recently has science began to understand how passive heating (as opposed to getting hot and sweaty from exercise) improves health.
At Loughborough University we investigated the effect of a hot bath on blood sugar control (an important measure of metabolic fitness) and on energy expended (number of calories burned). We recruited 14 men to take part in the study. They were assigned to an hour-long soak in a hot bath (40˚C) or an h ...read more
During the early Earth’s heavy bombardment, could metabolism have started without phosphate, one of life’s key ingredients? (Image: NASA/Simone Marchi)
“CHNOPS” is one of science’s most revered acronyms, an amalgamation of letters that rolls of the tongues of high school biology students and practicing researchers alike. It accounts for the six elements that comprise most biological molecules: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur.
Biologists ...read more
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Need to memorize a series of numbers? Try this: Imagine yourself walking through a house while locking visualizations of a “12” or “78” into different rooms and cabinets located throughout the house.
You’ve just used the “method of loci,” which is a fundamental memorization technique that dates back to ancient Greece and is employed by champion memory athletes. Radboud University Medical Center neuroscientist Martin Dresler, lead ...read more
I just read a concerning paper about an experimental stem cell treatment for children with autism.
The authors are Himanshu Bansal and colleagues of India. The senior author, Prasad S Koka, is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Stem Cells where the paper appeared, which raises questions about whether the manuscript received a thorough peer review. Koka is actually an author on all five of the research papers published in that issue of the journal. But that’s a minor issue compared to ...read more
A trove of footage from early U.S. nuclear weapons tests has just been declassified and uploaded to YouTube.
The film release was part of a project headed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapons physicist Greg Spriggs which aimed to digitize and preserve thousands of films documenting the nation’s nuclear history. The endeavor required an all-hands-on deck approach from archivists, film experts and software engineers, but the team says that this digitized d ...read more
New research finds bits of Earth’s original crust in Canada. (Credit NASA)
Researchers who want to study the nature of Earth’s original crust find themselves between a rock and a hard place: Our planet’s top layer is constantly wearing down in one spot and building up in another, continents colliding or slip-sliding past each other in the great mosh pit of plate tectonics. You might have figured none of the early crust was even still around. New research shows you would have f ...read more
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Natural variability in atmospheric conditions could account for as much as half of the recent decline in Arctic sea ice, according to a new study.
While the masses of ice that float atop the planet have been in steady decline over the past few decades, scientists haven’t been able to say how much of the losses are attributable to human-driven climate change and how much is simply the result of periodic swings in climate conditions. While the scientific c ...read more
