Abnormal Heat For Next Four Years, New Model Predicts
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Author: Vishay Singh
Is the Kīlauea Eruption Winding Down?
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Livestock Infected with Worms Belch and Fart 33% More Methane
Scientists find that parasites dramatically alter how much methane a sheep emits. It’s estimated that 40% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and a substantial portion of that is directly ’emitted’ by livestock. And just last year, climate scientists reported that we’ve actually been underestimating the extent to which the combined belches and flatulence of farmed animals contributes to climate change by 11%. Unsurprisingly, there& ...read more
Physicists finally explain why your earphones are always tangled.
Photo: Flickr/Steven Guzzardi [Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. En ...read more
What caused this colossal heart-shaped hole in the cloud deck off the coast of California and Baja?
NASA’s Terra satellite spied this heart-shaped hole in the cloud deck over the Pacific on August 7, 2018. (Source: NASA Worldview) I’m always on the look out for interesting images of Earth shot from space so that I can share them here at ImaGeo. And when I saw the one above, I just couldn’t resist it. Source: NASA Worldview Often, the cloud deck extends along the coast of California and down into Baja in a more or less continuous manner, as you can see in the image at righ ...read more
Brains Store Temporary Records Before Creating Life-long Memories
(Credit: Alena Hovorkova/shutterstock) A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. The first dance at my wedding lasted exactly four minutes and 52 seconds, but I’ll probably remember it for decades. Neuroscientists still don’t entirely understand this: How was my brain able to translate this less-than-five-minute experience into a lifelong memory? Part of the puzzle is that there’s a gap between experience and memory: our experiences are fleeting, but ...read more
A Brief Guide to Neuro-Products
On this blog I usually focus on academic, scientific neuroscience. However, there is a big world outside the laboratory and, in the real world, the concepts of neuroscience are being used (and abused) in ways that would make any honest neuroscientist blush. In this post I’m going to focus on three recent examples of neuro-products: commercial products that are promoted as having some kind of neuroscience-based benefit. 1) Neuro Connect Golf Bands We’ll start out with a silly one. Th ...read more
Closing In On Vaping's Most Toxic Ingredient
(Credit: Mike Orlov/shutterstock) How many breathless older smokers rue the day they first inhaled nicotine and tar? Someday, adolescents sucking tobacco-free Mods and Juuls could face similar regret. Initially hailed as a smoking cessation breakthrough, e-cigarettes have now been raising red-flags for years. Thanks to nicotine, vaping can be just as addictive as true cigarettes. And even if youthful vapers never drag on a Camel, preliminary evidence suggests they may still get chronic bronchi ...read more
The Evolutionary Quirk That Made Vitamin B12 Part of Our Diet
(Credit: bitt24/Shutterstock) Vitamins and other nutrients that we cannot make for ourselves are called essential. It’s a misleading term because “essential” most often means “important,” but in the world of dietetics, it denotes that we must obtain it in our diets. For example, vitamin Q, also called ubiquinone, is extremely important – it’s crucial for cellular respiration in the mitochondria – but it is not deemed essential because our cells s ...read more
Ancient Nuclear Waste Is Teaching Us About Radioactive Storage Today
The Dukovany Nuclear Power Station in the Czech Republic. (Credit: zhangyang13576997233/Shutterstock) There are 99 nuclear reactors currently operating in the United States. The power they generate is free of carbon dioxide emissions, but as a byproduct, they also generate small amounts of nuclear waste in the form of depleted uranium. Even after the uranium in the fuel reactors is spent, or depleted, it remains radioactive, and that means storing it is difficult. Controversy over a permanent ...read more