La Niña typically cools the Pacific. But this time, large swathes of warmer-than-average sea temperatures have muted the cooling.
A comparison of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean for two seven-day periods: Dec. 28, 1998 to Jan. 3, 1999; and Dec. 26, 2016 to Jan. 1, 2017. The strong La Niña of 1998/1999 is characterized by widespread blue colors concentrated especially along the equator west of South America. Whereas today’s Pacific i ...read more
A remarkable and troubling new paper: Addressing reverse inference in psychiatric neuroimaging: Meta-analyses of task-related brain activation in common mental disorders
Icahn School of Medicine researchers Emma Sprooten and colleagues carried out an ambitious task: to pull together the results of every fMRI study which has compared task-related brain activation in people with a mental illness and healthy controls.
Sprooten et al.’s analysis included 537 studies with a total of 21,427 par ...read more
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No one wants to catch the flu, and the best line of defense is the seasonal influenza vaccine. But producing an effective annual flu shot relies on accurately predicting which flu strains are most likely to infect the population in any given season. It requires the coordination of multiple health centers around the globe as the virus travels from region to region. Once epidemiologists settle on target flu strains, vaccine production shifts into high gear; it takes approx ...read more
Now SpaceX is eyeing Mars.
Since the dawn of the Space Age, science fiction enthusiasts have fantasized about reusable rockets. Over the past year, Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, made those visions a reality. Now, the tech mogul has his sights set on a bigger, redder prize. SpaceX has tried four times in the past two years to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets at sea; each exploded. But in April, a Falcon 9 successfully touched down on a drone ship in the Atlantic — a first — ...read more
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A small protein could lead to a cure for traumatic brain injuries.
A short protein fragment, or peptide, may lead the way to healing traumatic brain injuries, a primary cause of death and disability among youth. Currently, drugs to treat such injuries are injected directly into the brain — an invasive technique — or into the bloodstream, which allows the medication to spread throughout the brain, causing harmful side effects. Attaching drugs to the new peptide, called CAQK, woul ...read more
New insights brought to you by the Dawn spacecraft.
Dwarf planet Ceres, found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sports a weirdly tall and lonely mountain: Ahuna Mons. After comparing it with domes on Earth, scientists now believe Ahuna Mons formed when a slushy mix of internal ice and natural antifreeze reached the surface along a duct — just as magma builds volcanoes on our planet. Once on Ceres’ surface, the Slurpee-like material couldn’t flow far, and it slo ...read more
Ethics in a post-CRISPR-Cas9 society.
As the prospect of humans who have been genetically cut and pasted moves closer to reality, governments have begun to take notice of the need for regulation. Through the recently developed gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, scientists can now tweak DNA with unprecedented speed and precision. In 2015, Chinese scientists announced they had used CRISPR-Cas9 on human embryos for the first time. The project, though unsuccessful, took many researchers and governm ...read more
Nuclear chemist Dawn Shaughnessy pushes against the limits of matter.
And then there were 118. In January, an international collaboration of scientists added four new elements to the periodic table: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson. It took the scientists three months to make each atom using a particle accelerator in Dubna, Russia. For years, they smashed together lighter elements at ever-higher energies, hoping they’d fuse perfectly into one heavy, brand-new element. But ...read more
The move paves the way for animal-human hybrid research.
Remember the freakish animal-human hybrids in The Island of Dr. Moreau? The science fiction fantasy might return, approaching science fact. In August, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed lifting a funding ban on research that uses human stem cells to create animal embryos. The move would free U.S. scientists to create, under carefully monitored conditions, the genetic equivalent of an animal-human hybrid. These “chi ...read more
