Your nose, mouth, skin pores and…other…body holes each serve their unique functions. But most of them also double as biological exhaust pipes, spewing gaseous byproducts of the myriad internal chemical reactions keeping you alive.
And, just as we measure emissions form our internal-combustion vehicles, advances in medical technology make it easier to analyze the gases you leak into the atmosphere.
Scientists at RMIT University in Australia developed a pill-sized sensor that measu ...read more
I just learned about a truly remarkable case in which a doctor apparently wrote a paper about a serial killer who murdered her five children - without realizing what had happened. It's an old case, but it doesn't seem to be widely known today.
The paper is called Prolonged apnea and the sudden infant death syndrome: clinical and laboratory observations and it was written in 1972 by Dr Alfred Steinschneider of Syracuse, New York. In this paper, Steinschneider described the case of a woman, "Mr ...read more
Although it’s possible for space missions to communicate data with Earth, the process is anything but fast. Voyager 1, for example, takes about 19 hours to send a signal back to Earth, and that lag only increases as the spacecraft gets further away. For truly long-term, deep space missions, the significant amount of time it takes to send a signal isn’t going to cut it. The spacecraft will need to adjust its own trajectory without relying on ground navigation. That’s where ...read more
One of the many consequences of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is ocean acidification—the lowering of seawater pH as CO2 chemically reacts with dissolved ions in seawater. Scientists have found that more acidic waters are dangerous to many species, especially structure-builders like corals, and thus the potential drop in pH predicted in the future would be devastating to marine habitats.
So it's not surprising that many scientists are actively looking for ways to mitigate thi ...read more
I'm a bit late to this story, but it's significant enough that I didn't want to let it pass by without posting something about it. The long and short of it is this: 2017 truly was a horrific year for weather and climate disasters, both in the United States and the world as a whole.
Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, fires and freezes in the United States claimed at least 362 lives and injured many more in 2017. In total, the nation experienced 16 weather and climate disaster ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine