Four-year-old Nadia began to show some worrisome signs. She had an unusually poor appetite accompanied by a dry cough. Sure enough, testing revealed that she was infected with COsVID-19. Nadia now seems to be on the mend after receiving medical attention. Good thing too, because Nadia is one of the very few of her kind […]
A significant melt event is unfolding in Greenland this week. With temperatures nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than usual in some areas, the southern part of the ice sheet is melting at its highest rate this season. Forecasts suggest that the melting on Greenland’s South Dome—one of the highest elevations on the ice sheet—may be […]
Your clever brain can work overtime building worst-case scenarios. Here’s how to recognize and avoid common thinking traps so you don’t get stuck — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link
Our sun is a ship; our galaxy is the sea. Moving in cosmic currents, our star completes a lap of the Milky Way every 230 million years or so, with its retinue of planets in tow. For the most part, this journey is solitary, save for the occasional close encounter with another star. But a […]
Originally published in November 1895 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “The federal government has been experimenting at its military posts with condensed rations. At Fort Logan, the rations consisted of coffee and soup, condensed into small tablets; the bread was crushed into a flat cake of the weight and hardness of a stone. The bacon was […]
Vaccines may soon make their film debut. Led by pharmaceutics expert Maria A. Croyle, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a thin sheet that preserves vaccines and other biological medicines for long periods without refrigeration. This means the carefully cooled vials now used to ship vaccines could potentially be replaced by […]
With almost 70 percent of the world’s student population impacted by school closures according to UNESCO, the long-term impact on individuals, the education system, the global workforce, and tools and technology, can only be speculated about and hypothesized. What we do know is that building resilience among students is more important than ever. The need […]
Deep in the inky depths of what’s called the ocean’s mesopelagic zone, more than five hundred meters below the surface, the main source of light is not the sun. Even during the day. Most of the light comes instead from bioluminescent organisms, creatures that produce their own light. It’s in these dark depths that southern […]
When Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas in 2017, the neighborhood that suffered the worst flood damage was a section of southwest Houston where 49% of the residents are nonwhite. When Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana in 2005, the damage was the most extensive in the region’s African American neighborhoods. Of the seven ZIP codes that suffered […]
The scenario might sound like the opening line of a science-themed comedy routine: a molecular biologist and a Bible scholar meet on a bus. Eight years after that encounter the two have developed a new technique using DNA sequencing that they say will enable them to match—or separate—minuscule fragments of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. […]