An overwhelming number of emergency managers in the U.S. are white, and the profession must diversify to reverse decades of disaster response policies that have shunned minority communities and perpetuated racial discrimination, a state emergency manager told Congress yesterday. Curtis Brown, the emergency management coordinator for Virginia, delivered a blistering statement to a House committee […]
A spacecraft is only as strong as its power source, which is why when NASA was designing its Perseverance Mars rover, the agency turned to radioactive plutonium. The plutonium that will be blasting off the planet on Thursday (July 30) isn’t in the same form as is used for weapons, and it’s well protected in case something happens […]
For more than four centuries, archaeologists and geologists have sought to determine the geographical origins of the stones used to build Stonehenge thousands of years ago. Pinning down the source of the large blocks known as sarsens that form the bulk of the monument has proved especially elusive. Now researchers have resolved the mystery: 50 […]
A major drop in public transit use coincides with concerns about reducing air pollution that can exacerbate lung conditions — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link
Originally published in August 1908 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “It is not often that a measure of such a startling character as the Daylight Saving Bill is introduced into the English House of Commons. The fact that the momentous changes advocated are proposed by William Willett, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that […]
Since World War II, most countries around the world have come to use gross domestic product, or GDP, as the core metric for prosperity. The GDP measures market output: the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in an economy during a given period, usually a year. Governments can fail if this number […]
As California’s Camp Fire raged in 2018, soot and other pollution filled the skies. Particulate matter concentrations widely surged above 12 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3), pushing them into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “unhealthy” range. And in some places, they jumped to hundreds of µg/m3. This miasma included particles 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller, […]
Three years ago, I received an e-mail from a 10-year-old girl I’ll named Ann, from Brazil, my native country, asking me several questions. Is there life on Mars? Do you control the Curiosity [rover]? Does NASA have a lot of technology? Do you work with research? Do you know many scientists? Do you know the […]
When the immune system fights viruses, timing is key. And this maxim may be especially true for its defense against the deadly severe form of COVID-19. Several new studies of immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, suggest timing could be critical for a class of proteins known as interferons, which are […]
In April, Vice President Mike Pence violated COVID-19 safety protocols at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, refusing to don a mask when he toured the hospital. In May, President Donald Trump similarly eschewed a mask—while visiting a mask-making facility. Pence said he wanted to look health care workers in the eye, even though masks don’t […]