On March 24, with only four hours’ notice and no consultation with India’s 29 states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Almost all transport and industry came to an abrupt halt, throwing hundreds of millions of workers in the informal sector, who live hand-to-mouth at the best […]
The world will sorely miss the wit and wisdom of David Perlman, long admired as the senior statesman of American science writing, who has passed away at age 101. He was born during the 1918 flu pandemic and died in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The former San Francisco Chronicle reporter and science editor emeritus […]
Yesterday morning, I was riding my bike up a pretty significant hill. To get up that hill, I was pedaling as hard as I could. I had nearly reached the top when I felt that familiar trickle of moisture run down my forehead. Even though it was only 6ºC (42ºF), I was sweating. Our human […]
Top news from around the world Credit: NASA Advertisement U.S. A hiker found two rusted, unexploded bombs from 1935 on the Mauna Loa volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. The bombs had been intended to help divert lava flow during an eruption. FRANCE Researchers report dinosaur footprints up to 1.25 meters long on the roof of […]
When you walk on a sandy beach, it takes more energy than striding down a sidewalk—because the weight of your body pushes into the sand. Turns out, the same thing is true for vehicles, driving on roads. “The weight creates a shallow indentation or deflection in the pavement. And makes it such that it’s continuously […]
In late April Democrat Kweisi Mfume of Maryland won a special election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in a landslide victory against his Republican rival. More remarkable than his win, which garnered three quarters of the vote, however, was that more than 110,000 Baltimoreans in the district cast their ballot by […]
Fiber may seem like a somewhat frumpy nutrient, but it is actually one of the hottest nutrition topics right now. That’s partly because fiber plays such a big role in the health and function of the gut microbiota. And anything to do with the microbiome is trending—for good reason! The way we define and categorize fiber has […]
Six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and with summer on the doorstep, scientists are still investigating whether weather and climate affect the novel coronavirus. Experts seem to be converging on a mix of good and bad news. Hotter, more humid weather probably does dampen the transmission of the virus, at least a bit. But it’s […]
This is not the right time for a bigger particle accelerator. But CERN, the European physics center based in Geneva, Switzerland, has plans—big plans. The biggest particle physics facility of the world, currently running the biggest particle collider in the world, has announced it aims to build an even bigger machine, as revealed in a […]
Originally published in January 1898 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “The catalog of brilliant achievements of surgery must now include the operation performed by Dr. Carl Schlatter, of the University of Zurich, who has succeeded in extirpating the stomach of a woman. The patient is in good physical condition, having survived the operation three months. Anna […]