Insomnia is one of the most frustrating experiences in our modern existence. You stare up at the ceiling (or worse, at the red numbers on a clock), mind buzzing with random thoughts, tossing and turning while everyone else snores away blissfully. It can really drive a person crazy! Everyone has insomnia sometimes. Even though I’m […]
Fires aided by climate change wrecked havoc last year across Australia. Now there’s a chance that water could help save the country from an even worse fate—and not just as a way to extinguish future blazes. An Australian utility has drawn up plans that would marry the country’s renewable energy power with a decades-old trick […]
As COVID-19 claims more victims, scientific models make headlines. We need these models to make informed decisions. But how can we tell whether a model can be trusted? The philosophy of science, it seems, has become a matter of life or death. Whether we are talking about traffic noise from a new highway or about […]
For the fourth Science on the Hill event, “Future Climate: What We Know, What We Don’t”, experts talked with Scientific American senior editor Mark Fischetti about what goes into modeling our climate and how such models are used in addition to long-term climate prediction. Source link
Have you ever met someone who was glad they had pneumonia? I have. And no, this was not someone who wanted to be sick. It was a father, telling me about a time after his baby was born. His work gave him no paternity leave. But because he was sick, he could stay home. He […]
Before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States, Chris Trondsen felt his life was finally in control. As someone who has battled obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and other mental health issues since early childhood, it’s been a long journey. “I’ve been doing really, really well,” Trondsen said. “I felt like most of it was […]
The pandemic creates both a need and an opportunity to help kids deal with difficult emotions — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link
Malaria struck an estimated 228 million people worldwide in 2018. Yet questions remain about how the mosquito-borne malaria parasite, Plasmodium, infects humans—and how antimalarial-drug-resistance genes spread. Different strains of the parasite can exchange genes with one another when they reproduce sexually inside an individual mosquito, and the resulting mixed strains infect humans through the mosquito’s […]
Latin America has become the new epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic. At a media briefing on June 9 Carissa Etienne, head of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), offered a clinical but dire assessment by moving through a chillingly long list that encompasses countries from Mexico to Chile. “In Mesoamerica, case counts are rising […]
Using satellite data, experts have already identified two major blazes in deforested areas of the Brazilian Amazon rain forest—more than two months before the start of the annual fire season. At the same time, the number of new coronavirus cases in the country have dramatically increased. In May a team from Brazil’s National Institute for […]