Wearing high-grade filter masks can help protect against the novel coronavirus. But after a few hours, these tight-fitting devices can also make it really hard to breathe. N95 respirators, for example, are famously good at blocking viral particles—but they can also reduce the amount of available oxygen by up to 20 percent. Now some Stanford […]
A new x-ray survey of distant galaxies suggests that the universe is expanding unevenly Credit: Scientific American Space & Physics June 2020 Advertisement In my eighth-grade science class, our teacher explained to us the Doppler effect: that objects moving away from us would display stretched-out sound or light waves, whereas objects moving toward us would […]
One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability it gives us to catch up on films and television that we missed the first time around. Recently I watched the Up series, a remarkable documentary project by filmmaker Michael Apted that has tracked the lives of 14 British people since 1964, when they were […]
Accurately distinguishing friend from foe is a matter of life and death for ants: mistaking an invader for a nest mate—or the reverse—can lead to fatal chaos. Scientists have long observed ants deftly navigating through crowds, attacking only individuals that might be hostile. New research confirms how smell receptors on the insects’ antennae hold the […]
Most food waste gets thrown into in landfills rather than being recycled—but one abandoned dump is getting a makeover — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link
The ongoing global COVID-19 outbreak has revealed how strikingly unprepared the world is for a pandemic. A governance crisis is unfolding alongside the pandemic as health officials around the world compete for access to scarce medical supplies. As the governments of African countries seek to avoid catastrophic outcomes, we point to a recent Lancet analysis […]
When Nathalie Feiner spotted a tiny nematode worm wriggling in an embryonic lizard’s brain from the French Pyrenees, she thought it was a freak accident. She was dissecting hundreds of common wall lizard embryos for a study and had never encountered this invader before—but soon she started finding them in more of the still unhatched […]
In athletics, the path along which runners sprint is dictated in advance. What the competition tests is the skill of the runners in traversing that path at the fastest speed. The primary task of scientific research, on the other hand, is to identify the right path to take. But even though this holds true […]
In 2017 researchers from several universities used advanced laser-based technology to peer inside ice cores pulled from high in the Alps. They found the Black Death. The ice-core record showed that during the past 2,000 years, the annual levels of lead in the atmosphere took a sudden dip only once. That period was 1349 to […]
The need for connection– to form and maintain at least a minimal number of positive, stable, intimate relationships– is a fundamental need that affects our whole being, permeating our entire suite of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. While voluntary solitude can be great fodder for creativity, and being alone doesn’t necessarily indicate loneliness, what happens when […]