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Science

Climate Change to Kill a Quarter Million a Year

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In the coming decades, more than a quarter-million people may die each year as a result of climate change, according to a new review study. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that climate change would lead to about 250,000 additional deaths each year between 2030 and 2050, from factors such as malnutrition, heat stress and malaria. But the new review, published Jan. 17 in The New England Journal of Medicine, said this is a “conservative estimate.” That’s because it fails to take into account other climate-related factors that could affect death rates — such as population displacement and … Read more

SCIENCE: We Can Now Rewrite Rat Memories

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When Ivan Pavlov’s dog heard the ding of a bell, the pup started salivating in anticipation of his dinner. When professor Mary Torregrossa’s rats heard a similar tone, they craved cocaine. At least, some of them did — before Torregrossa and her colleagues rewrote their memories. Torregrossa studies the psychology of drug addiction and relapses at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (where she is also an associate professor of psychiatry). In a new study published Jan. 22 in the journal Cell Reports, Torregrossa and two of her colleagues set up a Pavlovian experiment in which a group of … Read more

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Destroying the Earth (In Three Easy Steps)

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Mad scientists through the ages have dreamed of holding the world hostage by threatening to destroy the whole thing, demanding riches, power and fame, and respect from their peers. But if you’re going to play this game yourself, you’d better do it right — and doing it right means doing your homework. Destroying our planet is no easy task. Sure, you could bomb us back to the stone age, introduce a plague to wipe out all complex life or whip up some sort of nanomachine to completely eliminate the entire biosphere. But in all those cases, the rock we stand … Read more

Did Time Run in Reverse Before the Big Bang?

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Like a mountain looming over a calm lake, it seems the universe may once have had a perfect mirror image. That’s the conclusion a team of Canadian scientists reached after extrapolating the laws of the universe both before and after the Big Bang. Physicists have a pretty good idea of the structure of the universe just a couple of seconds after the Big Bang, moving forward to today. In many ways, fundamental physics then worked as it does today. But experts have argued for decades about what happened in that first moment — when the tiny, infinitely dense speck of … Read more

TECH: Make it rain!

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Don’t call them the weather gods, but this company can actually make it rain. North Dakota-based Weather Modification International uses planes to target clouds and draw out more rain from them.The concept, called cloud seeding, has been around for decades. But there is new urgency due to climate change and a rapidly growing global population, which have disrupted global water supplies. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages, according to the World Wildlife Fund.Weather Modification describes cloud seeding as “an enhancement” of the natural precipitation process. The technology makes storms more efficient by getting additional moisture … Read more

AI Can Now Read Your Mind (Sort Of)

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Neuroscientists are teaching computers to read words straight out of people’s brains. Kelly Servick, writing for Science, reported this week on three papers posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in which three different teams of researchers demonstrated that they could decode speech from recordings of neurons firing. In each study, electrodes placed directly on the brain recorded neural activity while brain-surgery patients listened to speech or read words out loud. Then, researchers tried to figure out what the patients were hearing or saying. In each case, researchers were able to convert the brain’s electrical activity into at least somewhat-intelligible sound … Read more

Cartographer Creates Beautiful Rainbow Maps of River Basins

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Rivers get the rainbow treatment in a gorgeous series of maps from a Hungarian cartographer. Available for download on Etsy, the maps are both beautiful and scientifically accurate. Their creator, Robert Szucs, has a background in geographic information systems (GIS) but was bored by standard river maps with “all the lines blue, all the same width.” “Uninspiring,” he told Live Science. “I felt I might be able to do better.” Since 2016, Szucs has been offering his maps on Etsy, where nearly 4,000 buyers seem to agree that he’s done better. Selling the maps was originally just a hobby, he … Read more

2018’s Ten Weirdest Science Stories – Live Science

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What were the top 10 strangest science stories of the past year? It wasn’t easy to choose just 10 — 2018 was pretty darn strange. However, writers at Live Science and at our sister site Space.com managed to put together a list of our favorites; from a space-bound Tesla to an unusual (and uncomfortable) confrontation between a seal and an eel. Ne-crow-philia? Crows can do some pretty amazing things. They use tools. They can solve puzzles. They also, sometimes, have sex with their dead. Scientists placed a dead crow on the ground and watched how other crows reacted. Some mounted … Read more

Are Black Holes Portals to the Future? – Live Science

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Black holes are among the most mysterious places in the universe; locations where the very fabric of space and time are warped so badly that not even light can escape from them. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, at their center lies a singularity, a place where the mass of many stars is crushed into a volume with exactly zero size. However, two recent physics papers, published on Dec.10 in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D, respectively, may make scientists reconsider what we think we know about black holes. Black holes might not last forever, and … Read more

Greenland May Soon Be Green Again – Live Science

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Greenland - Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Greenland is melting faster today than it has at any time in the last 350 years, and probably much longer, new research finds. Surface melt from the icy island has increased 50 percent in the last 20 years compared with the early 1800s, before the industrial era, researchers report today (Dec. 5) in the journal Nature. The runoff alone is now contributing about a millimeter to the global average sea level per year, said study co-author Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Climate change has hit Greenland very hard recently, and the ice sheet is responding quickly,” … Read more