The mountain of evidence connecting professional football and long-term brain damage grew this week with publication of a new study that examined the brains of former NFL players. Boston University scientists found 110 of the 111 post-mortem brains showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the […]
Smug eco-warriors may think they’re curbing global warming with their vegan diets, charged-up Teslas, and rooftop solar panels. But according to Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, we’re barely staving off disaster. He should know: The pessimistic professor has been studying sea ice for nearly 50 years. […]
This story originally appeared on The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Staff at the US Department of Agriculture have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead. A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation […]
There’s a reason some people laugh when I say that mindfulness meditation can save the United States—that it can dampen the political polarization now dividing the country; that it can defuse the hatreds that have propelled the word “tribal” into our political vocabulary and have led serious commentators to compare the US in 2017 to […]
Imagine you're a scientist. You published a paper in a reputable journal a couple of years ago, and that paper has made an impact in your field of study. It has shaped your own research and has inspired others to pursue similar lines of investigation. Thanks to that paper, you're enjoying a certain status among […]
Update: SpaceX successfully launched and re-landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to resupply the International Space Station. On Monday, SpaceX is poised to end a 40-day launch drought in the United States with a cargo run to the International Space Station. The commercial space outfit will fire off its 12th resupply service mission […]
At 7:37 am Eastern time on Saturday, a Cygnus cargo ship jam-packed with over three tons of crew supplies and hardware will blast toward the International Space Station atop Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket. ISS resupply missions aren’t just about making sure astronauts never run out of toilet paper. (Those folks keep a six month stockpile […]
Brains, beyond their signature achievements in thinking and problem solving, are paragons of energy efficiency. The human brain’s power consumption resembles that of a 20-watt incandescent lightbulb. In contrast, one of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers, the K computer in Kobe, Japan, consumes as much as 9.89 megawatts of energy—an amount roughly equivalent to […]
When Aleix Segura holds his breath, he thinks about his heart. On land, the focus causes his heart rate to increase—but underwater, it has the opposite effect. "Once my muscles are relaxed and my heart has slowed down, I kind of just … disconnect," says the world champion breath-holder. Sometimes, he relaxes so completely that […]
Zipping around like a bumblebee, the little black-and-yellow tractor claws its bucket into one of San Francisco’s few vacant lots, kicking up a puff of dust. Payload secured, it backs up—beep, beep, beep—whips around, and speeds to its dirt pile, stopping so quickly that it tips forward on two wheels. It drops its quarry and […]