CBS News reports: Companies making so-called “forever chemicals” knew they were toxic decades before health officials, but kept that information hidden from the public, according to a peer-reviewed study of previously secret industry documents. The new study in the Annals of Global Health concluded that 3M and DuPont, the largest makers of per- and polyfluoroalkyl… Read More »
Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes: After studying the reversal of Earth’s magnetic pole known to have occurred 42,000 years ago, a science team led by Alan Cooper from the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Australia concludes that the event had significant environmental repercussions, especially at lower and mid-latitudes. That time period, known as the Laschamps Excursion, had… Read More »
Philip Ball writes: Assembly theory makes the seemingly uncontroversial assumption that complex objects arise from combining many simpler objects. The theory says it’s possible to objectively measure an object’s complexity by considering how it got made. That’s done by calculating the minimum number of steps needed to make the object from its ingredients, which is… Read More »
W. Ian Lipkin writes: In 1999, the New York State Department of Health asked me to test brain samples from people in Queens experiencing encephalitis, or brain inflammation. Surprisingly, we found they were infected with West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne virus that had never been reported before in North America. How did a virus endemic… Read More »
Tuomas Tahko writes: Philosophers and scientists alike often talk about “fundamentality” or the “fundamental level”. We might say that, fundamentally, everything is made of waves or that quantum field theory is as close to a fundamental theory as we currently have. More colloquially, we might say that ultimately everything is made of the fundamental “building… Read More »
The Washington Post reports: Some of the workers received booster shots to prevent infection by common rabies, and none of them reported illness, according to their supervisor. But the incidents raised disturbing questions about the research: What if they encountered an unknown virus that killed humans? What if it spread to their colleagues? What if… Read More »
Katherine J. Wu writes: For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the… Read More »
The New York Times reports: The inner core of the Earth appears to hold an innermost secret. Geology textbooks almost inevitably include a cutaway diagram of the Earth showing four neatly delineated layers: a thin outer shell of rock that we live on known as the crust; the mantle, where rocks flow like an extremely… Read More »
The Washington Post reports: The theory that covid-19 started with a lab accident in central China received a modest boost in the latest U.S. intelligence assessment after the work of a little-known scientific team that conducts some of the federal government’s most secretive and technically challenging investigations of emerging security threats, current and former U.S.… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is… Read More »
Tim Adams writes: Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. That something, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in this enjoyable and provocative little book [Anaximander and the Nature of Science], occurred in the interaction between two of the place’s greatest minds. The first, Thales, one… Read More »
By Tom Siegfried, Knowable Magazine, February 2, 2023 Among the achievements of the ancient Roman Empire still acclaimed today, historians list things like aqueducts, roads, legal theory, exceptional architecture and the spread of Latin as the language of intellect (along with the Latin alphabet, memorialized nowadays in many popular typefaces). Rome was not known, though,… Read More »
Ed Struzik writes: Biologist Eric Regehr and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began studying polar bears from the American side of the Chukchi Sea, which stretches from Alaska to Russia, in 2008. But as the region warmed, and the increasingly thin spring sea ice off the Alaskan Coast made helicopter landings… Read More »
Nature reports: In December, computational biologists Casey Greene and Milton Pividori embarked on an unusual experiment: they asked an assistant who was not a scientist to help them improve three of their research papers. Their assiduous aide suggested revisions to sections of documents in seconds; each manuscript took about five minutes to review. In one… Read More »
Nature reports: Three years into the pandemic, the immune systems of the vast majority of humans have learnt to recognize SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination, infection or, in many cases, both. But just how quickly do these types of immunity fade? New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19,… Read More »
Nature reports: Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so. “We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and… Read More »