Uncategorized
- Climate
5 things to know about fighting climate change by planting trees
One group’s idea of planting vast swaths of trees to curb climate change exaggerates the proposal’s power to trap carbon, some argue.
-
Readers question carbon nanotube transistors and brain organoids
Readers had questions about carbon nantoube transistors and brain organoids.
-
Problem solving and the power of humankind
Editor in Chief Nancy Shute discusses the AIDS epidemic and a woman who helped define the limits of mathematical understanding in the 20th century.
- Science & Society
A Dallas museum hosts rare hominid fossils from South Africa
Fossils of the South African hominids Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi are on display at the Perot Museum of Science and History in Dallas.
- Health & Medicine
For people with HIV, undetectable virus means untransmittable disease
HIV outreach and care in Washington, D.C., reveals the struggles and successes of getting drugs into the hands of those who need them.
- Space
Realigning magnetic fields may drive the sun’s spiky plasma tendrils
Solar spicules emerge near counterpointing magnetic fields, hinting that self-adjusting magnetism creates these filaments, which may heat the corona.
- Tech
A tiny switch could redirect light between computer chips in mere nanoseconds
Microscopic switches that ferry information using light, not electric current, could help create better, faster electronics.
- Climate
California landfills are belching high levels of climate-warming methane
Airborne remote sensing spots the Golden State’s biggest emitters of the potent greenhouse gas from the sky.
- Health & Medicine
Drug-resistant microbes kill about 35,000 people in the U.S. per year
The latest CDC report on drug-resistant microbes finds that these pathogens infect close to 3 million people in the United States each year.
- Animals
A tooth fossil shows Gigantopithecus’ close ties to modern orangutans
Proteins from the past help clarify how an ancient Asian ape that was larger than a full-grown, modern male gorilla evolved.
- Space
NASA gave Ultima Thule a new official name
The distant world briefly visited by New Horizons is now called Arrokoth, a Powhatan word that means “sky.”
- Earth
Plastics outnumber baby fish 7-to-1 in some coastal nurseries
Ocean slicks serve as calm, food-rich nurseries for larval fish. A new study shows that slicks also accumulate plastics, which get eaten by baby fish.
