Banner
Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

Synchrotron Could Shed Light On Exotic Dark Photons

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how...

The Pain Scale Is Broken But This May Fix It

Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

User picture.
News StaffRSS Feed of this column.

News Releases From All Over The World, Right To You... Read More »

Blogroll

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is so commonly diagnosed – and overdiagnosed, and misdiagnosed – that it is hard to know what is based on evidence and what is based on teachers and concerned parents reacting to children that don't like to sit around and do nothing.

Actual clinical ADHD used to be rare but now it is a common problem of "pill culture" in psychiatry and the most common behavioral disorder label given to children in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Not that you want to do this but there is an easy way to speed up a woman's reproductive timing - just get a clock.

Not one of those modern digital things, an actual ticking clock will literally do it, says a paper upcoming in Human Nature.

It turns out that the tick-tock of the metaphor has some basis in reality. Or not. The authors also claim that poor women are more likely to be affected by this ticking sound. And the authors are psychologists so beware of mainstream media making grand biological claims based on this.

Interpreting snow depth records from past decades is as much art as science. Even into the 1990s, Soviets on Arctic drifting sea ice used meter sticks and handwritten logs to record snow depth. Today, things are a lot more accurate. Airborne measurements are validated by researchers on the ground using automated probes similar to a ski pole. 

Accuracy is important. The public has become concerned about what is happening at the poles, and so research led by NASA and the University of Washington combined data collected by ice buoys and NASA aircraft with historic data from ice floes staffed by Soviet scientists since the late 1950s through the early 1990s to track changes over decades. 

In the 1950s and '60s, economics in America really had a heyday. Tinkering is easy when the economy is good. By the 1970s, it was realized that economics truly was, as historian Thomas Carlyle labeled it in the 19th century, a "dismal science" - except leave off the science.

Materials scientists have long sought to form glass from pure, monoatomic metals and Scott X. Mao, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues have done it.

How was it accomplished? It's long been conjectured that any metallic liquid can be vitrified into a glassy state provided that the cooling rate is sufficiently high. As is said about the original alchemy, turning lead into gold, it is now simply a matter of having enough energy.  But this of vitrification single-element metallic liquids has needed more than just high energy.

Natural gas proliferation has been a huge boon for the environment - CO2 emissions have plummeted among the U.S. energy sector, primarily because coal emissions have been knocked back to early 1980s levels. But there are concerns by environmentalists that modern hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") has risks, and it has been implicated in everything from earthquakes to methane in water even to claims it will cause the earth to deflate.