News Articles

Corporate journalists and other pundits have argued that the 2020 election was a referendum on how the administration handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Is that true?

Europe’s past booms and busts, often driven by natural changes in climate, has been revealed using thousand-year-old pollen, spores and charcoal particles fossilized in glacial ice. The analysis of microfossils preserved in European glaciers also revealed earlier-than-expected evidence of air pollution and the roots of modern invasive species problems. The study looked at pollen, spores, charcoal and other pollutants frozen in the Colle Gnifetti glacier on the Swiss and Italian border. The research found changes in the composition of these microfossils corresponded closely with known major events in climate, such as the Little Ice Age and well-established volcanic eruptions.

In the Atacama Desert in Chile east of Pampa del Tamarugal, a plateau in northern Chile nestled between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west, fields of dark green and black glass inhabit a corridor stretching for 30 miles. If you've ever seen a glassblower at work, you know high heat will do the trick, but lacking a crucible 12,000 years ago, it has been a mystery what provided the 2,400 degree heat needed to turn the sand into molten glass that then solidified.A new study finds it was not of this earth. 

In the world of activists and pundits, companies making changes involve all reward and no risk, and if companies don't do it they are just greedy. That thinking is why poor people are subsidizing electric cars and solar panels for the rich, which has made reliance on fossil fuels greater in the past decade.In the real world, companies hesitate because there are no answers to the questions that smart people have. When it comes to reusable packaging, there are more science and technology questions than answers, and there are four reasons companies are hesitating.1.The potential to hurt brand reputation if this new environmental scheme doesn’t turn out to be better for the environment.

Polyurethane is a plastic material used as foam for medical applications, like tubes for intravenous catheters, mattresses, as packaging material, as construction foam and much more. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP, for Chemical Technology ICT, for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM and for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT are now exploring new ways to produce this type of plastic sustainably and without the use of materials that can be toxic at high levels.

Everyone says they have impostor syndrome about something, so perhaps many people just mask it and appear confident. Do men mask it better than women? 

If there is an Eye of Sauron in space, ot at least a Marvel villain like Apocalypse, it might look a lot like CW Leonis, roughly 400 light-years away in the constellation Leo.

All proteins in a cell are assembled by complicated molecular machines. The cell nucleus is a kind of vault: It is located in the cell and guards the DNA, which contains the building instructions for all the cell's proteins. When the cell needs a protein for a specific task, it orders a transcript of the matching DNA segment in the nucleus. This copy leaves the nucleus and reaches the ribosomes, complex molecular machines. These then work through the instructions step by step to produce the desired protein.

Did french fries taste better when they were cooked in fat? How about Coca-Cola when it was made with cane sugar or Fritos when they were salty?People will insist they can tell the difference and they probably can, but sales show that different is not worse. Today, adults are nostalgic about the stuff that older people say is no good.What about the taste of coffee? It is entirely subjective. Dark roast or light, Arabica or Robusta, you like what you like. What if what you like changes?A new paper seeks to sound the climate change around using coffee growing conditions. 

A tipping point in climate computer estimates is a threshold where large and perhaps irreversible changes occur. Some estimates are silly, 20 foot ocean rises, etc., but without data from recent times it is hard to make models more reliable. There was a period of high warming nearly 1,100 years ago and in 10,000 B.C. we were still in an ice age, but with only accurate temperature readings for the last 40 years, and formal observation at all only done for the last 150 years, the only way for climate models of the future to be calibrated is to 'predict the past.'

A research team is working to better define how the finger interacts with a device to create technology that goes beyond sensing and reacting to touch - they want the ability to mimic the feeling of physical objects. Like virtual shopping experience that would let the user feel the texture of materials before purchasing them. And that's actually better for us in many ways.

Even if insurance and household incomes are similar, white people are more likely than people of color to be sent home after surgery rather than to a skilled nursing facility. People of color are also more likely to stay in long-term care or get care at home, according to results presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2021 annual meeting.The reason, the authors believe, it is that people of color are more likely to have severe diabetes and high blood pressure, which can impact recovery.