Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
When well-meaning people in Madagascar, urged on by poorly-informed environmentalists and carbon credit companies, rushed to plant a million trees in one January day, scientists were outraged. They were planting them in the country’s barren Central Highlands - and destroying an ancient ecosystem.Ancient Madagascan grasslands fell victim to a modern frenzy to afforest the world that has gripped political leaders - and that is thanks to lobbyists paid by environmental lawyers.
A new operating mode for fusion power avoids instabilities in the plasma that place a heavy load on the vessel wall and to remove heat and particles from the plasma more gently.The aim of fusion energy is to tame atomic nuclei the way the sun does. Because the fusion fire only ignites at temperatures above 100 million degrees, its low-density hydrogen plasma fuel must not come into contact with the colder vessel walls. That is achieved using magnetic fields inside a ring-shaped vacuum chamber. The international experimental reactor ITER, currently being built in Cadarache, France,will show feasibility by generating fusion power of 500 megawatts.
A high-tech jamming session, through which a blend of live human and computer-generated sounds came together to create a unique performance piece, has been created thanks to "spooky action at a distance."
Emotions are an integral part of our lives. They influence our behavior, perceptions, and day-to-day decisions. The spontaneous amodal coding of emotions - independent of perceptual modalities like the physical characteristics of faces or voices - is easy for adults, but how does the same capacity develop in children?Recent experiments using kids ages 5, 8 and 10 years sought to find out when children began to recognize happiness or anger depending on whether it is expressed by a voice or on a face.
In geological history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years has been ice ages, and it has been 12,000 years since the last one. In a 'glass half full' optimistic take on emissions, the Industrial Age put a halt to a 6,500 year cooling trend and the ice age for which we are overdue, but just like salt, sugar, or Avengers movies, there can be too much of a good thing and now there are worries that climate is going out of control the other way.
When it comes to evolutionary biology and life on other planets, there is talk of amino acids, the building blocks of our existence.But for any of that to work we first needed magnetic fields and plate tectonics, and a new paper finds that Earth became a "Goldilocks planet" by getting to the right place at the right time. So if we want to find other forms of life, we need to look for exoplanets that developed earlier rather than later.Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars in other solars around distant stars and with thousands now known, there is a lot of speculation about how to detect life. It will start with narrowing down the possibilities; position, temperature, and geochemistry.
When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes while when stars that are less massive reach their end, they explode in a supernova and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars.Those are called neutron stars and heaviest known neutron star is two and a half times the mass of our sun while the lightest known black hole is about five solar masses. What's in that "mass gap" between neutron stars and black holes?A new paper posits some answers.
How a sunset would appear on other planets is a staple of science-fiction. The sun is as fundamental to grounding our existence as the earth, for most of us. Yet lots of people go months without seeing a sunrise or sunset.That's extreme, but even more extreme is how it would look on Titan.
Environmental groups believe that living in cities is better for the environment but if there is one thing that COVID-19 has made clear, it's that living in cities is better for spreading infectious disease also. Despite having numerous large cities, the U.S. was on the verge of having measles wiped out, but as the anti-vaccine movement spread on the east and west coasts, they brought a resurgence of it. A group of researchers looked for its origins and found it may help provide answers about coronavirus, which is in the same family as the common cold but was discovered to be novel in the 1960s.
Though we've only detected a few thousand exoplanets, there are likely 6,000,000,000 Earth-like ones out there, and that means millions could be "ocean worlds" capable of supporting life.Right now, our knowledge of ocean worlds is limited to moons like Enceladus around Saturn and Europa around Jupiter. Plumes of water erupt from Europa and Enceladus, so we can tell that these bodies have subsurface oceans beneath their ice shells, and they have energy that drives the plumes, which are two requirements for life as we know it
When called on to explain why he lives in a gigantic mansion with its resulting environmental cost, Academy Award winner, Nobel laureate, and U.S. Vice-President Al Gore said he bought carbon offsets from a company he owned that sold carbon offsets.Paying himself to emit greenhouse gases sounded ridiculous but a new analysis shows that buying offsets - paying a company to plant trees - can be just plain risky. Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but if they are managed by a group that doesn't believe in logging or clearing brush. If a forest goes bust in a fire all that stored carbon goes up in smoke again.Credit: David Meikle, The University of Utah
There have been more celebrity suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic and while tragic, they may help to bring great awareness to the risks of depression and anxiety in other populations at all times. Such as pregnant and postpartum women.
