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Building on lessons learned from SARS-CoV-2, pandemic preparedness has taken on renewed urgency Credit: Scientific American Health & Medicine, April/May 2022 Advertisement The COVID pandemic is by no means over. Despite plunging case numbers in the U.S. as of this writing, many countries in the world are still experiencing peak infection rates. And it is … Read more
Ukraine could be a space technology superpower but the country is held back by “Stalin-esque” attitudes that treat experts like peasants, says American aerospace engineering student Aaron Harford who chose Ukrainian capital Kyiv for his Ph.D. studies four years ago. A mid-life divorce prompted Harford, at that time a math professor at Henderson State University … Read more
A Russian-made video posted on Telegram a week ago is causing some anxiety about the status of a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS). As shared by NASA Watch on Saturday (March 5), the video by Russian state news outlet RIA Novosti shows NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei being left behind on the … Read more
As rodents called agoutis avoid areas where ocelots prowl, they spread fewer of the palm seeds they eat, which could lead to a cascade of changes in biodiversity throughout Panama’s forests Life 8 March 2022 By Jake Buehler An agouti gnawing on a palm seed Steven Paton A game of cat and mouse is playing … Read more
Ten years ago, an unnamed American woman was diagnosed with HIV. Like the tens of thousands of people who test positive in the US each year, she faced a lifetime of anti-retroviral therapies to keep the virus from obliterating her immune system. Today, that’s no longer the case. The patient is part of an … Read more
Neuroscientists may have discovered the brain regions that give rise to our identity Credit: Scientific American MIND, March/April 2022 Advertisement Human consciousness remains one of the biggest puzzles in science. Indeed, we have made moderate progress on how to measure it but less on how it arises in the first place. And what gives rise … Read more
More than 1500 years ago, a vast culture known as the Hopewell tradition (or Hopewell culture) stretched across what is today the eastern United States. The cause of the culture’s decline has long been debated, with war and climate change two of the possibilities, but now a new avenue of inquiry has opened up: debris from a … Read more
In 2016 a panel of physicists, a cosmologist and a philosopher gathered at the American Museum of Natural History to discuss an idea seemingly befitting science fiction: Are we living in a computer simulation? How exactly the flesh and blood of our brain is able to formulate an aware, self-examining mind capable of critical thought … Read more
Credit: Scientific American Space & Physics, February/March 2022 Advertisement On this past Christmas Day, NASA scientists and engineers cheered and breathed a cautious sigh of relief for the first time in, likely, years. The James Webb Space Telescope launch had gone off successfully, after years of delay, budget overages and technical challenges. In the ensuing … Read more
COVID-19 vaccines saved nearly 241,000 lives in the United States and prevented more than 1 million virus-related hospitalizations in the first six months of the country’s inoculation program, according to a new research model. A research letter, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA Network Open, found coronavirus vaccinations also prevented more than 14 … Read more