Wendy Science

In  , Professor Mildred Dresselhaus will for her leadership and contributions across many fields of science and engineering. She is the  to receive the organisation’s highest honor since its inception in 1917. Dresselhaus is famous for her work in carbon-based materials including buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs), nanotubes and graphene. In the energy sector, carbon-based materials are in terms of their ability to increase energy storage capacities in battery technologies and supercapacitors. to the IEEE, “the era of carbon electronics can be traced back to [Dresselhaus's] tireless research efforts.” Dresselhaus is the daughter of destitute Eastern European immigrants and a product of Great Depression and World War II–era New York City schools and their melting-pot culture where her only apparent career option was that of a schoolteacher (and “even that was a bit of a stretch, given the time and place”). But her love of music would help her discover ...

Device stimulates hand muscles to counteract writing issues experienced by some people with Parkinson’s. Larry Greenemeier reports. April 30, 2015 | | causes tremors or stiffness that can turn everyday tasks such as eating, brushing teeth or into frustrating chores.A few years ago, a company called developed forks and spoons that respond to shaking by steadying the utensil, making it easier enjoy a meal.Now researchers at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art in London are developing a device called the ARC pen that vibrates to stimulate muscles in the hand. The vibrations could help Parkinson's patients’ handwriting—in part by counteracting what’s known as micrographia, which causes writing to be small and barely legible. Micrographia is often an early sign of Parkinson’s and afflicts about of patients.The researchers, who formed a company called Dopa Solution, have not published results but they say that 12 out of the 14 Parkinson’s sufferers testing their vibrating...

From A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth , by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink. Copyright © 2015, Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Press. Perhaps it is terrestrial chauvinism, or perhaps it is true that only life such as our own is possible in the universe. But the search for exoplanets has, at its core, the central goal of finding other “Earths.” The question becomes to define just what an Earthlike planet really is. We all have a conception of our planet in the present day: dominated by oceans, a green and blue place, and our place. But as we go back in time and forward in time, we find that the Earth was and absolutely will be a place very different from the planet we now call home. Earthlike is really a time as well as a “place” definition, it turns out. There are various definitions that are current in astronomy and astrobiology, the two fields most concerned with defining just what ...

The suborbital "New Shepard" spacecraft reached an altitude of more than 93 kilometers in its inaugural flight April 30, 2015 | and | Blue Origin, a company founded by Amazon.com's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, launched the New Shepard spacecraft from its West Texas proving grounds The private spaceflight company Blue Origin launched a surprise test  of its suborbital New Shepard spaceship on Wednesday (April 29), a mission that successfully demonstrated the space capsule but failed to recover its reusable rocket booster. Blue Origin, a company founded by Amazon.com's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, launched the New Shepard spacecraft from its West Texas proving grounds.   shows it soaring up to an altitide of 307,000 feet (93,573 meters).  "The in-space separation of the crew capsule from the propulsion module was perfect,"  . "Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return." [ ] A longer,   show...

For the past two decades scientists have been trying to unravel a mystery in young girls. Breast development, typical of 11-year-olds a generation ago, is now occurring in more seven-year-olds and, rarely, even in three-year-olds. That precocious development, scientists fear, may increase their risk for cancer or other illnesses later in life. Time has not resolved the puzzle. Nor is there any indication that this trend is slowing. More and more families are finding themselves in the strange position of juggling stuffed animals and puberty talks with their first and second graders. Obesity appears to be the major factor sending girls into these unchartered waters. The rate of obesity has more than doubled in children over the past 30 years. And whereas only 7 percent of children aged six to 11 were obese in 1980, nearly 18 percent were obese in 2012. The latest studies, however, suggest that weight gain does not explain everything. Family stress and chemical exposures in the environme...

A distorted science project from Science Buddies April 30, 2015 | | Flat maps cannot accurately depict the surface of our round Earth. So how do map makers adjust? Try this hands-on activity and make your own mineature planet--then flatten it and see what happens! Key concepts Maps Introduction Background Materials Surface covered with butcher paper or other protective material Medium-size balloon (for example, a 12-inch balloon) Bottle cap (such as one from a plastic water bottle) Permanent marker (medium-thick works best) Scissors Six pushpins Cardboard piece, 20-by-25 centimeters or larger (It should be either thick cardboard or two layers of regular cardboard so the pushpins do not stick through.) Two assistants (The activity can be done alone but is easier with assistants.) Preparation You will use a balloon to represent Earth in this activity. Blow up the balloon to about half full and tie it. The top of the balloon and the knot represent the North and South p...

ALAMEDA, Calif.—The first time Devine Simpson had an asthma attack, she said she couldn't stop coughing. It was so bad, it woke her up in the middle of the night. "I felt like I was going to throw up," she said. Devine was diagnosed at age 3, and for many years, her asthma seemed out of control, said her mother, Tracie Simpson. About two years ago, Simpson began bringing Devine, who is now in fifth grade, to the Breathmobile, a mobile 33-foot recreational vehicle that is outfitted as an asthma clinic. Operated by West Oakland, Calif., nonprofit the Prescott-Joseph Center with a recent influx of funding from Chevron Corp., the clinic is parked in front of a smattering of Alameda and Contra Costa elementary schools on most days. Devine is one of 25 million people in the United States diagnosed with asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Asthma is an inflammatory condition or disease of the airways that affects the bronchial tubes in ...

In honor of the spacecraft MESSENGER, which ends its mission today with a planned collision with Mercury, here’s a look back at the craft and its travels, as illustrated by Don Foley for the issue of . Illustration by Don Foley. Originally produced for "Journey to the Innermost Planet" by Scott L. Murchie, Ronald J. Vervack, Jr., and Brian J. Anderson, in Scientific American, March 2011. Graphic by Jen Christiansen; Source: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington; Originally produced for "Journey to the Innermost Planet" by Scott L. Murchie, Ronald J. Vervack, Jr., and Brian J. Anderson, in Scientific American, March 2011. Although MESSENGER was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, it wasn’t the first mission to send back images of the planet. Mariner 10 flew by three times in 1974-75, thanks to a sling-shot assist from Venus. Here is how Allen Beechel illustrated its trajectory for the issue of the magazine...

THIS IS A PREVIEW. or to access the full article.Already a subscriber or purchased this issue? Although many women begin their studies in these fields, their numbers drop at every stage of educational and professional advancement. At the undergraduate level in the U.S., about half of all students are women. Yet in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math—STEM for short—women account for only 39 percent of bachelor's degrees and 35 percent of Ph.D.s. At the end of this leaky educational pipeline, only 27 percent of the people working in STEM-related occupations are women. Educators and policy makers have deployed various strategies to encourage women to stay in STEM careers, but the effectiveness of these campaigns could be improved. Measures to increase the number of women in these careers typically center on the barriers, biases and stereotypes that discourage them—a so-called prevention focus. The obstacles can be formidable, but emphasizing only the negatives c...

WORKING IN THE FIELD CCF's Marker examines a young cheetah captured by a farmer with a cage trap, circa 1999. As she has done with more than 900 cheetahs, Marker anesthetized the animal to check for injuries, assess its overall health and collect blood samples.....[ More ] WORKING IN THE FIELD CCF's Marker examines a young cheetah captured by a farmer with a cage trap, circa 1999. As she has done with more than 900 cheetahs, Marker anesthetized the animal to check for injuries, assess its overall health and collect blood samples. She has farmers (on the right) assist with the checkup so they can understand more about the species, which she believes makes them less likely to shoot on sight. This cheetah was only 10 months old and therefore unable to go back into the wild and survive on its own, so the CCF found a facility in Namibia where it could live.[ Less ]  [ ]

The National Zoo is working on ways to make artificial insemination and embryo transfers reliable enough to rebuild genetically stagnant cheetah populations April 30, 2015 | | The cheetah has been critically endangered for decades. Between 7,000 and 10,000 cheetahs are left in the wild—the majority in Africa—down from 100,000 in 1900, and habitat destruction and human conflict continue to decrease their numbers. More on this Topic For many reasons, breeding cheetahs is difficult. Because most of the species died leaving only a small number left to repopulate in the wild some 10,000 years ago, today’s cheetah population suffers from low genetic diversity. All living cheetahs are between 5 and 10 percent genetically alike; this similarity manifests itself in poor sperm quality, increased disease susceptibility and high infant mortality. To make matters worse females are picky about which mates they choose and have delicate reproductive cycles. If two unrelated female cheetahs are pla...

Climate change caused by human activities currently drives 75% of daily heat extremes and 18% of heavy rain or snowfall events, the team found—warning that further global warming will sharply increase the risks of such weather. More on this Topic Global warming has profoundly changed the odds of extreme heat, rain and snowfall, researchers report on 27 April in . Climate change caused by human activities currently drives 75% of daily heat extremes and 18% of heavy rain or snowfall events, the team found—warning that further global warming will sharply increase the risks of such weather. The researchers looked at 'moderate' extremes, which they defined as events expected to occur on 1 in every 1,000 days under present conditions. “Climate change doesn’t ‘cause’ any single weather event in a deterministic sense,” says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Switzerland, and the study's lead author. “But a wa...

A Progress robotic delivery spacecraft that launched toward the International Space Station suffered a serious malfunction shortly after liftoff April 29, 2015 | and | A file photo of a Russian Progress 55 cargo ship leaving the International Space Station in July 2014. Russia's latest cargo ship Progress 59 launched on April 28, 2015, only to suffer a serious malfunction after reaching orbit. An ailing Russian cargo spacecraft is falling from space and will soon meet a fiery demise in Earth's atmosphere after suffering a serious malfunction on Tuesday (April 28), a NASA astronaut said today. The unmanned   is doomed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after failing to deliver more than 3 tons of supplies to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly told reporters in a series of televised interviews.   has shown it to be tumbling in an out-of-control spin. "We were both told recently by both the U.S. and Russian flight contro...

The U.S. National Institutes of Health reiterated its position after researchers delete a disease gene in nonviable zygotes April 29, 2015 | and | The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reaffirmed its ban on research that involves gene-editing of human embryos. In a statement released on April 29, NIH director Francis Collins spelled out the agency’s long-standing policy against funding such research and the ethical and legal reasons for it. The statement comes after   that researchers in China had used a gene-editing technology called CRISPR to remove disease genes from a human embryo. That research was published in  on April 18. The NIH is concerned about the safety of the technique and the ethical implications of altering genes that will be passed to future generations of humans. Collins also pointed out that there are few clinical situations in which editing would be the only way to prevent the passage of a genetic disease from parent to child. In al...

When calamities like the Nepal earthquake hit, people look for numbers to help calculate the toll of destruction. That puts the spotlight on operations like , which is world’s largest independent Web site for earthquake data. The site has a rapid earthquake-loss estimation model, so that within 30 minutes of an event, anywhere in the world, they can offer a prediction about fatalities and economic loss. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) also has a Web site; the models differ in how they determine an event’s impact, the economic inputs used and the databases they draw from. Earthquake-report.com has a narrower estimate of deaths, up to 10,000, whereas the USGS gives a much broader spread, estimating that between 10,000 and 100,000 fatalities are most likely. Earthquake-report co-founder James Daniell, a civil and structural engineer at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technologyin Germany, began collecting earthquake damage statisti...

As the main driver of climate change, the connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming is clear. But evidence shows they may be connected in another way—the physical footprint of oil and gas development on the landscape may not only contribute to global warming, it may also affect an ecosystem’s ability to withstand it. New research shows that an area larger than the land area of Maryland—more than 11,500 square miles—was completely stripped of trees, grasses and shrubs to make way for more than 50,000 new oil and gas wells that were developed each year between 2000 and 2012. Such broad industrialization may harm the ability of some regions to recover from drought and damage the ability of the land to store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of the development studied was in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the central U.S. and Canada, where are creating “industrialized landscapes,” often in areas that are already drought stricken. That fast-spreading d...

A relatively small number of tree species store more than half the carbon April 28, 2015 | and | Despite ongoing logging and recent drought, the Amazon is home to perhaps a sixth of the carbon stored in living vegetation the world over. Within the botanical menagerie that makes up the Amazon rainforest, which is so important it’s frequently dubbed the “lungs of the planet,” scientists have pinpointed a small number of tree species that are doing the heaviest breathing as they help to slow global warming. Their discovery—that 182 species store half the rainforest’s woodbound carbon—suggests that the future of the world’s climate, and the contours of its coastal areas, are intertwined with the fate of this small portion of an estimated 16,000 Amazonian tree species. Despite   and  , the Amazon is home to perhaps a sixth of the carbon stored in living vegetation the world over, helping to keep levels of climate-changing carbon dioxide down in the atmosphere. “The Amazo...

The extremely successful global healthcare program sets malaria eradication goals in some countries Apr 14, 2015 | | RTI International In an era when partisan squabbling threatens to bring the U.S. government to a halt, one of America's most successful global health programs, begun under President George W. Bush in 2005, is about to enter a second phase. Known as the President's Malaria Initiative, or PMI, the program is considered by many to be one of the best run and most effective of the U.S.'s worldwide health efforts. The initiative is one of the largest players in the international effort to combat malaria, which kills more than half a million people a year. An estimated 4.3 million fewer malaria deaths occurred between 2001 and 2013, according to the World Health Organization, which is about a 47 percent reduction in the number of deaths if malaria patterns in 2000 had gone unchecked. PMI accounted for a substantial part of this success. The program is based on ...

Male minnows exposed to a widely used diabetes drug ubiquitous in wastewater effluent had feminized reproductive parts and were smaller and less fertile, according to a  . It is the first study to examine the drug metformin’s impact on fish endocrine systems and suggests that non-hormone pharmaceuticals pervasive in wastewater may cause reproductive and development problems in exposed fish. Metformin is largely used to combat insulin resistance associated with type-2 diabetes, which accounts for about 90 percent of all diagnosed U.S. adult diabetes cases. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee exposed young fathead minnows to water containing levels of metformin commonly found in wastewater effluent. Eighty-four percent of 31 metformin-exposed male fish exhibited feminized reproductive organs. “Normally in females you see eggs developed in ova, in males, you see a different structure – producing tiny sperm instead of an egg structure,” said Rebecca Klaper, an as...