THE sun is the source of all our warmth. Without it, we would not exist. Like everything else, it is cyclical in nature. The term “lunatic” referred to people who seemed to go a bit strange when there was a full moon. Some people are perhaps susceptible to its gravitational forces. After all, it is the moon that lifts the entire oceans creating high and low tide. There are people who have varying mood swings and others who are a tad more steady. Yet we all have our ups and downs.
People living around the Pacific Ring of Fire are facing a terrifying New Year of earthquakes and volcanoes after experts predicted a period of unprecedented seismic activity.
Santa really was good this year. Rather than handing out expensive kitchen gadgets to clutter up the shrinking counter space, he had some swell presents in his bag. My Dearest was the clear winner — she got a new snow shovel!
When the US entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
Albert Einstein contributed greatly to modern physics, but was he wrong in his definition of gravity lensing? If you are less impressed with clever manipulation of mathematical equations and prefer empirical science, that which is based on verifiable observation of natural events, then the work of Edsel Chromie will interest you.
Paper Reviewed: Pingale, B.N., Singh, S.D. and Yadav, A. 2017. Potential impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on yield and plant growth of rice (Oryza sativa) and maize (Zea mays) crops. Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences87: 1041-1044.
Image copyright: TANUSREE CHAUDHURIImage caption: Tanusree Chaudhuri (centre) with two of her remote-working research colleagues
Tanusree Chaudhuri, 34, was pregnant with her first child when her supervisor told her she would have to give up her dreams. She was doing a doctorate in computational biology and aspired to improve people’s health.
Image copyright: JAMES GALLAGHERImage caption: Peter has Huntington’s disease and his siblings Sandy and Frank also have the gene
It has been a remarkable year of promise in medical science. Incurable diseases from sickle cell to haemophilia now look as though they can be treated. Here are the highlights.
In recent decades, select groups of scientists and politicians have blamed carbon dioxide (CO2) — a “greenhouse gas” — for increasing global temperatures to dangerous levels.
Image copyright: ROBERT PARKImage caption: Stem rust infecting wheat in a field
Scientists say they have made a step forward in the fight against a wheat disease that threatens food security. Wheat is a staple food crop, making up a fifth of the calories on our plates.
But in many parts of the world, the crop is being attacked by stem rust (black rust), a fungus that can ravage a farmer’s fields. Researchers from the UK, US and Australia identified genetic clues that give insights into whether a crop will succumb to stem rust.
Nasa is to fund a helicopter mission to hunt for alien life on Saturn’s largest moon – the ocean world of Titan. The US space agency announced this week that the project, dubbed Dragonfly, has been selected as a finalist for a new expedition which will launch in the 2020s.
President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.
He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation.
Apple has confirmed the suspicions of many iPhone owners by revealing it does deliberately slow down some models of the iPhone as they age. Many customers have long suspected that Apple slows down older iPhones to encourage people to upgrade.
“Words,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, “transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?