Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100° Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers, and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.
Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation, and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.
Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.
The world’s most important climate talks were pulled back from the brink of collapse after poorer countries reluctantly accepted a finance package of “at least” $300 billion a year from wealthy nations after bitter negotiations.
Fears about stretched budgets around the world and the election of Donald Trump as US president, who has described climate change as a “hoax,” drove the developing countries into acceptance of the slightly improved package after Sunday 2:30 am local time in Baku.
The UN COP29 climate summit almost collapsed twice throughout Saturday evening and into the early hours of Sunday morning, as vulnerable nations walked out of negotiations and India objected stridently.
Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behavior and identity but are not well understood.
Delusions, on the other hand, are fixed, usually false, beliefs that are strongly held but not widely shared. In previouswork, we proposed that studying delusions provides unique insights into the cognitive nature of belief and its dysfunction.
Based on evidence from delusions and other psychological disciplines, we offered a tentative five-stage cognitive model of belief formation.
An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food—and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.
So food scientists, and a few companies, are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse-engineer an egg,” says David Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
That’s not easy, because real eggs play so many roles in the kitchen. You can use beaten eggs to bind breadcrumbs in a coating, or to hold together meatballs; you can use them to emulsify oil and water into mayonnaise, scramble them into an omelet or whip them to loft a meringue or angel food cake. An all-purpose egg substitute must do all those things acceptably well, while also yielding the familiar texture and—perhaps—flavor of real eggs.
Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business.
Scientists, too, have given them short shrift compared with the seemingly endless attention they have lavished on social insects like ants and bees.
Yet, there are a handful of exceptions. Some researchers have made conscious career decisions to dig into the hidden, underground world where earwigs reside, and have found the creatures to be surprisingly interesting and social, if still not exactly endearing.
Raquel Garcia has been fighting for years to clean up the air in her neighborhood southwest of downtown Detroit.
Living a little over a mile from the Ambassador Bridge, which thousands of freight trucks cross every day en route to the Port of Detroit, Garcia said she and her neighbors are frequently cleaning soot off their homes.
“You can literally write your name in it,” she said. “My house is completely covered.”
This suggests that microplastics in the air may affect weather and climate by producing clouds in conditions where they would not form otherwise.
We are atmosphericchemists who study how different types of particles form ice when they come into contact with liquid water. This process, which occurs constantly in the atmosphere, is called nucleation.
Clouds in the atmosphere can be made up of liquid water droplets, ice particles, or a mixture of the two. In clouds in the mid- to upper atmosphere where temperatures are between 32° and minus 36° F (0° to minus 38° C), ice crystals normally form around mineral dust particles from dry soils or biological particles, such as pollen or bacteria.
Ice in clouds has important effects on weather and climate because most precipitation typically starts as ice particles.
Many cloud tops in nontropical zones around the world extend high enough into the atmosphere that cold air causes some of their moisture to freeze. Then, once ice forms, it draws water vapor from the liquid droplets around it, and the crystals grow heavy enough to fall. If ice doesn’t develop, clouds tend to evaporate rather than causing rain or snowfall.
While children learn in grade school that water freezes at 32° F (0° C), that’s not always true. Without something to nucleate onto, such as dust particles, water can be supercooled to temperatures as low as minus 36° F (minus 38° C) before it freezes.
For freezing to occur at warmer temperatures, some kind of material that won’t dissolve in water needs to be present in the droplet. This particle provides a surface where the first ice crystal can form. If microplastics are present, they could cause ice crystals to form, potentially increasing rain or snowfall.
Clouds also affect weather and climate in several ways. They reflect incoming sunlight away from Earth’s surface, which has a cooling effect, and absorb some radiation that is emitted from Earth’s surface, which has a warming effect.
The amount of sunlight reflected depends on how much liquid water vs. ice a cloud contains. If microplastics increase the presence of ice particles in clouds compared with liquid water droplets, this shifting ratio could change clouds’ effect on Earth’s energy balance.
The Earth constantly receives energy from the Sun and reflects it back into space. Clouds have both warming and cooling effects in this process.
Credit:
NOAA
How we did our work
To see whether microplastic fragments could serve as nuclei for water droplets, we used four of the most prevalent types of plastics in the atmosphere: low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, and polyethylene terephthalate. Each was tested both in a pristine state and after exposure to ultraviolet light, ozone, and acids. All of these are present in the atmosphere and could affect the composition of the microplastics.
We suspended the microplastics in small water droplets and slowly cooled the droplets to observe when they froze. We also analyzed the plastic fragments’ surfaces to determine their molecular structure, since ice nucleation could depend on the microplastics’ surface chemistry.
For most of the plastics we studied, 50 percent of the droplets were frozen by the time they cooled to minus 8° F (minus 22° C). These results parallel those from another recent study by Canadian scientists, who also found that some types of microplastics nucleate ice at warmer temperatures than droplets without microplastics.
Exposure to ultraviolet radiation, ozone, and acids tended to decrease ice nucleation activity on the particles. This suggests that ice nucleation is sensitive to small chemical changes on the surface of microplastic particles. However, these plastics still nucleated ice, so they could still affect the amount of ice in clouds.
What still isn’t known
To understand how microplastics affect weather and climate, we need to know their concentrations at the altitudes where clouds form. We also need to understand the concentration of microplastics compared with other particles that could nucleate ice, such as mineral dust and biological particles, to see whether microplastics are present at comparable levels. These measurements would allow us to model the impact of microplastics on cloud formation.
Plastic fragments come in many sizes and compositions. In future research, we plan to work with plastics that contain additives, such as plasticizers and colorants, as well as with smaller plastic particles.
As the Popo Agie River wends its way down from the glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains toward the city of Lander, it flows into a limestone cave and disappears. The formation, known as the Sinks, spits the river back out at another feature called the Rise a quarter of a mile east, a little more voluminous and a little warmer, with brown and rainbow trout weighing as much as 10 pounds mingling in its now smooth pools. The quarter-mile journey from the Sinks to the Rise takes the river two hours.
Scientists first discovered this quirk of the middle fork of the Popo Agie (pronounced puh-po zuh) in 1983 by pouring red dye into the river upstream and waiting for it to resurface. Geologists attribute the river’s mysterious delay to the water passing through exceedingly small crevasses in the rock that slow its flow.
Like many rivers in the arid West, the Popo Agie is an important aquifer. Ranchers, farmers, businesses, and recreationists rely on detailed data about it—especially day-to-day streamflow measurements. That’s exactly the type of empirical information collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them, or something else.
For some people, including me, one piece stands out—the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel, and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.
As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.
In the 1940s, scientists at the recently established National Cancer Institute were trying to breed mice that could inform our understanding of cancer, either because they predictably developed certain cancers or were surprisingly resistant.
The team spotted a peculiar litter in which some baby mice had short, kinked tails and misplaced ribs growing out of their neck bones. The strain of mice, nicknamed “tail short,” has been faithfully bred ever since, in the hope that one day, research might reveal what was the matter with them.
After more than 60 years, researchers finally got their answer, when Maria Barna, a developmental biologist then at the University of California San Francisco, found that the mice had a genetic mutation that caused a protein to disappear from their ribosomes—the places in cells where proteins are made.
For Cherise Irons, chocolate, red wine, and aged cheeses are dangerous. So are certain sounds, perfumes and other strong scents, cold weather, and thunderstorms. Stress and lack of sleep, too.
She suspects all of these things can trigger her migraine attacks, which manifest in a variety of ways: pounding pain in the back of her head, exquisite sensitivity to the slightest sound, even blackouts and partial paralysis.
Irons, 48, of Coral Springs, Florida, once worked as a school assistant principal. Now, she’s on disability due to her migraine. Irons has tried so many migraine medications she’s lost count—but none has helped for long. Even a few of the much-touted new drugs that have quelled episodes for many people with migraine have failed for Irons.
At the University of Toronto, just across the street from the football stadium, workers are putting up a 14-story building with space for classrooms and faculty offices. What’s unusual is how they’re building it — by bolting together giant beams, columns, and panels made of manufactured slabs of wood.
As each wood element is delivered by flatbed, a tall crane lifts it into place and holds it in position while workers attach it with metal connectors. In its half-finished state, the building resembles flat-pack furniture in the process of being assembled.
The tower uses a new technology called mass timber. In this kind of construction, massive, manufactured wood elements that can extend more than half the length of a football field replace steel beams and concrete. Though still relatively uncommon, it is growing in popularity and beginning to pop up in skylines around the world.
The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize: a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space.
The spherical shell known as the Oort Cloud is, for all practical purposes, invisible. Its constituent particles are spread so thinly, and so far from the light of any star, including the Sun, that astronomers simply cannot see the cloud, even though it envelops us like a blanket.
It is also theoretical. Astronomers infer the Oort Cloud is there because it’s the only logical explanation for the arrival of a certain class of comets that sporadically visit our solar system. The cloud, it turns out, is basically a gigantic reservoir that may hold billions of icy celestial bodies.
On October 10, 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf of Mexico—a pillar of American air superiority—found itself under aerial attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the Florida coast, unexpectedly hulked up to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour whipped into the base, flinging power poles, flipping F-22s, and totaling more than 200 buildings. The sole saving grace: Despite sitting on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael’s 9- to 14-foot storm surge swamped other parts of Florida. Tyndall’s main defense was luck.
That $5 billion disaster at Tyndall was just one of a mounting number of extreme-weather events that convinced the US Department of Defense that it needed new ideas to protect the 1,700 coastal bases it’s responsible for globally. As hurricanes Helene and Milton have just shown, beachfront residents face compounding threats from climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. Rising oceans are chewing away the shore. Stronger storms are more capable of flooding land.
In response, Tyndall will later this month test a new way to protect shorelines from intensified waves and storm surges: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by Rutgers University scientists. The 50-meter-wide array, made up of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing about 46,000 pounds, can take 70 percent of the oomph out of waves, according to tests. But this isn’t your grandaddy’s seawall. It’s specifically designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature’s most effective wave-killers.
Pamela Goodwin has received hundreds of emails from patients asking if they should take a cheap, readily available drug, metformin, to treat their cancer.
It’s a fair question: Metformin, commonly used to treat diabetes, has been investigated for treating a range of cancer types in thousands of studies on laboratory cells, animals, and people. But Goodwin, an epidemiologist and medical oncologist treating breast cancer at the University of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, advises against it. No gold-standard trials have proved that metformin helps treat breast cancer—and her recent research suggests it doesn’t.
Metformin’s development was inspired by centuries of use of French lilac, or goat’s rue (Galega officinalis), for diabetes-like symptoms. In 1918, researchers discovered that a compound from the herb lowers blood sugar. Metformin, a chemical relative of that compound, has been a top type 2 diabetes treatment in the United States since it was approved in 1994. It’s cheap—less than a dollar per dose—and readily available, with few side effects. Today, more than 150 million people worldwide take the stuff.
When satellites first started peering down on the craggy, glaciated Antarctic Peninsula about 40 years ago, they saw only a few tiny patches of vegetation covering a total of about 8,000 square feet—less than a football field.
But since then, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed rapidly, and a new study shows that mosses, along with some lichen, liverworts and associated algae, have colonized more than 4.6 square miles, an area nearly four times the size of New York’s Central Park.
The findings, published Friday in Nature Geoscience, based on a meticulous analysis of Landsat images from 1986 to 2021, show that the greening trend is distinct from natural variability and that it has accelerated by 30 percent since 2016, fast enough to cover nearly 75 football fields per year.
There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content.
They are opportunists. These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.
There are several types of this sort of conspiracy-spreader trying to influence you.
On February 3, 2023, a train carrying chemicals jumped the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio, rupturing railcars filled with hazardous materials and fueling chemical fires at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
The disaster drew global attention as the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania urged evacuations for a mile around the site. Flames and smoke billowed from burning chemicals, and an acrid odor radiated from the derailment area as chemicals entered the air and spilled into a nearby creek.
Three days later, at the urging of the rail company Norfolk Southern, about 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a chemical that can be toxic to humans at high doses, was released from the damaged train cars and set aflame.
Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.
They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.
Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.
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