An anniversary is usually a cause for celebration. Gifts are exchanged. Happiness is spread. Memories are shared. The U.S. Department of the Interior has a different idea about how it will mark the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.…
Category: Science
We Have Entered a New Period of Extinction
You can probably guess with a good degree of certainty just which creatures were wiped out during the last mass extinction on Earth. That’s right: the dinosaurs. Well, to be more accurate, it was the non-avian dinosaurs that were wiped…
Your Contact Lenses Increase Your Chance of Eye Infections
If you wear contacts, you may be far more familiar than you’d like to be when it comes to eye infections and the costs associated with them. Even if you have been able to avoid such nuisances, according to a…
Mars Missions May Damage the Brains of Astronauts
For years, physicians have known that radiation treatment can cause cognitive and memory problems in cancer patients, a condition commonly known as having “chemo brain.” More specifically, as described by the American Cancer Association, symptoms of “chemo brain” can include…
Two Huge Magma Chambers Sitting Beneath Yellowstone National Park
Apparently, there is more to the Yellowstone National Park than meets the eye. As described in Science Magazine, scientists had already known about a volcanic plume that exists under the Park, which “brings molten rock up from deep in the…
Pacific Ocean Warm Blob May Cause California Drought
At best, this year’s weather has been called “odd.” During the East Coast winter, it seemed to snow massive amounts each week and when it wasn’t snowing, the weather proved bone-chillingly cold. The West Coast has instead been “warm and…
Researchers Get Frustrated Magnets to Show Hall Effect for the First Time
In condensed matter physics as described in a Wikipedia article on the subject, “frustration” is a phenomenon in which atoms stick to specific, non-trivial positions or where inter-atomic forces favoring different structures conflict, and this “frustration” creates complicated structures or…
Limiting Global Warming to 2 Degrees Celsius Is “Utterly Inadequate”
In October of last year, scientists David G. Victor and Charles F. Kennel wrote in an article for the journal Nature that for nearly a decade, international diplomacy has set a goal of “stopping global warming at 2 degrees celsius above…
WHO Report Finds Monsanto Roundup Weed Killer a Probable Cancer Risk
Monsanto Company is an American multinational agricultural corporation headquartered in Missouri. In 1974, the company invented glyphosate, the active ingredient of its herbicide, Roundup. In the mid-1990s, Monsanto introduced genetically engineered crops such as corn and soybeans, which were resistant…
Super Pi Day is a Once in a Century Event
For math enthusiasts, March 14th, or Pi Day, provides the perfect excuse to make pies and celebrate the mathematical constant, pi. Pi describes the circumference of a circle and is often written as 3.14, though computers have calculated pi up…
Female Menopausal Killer Whales Are Group Leaders, Help in Group Survival
Research studies have previously shown that postmenopausal women have a “decidedly beneficial effect on the reproductive success of [their] children and the survival of [their] grandchildren.” This effect, known as the grandmother hypothesis, has been used to better understand, in…
Over 1 Billion Teenagers and Young Adults at Risk for Hearing Loss
According to the Center for Hearing and Communication, hearing loss affects approximately 38 million people in the United States. By age 65, one of every three people have some degree of hearing loss, making it a major public health issue…
Alien Life on Saturn’s Moon Titan May Be Nothing Like We Know It
The search for alien life has often seemed the stuff of science fiction dreams; however, an increasing number of scientists are not ashamed to be associated with this movement. Officially called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI, this term…
Researchers Find Chronic Fatigue Syndrome May Be a Disease
The condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has a controversial and storied history since its discovery in 1988. According to Wikipedia citing other sources, for years, many in the medical community did not recognize CFS (also known as myalgic…
Climate Change Denier Wei-Hock Soon Took Over $1 Million from the Oil Industry
There is an ongoing debate about how humans are affecting the global climate and subsequently, what governments and policy makers should do to stem the effects of climate change. According to Wikipedia, no scientific body disagrees with the view that…
Rising Seas May Claim Parts of New York City According to Climate Change Panel
Over the last century, the temperature of the earth has increased by approximately 1.4 degrees F and is expected to increase another 2 to 11.5 degrees F in the next century. Scientists have shown human activities have driven these changes given…
Both Modern and Ancient Cities Grew in a Similar Way
We’d like to think that our modern technology and infrastructure, skyscrapers and sophisticated economic system has rendered the modern, Western city the epitome of civilization. But perhaps modern cities are not too different form their ancient predecessors. According to Archaeology,…
New Aggressive HIV Strain from Cuba Worries Researchers
In 2013, lead author Steven G. Deeks, M.D. and his colleagues Drs. Sharon R. Lewin and Diane V. Havlir, published an article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet titled, “The end of AIDS: HIV infection as a chronic disease.”…
NASA Releases Video Capturing 5 Years of the Sun’s Surface
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is a research program designed to better understand the causes of solar variability and its effect on Earth and near-Earth space. According to Wikipedia, major research goals also include investigating the formation and structure of…
NASA Warns US Southwest Facing a Long Term MegaDrought
There are those who strongly believe that man-made climate change will destroy the earth — and others who just as strongly deny such claims. Regardless of your own views about this debate, it is clear that places in the United…