Новости за 21.11.2016

Steven T. Corneliussen, Physics Today
Until autumn, the US presidential campaigns and their press coverage attended only sparsely to science issues. Things picked up after Labor Day, but even during the televised debates, little was asked or said. Then Donald Trump won. A trickle of media coverage ensued about science implicationsbut was engulfed by a tsunami of reporting and commentary on climate implications, much of it conspicuously confounded, dismayed, or outright horrified.

Julia Rosen, Science News
Last month, researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico hoped to reach the top of Popocatpetl, a 5400-meter-tall volcano near Mexico City, to install monitoring equipment at its summit crater. But El Popo, as locals call it, rebuffed them with ash and belches of acrid gasprecisely what the scientists wanted to measure. They settled for installing the sensor lower down the mountain, and hope to move it higher next year. The goal is to measure just whatand how muchEl Popo has been smoking... Читать дальше...

Maddie Stone, Gizmodo
Over the weekend, NASA and NOAA launched the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R), the United States' most advanced weather satellite yet, to study extreme storms, tornadoes, fires, lightning, and solar activity at unparalleled resolution. GOES-R is on its way to a geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth. In two weeks, it'll reach its destination, becoming the first of a new generation of Earth-observing spacecraft that will extend NOAA's... Читать дальше...

Drake Baer, Science of Us
If you want to your computer to save the above image of a cute kid dressed up as a robot, it's simple enough: just right-click and save-as, or the equivalent on your operating system. But if you, the human being, wanted to remember the image, the process is way less clear.

Ethan Siegel, Forbes
There are a great many puzzles out there in quantum physics, which is notorious for defying our intuition. Particles seem to know whether you're looking at them or not, displaying different behaviors if you watch them go through a double-slit versus if you don't. Measuring one quantity, like a particle's position, creates an inherent uncertainty in a complementary quantity, like momentum.

Michael Le Page, NewScientist
It's an internet sensation. An alarming graph showing the global area of sea ice falling to unprecedented lows for this time of year has gone viral.The graph adds together the area of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic to show the global total.

Paul Ratner, Big Think
For all the iPhones, virtual reality headsets, deep space rocket engines and self-driving cars that are a part of our modern world, many a crazy contraption was invented along the way. It's entirely possible the ideas presented below are not the weirdest inventions ever simply because the truly weird ones probably never got close to the light of day or their creators were somehow destroyed in the process. Still, these are some of the strangest fruits of human ingenuity we know.

Brian Koberlein, Forbes
The reactionless thruster known as the EM Drive has stirred heated debate over the past few years. If successful it could provide a new and powerful method to take our spacecraft to the stars, but it has faced harsh criticism because the drive seems to violate the most fundamental laws of physics. One of the biggest criticisms has been that the work wasn't submitted for peer review, and until that happens it shouldn't be taken seriously.

Ben Panko, Smithsonian
In matters of the heart, a lot can go wrong. As we age, high blood pressure can overburden this tenacious muscle, causing stroke or heart failure. Smoking cigarettes may harm your heart and blood vessels, as well as damaging individual blood cells. Or the natural effects of old age can render the heart simply too weak to do its job, manifesting in tiredness, shortness of breath or even death. But the heart can also harden, its soft muscle changing into bone.

Mason Inman, Cosmos Magazine
In the 1950s, geologist M. King Hubbert, known as the father of peak oil, warned that crude oil production would eventually peak and then decline. But ironically, he also figured out the mechanics of a technique that would one day expand the life of global oil reserves: hydraulic fracturing.

Ross Pomeroy, RCScience
The mainstream media is absolutely biased, but not in the manner you might be thinking. Ideology sways reporting at some news organizations, but far more pernicious and pervasive is the modern media's penchant for reporting anecdotes.

Aleszu Bajak, Undark
Vice President-elect Mike Pence has many crusades under his belt. He has spearheaded efforts to slash funding for the reproductive nonprofit Planned Parenthood. He recently helped to pass a bill limiting women's access to abortion in his home state of Indiana. And he is an avowed skeptic of evolution, favoring instead the biblical version of humanity's creation.

Mutaz Musa, The Scientist
The concept of aging is undergoing a rapid transformation in medicine. The question has long been asked: Is aging a natural process that should be accepted as inevitable, or is it pathologic, a disease that should be prevented and treated? For the vast majority of medicine's history, the former position was considered a self-evident truth. So futile was any attempt to resist the ravages of aging that the matter was relegated to works of fantasy and fiction. But today... Читать дальше...

Bruce Bower, ScienceNews
The world's earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes.Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization's hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt, says archaeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.

Ida Kvittingen, ScienceNordic
The weirdest language in the world is without a doubt Pirah, says Rolf Theil.The linguistics professor at the University of Oslo has picked his favourite among thousands of human languages.The Pirahs live along the Maici River in the Amazon jungle of Brazil and have become the darlings of language researchers. So much is radically different from Norwegian, or English.

Charley Lineweaver, Conversation
The question of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has been asked by people for many years.But if we hear something, should we answer? In the absence of any signal from them, should we try to make our presence known?One of those asking these questions is Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist with many deep thoughts and a good sense of humour.