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When Flu Pandemics Hit, Closing Schools Can Slow Spread

Everyone knows that when your kids get the flu, they stay home from school. But what does it take to justify closing the school down entirely? That’s a question we should probably answer before the next big pandemic hits. At one point during the swine flu outbreak in 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and [...]

Time Travel And Photos Of Earth’s ‘Oldest’ Animals

Photographer Piotr Naskrecki presented a hypothetical: “If someone said, ‘We have a dinosaur in Central Africa!’ — would you consider that worthy of conservation? If so, why?” That was his way of putting me in place for asking why anyone would care about a creepy grasshopper in South Africa. Apples and oranges, in a way, [...]

International Meeting On Controversial Bird Flu Research Draws Near

The World Health Organization has just one week left to prepare for a highly anticipated meeting on controversial bird flu research. One official says that 22 invitations have gone out and the WHO is still waiting to hear back from some of the invitees. Recent experiments involving the H5N1 bird flu virus have caused a [...]

‘Amasia’: The Next Supercontinent?

The Earth’s continents are in constant motion. On at least three occasions, they have all collided to form one giant continent. If history is a guide, the current continents will coalesce once again to form another supercontinent. And a study in Nature now shows how that could come about. You can think of continents as [...]

‘Rasputin Was My Neighbor’ And Other True Tales Of Time Travel

He was old, but not ancient, the man next to us at the delicatessen. It was 1973. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had ordered dinner and this old guy, sitting by himself, seemed lonely, so we got talking and he told us how he had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that [...]

Robots Encountering Socks

“Consider the perceptual challenges inherent in the robotic manipulation of unseen socks,” says an engineering team at the University of California, Berkeley. Suppose you’re a robot. If you had a camera in your head, and you could watch a human doing a simple task, like bunching a pair of socks, could you, just by watching, [...]

Two Deaths: A Poet And A Beetle

She’d wake up like we do, look out the window just like us, rummage through her days, but somehow what caught her attention — a grasshopper’s hop, an infant’s fingernails, plankton, a snowflake — when Wislawa Szymborska noticed something, she noticed it so well, her gaze reshaped the thing she saw, gave it a dignity, [...]

Addicts’ Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control

Many addicts inherit a brain that has trouble just saying no to drugs. A study in Science finds that cocaine addicts have abnormalities in areas of the brain involved in self-control. And these abnormalities appear to predate any drug abuse. The study, done by a team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., looked [...]

Is Today’s Beef Better For The Environment?

The American beef industry has taken a bit of a beating in recent years. Beef has been linked to heart disease and cancer and hamburgers have been recalled. We’re also often told that cattle require a lot of precious food and water to make tender steaks. But a study wants to rectify beef’s image as [...]

Whose Fingers Are On The Victoria’s Secret Model’s Shoulder?

It’s not like it hasn’t been done before; it has. The problem is, it is so easy now, anyone can do it, and we’d never know because the tools are so subtle. I’m talking about doctored pictures — manipulating images, or what simpler folks call “lying.” There used to be a saying on the Web: [...]