Stronger Flood Protection Standards Are Coming for New Hospitals, Schools and Apartments The International Code Council has approved stronger building codes to protect hospitals, schools and other structures from flooding By Thomas Frank & E&E News The Barker Reservoir and Buffalo Bayou Dam are shown August 30, 2017 in Houston, Texas. The city of Houston…
Superb starlings take an unusual approach to co-parenting Grahame Cornforth / Alamy Stock Photo They say it takes a village to raise a child; for these birds, it is no different. Superb starlings not only help raise other starlings’ chicks, but they also switch between the roles of “parent” and “nanny” multiple times throughout their…
Neandertals may have been forging projectile weapons out of animal bones 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. A bone fragment unearthed from roughly 80,000-year-old rock in Europe shows signs of sharpening and bitumen residue — a sticky tar suggesting the point was once attached to some sort of shaft, perhaps to make a spear or…
Blood of Man Who’s Had 200 Snakebites Helps Make a Potent Antivenom A new snakebite treatment combines an existing drug with antibodies from a hyperimmune reptile collector, raising both hopes and ethical concerns By Katherine Bourzac & Nature magazine A cocktail containing antibodies and an enzyme inhibitor protects mice against the venom of the king…
Normal potatoes like these turn brown when they are sliced open Formatoriginal / Alamy The potatoes I am eating are nice, but they don’t stand out taste-wise. To find out what is special about them, you need to cut open the raw tubers and keep an eye on them. What you will see is, er,…
Jupiter’s Cyclones, Amazon’s Satellites and T. rex Collagen Climate studies are paused, new satellites join the crowded skies, the Juno spacecraft studies Jupiter, and biotech companies will create T. rex leather (or will they?). By Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! And happy May. I…
Some people live with pain for years or even decades AsiaVision/Getty Images Learning how to regulate negative emotions like anxiety could ease chronic pain. Scientists have found that a form of therapy that partly focuses on tolerating distress relieved ongoing discomfort more effectively than existing treatments. “Chronic pain is more than a sensory experience, it’s…
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As Americans become more polarized, even family dinners can feel fraught, surfacing differences that could spark out-and-out conflict. Tense conversations often end with a familiar refrain: “Let’s just drop it.” As a communications educator and trainer, I am…
Quantum correlations are the strongest ones ever measured SAKKMESTERKE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The strange connections between quantum objects are the strongest relationships physicists can detect – and the mathematics of graphs may help explain why that is. “We are touching the question of, in some way, why quantum theory is as it is,” says Carlos Vieira…
Where Bronze Age civilizations got large amounts of tin, a scarce metal, to mix with copper into the era’s namesake gold-colored metal has long puzzled archaeologists. A big part of the answer lies in Cornwall and Devon, two counties in southwestern England, a new study concludes. Farming communities began mining large tin ore deposits there…
