By Kathy Finn AMELIA, Louisiana (Reuters) - A day after Army engineers opened a key spillway to relieve flooding along the Mississippi River, residents of small Louisiana towns braced on Sunday for a surge of water that could leave thousands of homes and farms under as much as 20 feet of water. [More]
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Feed SubscriptionToo Hard For Science? Bora Zivkovic–Centuries to Solve the Secrets of Cicadas
Red-eyed periodic cicadas emerge every 13 or 17 years, but finding out why could take millennia In ""Too Hard For Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science
Read More »Solar Power Lights Up Bangladesh Rural Areas
DHAKA (Reuters) - Solar power is in place in nearly a million homes in rural Bangladesh, which is drastically short of electricity, the World Bank said on Monday. "More than 870,000 homes and shops in remote rural areas have installed solar home systems with support from the World Bank and other development partners," the global lender said in a statement. [More]
Read More »7 Radical Energy Solutions, Made Interactive
jQuery(document).ready(function() { [More]
Read More »Floodway Opening a Blessing for Louisiana Refineries
* Alon workers building levee at 80,000 bpd refinery * Spillway opening reduces flooding risk for 8 refineries [More]
Read More »Patent Watch: Registering Impacts in Sports
Masters of the martial art of Tae Kwon Do have gotten so lightning-quick that even a team of four judges placed around a competition ring can have a hard time keeping up.
Read More »Why Bayes Rules: The History of a Formula That Drives Modern Life
Google has a small fleet of robotic cars that since autumn have driven themselves for thousands of miles on the streets of northern California without once striking a pedestrian, running a stoplight or having to ask directions. The cars’ ability to analyze enormous quantities of data--from cameras, radar sensors, laser-range finders--lies in the 18th-century math theorem known as Bayes’ rule.
Read More »America’s Climate Choices Are Narrowing
In 1959 physicist Gilbert Plass warned in Scientific American that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was causing climate change. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson warned Congress of the risk . In 1979 the U.S
Read More »How To Be Persuasive
Want to convince with your gift of gab? Sales people are hip to the tricks, stating everything as a question and doing more listening than yapping.
Read More »Hospital-Acquired Infections: Beating Back the Bugs
It is the ultimate paradox of American health care: going to the hospital can kill you. Every year nearly two million hospital-acquired infections claim roughly 100,000 lives and add $45 billion in costs; that is as many lives and dollars as taken by AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.
Read More »The South Pacific Islands Survey–South Pacific Flotsam
We started trawling! The tide of seasickness has passed and the crew was up early this morning getting ready to deploy the high-speed trawl. The trawl looks like a manta ray and collects samples from the surface of the ocean through a fine mesh net attached to the trawl’s metal "mouth." The sampling net will collect anything in its path, usually plastic fragments and plankton.
Read More »Sugar Flushes Out Hidden Microbes
Used to be that sick kids got lollypops after a visit with the doctor. But in some cases candy can be more than a reward--it can be part of the therapy. Because scientists have found that, in battling chronic infections, sugar can boost the effectiveness of antibiotics
Read More »Method: Only Inauthentic "Green" Cleaning Products Are Failing
Numbers show that people are giving up on non-toxic cleaning products. But they're really just giving up the ones that are doing it for show.
Read More »Why the Mississippi River Floods Should Have Been Expected
By Richard A. [More]
Read More »World Health Organization to Decide Fate of Smallpox Stocks
By Declan Butler of Nature magazine Health ministers from the World Health Organization's (WHO's) 193 member states will next week debate when to destroy the two last known remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox, a scourge that was eradicated in 1980. Many scientists argue, however, that the variola stocks should be maintained, perhaps indefinitely
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