Category: Amazing News

There was a man who left Europe in 1799 to explore what we now call Latin America. He made some prescient predictions about climate change based on what he saw, and was a towering figure in his time. In fact, according to a wonderful interview we found on National Geographic’s website, Darwin would not be Darwin if it weren’t for Alexander Humboldt. National Geographic interviewed Andrea Wulf, author of “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World”  a new book that is attempting to restore Humboldt to his rightful prominence in history.

When asked why Humboldt has slipped between the cracks of history, Wulf replies:

I think there are several reasons. He was the last of the great polymaths who lived at a time when you could hold all the world’s knowledge in your head. As science became specialized, people like Humboldt got pushed to the boundaries.

The other thing, which is probably more important, is that he remained famous in the English-speaking world until World War I, when there was a lot of anti-German sentiment. In Cleveland, in 1859, they celebrated Humboldt’s centennial. But with the outbreak of war, they burned all the German books in the library. And he has never really recovered.

According to Wulf, on his adventures in Latin America, Humboldt ascended every accessible volcano, including Chimborazo, which is just under 21,000 feet. At the time, it was considered the tallest mountain in the world.  Wulf continues:

They have terrible shoes and clothing. It’s snowing and freezing cold. He has an injured foot from a previous climb, his feet are bleeding because the soles of his shoes have been shredded on the jagged rocks, and all the time the peak of Chimborazo is covered in fog.

Then suddenly the fog lifts and they see this snowcapped peak against the blue sky. They also see this huge crevasse in front of them. There’s no way to the top, so they stop there, at around 19,400 feet, about 1,000 feet below the peak. This is still the world record. No one has ever climbed that high. Not even air balloons have been that high. So he’s literally standing on top of the world.

Wulf felt compelled to follow in Humboldt’s footsteps, find out why on the next page…

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How about this for the scoop of the week?  Elon Musk has admitted that he’s in favor of nuking Mars in order to terraform it into a planet where humans can live.  That’s right, just last night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he said exactly that.  We found the details over on the Popular Science website:

Elon Musk has often been compared to Tony Stark. The billionaire entrepreneur is the brains behind SpaceX’s reusable rockets, Tesla’s electric cars, and the solar power provider SolarCity. But last night when comedian Stephen Colbert pressed Musk to decide whether he’s a superhero or a supervillain, Musk was evasive.
Now we know why. Later on in the interview, Musk admitted that he advocates detonating thermonuclear explosives on neighboring planet Mars.

The businessman has often stated that he thinks humans should colonize Mars, and now it seems he’ll stop at nothing to get his way.

“It is a fixer-upper of a planet,” Musk told Colbert. “But eventually you could transform Mars into an Earth-like planet.”

There’s a fast way and a slow way to do that… “The fast way is, drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles,” said Musk.

Well how about that… even though he says he just wants to do “useful things” several times in the interview with Colbert, it looks like Elon Musk may have supervillian tendencies.

 

Source: Elon Musk To Stephen Colbert: Nuclear Weapons Could Terraform Mars

Image Credit: Screen grab from YouTube

Bruce Ribner, Emory University

A year ago, I received a phone call: an American citizen had been infected with Ebola virus disease while serving as a medical missionary in Liberia. Would Emory University Hospital accept this patient for treatment?

Of course, we said yes. Kent Brantly was admitted to our Serious Communicable Diseases Unit on August 2 2014 – the first person to be treated for Ebola in the United States. Three more patients would also come to Emory, putting us at the center of public scrutiny and debate.

Most of the tsunami of hate mail I received in those early days was based on concern that we would be unable to contain the virus, endangering the American public. Caught up in panic about “bringing Ebola to the United States,” most people missed the real question exposed by the outbreak – how do we prevent infectious diseases from spreading out of control in the first place?

Prep time made all the difference

Emory’s specialized Serious Communicable Diseases Unit was built in 2002 in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to care for CDC scientists and others who had become exposed to highly infectious diseases.

Before last summer, only two patients suspected of having highly contagious diseases had been treated there, and both turned out to be negative. But the health care professionals who work in the Serious Communicable Diseases Unit, all volunteers, go through special training every few months, so we knew we were ready to care for a patient with Ebola.

In the 72 hours from that phone call to Dr Brantly’s arrival at Emory, the staff who would care for him – including some who canceled vacations to be part of the team – came together to review and rehearse procedures.

We also worked to counter fear with facts. We held town hall meetings with other hospital staff to answer their questions and hosted a packed press conference to explain more about Ebola, our isolation unit and why the American public had nothing to fear from these patients.

Ebola cases continue to be reported in West Africa, but when was the last time you saw a major media report about fighting the virus and preventing future outbreaks?

The biggest threat we face now isn’t the Ebola virus – it’s our short attention span.

The danger of distraction

Whether fueled by apathy, boredom or both, the public’s short attention span imperils public health both in developing nations and in the United States.

For evidence, just look back to the beginning of the Ebola outbreak early last year.

Ebola ravaged communities in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea because these countries lacked the public health infrastructure to identify and contain it. Nongovernmental organizations had been trying to help address health problems in the region, but much of their effort seemed geared to what would appeal to donors and supporters.

Many organizations focused on a single illness without deeply addressing the underlying problem that allows all of these diseases to spread.

It’s sexy to talk about how you are going to conquer malaria, wipe out river blindness – or even eradicate Ebola. “Building a sustainable public health infrastructure” just doesn’t have the same ring. But it is the most crucial step, with funding and support from around the world, if we want to avoid another major infectious disease outbreak.

The same is true in the United States.

While our health care system is vastly ahead of those in resource-poor nations, it proved woefully inadequate when confronted with last year’s Ebola outbreak.

All hospitals in the US are required to have emergency response plans, but the panic and problems dealing with Ebola revealed that many were geared primarily to mass-casualty events like plane crashes that might require acute surgical interventions – not quickly and safely identifying, containing and treating highly infectious diseases.

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To just about everyone, the term “mining” conjures up images of things like huge dump trucks, the blackened faces of miners, or the huge tailings ponds that are the byproducts of mining.

German scientists have discovered another, and literally greener, method for mining germanium, as this amazing article over on the Popular Science website explains:

“…scientists from the Freiburg University of Mining and Technology in Germany have found a new way of extracting the semiconductor material, germanium, from the earth.

They’re taking plants like sunflowers, corn, reed canary grass, and using them for phytomining. Others have used this method in the past with other metals like gold and copper. It involves, basically, mining plants. In this case, the scientists harvest the plants, which accumulate germanium after the roots and shoots soak up the element from the soil. They are then fermented and processed for biogas before extracting the germanium, which makes the method more efficient.scientists from the Freiburg University of Mining and Technology in Germany have found a new way of extracting the semiconductor material, germanium, from the earth.

This technology is still in it’s infancy and produces only small amounts of germaniaum, but the Freiburg scientists are actively researching ways to scale up.

Check out the informative article over on the Popular Science website.

 

Source: PopularScience.com – “GERMAN SCIENTISTS ARE GROWING PLANTS TO MINE MINERALS”

Photo Credit:

 

New research shows that it’s more effective, at least for Millenials, to write an email to express their intimate feelings than it is to leave a voicemail. We found a really interesting article about this over on Science Daily:

The research, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that, in this digital age, an email can be more effective in expressing romantic feelings than leaving a voicemail message.

Previous research and conventional wisdom suggested the opposite, that a voicemail message is a more intimate way to connect with others, but that may not be true, particularly among millennials.

“The bottom line is that email is much better when you want to convey some information that you want someone to think about,” said one of the authors, Alan R. Dennis, the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems in IU’s Kelley School of Business.

It turns out that the generations that have grown up with email and texting are better at communicating their feelings in email than in conversation. On the next page, we cover why that is…

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Elizabeth Gilbert, University of Virginia and Nina Strohminger, Yale University

The ability to repeat a study and find the same results twice is a prerequisite for building scientific knowledge. Replication allows us to ensure empirical findings are reliable and refines our understanding of when a finding occurs. It may surprise you to learn, then, that scientists do not often conduct – much less publish – attempted replications of existing studies.

Journals prefer to publish novel, cutting-edge research. And professional advancement is determined by making new discoveries, not painstakingly confirming claims that are already on the books. As one of our colleagues recently put it, “Running replications is fine for other people, but I have better ways to spend my precious time.”

Once a paper appears in a peer-reviewed journal, it acquires a kind of magical, unassailable authority. News outlets, and sometimes even scientists themselves, will cite these findings without a trace of skepticism. Such unquestioning confidence in new studies is likely undeserved, or at least premature.

A small but vocal contingent of researchers – addressing fields ranging from physics to medicine to economics – has maintained that many, perhaps most, published studies are wrong. But how bad is this problem, exactly? And what features make a study more or less likely to turn out to be true?

We are two of the 270 researchers who together have just published in the journal Science the first-ever large-scale effort trying to answer these questions by attempting to reproduce 100 previously published psychological science findings.

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