Imagine being able to use electricity to power your car – even if it’s not an electric vehicle. Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. Today, electrical energy generated by various methods…
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves. Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of…
Why do some persons succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while others who suffered the same ordeal do not? UCLA scientists have linked two genes involved in serotonin production to a higher risk of developing PTSD. Published in the online edition of the Journal of Affective Disorders, the findings suggest that susceptibility to PTSD is…
So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behavior — haven’t delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk. There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can…
Politically conservative Americans have lost trust in science over the last 40 years while moderates and liberals have remained constant in the stock they put in the scientific community, a new study finds. The most educated conservatives have slipped the most, according to the research set to appear in the April issue of the journal…
Last April the scientific journal Nature published a series of articles on the overproduction of Ph.D.’s in the sciences. In particular, the journal singled out doctoral education in the United States for its imbalanced Ph.D.-to-job ratio, citing some stunning statistics: From 1973 to 2006, for example, the number of biological-sciences Ph.D. recipients in tenure-track positions…
In a closely watched case, the Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling allowing human genes to be patented, a topic of enormous interest to cancer researchers, patients and drug makers. The Court overturned patents belonging to Myriad Genetics on genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Scientists say genes carrying…
British children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says. Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says, resulting in a “nature deficit disorder”. Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the U.K….
Biologists and engineers are working on a tiny robot that functions like a living creature and could be safely used within the human body to diagnose disease. Called ‘Cyberplasm’, it’s based loosely on the sea lamprey, and will have an electronic nervous system, ‘eye’ and ‘nose’ sensors derived from mammalian cells, and artificial muscles that…
A controversial type of pesticide linked to declining global bee populations appears to scramble bees’ sense of direction, making it hard for them to find home. Starved of foragers and the pollen they carry, colonies produce fewer queens, and eventually collapse. The phenomenon is described in two new studies published in Science. While they don’t…