The vast expanse of sea ice around Antarctica has suffered a “precipitous” fall since 2014, satellite data shows, and fell at a faster rate than seen in the Arctic. The plunge in the average annual extent means Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34 years. “The Arctic has become a poster child for global warming,” Parkinson said, but the recent sea ice falls in Antarctica have been far worse.

Scientists at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center are racing to develop a vaccine to inoculate U.S. herds against the disease. Once they leave the island, these vets will be certified Foreign Animal Disease Diagnosticians—and they’ll be the country’s first responders if an outbreak ever reaches U.S. soil. The pigs arrived a week or so before the vets descended on Plum Island for FADD School—the two-week course that mints new Foreign Animal Disease Diagnosticians.

It’s exacting in its detail and has already shown to be prescient: Since Red Moon was published in October 2018, the Chinese have announced a plan to build a base at the lunar south pole, right where Robinson placed their outpost in his book. He talked to IEEE Spectrum about the world he conjured in his work and what it might tell us about our lunar future, why you can’t colonize the moon for profit, what kind of tech will be necessary to get and stay there, and why the best spoils will go to China. Robinson: I was able to use a lot of what I had learned from my Mars books, which was good, because while I also read the current scientific literature on how we could set up a base on the moon, that’s not a huge body of work.

All of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation. And while radiation and other types of DNA damage can cause tumours in plants, mutated cells are generally not able to spread from one part of the plant to another as cancers do, thanks to the rigid, interconnecting walls surrounding plant cells. Interestingly, in addition to this innate resilience to radiation, some plants in the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem to be using extra mechanisms to protect their DNA, changing its chemistry to make it more resistant to damage, and turning on systems to repair it if this doesn’t work.

Space settlers establishing bases further afield might adopt Earth time and calendars while starting up a new society, but as time goes on, they might want a more permanent solution tailored to their lives. Gangale said he originally entertained the idea of synchronizing Mars months to the movement of its moons, the way Earth’s months are tied to the moon’s 27-day orbit, but it wasn’t practical: Phobos orbits Mars three times a day, and Deimos completes its orbit once every 30 hours—“much too short to use as a basis for dividing the year into usable fractions,” says Gangale. For settlers staying closer to home, nonprofit group LunarClock.org advocates for Lunar Standard Time and the Lunar Calendar, where a year consists of 12 “days” (comparable to Earth months), each named for a person who has walked on the moon, broken up into 30 “cycles” (comparable to Earth days) of 24 moon-hours.

The statement that there’s nothing outside the universe — there’s no observer outside the universe — implies that we need a formulation of physics without background structure. The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. The idea is to try to reformulate physics in terms of these views from the inside, what it looks like from inside the universe.

Wilson is a major proponent of group selection, an evolutionary theory based on the idea that in social species like ours, natural selection favors characteristics that foster the survival of the group, not just of individuals

Wilson and Gervais applied the concept of group selection to two different types of human laughter. Laughter by group members in response to what Wilson and Gervais call protohumor—nonserious violations of social norms—was a reliable indicator of such relaxed, safe times and paved the way to playful emotions. Over the years additional theories have proposed different explanations for humor’s role in evolution, suggesting that humor and laughter could play a part in the selection of sexual partners and the damping of aggression and conflict.

Today’s physicists widely believe black hole information is preserved — that the quantum nature of gravity somehow modifies event horizons (and corrects Hawking’s calculation) in a way that encrypts the outgoing Hawking radiation with a record of the past. Hawking, in his calculation, glossed over the (unknown) microscopic properties of the space-time fabric at the event horizon, and Unruh likewise treated the fluid in a sonic black hole as smooth, ignoring its composite atoms. The philosophers concede that exotic possibilities for the quantum-scale properties of space-time “mute the strength” with which Steinhauer’s experiment makes black hole information loss more likely.

Since then Loftus and scores of psychologists from around the world have refined and replicated the effect in hundreds of experiments, with the rate of false memory creation usually somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent. Unlike some examples of deceptive practice, there are clear and robust ethical clearances involved in the creation of a false memory experiment. Fakery and false memories
In settings where either a therapist or a law-enforcement officer is trying to access ‘forgotten’ or so-called ‘repressed’ memories from a patient or witness, the science of false memory has indeed shown that there are considerable dangers in using suggestive techniques and misinformation (even unwittingly).

In 1975, the US had their shot at going metric… but we blew it. In this video, we take a look at why our old system of measures has held out for so long, why Americans are so hesitant to make the switch, and most importantly, how metric might already be here to stay. Learn more: http://bit.ly/2FJ0C99

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