Tag: science

“People just don’t want to get stuck,” Melin says. Understandable. And in that case, those people have plenty of options for long-range electric cars, if they’re willing to pay for it. But within the climate movement, fears of those kinds of reactions have grown intense. Some prefer to instead offer a message of low-carbon abundance—that clean energy technology can do everything we do now, and more. By that theory, the electrification of the Ford F-150, the best-selling automobile in America, stands above criticism. (One analyst, who did not want to be named, said he thinks the truck is “evil,” whether it’s electric or not.)

Yet even a truck could be much more efficient in terms of materials if it did not promise trips that went as far. Long trips are “drastically overrepresented in people’s minds,” says Tobias Brosch, a psychologist at the University of Geneva who has studied why people

Starting in the 1960s, doctors attempted transplants of kidneys, hearts, and livers from baboons and chimpanzees—humans’ closest genetic relatives—into people. But the organs failed within weeks, if not days, due to rejection or infection. These efforts were largely abandoned after “Baby Fae,” an infant with a fatal heart condition, died within a month of receiving a baboon heart transplant in 1984. (Her immune system rejected the heart.) 

By the 1990s, researchers turned their attention to pigs. Their organs are more similar in size to human ones and take only months to grow to a size suitable for donation. Unlike primates, there’s less concern about them passing on HIV-like viruses to patients (though pigs harbor different kinds of viruses). And scientists thought pig donors would be more accepted by the public, since they are already raised for agriculture.

But biological differences between pigs and humans make transplantation much more challenging. So

For centuries, mathematicians have sought to understand and model the motion of fluids. The equations that describe how ripples crease the surface of a pond have also helped researchers to predict the weather, design better airplanes, and characterize how blood flows through the circulatory system. These equations are deceptively simple when written in the right mathematical language. However, their solutions are so complex that making sense of even basic questions about them can be prohibitively difficult.

Perhaps the oldest and most prominent of these equations, formulated by Leonhard Euler more than 250 years ago, describe the flow of an ideal, incompressible fluid: a fluid with no viscosity, or internal friction, and that cannot be forced into a smaller volume. “Almost all nonlinear fluid equations are kind of derived from the Euler equations,” said Tarek Elgindi, a mathematician at Duke University. “They’re the first ones, you could say.”

Yet much

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Scientists have discovered a record number of dead fir trees in Oregon, a foreboding sign of how drought and the climate crisis are ravaging the American West.

A recent aerial survey found that more than a million acres of forest contain trees that have succumbed to stressors exacerbated by a multiyear drought. Images released by the US Forest Service show Oregon’s lush green expanses dotted with ominous swathes of red.

“It is stunning,” said Daniel DePinte, an aerial survey program manager with the Forest Service who led the agency’s Pacific Northwest region aerial survey, noting that this year saw the highest mortality rate for firs in this area in history. These evergreen conifers are less able to survive in drought conditions than other heartier trees that line the landscapes.

He and his colleagues scanned

A few weeks ago, Sports Illustrated tweeted this video of Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry that instantly went viral. It shows him taking a shot at the basket—from the far side of the court. The ball goes in. OK, I can believe that. He’s a famously great shooter. But then he turns around and grabs another ball and takes another shot … and makes it. And then again. And again. And a fifth time.

So is it real or fake? Let’s use statistics and physics to find out.

Basic Probability

Physicists don’t usually jump right into the most complicated version of a problem. Instead, they do a rough estimation, often called a “back of the envelope” calculation. So let’s make some approximations about the probability of making five full-court shots in a row.

We can start with a simple experiment that you can try at home—you just