According to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 415 parts per million (ppm), far higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years, since before the evolution of homo sapiens. From a report: Holthaus spotted the new high on Sunday when it was tweeted out by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which measures daily CO2 rates at Mauna Loa along with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Measurements have been ongoing since the program was started in 1958 by the late Charles David Keeling, for whom the Keeling Curve, a graph of increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, is named. "This is the first time in human history our planet's atmosphere has had more than 415ppm CO2," Holthaus said in a widely shared tweet. "Not just in recorded history, not just since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Since before modern humans existed millions of years ago," added Holthaus.

Long-time Slashdot reader William Robinson writes: Using cores drilled from coral, scientists have been able to produce the first 400-year-long seasonal record of El Niño events. "This understanding of El Niño events is vital because they produce extreme weather across the globe with particularly profound effects on precipitation and temperature extremes in Australia, South East Asia and the Americas," reports Phys.org.

The results? A new category of El Niño "has become far more prevalent in the last few decades than at any time in the past four centuries," reports Scientific American. "Over the same period, traditional El Niño events have become more intense."
Obtaining this data was considered impossible, until a Melbourne PhD researcher realized that coral cores, like tree rings, captured the "signature" of El Niño events going back for several centuries, according to the article. They were then able to identify that signature using machine learning techniques, and after three years of work produced the 400-year record.

The study's lead author now says that "By understanding the past, we are better equipped to understand the future, especially in the context of climate change."

"By scanning the brains of adults who played Pokemon as kids, researchers learned that this group of people have a brain region that responds more to the cartoon characters than to other pictures," reports the Verge.

"More importantly, this charming research method has given us new insight into how the brain organizes visual information." For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers recruited 11 adults who were "experienced" Pokemon players -- meaning they began playing between the ages of five and eight, continued for a while, and then played again as adults -- and 11 novices. First, they tested all of the participants on the names of pokemon to make sure the pros actually could tell a Clefairy from a Chansey. Next, they scanned the participants' brains while showing them images of all 150 original pokemon (in rounds of eight) alongside other images, like animals, faces, cars, words, corridors, and other cartoons. In experienced players, a specific region responded more to the pokemon than to these other images. For novices, this region -- which is called the occipitotemporal sulcus and often processes animal images -- didn't show a preference for pokemon.

It's not that surprising that playing many hours of Pokemon as a kid would lead to brain changes; looking at almost anything for long enough will do the same thing. We already know that the brain has cell clusters that respond to certain images, and there's even one for recognizing Jennifer Aniston... The results support a theory called "eccentricity bias," which suggests that the size of the images we're looking at and whether we're looking at it with central or peripheral vision will predict which area of the brain will respond.

pgmrdlm quotes National Geographic: For years, João Duarte has puzzled over a seemingly boring underwater expanse off the coast of Portugal. In 1969, this site spawned a massive earthquake that rattled the shore and sparked a tsunami. But you would never know why just from looking at the broad, featureless surface of the seabed. Duarte, a marine geologist from the Instituto Dom Luiz at the University of Lisbon, wanted to find out what was going on.

Now, 50 years after the event, he may finally have an answer: The bottom of the tectonic plate off Portugal's coast seems to be peeling away from its top. This action may be providing the necessary spark for one plate to start grinding beneath another in what's known as a subduction zone, according to computer simulations Duarte presented in April at the European Geosciences Union meeting.

If confirmed, the new work would be the first time an oceanic plate has been caught in the act of peeling—and it may mark one of the earliest stages of the Atlantic Ocean shrinking, sending Europe inching toward Canada as predicted by some models of tectonic activity.
"Duarte is not the first to propose these curious happenings off Portugal's coast," the article points out, "but it's the first time there are data to back it up."

reporter shares a report from NPR: For the first time, scientists have used genetically modified viruses to treat a patient fighting an antibiotic-resistant infection. Isabelle Carnell-Holdaway, 17, began the experimental treatment after doctors lost all hope. She was struggling with a life-threatening infection after a lung transplant. With the new treatment, she has not been completely cured. But the Faversham, England, teenager has recovered so much that she has resumed a near-normal life. The treatment involves a cocktail of three viruses known as "bacteriophages" that specifically attack the dangerous bacterium causing her infection. "These viruses have one specialty: they naturally infect bacteria," reports Live Science. "Once they do so, the viruses replicate inside the bacterial cell, and, through this replicative process, kill the bacterium." The downside with phages is that they're so specific to the bacteria they infect that a phage that works for one patient with a particular infection may not work for another patient infected with the same species of bacteria.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

sciencehabit writes: Scientists have been studying the social intelligence of dogs -- how they evolved to communicate and bond with us -- for more than two decades, but they've largely ignored cats. That has started to change. In the past five years, a number of laboratories exploring feline social cognition have popped up around the globe, revealing that cats rival dogs in many tests of social smarts. But cats are hard to work with -- they freak out in the laboratory and often don't cooperate even when researchers study them in their homes -- causing some to wonder whether studies of the feline mind will take off the same way they have for dogs. Oregon State University devised an "attachment test" where an owner and his/her cat will go into a room for a moment, and then the owner will leave. The cat will typically tend to freak out, meow a lot, and walk around in circles until the owner comes back. When the owner comes back and sits down on the ground, often the cat will come back to the owner.

What's particularly interesting about this study is that the cat, after welcoming its owner and recognizing their presence, will then leave and start exploring the room. While the average person would assume that the cat doesn't care about their owner since they appear to just want to explore, it's the opposite that's true. The cat has such a close bond with their owner that they feel they're able to go explore now that their owner is there with them.

They also do a similar test with a fan that has streamers attached to it. With the fan on making loud noise and freaking out the cat, the owner is instructed to "make nice" with the fan. After making sweet talk and touching the fan, some cats will start to calm down, approach the fan, and even lay down in front of it. The cats appear to pick up the emotional cues from their owners and learn that the fan is not something that they should be afraid of.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Last October, researchers studied population data from more than a million Swedish residents and found that people who had their appendix removed were slightly less likely to develop Parkinson's. But other research has shown that there were no clear link between the two events. So Gregory Cooper and his team at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio decided to look with an even bigger microscope. They studied the electronic health records of more than 62 million Americans. Contrary to the October study, though, they spotted an increased risk of Parkinson's among those who had their appendix removed, roughly three times higher. And while Parkinson's starts becoming much more common in old age, a consistent added risk from appendix removal was even seen in those who developed it younger and across different ethnicities. "This is the largest study to date that's looked at this," Cooper told Gizmodo by phone this week. "And it's the most generalizable to the overall population, we think."

Cooper went on to say that this doesn't mean people shouldn't get an appendectomy if they need it: "Even with that threefold risk, it was still less than 1 percent of individuals who had an appendectomy and went on to develop Parkinson's. So in the grand scheme of things, it's a very low risk, and it shouldn't dissuade anyone from getting an appendectomy."

the_newsbeagle writes: While the Google spinoff Wing is just launching its first commercial service in Australia (scones and coffee are on the menu) and getting FAA clearance to operate in the United States, a company called Zipline is already offering a nationwide service in Rwanda. Zipline currently uses its fixed-wing drones to deliver blood products to hospitals across the country, and will soon begin delivering other medical supplies as well.

Medical supplies seem like they could be a killer app for delivery drones, since they're often lightweight and urgently needed. But Zipline hasn't yet proven that its business model is sustainable. So two technology reporters from IEEE Spectrum traveled to Rwanda to embed themselves in a Zipline operations center, and produced an in-depth report and a 360 video about the company's logistics and technology.

schwit1 writes: The new rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will force companies to disclose the prices of prescription drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid that cost $35 or more for a month's supply. Addressing high prescription drug prices has been one issue that the Trump administration and Democrats have agreed on over the past two years, with Congress calling big pharma executives and pharmacy heads to testify. "Requiring the inclusion of drugs' list prices in TV ads is the single most significant step any administration has taken toward a simple commitment: American patients deserve to know the prices of the healthcare they receive," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, unveiled his space company's lunar lander for the first time on Thursday. "This vehicle is going to the moon," Bezos said during an invite-only presentation to media and space industry executives. "We were given a gift -- this nearby body called the moon," Bezos said. He added that the moon is a good place to begin manufacturing in space due to its lower gravity than the Earth. Getting resources from the moon "takes 24 times less energy to get it off the surface compared to the Earth," Bezos said, and "that is a huge lever."

Bezos also unveiled the company's BE-7 rocket engine at the event. The engine will be test fired for the first time this summer, Bezos said. "It's time to go back to the moon and this time stay," Bezos said. "I love Vice President Pence's 2024 lunar landing goal," Bezos said, adding that Blue Origin can meet that timeline "because we started this three years ago." Blue Origin's most visible program has been its New Shepard rocket system, which the company is developing to send tourists to the edge of space for 10 minutes. New Shepard has flown on 11 test flights, with its capsule, built to carry six passengers, reaching an altitude of more than 350,000. The capsule features massive windows, providing expansive views of the Earth once in space. The company plans to send its first humans onboard a New Shepard rocket sometime in the next year. But it has yet to begin selling tickets.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A small Cessna soared high above the Mojave Desert recently, its engine growling in the choppy morning air. As the aircraft skirted the mountains on the edge of Death Valley National Park, a clutch of passengers and environmentalists peered intently at a broiling salt flat thousands of feet below. The desolate beauty of the Panamint Valley has long drawn all manner of naturalists, adventurers and social outcasts -- including Charles Manson -- off-road vehicle riders and top gun fighter pilots who blast overhead in simulated dogfights.

Now this prehistoric lake bed is shaping up to be an unlikely battleground between environmentalists and battery technologists who believe the area might hold the key to a carbon-free future. Recently, the Australia-based firm Battery Mineral Resources asked the federal government for permission to drill four exploratory wells to see if the hot, salty brine beneath the valley floor contains economically viable concentrations of lithium. The soft, silvery-white metal is a key component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and is crucial to the production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

The drilling request has generated strong opposition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Defenders of Wildlife, who say the drilling project would be an initial step toward the creation of a full-scale lithium mining operation. They say lithium extraction would bring industrial sprawl, large and unsightly drying ponds and threaten a fragile ecosystem that supports Nelson's bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and the Panamint alligator lizard, among other species.

Trees in urban streets grow more quickly but die faster than those in rural forests, resulting in a net loss of carbon storage from city planting initiatives, new research shows. From a report: Researchers led by Ian Smith of Boston University, US, found that street trees in Boston grow nearly four times faster than those in forest stands nearby in rural Massachusetts. However, mortality rates of street trees are more than double those in rural forests, with young and very large trees most at risk. The findings have implications for urban greening programs, suggesting that planting initiatives alone are insufficient to meet municipal carbon storage, canopy cover and biomass goals. Many cities are embracing greening initiatives to improve urban sustainability and reduce the environmental impacts of urbanisation, the researchers write. "However, cities have been dramatically understudied by ecologists," they add. "Despite the widely espoused benefits of urban trees, the role of urban vegetation in the carbon cycle remains uncertain." Street trees take many years to pay their way on carbon costs.

How does a half-inch beetle find fires 80 miles away? Why, it's called "stochastic resonance" of course! Slashdot reader bodog shares an excerpt from a report via Scientific American: The fire chaser beetle, as its name implies, spends its life trying to find a forest fire (because freshly burnt trees are fire chaser beetle baby food). [T]hey can sense fires from distances over which car stereos are hard pressed to pick up FM radio. In fact, because the infrared emission of a burning oil tank of known volume (in this case, 750,000 barrels) can be calculated with reasonable certainty, scientists that studied the Coalinga oil tank explosion have inferred the beetles can detect infrared radiation intensities so low that they are buried in the thermal noise around them. But ... how?

The heat eyes on the sides of fire chaser beetles are filled with about 70 infrared sensilla. Inside each sensillum is a hair-like sensor (called a dendritic tip in the diagram above) that physically deforms when the sensillum expands in response to heat, triggering a neural response. [...] A signal picked up by more than one of them can be summed up and amplified by the neurons that wire the [70-90] array. As a result, the heat eye can detect softer signals than a single sensor could.

Finally, it is also possible the beetles are better able to detect a signal buried in noise due to a spooky (to me) phenomenon called "stochastic resonance." In this scenario, added thermal noise counterintuitively helps a sensor pick up a signal. A signal below the threshold for triggering a sensor -- but still close to it -- will resonate by chance with a portion of thermal noise that is the same frequency. When there is more noise, there is more signal at that resonant frequency. Together, noise plus signal adds up to an impulse sufficient enough to trip the sensor when signal alone or signal with less noise would not. Incredibly, the measurement gets more precise in the presence of noise than without.

Lost at the bottom of the North Sea almost eight millennia ago following the end of the ice age, a vast land area between England and southern Scandinavia -- the home to thousands of stone age settlers -- is about to be rediscovered by scientists. From a report: Marine experts, scientists and archaeologists have spent the past 15 years meticulously mapping thousands of kilometres under water in the hope of unearthing lost tribes of prehistoric Britain. On Wednesday a crew of British and Belgian scientists set off on their voyage across the North Sea to reconstruct the ancient Mesolithic landscape hidden beneath the waves for 7,500 years. The area was submerged when thousands of cubic miles of sub-Arctic ice started to melt and the sea levels began to rise worldwide at that time.

The ancient country, known as Doggerland, which could once have had great plains with rich soils, formed an important land bridge between Britain and northern Europe. It was long believed to have been hit by catastrophic flooding. Using seabed mapping data the team is planning to produce a detailed 3D chart which will indicate the rivers, lakes, hills and coastlines of the country. Specialist survey ships will take core sediment samples from selected areas to extract millions of fragments of DNA from the area's plants and animals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: [T]he ability to quickly and easily desalinate water has long been a goal of scientists around the world. And now, a group of researchers from Columbia University believe they've found a way to do it. The process is called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction (TSSE) and it's designed to purify hypersaline brines (water that contains a high concentration of salts, making it up to seven times as salty as seawater). This kind of waste water is produced by industrial processes and during oil and gas production and it poses a major pollution risk to groundwater.

The research team, led by Columbia Engineering's assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering Ngai Yin Yip, mixed a solvent (dyed red) in with a sample of hypersaline brine (dyed blue). The liquids appear to stay separated in the jar, but after heating them, and then decanting the red solvent into another jar to be heated separately, the team was left with a layer of clear water. While the science is complicated, the above video shows the process in a pretty simple way (no chemistry PhD required). What's most exciting about the process is its implications. The team was able to remove up to 98.4% of the salt, which is comparable to the current "gold standard" process, reverse osmosis. But unlike reverse osmosis or other methods of desalination, this process doesn't require high temperatures or high pressures -- just a low-grade heat of less than 70C (158F). The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from USA Today discussing a new book from famed astronautical engineer Bob Zubrin, who makes the case for why we should go to space -- not only for the knowledge and challenge, but to "ensure our survival and protect our freedom." Among the reasons why he thinks we need to spread out through the Solar System (and perhaps beyond): For the Knowledge: We know little about the universe, despite our conceit that we have things figured out. The farther we go, the more new things we will encounter, and the more our knowledge and understanding will expand.

For the Challenge: Zubrin looks at the way the Age of Exploration rejuvenated a stagnant Europe at the beginning of the 16th Century, and the way the American frontier imparted a dynamism to American culture that, since that frontier's closing, seems to have faded. New frontiers, with their array of opportunities and challenges, make an excellent antidote to stagnation, aristocracy and zero-sum thinking.

For Our Survival: Last week saw reports that an 1100-foot asteroid will pass within 13,000 miles of earth -- that's closer than many satellites -- in less than a decade. (The famous Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona was made by an asteroid a fraction that size, and exploded with the force of more than 100 Nagasaki-sized atomic bombs). These asteroid encounters turn out to be much more common than once thought, and the likelihood of a strike is high enough that authorities are rehearsing a response. With a strong space economy, deflecting dangerous asteroids will be easy. Without it, we're just sitting ducks in a cosmic shooting gallery.

For Our Freedom: Earth is crowded, and governments (and corporations like Facebook) are getting ever more intrusive as privacy grows every more scarce. The danger of a global tyranny backed by modern technology of surveillance and control is growing. Getting a sizable chunk of humanity off the planet and far enough away -- the Moon, Mars, even the asteroid belt -- makes it less likely that such a tyranny could become all-encompassing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity. In contrast to leveraging incoming energy as a normal solar cell would, the negative illumination effect allows electrical energy to be harvested as heat leaves a surface. Today's technology, though, does not capture energy over these negative temperature differences as efficiently. By pointing their device toward space, whose temperature approaches mere degrees from absolute zero, the group was able to find a great enough temperature difference to generate power through an early design.

The group found that their negative illumination diode generated about 64 nanowatts per square meter, a tiny amount of electricity, but an important proof of concept, that the authors can improve on by enhancing the quantum optoelectronic properties of the materials they use. Calculations made after the diode created electricity showed that, when atmospheric effects are taken into consideration, the current device can theoretically generate almost 4 watts per square meter, roughly one million times what the group's device generated and enough to help power machinery that is required to run at night. By comparison, today's solar panels generate 100 to 200 watts per square meter. The study has been published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

A new study from the University of Oxford claims screen time doesn't have a detrimental impact on young people's brains, like so many researchers have claimed. Instead, it says family, friends and school life all had a greater impact on wellbeing. An anonymous reader shares the report from ZDNet: The researchers' skepticism was based on the Grand Theory of Chicken and Egg. As one of the lead researchers, Amy Orben explained: "The previous literature was based almost entirely on correlations with no means to dissociate whether social media use leads to changes in life satisfaction or changes in life satisfaction influence social media use." Quite. Does social media make kids -- or anyone else, for that matter -- miserable? Or do miserable people turn to social media in search of, well, something?

These researchers spoke to 12,000 UK teens and concluded that the effect of social media on their life satisfaction was tiny. Indeed, as another of the lead researchers, Professor Andrew Przybylski told the BBC: "99.75 percent of a person's life satisfaction has nothing to do with their use of social media." Nothing has really changed, he said. Family, friends and school life are still the dominating factors in teen happiness. Moreover, Przybylski took the time to completely contradict Apple CEO and his pained worries about screen time. Przybylski put it quite baldly: "Parents shouldn't worry about time on social media. Thinking about it that way is wrong." For perfect measure, he added: "We need to retire this notion of screen time."

schwit1 shares a report: At least eight studies in the last seven years have looked at what happens specifically in a room accumulating carbon dioxide, a main ingredient in our exhalations. While the results are inconsistent, they are also intriguing. They suggest that while the kinds of air pollution known to cause cancer and asthma remain much more pressing as public health concerns, there may also be pollutants whose most detrimental effects are on the mind, rather than the body.

So can you trust the decisions made in small rooms? How much does the quality of air indoors affect your cognitive abilities? And as our knowledge of indoor air's effects grows, do we need to revise how we design and use our buildings? Buildings in the United States have grown better sealed in the last 50 years, helping reduce energy used in heating and cooling. That's also made it easier for gasses and other substances released by humans and our belongings to build up inside. Although indoor air quality is not as well monitored as the air outdoors, scientists and ventilation professionals have extensively monitored carbon dioxide indoors. Higher CO2 levels -- say, above 1,200 parts per million (ppm) -- often indicate a low ventilation rate. Worrisome substances emitted by new furniture, office supplies and carpets could be accumulating in the air.

"Interstellar Technologies has successfully launched its MOMO-3 sounding rocket into space, with the vehicle easily crossing the Karman line (62 miles in altitude) before splashing into the Pacific," reports Engadget. This is the first time a private rocket launched from Japan has reached space. From the report: There was a fair amount riding on the mission. Interstellar's ultimate aim is to ferry small satellites into orbit at a fraction of the cost of government launches, and this takes the company one step closer to achieving its dream. It also relieves some of the pressure on Interstellar founder Takafumi Horie. There had been skepticism about the Livedoor creator's spaceflight chops given his controversial entrepreneurial history (including a conviction for accounting fraud). This shows that his initiative can work on a basic level -- the challenge is translating a test like this into a full-fledged business. You can watch the launch here.