Paleoclimate Data Raise Alarm on Historic Nature of Climate Emergency

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August 13, 2021

Climate Change Paleoclimate Data Raise Alarm on Historic Nature of Climate Emergency The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report uses data from our planet's distant past to better understand current warming By Katarina Zimmer

Medicine New DNA Blood Test Could Pinpoint Cancer's Source in the Body The assay could also help evaluate organ transplants and fetal genetic disorders By Anna Goshua

Ecology Summer of Science Reading, Episode 2: Life beneath Our Feet In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week's show: Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, and Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. By Deboki Chakravarti | 20:47

Ecology Suspect List Narrows in Mysterious Bird Die-Off Here's how researchers are zeroing in on the culprit By Maddie Bender

Behavior The FDA Shouldn't Support a Ban on Kratom The herbal supplement can be abused, but given the explosion in opioid deaths, eliminating this safer substitute will almost certainly lead to more deaths By Maia Szalavitz

Planetary Science Crumbly Mars Rock, Not Hardware Flaws, Scuttled Perseverance's First Sample Attempt After an alarming failure, the rover is set to continue its mission to retrieve specimens for eventual return to Earth By Robin George Andrews

Planetary Science NASA Probe Finds Higher Chance of Asteroid Bennu Striking Earth Using data from the OSIRIS-REx mission, scientists calculated slightly increased (but still low) odds the space rock will collide with our planet in the 2100s By Meghan Bartels,SPACE.com

Climate Change Are 'Green Banks' Really Better for the Environment? Consumers can indeed lower their financial carbon footprint once they know how to navigate the hype By Avery Ellfeldt,E&E News

Mathematics Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past Mathematicians want to think their field is a meritocracy, but bias, harassment and exclusion persist By Rachel Crowell

Black Holes Astronomers Find an Unexpected Bumper Crop of Black Holes In trying to explain the spectacular star trails of the star cluster Palomar 5, astronomers stumbled on a very large trove of black holes. By Christopher Intagliata | 03:24

Neuroscience Inspired by Chronic Illness, She Made Award-Winning Art about the Brain Scientific American presents the winner and honorable mentions of the 11th annual Art of Neuroscience contest By Maddie Bender

Extraterrestrial Life Martian Crust Could Sustain Life through Radiation Meteorites reveal that so long as groundwater is present, the Martian subsurface is habitable By Nikk Ogasa

Climate Change How Much Worse Will Thawing Arctic Permafrost Make Climate Change? Global warming is setting free carbon from life buried long ago in the Arctic's frozen soils, but its impact on the climate crisis is unclear By Jordan Wilkerson

Particle Physics Exotic Four-Quark Particle Spotted at Large Hadron Collider The rare tetraquark is one of dozens of nonelementary particles discovered at the accelerator and could help test theories about the strong nuclear force By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine

Quantum Computing How Quantum Computing Could Remake Chemistry It will bring molecular modeling to a new level of accuracy, reducing researchers' reliance on serendipity By Jeannette M. Garcia

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 325, Issue 2

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FROM THE ARCHIVE We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We're Going to Say So It's time to use a term that more than 13,000 scientists agree is needed By Mark Fischetti | April 2021

QUOTE OF THE DAY "None of Earth's past warm periods is an appropriate analogue for what we're seeing today, however. The rates of what we're undertaking right now tend to distinguish current climate change from past changes of this magnitude that have happened over much longer timescales and are caused by natural climate drivers." Kim Cobb, climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology

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