Science

The morning after Hurricane Helene pummeled the eastern seaboard of the US, Thomas Witherspoon inspected the damage to his western North Carolina home. The night before, he listened to the wind whip down trees and snap power lines along the two-mile access road connecting his family to their few neighbors in Buncombe County.

Like the tens of thousands of other North Carolina residents, the power to Witherspoon’s neighborhood was completely out. It was impossible to communicate with the house down the road, let alone anyone several miles away. Unable to send text messages or make phone calls, radio became the one form of communication left in rural North Carolina. After fixing what he could on his own property, Witherspoon, a lifelong amateur radio enthusiast, began distributing handheld radios to his neighbors.

Ambition is not a dirty word—especially if you’re Bertrand Piccard. The explorer, psychiatrist, and environmentalist aims to “promote sustainability through spectacular actions” to prove that a cleaner future is possible. During 2015 and 2016, he famously circumnavigated the globe in a solar-powered airplane, Solar Impulse, to show off the potential of renewables.

But even more ambitious was what he attempted after he landed. He tasked his foundation with demonstrating that environmental protection and economic profit can go hand in hand. The goal was to find 1,000 interventions that can protect the planet while also making money, shattering the argument that pursuing sustainability must come at a cost.

Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business. The market for surrogacy is expected to expand to $129 billion by 2032, fueled by older parents, rising infertility, and more same-sex families. Silicon Valley contributes to the growth too: Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Snap pitch in up to $80,000 toward the six-figure cost of the process.

Yet it’s still controversial to “rent a womb” (as detractors call it). One human rights expert for the United Nations said that commercial surrogacy “usually amounts to the sale of children.” Critics claim the practice exploits poor women who are not fully informed of the hazards; in fact, the United States is one of the only developed countries that allows pregnancy for profit.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Mathematics started with numbers—clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract enterprise. One of the first major steps down this road was taken in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It involved a field called group theory, and it changed math—theoretical and applied—as we know it.

Groups generalize essential properties of the whole numbers. They have transformed geometry, algebra, and analysis, the mathematical study of smoothly changing functions. They’re used to encrypt messages and study the shapes of viruses. Physicists rely on them to unify the fundamental forces of nature: At high energies, group theory can be used to show that electromagnetism and the forces that hold atomic nuclei together and cause radioactivity are all manifestations of a single underlying force.

THIS ARTICLE IS republished fromThe Conversationunder aCreative Commons license.

A little bit of alcohol was once thought to be good for you. However, as scientific research advances, we’re gaining a clearer picture of alcohol’s effect on health—especially regarding cancer.

The complex relationship between alcohol and cancer was recently highlighted in a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research. The report’s findings are eye-opening.

The authors of the report estimate that 40 percent of all cancer cases are associated with “modifiable risk factors”—in other words, things we can change ourselves. Alcohol consumption being prominent among them.

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“This is Marina. She leads a feminist organization.” This is how I am introduced at the entrance of an event that aims to “normalize egg freezing,” run by a startup collaborating with a private fertility clinic. It’s a misunderstanding, but for a moment I contemplate whether that’s what I should be doing, and my mind wanders.

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some 50 miles southwest of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, and strategically located close to a cluster of the island’s top universities, the 3,500-acre Hsinchu Science Park is globally celebrated as the incubator of Taiwan’s most successful technology companies. It opened in 1980, the government having acquired the land and cleared the rice fields,with the aim of creating a technology hub that would combine advanced research and industrial production.

Amid a US outbreak of avian influenza in poultry flocks and dairy cattle, the federal government on Friday announced $72 million in funding to three vaccine manufacturers to expand the production of bird flu vaccines for humans, in the event that they are needed.

The H5N1 virus has affected millions of wild and commercial birds nationwide, and in March it made the jump to dairy cows for the first time. As the number of affected animals grows, so does the concern for spread to people. In the past, H5N1 has had a high mortality rate in humans, and scientists are monitoring the virus closely to determine whether it poses a pandemic risk. The US government has a stockpile of approved H5N1 vaccines, but today’s awards, which will go to CSL Seqirus, GSK, and Sanofi, will double that number.

Most of us don’t know how our food is made. We don’t know much about what our burger ate when it was part of a cow, where that cow lived, or how it died. Ditto for the wheat in our bread, or the leaves in our salad. The food system is mostly a black box to us.

This disconnection is why farm-to-table has been so successful—it seeks to reacquaint us with our food, and to consider the water, emissions, labor, and care that go into our meals.

Toward the end of last year, US health authorities got a tip-off about an upcoming wave of respiratory syncytial virus, a seasonal virus that kills 160,000 people globally every year. Before hospitals reported an uptick in patients, they could see that RSV was more acute in the northeast of the country, with concentrations of the virus ultimately reaching levels more than five times greater than in the western United States. Their early warning system? Wastewater.