Science

Recently, two groups of researchers — some from the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona, the others from Canine Companions for Independence — teamed up for a study on dogs' interactions with people. And the study, according to Science Magazine reporter David Grimm, offers insights on dogs' ability to understand human body language.

For their study, the researchers used 375 eight-week-old Labrador and golden retriever puppies.

According to residents of the Novel South Capitol apartment building in Navy Yard, Washington D.C., many of their fellow tenants roam the common areas without masks.

Residents spoke to the Washingtonian, one of them being a 38-year-old self-descibed entrepreneur who asked to remain anonymous and said she loved living at the luxury building until the coronavirus pandemic struck. She and her live-in boyfriend are in high-risk categories, and the stress of dealing with fellow tenants who refuse to wear masks is too much.

Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta are preparing for the release of their forthcoming book, "Nightmare Scenario," which aims to highlight former President Donald Trump's disastrous COVID-19 response since the onset of the pandemic.

According to Axios, the agents for the book, which will be released by HarperCollins Publishers, are Javelin's Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer. Jonathan Jao, HarperCollins' vice president and executive editor, has also been named as editor of the book. The publication also offered a brief overview of the book and the controversial topics it will address.

It was a dry day, like most days in the Judean Desert. It was the 1940s in the West Bank region of Qumran, where a group of Bedouin men were herding goats in the hills just west of the Dead Sea, so named because the water is so salty that very few organisms can survive in it. In the course of their day, the Bedouins noticed a nearby cave, in which they discovered clay jars filled with ancient leather scrolls. They had no idea they were about to forever change our understanding of Biblical history.

Over the following decade, fragments from more than 900 other scrolls were discovered in ten additional caves. Later dubbed the Dead Sea Scrolls, the documents contained passages from the Book of the Twelve Prophets, including the books of Zechariah and Nahum. These documents — versions of what Jews call the Tanakh, or what Christians would call the Old Testament — are mostly in Hebrew, although some were written in Aramaic, Greek and Nabataean-Aramaic. They are dated between the third century BCE and the first century CE.

NASA was preparing for a key test of its troubled Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on Thursday as the agency prepares to return to the Moon.

The second "hot fire" test will see all four of the rocket's RS-25 engines fire simultaneously and achieve a maximum of 1.6 million pounds of thrust (7.1 million newtons).

Scientists have generated early-stage human embryo models that could help shed light on the "black box" of initial human development stages and improve research on pregnancy loss and birth defects.

Two separate teams found different ways to produce versions of a blastocyst -- the pre-embryonic mass of cells at the stage of development around five days after a sperm fertilizes an egg -- potentially opening the door for a huge expansion of research.

The origin of life on Earth is one of the most complex puzzles facing scientists. It involves not only identifying the numerous chemical reactions that must take place to create a replicating organism, but also finding realistic sources for the ingredients needed for each of the reactions.

One particular problem that has long faced scientists who study the origin of life is the source of the elusive element, phosphorus. Phosphorus is an important element for basic cell structures and functions. For example, it forms the backbone of the double helix structure of DNA and the related molecule RNA.

Though the element was widespread, almost all phosphorus on the early Earth – around 4 billion years ago – was trapped in minerals that were essentially insoluble and unreactive. This means the phosphorus, while present in principle, was not available to make the compounds needed for life.

In a new paper, we show lightning strikes would have provided a widespread source of phosphorus. This means lightning strikes may have helped spark life on Earth, and may be continuing to help life start on other Earth-like planets.

One potential source of phosphorus on the early Earth is the unusual mineral schreibersite, which is found in small amounts in meteorites. Experiments have shown that schreibersite can dissolve in water, creating aqueous phosphorus which can react and form a variety of organic molecules important for life. Examples include nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA, and phosphocholine, a precursor to the lipid molecules that make up the cell membrane.

But there's another potential source for schreibersite. While studying a glass structure created by a lightning strike called a fulgurite, we found a substantial amount of the unusual phosphorus mineral inside the glass.

If lightning strikes created a large amount of schreibersite, and other reactive phosphorus minerals, then lightning could be an alternate source of the reactive phosphorus needed for life.

To determine if this was the case, we estimated the amount of phosphorus made available by lightning strikes from 4.5 billion years ago, when the Earth formed, to 3.5 billion years ago when we have the earliest fossil evidence of life.

Our study

To do this, we needed to estimate three things: the number of fulgurites formed each year; how much phosphorus was in the rocks on early Earth; and how much of that phosphorus is turned into usable phosphorus, by the lightning strikes.

Fulgurites form when lightning strikes the ground, so first we needed to know how much lightning there was. To determine the amount of lightning, we looked at estimates of the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere on early Earth and estimates of how much lightning there would be on Earth for different amounts of CO₂. The CO₂ in the atmosphere can be used to estimate global temperature, which is a key factor in controlling the frequency of thunderstorms.

Meteorites and comets have captured the public imagination for centuries. They inspire awe when we see them shoot across the night sky — and terror at the thought that maybe, just maybe, one of them will collide with our planet.

This article first appeared in Salon.

President Joe Biden on Thursday night delivered good news on America's vaccination campaign, as he announced that every American should be eligible to sign up for a vaccine by May 1st.

Instead of celebrating this news, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) took to Twitter Friday to bitterly complain that Biden and the Centers for Disease Control had not embraced hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that former President Donald Trump falsely claimed would be a "game changer" for treating COVID-19.

The largest asteroid to pass by Earth this year will approach within some 1.25 million miles (two million kilometers) of our planet on March 21, NASA said Thursday.

The US space agency said it will allow astronomers to get a rare close look at an asteroid.

The bundle of instruments known as SuperCam on board the Perseverance Mars rover has collected its first samples in the hunt for past life on the Red Planet, mission scientists said Wednesday.

The return to Earth years from now of the rocks and soil it retrieves "will give scientists the Holy Grail of planetary exploration," Jean-Yves le Gall, president of France's National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), which mostly built the mobile observatory, commented via a YouTube broadcast.

For those who find that Fox News isn't right-leaning enough, One America News Network (OANN) has filled that gap. The cable show and news site, though launched three years before Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, emerged as a mainstay for pro-Trump propaganda during the course of his presidency. The network notoriously amplified Trump's meritless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Before that, it has taken Trump-friendly positions on everything from the supposed "migrant caravan" in 2018 to the claim that the novel coronavirus was developed in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory. Trump himself has praised OANN, referring to the organization as a "great network" early in his presidency and urging supporters to follow its coverage as it helped him try to overturn the 2020 election. And, like Trump and many on the right, the network has been eager to politicize the COVID-19 pandemic and public health–related measures designed to combat it. Now, a recent article from OANN features such a shocking misinterpretation of a public health study that it feels almost intentionally bad-faith.

This article was originally published at Salon