Lupus is a lifelong disease that has no cure. It affects an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States and 5 million people worldwide, many of them young women, according to the Lupus Foundation of America. Most patients are treated with steroids to tame the inflammation. Immunosuppressant drugs are also used, but these make … Read more
And when you factor in a van’s price, the cost of fuel, insurance, and depreciation, plus parking fines and congestion charges, the cost-effectiveness calculation swings even further in cargo bikes’ favor—so there would also appear to be an economic incentive for companies to make the switch. This, though, is where it becomes tricky. A traditional … Read more
If there is anyone who attracts near-ubiquitous admiration in the United Kingdom, it’s David Attenborough. The naturalist has had a hold on our eyes and ears with a remarkable stream of nature documentaries since the 1950s. Even into his later years, Attenborough—who is now 96—has relentlessly continued to release new documentaries and sequels to his … Read more
In the late 1970s, a physicist and textiles engineer in Texas named Robert Steadman published a paper called “The Assessment of Sultriness.” The title reflected an unpleasant sort of steaminess—how temperature and humidity combine to make life hard on the body. To do it, he drew on a long history of experimentation. In the 18th … Read more
Though Bd swept through Central America from the 1980s to the 2000s, the analysis that demonstrated its effect on human health could be accomplished only recently, says Michael Springborn, the paper’s lead author and a professor and environmental and resource economist at UC Davis. “The data existed, but it wasn’t easily obtainable,” he says. Over … Read more
“There’s a significant amount of math and formulas that has been written about this over the years,” says Still, “but that doesn’t take into account psychology.” There are both positive and negative elements at play when it comes to the psyche of this particular queue. Almost no one within it will ever have waited as … Read more
To keep those Glen Canyon turbines spinning, Lake Powell needs more water. But without big cuts in consumption, the obvious solution for filling the reservoir is stealing the water from somewhere else in the system. Flaming Gorge reservoir on the Green River, which also happens to be the habitat for the razorback suckers raised at … Read more
A new tool from Belsky and his colleagues, introduced in 2020 and updated earlier this year, acts as an aging speedometer. In creating their Pace of Aging biomarker, they quantified the rate of change in 19 markers of organ function at four ages, compiled them into a single index, and modeled it with methylation. “We’re … Read more
But utilities will likely play the biggest role in ushering in a new era of electricity grids, says Max Baumhefner, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. One easy way they can encourage EV drivers help the grid is by offering “time-of-use” rates, which make it cheaper for owners to charge at times … Read more
This was slow going. “We spent a lot of time, probably the first couple of years, really just working out the immunopanning and culturing the astrocytes,” recalls Caldwell. One challenge was making sure that the media contained few proteins to start with—those would have interfered with their measurements. The scientists also needed to make sure … Read more