Shaken and chilled — but not stirred — ordinary frozen water turns into something different: a newly discovered form of ice made of a jumble of molecules with unique properties.
“This is completely unexpected and very surprising,” said Christoph Salzmann, a chemistry professor at University College London in England and an author of a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science that described the ice. [...]
“Lo and behold, something completely unexpected happened,” said Dr. Rosu-Finsen, who is now an associate editor at the journal Nature Reviews Chemistry.
The white material inside looked like what one would expect smashed-up ice to look like, but it had been transformed.
The material was now denser, and much of the crystalline structure had been destroyed, producing an amorphous material. The density, however, did not match the already known high- and low-density amorphous ices. Intriguingly, it fell in between; indeed, it was almost exactly the same density as liquid water. Until now, all of the solid forms of ice, crystalline or amorphous, were either significantly denser or less dense than liquid water.
The researchers named it medium-density amorphous ice, or MDA.
The Ants, the Bees, and the Blind Spots of the Human Mind: How Entomologist Charles Henry Turner Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Evolution of Intelligence and Emotion
The son of a nurse and a church janitor, entomologist Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867–February 14, 1923) died with a personal library of a thousand books, having published more than fifty scientific papers, having named his youngest son Darwin, and having revolutionized our understanding of the most abundant non-human animals on Earth by pioneering a psychological approach to insect learning, devoting his life to discovering “stubborn facts that should not be ignored.”
Without a proper laboratory, without access to research libraries and university facilities, he became the first human being to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch, and the first scientist to achieve Pavlovian conditioning in insects, training moths to beat their wings whenever they heard his whistle and concluding that “there is much evidence that the responses of moths to stimuli are expressions of emotion.”
it’s fire season somewhere all the time
flashback
This is such a great story and I wanted everyone to be able to read it, so I chose it as one of my 10 free NYT gift articles. I love Karen Russell’s novel “Swamplandia” for it’s weird combo of kitsch and conflict specific to the Florida landscape.
The Night Falls is a tourist trap in Florida, a beautiful grotto turned into a roadside attraction where three sisters sing in kitschy bird outfits. And then they drown and become actual birds, monstrous ones, whose seductive song, like that of the sirens in Greek myth, draws people to their doom.
Mingling comedy and horror while leaning into the seedy sublime of Florida, this scenario sounds like a story by Karen Russell, the author of “Swamplandia!” and “Vampires in the Lemon Grove.” And it is a story by Karen Russell, created for a new dance-driven musical theater production, “The Night Falls” ...
The first task for Russell was to come up with a story idea suited to dance and music. Sirens fit the bill. “I had been thinking a lot about what you hear referred to as this epidemic of anxiety or despair, and the amplification systems we have now,” she said. “What if there were a sonic contagion?”
Naturally, for her, the setting had to be a (fictional) abandoned park in Florida, where she was born. (She now lives in Portland, Ore.) “I grew up going to all these places, like the Weeki Wachee mermaids,” she said. “And I thought it would be a playful way to take people’s suffering seriously without feeling so serious.”
What is the value of a human organ? It’s a question that’s been on my mind since I heard about a disturbing proposed change to the law in Massachusetts that would allow incarcerated people to swap their body parts for reduced prison sentences.
That’s right. Prisoners who donate one of their organs or their bone marrow could be rewarded with anywhere between 60 and 365 days off their sentence if this bill were to pass.
One benefit of the bill, according to one of its cosponsors, is that it will broaden the pool of potential organ donors. It’s true that there is a dire shortage of organs. In the US alone, more than 100,000 people are waiting for a transplant, and 17 people per day die on the waiting list.
The U.S. Air Force has told North Dakota leaders that it believes a Chinese company’s plans to build a wet corn milling plant near its Grand Forks base poses a “significant threat to national security,” prompting city officials to say they'll move to stop a project once touted as an economic boon.
The Fufeng Group’s planned $700 million facility would be 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the Grand Forks Air Force Base, a location that triggered some local concern about potential espionage. Gov. Doug Burgum and U.S. Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer — all Republicans — pressed the federal government in July to expedite a review of any security risk. [...]
The Grand Forks Air Force Base is a center for both air and space operations, according to a letter sent to Hoeven and Cramer by Andrew Hunter, an assistant secretary of the Air Force. The senators released the correspondence Tuesday.
“The proposed project presents a significant threat to national security with both near- and long-term risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area,” Hunter wrote. The letter didn't offer any evidence that Fufeng is a threat, nor did it detail what kind of risks the company's business might pose.
Dangerously cold air from the Arctic roared into the Northeast early Friday, and it is poised to become even more frigid Friday night into Saturday morning. Parts of Maine could endure their most extreme wind chills in at least a generation.
Nearly 50 million Americans in 15 states find themselves under wind chill alerts into Saturday, with millions more in Canada’s southeast provinces under warnings for extreme cold as well.
Wind chills are projected to bottom out between minus-50 and minus-65 in northern and western Maine and could even plummet to around minus-100 at New England’s highest spot, the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Through midday Friday, wind chills had already tumbled into the minus-80s on Mount Washington and into the minus-40s in Upstate New York and northern Maine.
Yes THIS
The CDC’s move towards annual Covid immunization for the general public left me wondering “but what about me and the millions of others with higher risks for severe/deadly Covid infections than the general public?”
Bay Area coronavirus cases and other metrics such as case rates and hospitalizations are still falling, but the rate of decline has slowed and wastewater samples aren’t giving an entirely rosy picture. Still, the state and federal governments are moving forward with plans to lift their public health emergency declarations, which will mean no more free tests. We explore other implications of the change for Californians in a useful summary.
The Biden administration has repeatedly said the federal government would continue to make vaccines and treatments available to Americans at no cost once the COVID-19 public health emergency expires on May 11 — at least while the current supply lasts. But those supplies could run out as early as this summer….
People with a confirmed COVID-19 infection may experience a 24% increased risk for high cholesterol levels for up to a year after infection, according to a recent study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. “These are people who never had cholesterol problems before,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, an author of the study and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told NBC News. “Now, all of a sudden, they started having problems weeks and months after COVID-19.” [...]
When the U.S. COVID-19 public health emergency expires on May 11, one of the most significant changes Americans will face is no longer having access to cost-free coronavirus tests.
Inter Press Services, whose “main focus is news and analysis about social, political, civil, and economic subjects as it relates to the Global South, civil society and globalization.
Environmental Accountability, Justice & Reconstruction in Russian War on Ukraine — Inter Press Services
Next month (February 24) will mark one year since Russia began its full-scale war on Ukraine. This large-scale land invasion has had repercussions across the geopolitical, humanitarian, financial, and even food and energy domains. It has also had devastating ecological impacts.
Measurable environmental damage—valued by Ukrainian authorities at an estimated US$46 billion and still rising—includes direct war damage to air, forests, soil and water; remnants and pollution from the use of weapons and military equipment; and contamination from the shelling of thousands of facilities holding toxic and hazardous materials.
The longer-term costs for Ukraine with regard to lost ecosystem services are much harder to quantify. On top of this, the war effort has directed government attention and resources away from environmental governance and climate action, posing additional risks for national, regional and global sustainable development.
However, as this SIPRI Topical Backgrounder sets out, Ukrainian authorities, civil society and international partners are responding vigorously to these challenges, not only by drawing attention to the ecological impacts of the war but also by recording and measuring those impacts, pursuing accountability and restitution, and laying the groundwork for a green reconstruction.