Aurelia Butler

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  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Physics

    A new microbead proves effective as a plastic-free skin scrubber

    A new degradable microbead could soon replace plastic exfoliants in skin cleansers.

    The polymer spheres effectively remove permanent marker and eyeliner on animal skin samples and break down into molecules similar to sugars and amino acids, researchers report December 6 in Nature Chemical Engineering. The beads offer a more environmentally friendly alternative to microplastic beads, the scientists say.

    In 2015, the United States banned companies from adding plastic microbeads to personal care products that get rinsed down the drain to prevent them from entering waterways where marine life might ingest them. Several countries have implemented similar bans, but others still allow companies to add plastic microbeads as scrubbers and exfoliants. More

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in Heart

    Generative AI is an energy hog. Is the tech worth the environmental cost?

    It might seem like magic. Type a request into ChatGPT, click a button and — presto! — here’s a five-paragraph analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, as an added bonus, it’s written in iambic pentameter. Or tell DALL-E about the chimeric animal from your dream, and out comes an image of a gecko-wolf-starfish hybrid. If you’re feeling down, call up the digital “ghost” of your deceased grandmother and receive some comfort (SN: 6/15/24, p. 10).

    Despite how it may appear, none of this materializes out of thin air. Every interaction with a chatbot or other generative AI system funnels through wires and cables to a data center — a warehouse full of server stacks that pass these prompts through the billions (and potentially trillions) of parameters that dictate how a generative model responds. More

  • 163 Shares119 Views

    in Heart

    Climate change made 2024 the hottest year on record. The heat was deadly

    Over and over, the numbers tell the same story: 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, knocking the previous record holder — 2023 — out of the top spot (SN: 12/6/23). But temperatures alone can’t describe the human cost: humidity that challenges the body’s ability to cool itself; nighttime temps that rob people of sleep; power outages; wildfire smoke; ruined crops; rising cases of mosquito-borne disease (SN: 9/20/24).

    Meanwhile, record-breaking water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico fueled hurricanes Helene and Milton (SN: 10/9/24). Helene’s torrential rains caused flooding across six states in the U.S. Southeast, killing over 200 people (SN: 10/1/24). More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Heart

    Meet a scientist tracking cactus poaching in the Atacama Desert

    Pablo Guerrero has been visiting cacti in the Atacama Desert his whole life, first on family trips to the Chilean coast and later as a researcher studying the impacts of climate change and illegal poaching on the fragile flora.

    The desert, which is the driest spot on Earth beyond the planet’s poles, can be so desolate that NASA uses it to test Mars rovers. But from a young age, Guerrero learned to spot pockets of life hidden within the arid landscape. More

  • 113 Shares139 Views

    in Heart

    Climate stress may undermine male spiders’ romantic gift giving

    Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts.

    Researchers have described gift giving in courtship in only 15 or 20 of the world’s more than 50,000 known species of spiders, says evolutionary biologist Maria José Albo of Universidad La República in Montevideo, Uruguay (SN: 7/26/16). Since 2015, she and her lab have focused on spiders that flirt mostly in evenings and nights among the rocks and pebbles of rivers of Uruguay and southern Brazil. More

  • 113 Shares129 Views

    in Heart

    New videos reveal the hidden lives of Andean bears

    Camera collar footage is unveiling the secret lives of Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus), South America’s only surviving ursid. A wild Andean bear in Peru was caught eating soil or clay, courting females and even cannibalizing a dead bear cub.

    “It’s so hard to see an Andean bear,” says Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a wildlife biologist at Amazon Conservation, a nongovernmental organization in Cusco, Peru. Scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left in the wild. “And it’s even harder to see what they are doing.” Even though the bears are deep brown or black with bright spectacled faces and can weigh up to 340 pounds, they’re tricky to spot in the dense, steep forests of the Andes. More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Physics

    Starchy nanofibers shatter the record for world’s thinnest pasta

    The world record for the thinnest pasta has been shattered, though the new, narrow noodles are better suited to wound dressings than the dinner table.

    From white flour, researchers made starch-rich nanofibers that are about 370 nanometers thick, on average — or about two hundredths the thickness of a human hair. The nano-noodles could be used in biodegradable bandages, chemist Adam Clancy and colleagues reported October 30 in Nanoscale Advances.

    To make the noodle “dough,” the scientists mixed the flour with formic acid, a liquid that helps uncoil the long starch molecules in the flour. “Normally, if you want to cook starch, then you use water and heat to break up the tight packing of starch,” says Clancy, of University College London. “We do that chemically with formic acid. So we effectively pickle it instead of cooking it.” More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Heart

    From electric cars to wildfires, how Trump may affect climate actions

    If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States.

    It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on the aggressive actions — including slashing U.S. carbon emissions and transitioning to greener, lower-carbon sources of energy — that scientists have repeatedly said are necessary to help keep the planet’s warming in check. There is simply no more time for denial or delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned back in 2021 (SN: 8/9/21). More