Month: March 2018

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When gun enthusiasts gather for the National Rifle Association’s annual conventions, rates of gun-related injuries and deaths drop by 20 percent nationwide—and a whopping 63 percent in the hosting state—according to an analysis published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The finding was based on an analysis of insurance data on gun injury rates during NRA conventions from 2007 through 2015, as well as rates three weeks before and three weeks after each of the conventions. The researchers behind the work—health policy expert Anupam Jena, MD, PhD of Harvard Medical School and economist Andrew Olenski of Columbia University—also looked at crime rates during those times.

They found no significant change in crime rates despite the dip in injuries. They also noted that the largest drops in firearm-related injuries during NRA conventions were in men, the southern and western areas of the country, and in states with the highest levels of gun ownership.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Anders Clark | EyeEm)

Charter Communications is appealing a court ruling that said the ISP must face a lawsuit alleging the company falsely promised fast Internet speeds that Charter knew it could not deliver.

Charter claims that federal regulations, including the recent repeal of net neutrality rules, preempts the lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary in February 2017.

The New York Supreme Court rejected Charter's motion to dismiss the case on February 16, but Charter is appealing the decision in a state appellate court. (Despite its name, the New York Supreme Court is not the state's highest court.)

Enlarge / Waves crash over houses on Turner Rd. as a large coastal storm affects the area on March 2, in Scituate, Massachusetts. A powerful nor'easter is bringing snow, rain, and high wind to much of the Northeast. (credit: Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

The winds were howling so much in Washington DC on Friday that flight controllers at Dulles International Airport had to temporarily evacuate their tower, which suspended flight operations. Conditions weren't much better on board the airplanes themselves. A Canadair Regional Jet reported, after it landed at the same airport with about 50 passengers, that "pretty much everyone on the plane threw up."

Up the coast, conditions were even more severe, as New England residents had to deal not only with severe winds, but major coastal flooding as well. Boston is no stranger to a good nor'easter, of course, but the storm now bearing down on the Eastern United States is especially brutal by historical standards in terms of winds and coastal flooding. It also happens to be the second such powerful nor'easter that has wracked the US East Coast in just two months.

For much of the 20th century, the Northeastern Blizzard of 1978 set the benchmark for extreme snowfall and flooding. During this storm, the tidal gauge in Boston Harbor measured a record 15.1 feet. The extreme "bomb cyclone" storm that afflicted the Eastern United States in January of this year recorded a mark of 15.16 feet in Boston, eclipsing the record.

Enlarge / All of these Lego pieces will now be made of sugarcane-derived polyethylene. (credit: Lego)

Starting this year, buyers of new Lego playsets will begin to see a new type of block in their boxes—ones made of plant-based plastic.

The Danish company announced the initiative on Thursday, confirming that roughly "1-2 percent" of all Lego bricks are now being made of sugarcane-sourced polyethylene. For this material-switch rollout, Lego has made the admittedly cute decision of using it to produce playsets' tiny Lego plants—as in, trees, shrubs, vines, and patches of grass.

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Imagine a mammoth, grazing 20,000 years ago in the steppe-tundra—a vast and frigid grassland where plants grew slowly under a frigid, low-carbon atmosphere. The mammoth tramples saplings, reducing forest cover and allowing grass to flourish. It devours the grass, leaving room for fresh, new plant life to grow. The mammoth and the grass belong to an ecosystem of dazzling complexity, where every tiny factor plays a role in the exact balance of nutrients, the release of carbon, and the life cycle of every species that lived there.

Dan Zhu is a scientist who studies how land, plants, and animals all feed into the climate. She led a team of researchers that built the closest thing we have to a time-machine terrarium that lets us study the ecosystem the mammoth inhabited: a computational simulation of the tundra they occupied. The results, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution this week, help to explain one of the big mysteries about mammoths: how did such an enormous animal survive in an environment where everything struggled to grow?

The tundra in the computer

We can't build our own tundra, and the mammoths are long gone. So how do we study this? Imagine you could shrink that tundra and keep it in a terrarium, studying the complexity and understanding the interplay. Make it a time machine too: pause it, reboot it, and fast-forward it through hundreds of years at a time. This magical terrarium would let you play out hundreds of different scenarios, tweaking conditions slightly to see how they influence the ecosystem that develops.

United Launch Alliance

America has a new weather satellite—the second of a new generation of high-definition weather observation spacecraft. The GOES-S spacecraft lifted off from Florida on Thursday evening, launched aboard an Atlas V rocket. It will reach its target geostationary orbit in two weeks, about 36,000km above the Earth's surface.

From this point, the satellite will undergo several months of testing to determine the health of the spacecraft and its six primary instruments. Officials with NOAA and NASA expect the instrument to become fully operational this fall.