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Climate change may make it harder to predict the most severe of the El Niño and La Niña weather disturbances in the Pacific Ocean. That’s because these events will become less connected with what happens halfway around the world in the Atlantic, researchers report online August 21 in Science Advances. In today’s climate, cooling in the waters of the equatorial Atlantic, called an Atlantic Niña, can lead to especially warm water in the equatorial Pacific, or El Niño (SN: 5/28/16, p. 13.) Meanwhile, warmer Atlantic Niño waters tend to give rise to the cooler waters of La Niña in the Pacific. That call-and-response relationship, which involves air being swept into the atmosphere from over the Atlantic and settling down over the Pacific, can give forecasters an edge in anticipating destructive El Niño and La Niña events. But as the atmosphere gets warmer, that gas exchange is expected to become more sluggish, weakening the … [Read more...] about Climate change may make El Niño and La Niña less predictable

The brains of mice and people are mostly similar, except when they’re not. That finding, from a detailed comparison of thousands of individual brain cells from both species, reveals new ways in which human brains are distinct from those of mice (SN: 8/17/19, p. 22). The results, published August 21 in Nature, emphasize that the brains of laboratory mice are not always good proxies for human brains. Human brains and mice brains do have roughly the same number of cell types in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain that handles many sophisticated jobs like planning, decision making and even consciousness, neuroscientist Rebecca Hodge at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and colleagues found. That number — 75 — comes from comparing the behavior of genes in single mouse cells with the behavior of genes in single nuclei from human cells. But amid that overall similarity lie big differences, some of which may be behind people’s high-powered mental … [Read more...] about What human and mouse brains do and don’t have in common

Regular old quantum teleportation wasn’t enough for scientists. So they’ve kicked it up a notch. Previously, physicists had teleported qubits, or quantum bits of information. Just as a standard bit in a desktop computer has two possible values, 0 or 1, a qubit has two possible states. Now scientists have moved on, reporting in the Aug. 16 Physical Review Letters that they’ve teleported qutrits, which have three possible states. Both qubits and qutrits have the weird quantum property of being able to exist in multiple states at once. But while a qubit can represent 0 and 1 at the same time, a qutrit can be a combination of 0, 1 and 2. In quantum teleportation, rather than sending objects from one place to another in Star Trek fashion, the properties of a quantum particle are transferred to another, distant particle (SN Online: 7/7/17). Until now, those properties could only be binary. For example, a particle of light, or photon, could be made to take one of two paths … [Read more...] about Quantum physicists have teleported ‘qutrits’ for the first time

Don’t just sit there. If you really want to bring scientific rigor to studying evolution and spider aggression, drive into a hurricane. That’s the notion that turned Jonathan Pruitt of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, into evolutionary biology’s storm chaser. He has rushed to the southeastern United States to collect spider data right before a storm and within 48 hours afterward. “I grew up in Florida,” Pruitt says; he knows hurricanes. As a kid ready for a break from school, “I would always hope that our hurricanes hit during a weekday instead of on a weekend.” Most studies of what hurricanes do to wildlife are just lemonade squeezed from the bad luck of storms that trashed some unrelated project in a forest, bird colony or other research site. An ideal hurricane study, however, needs replications and undamaged sites for comparison. Otherwise, “you just have one site where something bad happened,” Pruitt says. Sign Up … [Read more...] about Why one biologist chases hurricanes to study spider evolution

source Apple If you perform a Google search for “Apple Card,” the top result will be a link to Apple’s website telling you the card was “created by Apple, not a bank.” That might leave you wondering why Apple so badly wants you to know that its credit card was designed by a technology company and not a financial institution, especially during an era in which public distrust of large tech firms seems to be higher than ever. But if there’s one thing Apple wants you to know about the Apple Card, it’s that it was designed by Apple, a company that knows a thing or two about mobile software design and how people interact with apps. A company that was credited with inventing the modern smartphone back in 2007 – and whose business most certainly relies on making sure you continue using that smartphone and all of the features, accessories, and services that go along with it. That undoubtedly is a large part of Apple’s … [Read more...] about The Apple Card’s best feature is also its biggest flaw