| Inhale or Don't?: Marijuana Hurts Some, Helps Others Clinton didn’t inhale, Obama did--and maybe Reagan should have. New research suggests that THC, the chemical that gives marijuana its mind-bending properties, kills developing neurons, yet oddly, the same chemical saves neurons in adults with Alzheimer’s disease.“Marijuana is not the ‘soft drug’ people like to think it is,” says neuro­pharmacologist Veronica Campbell of Trinity College in Dublin, whose latest study uncovered the harmful effects of THC on young neurons. When Campbell and her co-workers treated brain cells from newborn or adolescent rats with THC, the neurons died, but THC did not have such deadly effects on neurons taken from adult rats. In fact, work from other labs shows that THC benefits adult neurons. “We don’t know why,” Campbell says. Several possi­bilities are being investigated for this “Jekyll and Hyde” effect. [More] rss.sciam.com |
What would rings around Earth look like? A video currently making the rounds on the Web ponders an intriguing astronomical scenario: What if Earth had rings, as Saturn does? [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Complex Physics of Clouds "I wandered lonely as a cloud" o'er fields of scientific inquiry, with nary a precise understanding, of all my complex processes. Or words to that effect ( apologies to Wordsworth ). You might forgive atmospheric scientists for having their heads in the clouds. After all, seemingly simple, fluffy clouds actually involve a complex interplay of fluid dynamics, turbulence, convection and mixing that changes depending on whether one looks at larger or smaller scales. [More] rss.sciam.com |
For One Last Ranger, an Expanding Duty List Bob Shade is Bonny Lake State Park’s lone-ranger, last-man-standing employee, since his three co-workers were eliminated last fall. nytimes.com |
Does a Weaker Sun Mean a Warmer Earth? The sun controls Earth's climate, bathing us in light ranging from ultraviolet to visible that warms the planet and drives the heat engines we know as weather systems and ocean currents. The sun is changeable, cycling from maximum to minimum outputs over a roughly 11-year cycle, increasing or decreasing the amount of light that reaches Earth as a result of the poorly understood aspects of the sun's seething nuclear fusion. Now new satellite measurements reveal that from 2004 to 2007--the declining phase of an unusually low and prolonged solar minimum--the sun put out even less ultraviolet light than expected but compensated by putting out more visible light. [More] rss.sciam.com |