| The Tesla Roadster is a rocket. And all-electric, too “Are you ready?” the young driver beside me asked, as we sat in the two-seat Tesla Roadster convertible, facing a straight, steep, quarter-mile road that rises from the water of San Francisco Bay up the headland to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he floored the accelerator. I was driven into the seat-back behind me--and I mean driven, like I was strapped into some insane amusement park ride--for several full seconds as the car accelerated and accelerated like a rocket up the climb. Only there was no screaming flame blasting behind us. There was no engine roaring either. I was being shot up this road so fast my emergency senses were on full alert, yet all was eerily quiet. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Extreme Monotremes: Why Do Egg-Laying Mammals Still Exist? Only two kinds of egg-laying mammals are left on the planet today--the duck-billed platypus and the echidna, or spiny anteater. These odd “monotremes” once dominated Australia, until their pouch-bearing cousins, the marsupials, invaded the land down under 71 million to 54 million years ago and swept them away. New research suggests these two kinds of creatures managed to survive because their ancestors took to the water.Before making their way to Australia, the marsupials had migrated from Asia to the Americas to Antarctica. Forced to contend with all the animals along the way, marsupials may have been primed for competition, hence accounting for their overwhelming success in Australia, says evolutionary biologist Matthew Phillips of the Australian National University in Canberra: “The question then becomes, ‘Why did the monotremes survive?’” [More] rss.sciam.com |
Climate change will impact infectious diseases worldwide, but questions remain as to how NEW YORK--As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy , another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases --threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth's climate . [More] rss.sciam.com |
At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off the Page Role-playing literary camps, like Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation. nytimes.com |
The Carbon Trap: Can China Survive without Coal? Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Watt's book, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind--or Destroy It.Cold, dark, silent. Close to death. Buried in the depths of a collapsed, illegal coal mine, Meng Xianchen and Meng Xianyou knew they had been given up for dead. [More] rss.sciam.com |