TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Weather is not climate, even as some U.S. cities near record temps Temperatures on the Eastern seaboard have risen to the high 80s and low 90s in recent days, 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for April in the region. Here in New York City, where Scientific American's offices are located, we may break the record high of 90 degrees Fahrenheit on this date set back in 1990. But as the temperature climbs in the Northeast and summer wilt sets in before trees have even budded out, it's worth remembering that weather is not climate.Weather is the day-to-day temperature, humidity or precipitation that determines whether you'll wear your spring coat or strip down for summer. Climate is the overall combination of all these elements over a long period of time. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Global Warming Impacts In Every Corner of the United States The Obama Administration on Tuesday released a report showing climate disruption is already leaving deep imprints on every sector of the environment and that the consequences of these changes will grow steadily worse in coming decades.The 196-page report crisscrosses the United States and finds that global warming has touched every corner: Heavier downpours, strengthened heat waves, altered river flows and extended growing seasons. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Wanted: Home for 17,000 tons of mercury The United States is sitting on a slippery stockpile of toxic material that has nothing to do with the nuclear power industry: thousands of tons of mercury. The question remains now of where to store it. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Is Mountaintop Removal Mining a Threat to Watersheds? U.S. EPA is conducting further environmental analysis on 79 pending permits for mountaintop mining , the agency announced today.The agency said the permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers , identified in a preliminary list released today, could all potentially pose a threat to the mountain watersheds and streams, warranting further review under the Clean Water Act . [More] rss.sciam.com |
Putting Madness in Its Place: Can the Environment Explain Schizophrenia's Hereditary Patterns? Schizophrenia hides its heritability well. Although fewer than 1 percent of the general population will be diagnosed as schizophrenic based on symptoms such as hallucination and disorganized thought, for children of a schizophrenic parent, those odds jump to about one in 10. And yet the condition’s genetic underpinnings have stubbornly resisted discovery. In the latest attempt, three crack teams of investigators pooled genomic data from 8,000 schizophrenics of European ancestry but could lay claim to only a handful of weak genetic risk markers.Analyses such as these, which appeared online July 1 in Nature ( Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group), have led researchers to question the value of brute-force genomics for analyzing schizophrenia. “I think we need to pause and think through the risk pathways to disease more clearly,” says Dolores Malaspina, director of the social and psychiatric initiatives program at New York University Langone Medical Center. In particular, devotees of genetics might want to cede a little ground to their colleagues in epidemiology, who over the past decade have amassed a provocative, interlocking set of studies implicating urban birthplace and migrant status as persistent risk factors. [More] rss.sciam.com |