Scientific American

The body of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was unearthed from his tomb in Isla Negra, Chile, this week. The exhumation marks the beginning of a forensic analysis aimed at clarifying whether the Nobel prizewinner’s death in 1973 was from prostate cancer -- as has been believed -- or from poisoning, as a key witness has claimed.

From Nature magazine

It is a safe bet that when local councilor C. Abbs testified before a royal commission in northeast England in 1866, he did not expect that his statements would be of use to a fisheries scientist nearly 150 years later.

Renewables could be the world's primary source of energy if only someone could solve the storage problem--how to store lots of electricity cheaply on a wide scale? Batteries are too expensive and don't last long enough. Pumped hydro is cheap but not feasible for most locations. Thermal storage is promising but still too expensive or hard to scale. Compressed air is cheap and scalable but not yet efficient enough (although LightSail, a new company backed by Peter Thiel, Vinold Khosla and Bill Gates, hopes to change that). And what about flywheels? The biggest player, Beacon Power, went bankrupt in 2011 .

Healthy food kills--or at least it can.

From Nature magazine

The story was tucked on the bottom of page A4 in last week's New York Times . Most readers probably passed on it. Another piece about how fast the ice is melting. So what's new.

The U.S. has one of the highest hospital readmission rates in the world. About 20 percent of Medicare patients wind up being readmitted within 30 days after discharge, according to government data. In Canada and England, that figure is only about 8 percent. Hospitals have tried a variety of strategies including patient counseling and home visits to lower readmissions, with mixed results. The office that administers Medicare is hoping that new financial penalties, part of the Affordable Care Act, will push hospitals to tackle the problem more aggressively. This year nearly two thirds of the hospitals in the U.S. will be penalized for having high readmission rates and will lose a combined total of $280 million in Medicare reimbursements. The cut in payments is scheduled to increase from up to 1 percent this year to 2 percent next year, and then to 3 percent in 2015.

New evidence is confirming that the environment kids live in has a greater impact than factors such as genetics, insufficient physical activity or other elements in efforts to control child obesity. Three new studies, published in the April 8 Pediatrics , land on the import of the 'nurture' side of the equation and focus on specific circumstances in children's or teen's lives that potentially contribute to unhealthy bulk.

From Nature magazine

Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" of British politics who died Monday at the age of 87, is being lionized as the woman who tilted British domestic and economic policy to the right.

Few people check into a hospital expecting to come down with a severe case of diarrhea while undergoing care for an entirely unrelated problem. And even fewer expect to die of the hospital-acquired intestinal infection that causes the watery stools. Yet for approximately 14,000 Americans each year, that is exactly what happens. The culprit is a strain of a spore-forming bacterium known as Clostridium difficile, or C. diff --in particular, a relatively recent strain that has grown more virulent and resistant to drugs.

From   Nature magazine.

Excerpted from The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability--Designing for Abundance , by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Copyright © April 16, 2013, North Point Press.

LONDON – Critics of renewables have always claimed that sun and wind are only intermittent producers of electricity and need fossil fuel plants as back-up to make them viable. But German engineers have proved this is not so.

Technologies that rely on ‘quantum-weirdness’ phenomena, such as electrons being in two places at the same time, are inherently delicate: the smallest disruption can make such uncertain states ‘collapse’ into well-defined outcomes. Now, however, physicists have shown that quantum effects do not always succumb entirely to disruptions -- at least not those from electromagnetic noise.

An oil flood through an Arkansas subdivision on March 29 is just the most recent example of pipeline problems in the U.S. In recent weeks, months and years diesel has leaked from a pipeline into wetlands near Salt Lake City; oil has spilled into the Yellowstone River in Montana; and about 20,000 barrels of oil have spewed into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The question: Is the problem the pipelines themselves or what they carry? [More]

Editor's Note: Each year, the Bickel & Brewer/NYU International Public Policy Forum directs a policy position at high schools worldwide for debate, pro or con. This year, organizers issued a climate-related challenge: "Resolved: Adaptation should be the most urgent response to climate change." 213 teams from 34 states and 29 countries responded, each writing 2,800-word essays making the case for their position. The following are two essays that survived the first round--one from Bozeman, Mont., making the case that adaptation is the only viable response and the other from high schoolers in Sherman Oaks, Calif., arguing that geoengineering is the best choice. The IPPF World Champion will be named on April 13, following oral debates in New York City.

A $2-billion particle detector mounted on the International Space Station has registered an excess of antimatter particles in space, the experiment’s lead scientist announced April 3. That excess could come from fast-spinning stellar remnants known as pulsars and other exotic, but visible sources within the Milky Way galaxy. Or the antiparticles might have originated from the long-sought dark matter, the hypothetical massive particles that constitute some 27 percent of the universe.

Tune-in to PBS at 9pm tonight to watch NOVA 's latest episode about a mysterious machine found buried on the sea floor. Discovered off the coast of a tiny Mediterranean Island inside a 2000-year old shipwreck, the Antikythera Mechanism is widely-believed to be the world's first computer.  Badly corroded by seawater, its true purpose has only been revealed through the use of X-rays and other hi-tech imaging devices. Watch the sneak preview below where researchers  Tony Freeth  and  Alexander Jones  explain how they deciphered the cryptic messages etched into the machine's gears. They tell us this remarkable device might have accurately predicted eclipses--down to the very hour they occurred.