2/4/19

Dear Reader:

A polar vortex slammed into the northern United States last week, but those cold temperatures don’t mean that climate change is taking a ski holiday. In fact, melting Arctic ice is to blame for the chill — and that’s not the only pole melting. Warmer oceans are eating away the underbelly of Antarctica’s ice shelves. When those ice shelves collapse, the glaciers behind them begin to rush to the sea. In our latest entry in Climate Change Chronicles, discover just how much ice is bottled up in glaciers — and how much havoc it could wreak if it flows away.

— The Editors

Glaciers represent thousands of years of ice and snow, piled into huge rivers that can bury mountains in their chill. That ice is a source of water for millions of people. Find out how scientists are measuring ice from space and studying glacial melt up close and personal — in the hopes of finding out how to stop it.

People might think of the Arctic and Antarctica as being similar. Both cold, both icy. But they are reacting differently to climate change because they are very different places. In some ways, in fact, they are polar opposites. We explain why.

Scientists have found that bullying and teasing in U.S. schools has gone up since the presidential election in 2016. The increases were more likely in areas where the adults had voted for President Donald Trump. Those areas also saw increases in race- and ethnicity-based bullying.

Neandertals have a reputation for eating paleo — lots of meat and not a lot else. But is such a diet realistic? Some scientists suspect that the only way to consume that much meat would be for Neandertals to snack on stuff that was not, er, fresh. To find out, one scientist is rotting large hunks of meat. For science.

Blocking a cough or sneeze is no joke. An unblocked “achoo” can shoot droplets of mucus several meters, as our in-house scientist has found. But can a tiny one-ply sheet of paper stop the snot? In our latest “do it yourself” science experiment, we put tissues to the test.

Scientists are designing a new bandage that may put a classic Band-Aid to shame. The bandage heals wounds by zapping them with tiny electrical currents. But no worries about bringing your own battery. This bandage gets its power the movements of the wearer. In rats, the wrap healed in days wounds that would normally take weeks.

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