Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”
Increasingly science agrees with the poetry of direct human experience: we are more than the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies, but beings of light as well. Biophotons are emitted by the human body, can be released through mental intention, and may modulate fundamental processes within cell-to-cell communication and DNA. Nothing is more amazing than the highly improbable …
The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier. Hansen said, …
Sea-level rise may be the most predictable outcome of climate change. Expanding warmer waters and melting land ice both contribute to flooding – and scientists agree that we are locked into sea-level rise for centuries to come. The question is not if we will retreat from the coast, but when. Still, the rush to develop the coast occurs at a maddening pace. …
U.S. coastal communities, home to more than 13 million people, are at risk of being completely flooded by rising sea levels within the century under a worst-case climate change scenario, new research publishedMonday reveals. In a scenario involving a 6ft rise by 2100, a total of 13.1 million people—more than 6 million of whom would be living in Florida—would be at risk …
Collective motion can be observed in biological systems over a wide range of length scales, from large animals to bacteria because collective systems always work better for adaptation than those which are singular. Individual bacterial cells have short memories. But groups of bacteria can develop a collective memory that can increase their tolerance to stress. This has been demonstrated experimentally …
More people live close to sea coast than earlier estimated, assess researchers in a new study. These people are the most vulnerable to the rise of the sea level as well as to the increased number of floods and intensified storms. By using recent increased resolution datasets, Aalto University researchers estimate that 1.9 billion inhabitants, or 28% of the world’s …
A dusty film of pollution is muting the reflective whiteness of Greenland’s pristine icecap and making it vulnerable to accelerated melting rates. Greenland is getting darker. Climatology’s great white hope, the biggest block of ice in the northern hemisphere, is losing its reflectivity. According to new research, the island’s dusty snows are absorbing ever more solar radiation, which is likely …
Greenhouse gases could tip the Earth – or at least a planet like Earth, orbiting a star very like the Sun – into a runaway greenhouse effect, according to new research. The new hothouse planet would become increasingly steamy, and then start to lose its oceans to interplanetary space. Over time, it would become completely dry, stay at a temperature …
Feelings of shame are universal in all cultures, and new research could explain why. Studies in the US, India, and Israel suggest that shame—like pain—evolved as a defense. “The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue,” says Daniel Sznycer, lead author of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The function of …
Damages from extreme events like floods are even more relevant than the mean sea level itself when it comes to the costs of climate impacts for coastal regions. However, while it is now rather well understood how sea-levels will rise in the future, only small progress has been made estimating how the implied damage for cities at the coasts will …
