https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/giving-thanks-can-make-you-happier#:~:text=In%20positive%20psychology%20research%2C%20gratitude,adversity%2C%20and%20build%20strong%20relationships.

#ScienceNews #Science It’s a frustration many parents know all too well: You’ve finally lulled your crying baby to sleep, so you put them down in their crib … and the wailing begins again. Science may have a trick for you. Carrying a crying infant for about five minutes, then sitting for at least another five to eight minutes can calm and lull the baby to sleep long enough to allow a parent to put the child down without waking them, researchers report September 13 in Current Biology. Some of those same researchers previously showed that carrying a crying baby soothes the child and calms a racing heart rate (SN: 4/18/13). For the new study, the team looked at what it takes to get that crying baby to nod off and stay asleep. The researchers put heart rate monitors on 21 crying babies, ranging in age from newborns to 7 months old. The team also took videos of the infants, monitoring their moods as their mothers carried them around a room, sat holding them and laid them in a crib. That allowed the team to observe how the babies responded to different environments, whether they were crying, fussy, alert or drowsy, heartbeat by heartbeat. “We tested the physiology behind these things that tend to be kind of common knowledge, though it’s not really well understood why they work,” says Gianluca Esposito, a developmental psychologist at the University of Trento in Italy. The babies’ heart rates slowed and they stopped crying when their mothers picked them up and carried them around for five minutes. Some infants even fell asleep. But the researchers also noticed that the babies tended to respond to the movement of the parent, whether they were in deep sleep or not. For instance, a baby’s heart rate quickened if a parent turned quickly while walking or tried to put the baby down. Sitting seems to smooth that transition from walking to bed, the team observed. Babies cradled in mom’s lap for at least five minutes tended to settle into a slower heart rate and stayed asleep once they were put in their crib. In contrast, the heart rates of six babies whose moms sat with them for less than five minutes accelerated once they were laid down and they woke up soon after. There’s a lot of research about the relationship between infants and mothers, “but I had not seen work showing that infants were responding to mothers’ behaviors while infants were sleeping,” says Sarah Berger, a developmental psychologist at the College of Staten Island in New York who was not a part of the study. Both Berger and Esposito caution this method isn’t a magic wand for all babies. It doesn’t rule out sleepless nights, but still, it’s something that parents can try, Esposito says. And while this study was done with mothers, anyone that an infant is comfortable with can do it. “Especially for very, very young kids … as long as these caregivers are familiar with the kid, it’s going to work,” he says.

#ScienceNews #Science #volcano When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the Pacific Ocean erupted earlier this year, the event was one for the record books — in several surprising ways. The January 15 eruption was so explosive that it injected water vapor so high that it touched space, a first-of-its-kind observation for an earthly volcano. And the event produced the greatest concentration of lightning ever detected — making it far flashier than the 2018 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia or the 2021 tornado outbreak across the U.S. South. The eruption also released so much energy that its disturbance of a charged layer of Earth’s atmosphere, called the ionosphere, rivaled that of a solar geomagnetic storm. Seismologists, geophysicists and oceanographers described these and other eruption superlatives at a news conference on December 12 and in several presentations in Chicago at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. “These are once in a lifetime … observations,” said Larry Paxton, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. He and colleagues examined data from NASA’s Global Ultraviolet Imager, on a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. On the day of the eruption, Paxton said, the instrument revealed “something unusual” in the far-ultraviolet light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: a roundish spot in the satellite data coinciding with the volcano’s location where there was a temporary decrease in those UV emissions. The instrument doesn’t see anything in the atmosphere below about 100 kilometers above sea level, what’s typically thought of as the boundary of space. That means that some sort of emitted material — most likely water vapor from the undersea volcano — had reached high enough into space to briefly absorb those particles of light, the researchers reported. Scientists had previously estimated that the eruption extended past the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. The new finding suggests the explosion reached even higher. The volcano began erupting in December 2021 (SN: 1/21/22). By early January, it was already “one of the most prolific lightning producers” on the planet, said Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with Vaisala Inc., an environmental instruments company headquartered in Vantaa, Finland. Using Vaisala’s Global Lightning Detection Network, Vagasky and colleagues estimate that on January 15 alone, there were at least 400,000 lightning strikes at and around the volcano — an order of magnitude higher than generally observed in Earth’s most powerful supercell thunderstorms, Vagasky said. “This was the most extreme lightning event ever detected by the global network.”

https://www.livescience.com/3945-history-dinosaurs.html

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/history-space-exploration

#ScienceNews #Science #Nuclear #Nuclearfusion #Energy Scientists at the world’s largest nuclear-fusion facility have for the first time achieved the phenomenon known as ignition — creating a nuclear reaction that generates more energy than it consumes. Results of the breakthrough at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF), conducted on 5 December and announced today by US President Joe Biden’s administration, has excited the global fusion-research community. That research aims to harness nuclear fusion — the phenomenon that powers the Sun — to provide a source of near-limitless clean energy on Earth. Researchers caution that, despite the latest success, a long path remains to achieving that goal. The chase for fusion energy: “It’s an incredible accomplishment,” says Mark Herrmann, the deputy director for fundamental weapons physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which houses the fusion laboratory. The landmark experiment follows years of work by multiple teams on everything from lasers and optics to targets and computer models, Herrmann says. “That is of course what we are celebrating.” A flagship experimental facility of the US Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programme that was designed to study thermonuclear explosions, NIF originally aimed to achieve ignition by 2012 and has faced criticism for delays and cost overruns. In August 2021, NIF scientists announced that they had used their high-powered laser device to achieve a record reaction that crossed a critical threshold on the path to ignition, but efforts to replicate that experiment, or shot, in the following months fell short. Ultimately, scientists scrapped efforts to replicate that shot and rethink the experimental design — an effort that paid off last week. “There were a lot of people who didn’t think it was possible, but I and others who kept the faith feel somewhat vindicated,” says Michael Campbell, former director of the fusion laboratory at the University of Rochester in New York and an early proponent of NIF while at Lawrence Livermore lab. “I’m having a cosmo to celebrate.” Nature looks at NIF’s latest experiment and what it means for fusion science.

#Science #ScienceNews #Evolution #HumanEvolution The story of human evolution has been one of the biggest mysteries on the planet, and it is one that keeps getting interesting. Researchers have now found that humans might not have learned to walk on two legs on the land. Instead, their upright walk developed on trees. Human bipedalism – walking upright on two legs is a unique feature that characterizes homo-sapiens and researchers have long been interested in decoding this unique behavioural change that separates us from other living organisms on the planet. In a study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers explored the behaviours of wild chimpanzees - our closest living relative - living in the Issa Valley of western Tanzania, within the region of the East African Rift Valley. The chimpanzees’ habitat is very similar to that of our earliest human ancestors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Prince_Alessandro_Farnese

#Science #ScienceNews #moon #Orion #spacecraft At its nearest point to the Moon it flew less than 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the surface. And it broke the distance record for a habitable capsule, venturing 268,000 miles (432,000 kilometers) from our planet. NASA's Orion spacecraft flew past the moon on December 5. The crew capsule and its test dummies will aim for a Pacific Ocean splashdown on Sunday, December 11 off the coast of San Diego after a three-week test flight, setting the stage for astronauts on the next flight in a couple years.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/polar-bear