Excellence And Citation Awards

The key to making a splashless urinal is ensuring that a person’s pee stream hits the porcelain at a shallow angle no matter where it is aimed, researchers report November 22 at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Indianapolis.   “For a small enough angle, there is no splash,” says mechanical engineer Zhao Pan of the University of Waterloo in Canada. Pan calls the angle where splashing ceases “the critical angle.” Keeping the angle that a fluid strikes the surface at the critical angle or lower prevents the splash. Pan and colleagues’ design — a tall, narrow urinal with a curving inner surface — employs the same geometry as a nautilus shell ( SN: 4/1/05 ). “There’s a smooth flow across the surface,” says Waterloo mechanical engineering student Kaveeshan Thurairajah, which prevents droplets from flying out. In experiments involving dyed fluids sprayed into conventional urinals, the team found significant splash that, in the real world, wou...

Apollo 8 Earthrise, taken in 1968 The Apollo 8 crew orbited the moon 10 times during late December of 1968, capturing this view of Earth. NASA Lisa Grossman , astronomy writer, chose Apollo 8’s Earthrise as her top space image. She says: The you-are-there, sci-fi-but-it’s-real feeling of seeing Earth over the edge of the moon gets my imagination going. And something about having the surface of the moon in the image gives me deep chills. I can imagine my own feet in those gray craters, my own eyes looking back at my own Earth. It’s wild. It’s eerie. I love it. I feel similarly about the selfie images from the Mars rovers ; here’s NASA’s Curiosity rover at Mont Mercou in 2021. NASA’s Curiosity rover used a camera on its head and one on its robotic arm to create this selfie with Mont Mercou in March 2021. NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS You can see the rover and the landscape behind it. That’s our robotic avatar on that planet, rolling around doing our work. Though I’m lukewarm about s...

Air pollution is a major cause of disease and early death worldwide and disproportionately impacts poor and marginalized communities ( SN: 7/30/20 ). Particulate matter — a type of pollution emitted from vehicle exhaust, power plants, wildfires and other sources —  has been tied to health harms including respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological diseases ( SN: 9/19/17 ). In the new study, researchers from Columbia University analyzed lung immune tissue from 84 organ donors, ranging in age from 11 to 93 years old. The donors were nonsmokers or had no history of heavy smoking. With age, the lungs’ lymph nodes — which filter foreign substances and contain immune cells — became loaded with particulate matter, turning them a deep onyx, the research team found. “If the [lymph nodes] build up with so much material, then they can’t do their job,” says Elizabeth Kovacs, a cell biologist who studies inflammation and injury at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Auro...

Shri Kiranbhai Lallubhai Patel, the Joint Managing Director of the ASPEE Group, has been awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Citation in Education Leadership Awards for the year 2022-23 by EducationWorld. The esteemed awards came to him in recognition of his extensive contribution towards developing schools and colleges in India. The award function was held on October 11, 2022, at The Leela Ambience Gurgaon Hotel & Residences, Gurgaon. In addition, Shri Tushar Desai has also been honoured for Aspee Kanya Vidyalay, Bilimora, Gujarat. Shri Kiranbhai Lallubhai Patel is currently the Joint Managing Director of one of the leading agricultural equipment manufacturing brands in India - ASPEE. He manages a pan-India network of 2,000+ distributors and dealers along with his marketing team. After completing his MBA from Berkeley, California USA, he initially joined American Spring & Pressing Works Pvt. Ltd., also known as ASPEE, as a Sales Manager. Over the years, he has climb...

Kendrick Frazier dedicated his life to that cause. I was saddened to learn of his sudden passing in November, at age 80. He was one of Science News ’ proudest supporters, first as a reader, then starting in 1969 as a reporter covering mostly earth sciences and then as editor in chief. After Frazier left Science News, he spent decades as editor of the Skeptical Inquirer , but he never really left the Science News family. “Being at Science News was my dream, since I had been a reader for many, many years as a young person,” Frazier told Maria Temming , assistant editor of Science News Explores , when she interviewed him while researching the history of Science News for our centennial ( SN: 3/26/22, p. 16 ). He was especially proud of our rigorous (some might say obsessive) standards of accuracy: “It’s a quality, reliable, respectable science news source,” he told Temming, “and I’ve always been proud of it, because we always — and you always — put scientific discoveries in perspect...

Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are engraved with Aboriginal designs. These tree carvings — called dendroglyphs — could be hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet have received almost no attention from western researchers.  That is slowly starting to change. In the winter of 2021, Garstone — who is Jaru, an Aboriginal group from the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia — teamed up with archaeologists to find and document some of these carvings. For Garstone, the expedition was a bid to piece back together the disparate parts of her identity. These pieces were scattered 70 years ago when Garstone’s mother and three siblings were among the estimated 100,000 Aboriginal children taken from their families by the Australian government. Like many others, the siblings were sent to live at a Christian mission thousands of kilometers from home. It would take decades of effort a...

Some through names for obscure units of measurement (à la Hertz, Faraday and Curie). Others in elements on the periodic table ( Mendeleev , Seaborg, Bohr , among many others). A few become household names symbolizing genius — like Newton in centuries past and nowadays, Einstein . But only one has been honored on millions and millions of cartons of milk: the French chemist, biologist and evangelist for experimental science Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was born 200 years ago this December, the most significant scientist birthday bicentennial since Charles Darwin’s in 2009 . And Pasteur ranked behind only Darwin among the most exceptional biological scientists of the 19th century. Pasteur not only made milk safe to drink, but also rescued the beer and wine industry. He established the germ theory of disease, saved the French silkworm population, confronted the scourges of anthrax and rabies, and transformed the curiosity of vaccination against smallpox into a general strategy for treating a...