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It’s gotten too darned hot lately to sleep without running the A-C. Of course, this means that now we’re losing sleep over our electricity bill, and whether global warming is going to threaten our retirement. Time to crack the science books. Don’t look for comfort from Popular Science, whose climate change-focused issue heaps on enough weather-related worrying to give us the hot shivers.
We got a chuckle over the scientific quest to make it snow by seeding clouds with silver iodide. “There’s something seductive about the idea of controlling the weather,” writes Sarah Scoles, appealing to the inner Zeus in all of us. The idea is to help drought-afflicted areas while also ensuring that Aspen has enough snow for ski season. Priorities, folks.
Worst was the 10-page spread on cute animals endangered by extreme weather. As tempera- tures climb, pandas may be forced to quickly migrate to colder regions, even though bamboo, their staple dish, may not be able to grow there. And koala bears are finding eucalyptus leaves increasingly poisonous because of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
Is weather talk getting you down? Not to worry: Scientific
American will give you plenty of other things to worry about.
A crop of “super lice” has become immune to over-the-counter shampoo treatments, for example. The Food and Drug Administration has approved three new lice treatments since 2009, but some say doctors aren’t properly rotat- ing them to ensure that the super lice don’t become immune to those treatments, too.
“Lice seem poised to keep researchers — and the rest of us — scratching our heads for quite some time,” says mag contributor Karen Weintraub.
If your skin isn’t already crawling, writer Steve Mirsky claims there are “eleventy bazillion” spiders lurking in our surroundings.
“Wherever you sit as you read these lines, a spider is probably no more than a few yards away,” says arachnologist Norman Platnick. “As most spiders have eight eyes, it’s probably looking at you, too.”
The top science mag even managed to make us worry about pizza pies. In Naples, Italy, Bruno Siciliano has been developing a pizza-making robot to see if it can master the “extraordinary level of agility and dexterity” required to work the dough. That sounds creepier than lice and spiders.