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Thomas Sumner

(He/Him)
  • Senior Staff Writer, Simons Foundation
New York
As seen in: Trending News (Podcast), BBC, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Fox News, New Scientist, Smithsonian, upenn.edu, Caltech, Flipboard and
Science communicator. Managing editor @SimonsFdn. Formerly @ScienceNews. He/Him. 🦋 Bsky: bsky.app/profile/thomassumner.com
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Clamor of Gravitational Waves From Universe's Merging Supermassive Black Holes 'Heard' for First ...

Clamor of Gravitational Waves From Universe's Merging Supermassive Black Holes 'Heard' for First ...

Simons Foundation — After 15 years of carefully observing stars called pulsars throughout our galaxy, the NANOGrav collaboration has “heard” the perpetual chorus of gravitational waves rippling through our universe. Much of this gravitational wave background is probably caused by pairs of supermassive black holes as they spiral toward collision.
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A Star That Devoured Its Own Planets

A Star That Devoured Its Own Planets

Simons Foundation — Astrophysicists estimate that the sunlike star called Kronos has consumed 15 Earths’ worth of rocky material.
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Ag drone field grows

Ag drone field grows

The Salinas Californian — A drone helicopter flies over an Oakville vineyard. While deadly military drones grab headlines, a very different type of drone glides above the vineyards of Davis. Precisely aligning itself along a row of grapes, the robotic helicopter releases its 16-liter pesticide payload on the crops below. The sight of the snowmobile-sized aircraft might seem out of place now, but agricultural drones are poised to become more common. This shift is thanks to clever engineering and a new federal policy aimed at opening the skies to commercial drones by 2015. The drones, which range from helicopters the size of hummingbirds to full-sized, fixed-wing ...
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Coastal Los Angeles losing fog to urban sprawl

Coastal Los Angeles losing fog to urban sprawl

Science News — Warmer nights lift cloud level Morning fog along parts of coastal Southern California is disappearing due to nearby urbanization, new research suggests. Since 1948, fog frequency has plummeted 63 percent in the Los Angeles area, bioclimatologist A. Park Williams of Columbia University and colleagues report in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters. Portions of San Diego also saw decreases. Fog around Santa Barbara and offshore islands remained relatively unchanged. Williams and colleagues collected weather observations from 24 airfields along the Southern California coast. Using 1950 census data and modern-day maps, the researchers discovered that at airfields where fog frequency fell, significant amounts of urbanization had taken place within a 10-kilometer radius.
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How to Hide Your Genome

How to Hide Your Genome

Science — CHICAGO, ILLINOIS-As the cost of genetic sequencing plummets, experts believe our genomes will help doctors detect diseases and save lives. But not all of us are comfortable releasing our biological blueprints into the world. Now, cryptologists are perfecting a new privacy tool that turns genetic information into a secure yet functional format. Called homomorphic encryption and presented here today at the annual meeting of AAAS, which publishes Science, the method could help keep genomes private even as genetic testing shifts to cheap online cloud services. Existing encryption techniques make data secure at the expense of making it unusable.
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Central American fires may intensify U.S. tornadoes

Central American fires may intensify U.S. tornadoes

Science News — Smoky air lowers cloud ceiling and segregates winds Smoke wafting across the Gulf of Mexico from Central America can help spawn intense twisters in and around North America's Tornado Alley, new research suggests. Reconstructing the extreme April 27, 2011 tornado outbreak, which sired 122 twisters across the Southeastern United States, researchers found that smoke particles in the atmosphere further enhanced conditions already favorable for intense tornado formation. The smoke lowered the cloud base and increased the difference in wind velocity at different elevations -two important mechanisms in brewing severe twisters -the researchers report in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.
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Faulty thermometers exaggerated western U.S. mountain warming

Faulty thermometers exaggerated western U.S. mountain warming

Science News — Incorrect temperatures were used in snowpack and ecology research Observations of sharply rising high-elevation temperatures in the western United States were caused by faulty equipment, not climate change, new research suggests. From 1991 to 2012, the National Water and Climate Center's Snow Telemetry network, or SNOTEL, reported a 1.16 degree Celsius per decade climb in minimum temperatures at high elevations throughout the mountainous American West. Correcting for flawed temperature sensors, which overstated temperatures by as much as 2 degrees Celsius, new research published January 13 in Geophysical Research Letters reduces this decadal increase to roughly 0.106 degrees.
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Studying a volcano in a war zone

Studying a volcano in a war zone

Science News — View the slideshow On clear nights a red glow radiates from the top of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the mountain's summit the source of the light thrashes and boils: the largest and most active lava lake in the world. Among volcanoes, Nyiragongo stands out. The magma that fuels its violent eruptions is incredibly fluid, capable of racing down the mountainside at highway speeds. The volcano would be a hotbed of research activity - if it weren't in the crossroads of war. More than a million people live in the volcano's shadow, many of them refugees from years of civil war and the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda.
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Galactic surprise: New find overturns theories how our galaxy evolved

Galactic surprise: New find overturns theories how our galaxy evolved

San Jose Mercury News — Posted: 01/05/2013 02:13:34 PM PST Updated: 01/08/2013 01:30:58 PM PST Click photo to enlarge Our galaxy wasn't always the beautiful cosmic ballet it is today. Billions of years ago, the Milky Way was a chaotic jumble of stars and gas moving every which way. Only over time did the Milky Way morph into its current uniform shape, with flat arms of starlight reaching out from a galactic core. Now, a new NASA study shows this process happened much more recently than scientists had thought.
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Scientists probe mystery of venus fly trap

Scientists probe mystery of venus fly trap

Fox News — By Thomas Sumner Plants aren't typically known for their speed. But the carnivorous Venus flytrap can close its jaw-like leaves in the blink of an eye. Charles Darwin once referred to the Venus flytrap as "one of the most wonderful plants in the world." But despite the plant's notoriety, its closing mechanism remains a mystery 250 years after its discovery. Biophysicists at the Ecole Polytechnique Universitaire de Marseille, in France, are investigating the cellular process behind the Venus flytrap's rapid response to prey. The researchers have already thrown out one popular explanation for the Venus flytrap's quick motion, that water movement within the plant makes its jaw snap.
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House windows may kill 22 million Canadian birds each year

House windows may kill 22 million Canadian birds each year

mongabay.com — By: Thomas Sumner, special to mongabay.com November 15, 2012 The body of a bird killed in a window strike. Birds mistake the reflective glass as a clear flight path, flying into the window at full speed. Photo by: Paige Shoemaker. The sickening thud of a bird crashing into a window is an all-too-familiar sound for many Canadian homeowners. Birds often mistake windows for openings, flying into the glass at full speed. A startling new analysis suggests about 22 million Canadian birds die each year from such crashes, researchers reported Sept. 4 in Wildlife Research.
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Bubbles within bubbles could deliver chemotherapy drugs without the life-saving treatment's debil...

Bubbles within bubbles could deliver chemotherapy drugs without the life-saving treatment's debil...

Daily Mail — New technique can target the treatment directly at cancer cells Researchers are in the early stages of creating a new method that uses bubbles within bubbles to deliver chemotherapy drugs, and could someday reduce the treatment's significant side effects. The side effects of the most common chemotherapy treatments stem from how the drugs work. Cells become cancerous when they begin replicating out of control, so chemotherapy drugs target and kill all cells in the process of replicating - cancerous or not. Chemotherapy's collateral damage largely includes cells in the body that replicate often, including cells in bone marrow, hair follicles and the digestive tract.
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Calcium Keeps Night Vision From Tricking Our Brains

Calcium Keeps Night Vision From Tricking Our Brains

LiveScience — (ISNS) -- As candy-crazed kids run up and down driveways this Halloween, guided only by the flickering light of jack-o'-lanterns, it's easy to appreciate the low light vision that's preventing trips over superhero capes and princess dresses. But despite the usefulness of night vision, scientists have only now identified the important chemical process that compensates for visual errors in low light. Biochemist Marie Burns led the University of California, Davis team that made the discovery. The researchers hope their findings, published this month in the journal Neuron, will improve understanding of vision and offer insight to scientists creating treatments for eye diseases.
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