When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

The result? LiquiGlide, a “super slippery” coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging—though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles—just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private space capsule called Dragon soared into the predawn sky Tuesday, riding a pillar of flame like its beastly namesake on a history-making trip to the International Space Station.

The unmanned capsule, built by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), is the first non-governmental spacecraft to launch to the space station, ushering in a new era of partnership between the public and private spaceflight programs.

“I think this is an example of American entrepreneurship at its best,” said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, in a briefing before the launch. About 100 VIP guests were on hand to witness the launch, NASA officials said.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX launched its Dragon capsule at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) today (May 22) from a pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It blasted off atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, a 157-foot (48-meter) booster powered by nine Merlin rocket engines. The space station was flying 249 miles above the North Atlantic Ocean as the rocket lifted off, NASA officials said. [Launch Photos: SpaceX’s Dragon Blasts Off for Space Station]

Congress also bears substantial responsibility for the anti-scientific, anti-empirical aspects of American drug policy. If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are able to define the terms of the upcoming presidential election, this issue won’t come up. But voters have consistently shown interest in the subject when permitted to directly question politicians, and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee, is eager to challenge Obama and Romney on this issue given the chance. When opportunities for these challenges arise, the classification of marijuana is one of the most vulnerable parts of the status quo to attack.12 states have pending medical marijuana legislation.

Over-the-counter HIV tests that would allow people to check in the privacy of their homes if they have the virus have moved a step closer in the US.

A panel of experts said the OraQuick In-Home HIV Test was safe and effective and its potential to prevent infections outweighed the risk of false results.

The Food and Drug Administration will decide this year whether to approve it.

The 20-minute test is 93% accurate for positive results and 99.8% for negative, the manufacturer said.

HIV affects nearly 1.2m people in the US, with 50,000 new cases each year.

The US says it will seek an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s by 2025, as it faces an ageing population and spiralling health costs.

Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the goal as part of the first National Alzheimer’s Plan.

An additional $50m will be added to research funding during 2012.

About 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or related dementias, a number expected to reach 16 million by 2050, at a cost of $1tn (£625m).

President Barack Obama has earmarked an additional $80m in his 2013 budget plan for Alzheimer’s research in what was described as an effort to “jumpstart” efforts to reach the 2025 goal.

In addition, the plan calls for better training of doctors in a bid to better recognise the symptoms of the disease, increased support for care-givers and public awareness of the disease, as well as better data tracking.

When you’re holding a gun, you’re more likely to think someone else is, too.

In a study, people holding either a realistic “gun” from the Wii system or a foam ball watched as photos of people holding guns or innocuous objects flashed on a screen. The groups made errors at similar rates, but gun-holders erred on the side of “gun present” while those holding a ball leaned toward “gun absent.”

When a real firearm was prominent in the lab but not held, participants displayed no bias toward spotting guns. The behavior, it turns out, also wasn’t just about weapons: When people held athletic shoes, they saw more sneakers in the photographs than truly existed.

Although most of the outrage has focused on the comparison between those who accept the evidence for climate change and murderers, many of the statements in the release are simply false. Many of the people and groups who do accept the evidence are anything but “the radical fringe of society.” And, despite what the Heartland would like to think, there’s absolutely no evidence that “Scientific, political, and public support for the theory of man-made global warming is collapsing.”

In many cases, the Heartland has suggested that their difference with climate science is primarily an issue with scientifically questionable “alarmism” of the sort typified by James Lovelock . With these ads and the accompanying announcements, however, it makes it clear that their issue is with the very basics of climate science and anyone who accepts it.

This is now creating a problem for the Institute as a whole. The Heartland is ostensibly focused on offering free-market solutions for various policy issues and has attracted a wide range of backing from corporations that favor limited regulation. But for both secondhand smoke and climate change, it has decided to attack the scientific evidence that is driving policy rather than offering a solution. And that is causing some of its backers to rethink their involvement with Heartland. Several of them dropped support when the internal documents were leaked, and others are doing so now. One report indicates that an entire initiative done in cooperation with the insurance industry is at risk.

The Heartland’s continued efforts in this area seem to risk turning it into a single-issue think tank. And that may actually make sense; the leaked financial documents indicate that some of its largest donations come from single individuals who are targeting money for climate efforts.

In any case, the Institute’s climate conference will occur towards the end of this month and, now that the ads have been pulled, most of the planned speakers will still attend. If years past are any indication, it will feature opinions ranging from questioning of basic facts (some speakers have claimed temperatures and sea levels haven’t gone up) to a general sense that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates of temperature changes are probably overstated. About the only common theme among the speakers is the belief that scientific mainstream is wrong.

Is eating more fruits and vegetables the key to reducing obesity? Evidence suggests this may not be the most effective strategy. A recent RAND study of more than 2,700 adults found that calorie intake from cookies, candy, salty snacks, and soda was approximately twice as high as the recommended daily amount. Consumption of fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, is only 20% shy of recommended guidelines.

Still, eating extra fruit adds more in total calories than it displaces in calories you would have otherwise consumed through junk food. For example, on average, eating one additional serving of fruit reduces about 16 calories from junk food, but it adds 70 calories to your daily total. Therefore, eating less junk food appears more important for reducing obesity than eating more fruit and veggies.

How can we get people to eat less junk food? The jury is still out on whether putting supermarkets in “food deserts” will help curb obesity. A recent RAND study showed that the number of supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and convenience stores near children’s and teens’ homes and schools was not closely related to diet quality or Body Mass Index (BMI).

Translating this knowledge into action could help reduce the heavy burden obesity places on the healthcare system. Medicare will spend about $38,000 more over the lifetime of an obese 70-year-old than it will spend on a 70-year-old of normal weight. And reducing obesity by 50% could reduce Medicare spending between 2005 and 2030 by about $1.2 billion.

One theory is that homosexual urges, when repressed out of shame or fear, can be expressed as homophobia. Freud famously called this process a “reaction formation” — the angry battle against the outward symbol of feelings that are inwardly being stifled. Even Mr. Haggard seemed to endorse this idea when, apologizing after his scandal for his anti-gay rhetoric, he said, “I think I was partially so vehement because of my own war.”

It’s a compelling theory — and now there is scientific reason to believe it. In this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we and our fellow researchers provide empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire.

The US space agency Nasa is set to test a real-time network of GPS sensors that it hopes will lead to faster, more accurate earthquake analysis.

Nearly 500 sensors in the Pacific-coast states of California, Oregon and Washington will be put to use.

The plan aims to characterise the locations and magnitudes of events in minutes to help with disaster response.

It should also lead to better predictions for any tsunami resulting from offshore earthquakes.

The system is called Real-time Earthquake Analysis for Disaster Mitigation Network, or Readi.

GPS data, providing minute-to-minute position information, have been mined extensively in the past to analyse the effects of earthquakes well after they have occurred.

It may even be possible to use the data to predict earthquakes, according to one Japanese researcher.

But the new network is a test bed for much wider-scale implementation as a warning system and could add to the suite of tools put into place in recent years to focus disaster response and tsunami warning efforts.

Today, Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University in Massachusetts say that these models are mathematically incompatible with an eternal past. Indeed, their analysis suggests that these three models of the universe must have had a beginning too.

Their argument focuses on the mathematical properties of eternity—a universe with no beginning and no end. Such a universe must contain trajectories that stretch infinitely into the past.

However, Mithani and Vilenkin point to a proof dating from 2003 that these kind of past trajectories cannot be infinite if they are part of a universe that expands in a specific way.

They go on to show that cyclical universes and universes of eternal inflation both expand in this way. So they cannot be eternal in the past and must therefore have had a beginning. “Although inflation may be eternal in the future, it cannot be extended indefinitely to the past,” they say.

They treat the emergent model of the universe differently, showing that although it may seem stable from a classical point of view, it is unstable from a quantum mechanical point of view. “A simple emergent universe model…cannot escape quantum collapse,” they say.

The conclusion is inescapable. “None of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal,” say Mithani and Vilenkin.

Since the observational evidence is that our universe is expanding, then it must also have been born in the past. A profound conclusion (albeit the same one that lead to the idea of the big bang in the first place).

Leading energy ministers have been told the world is on track for a long-term temperature increase of 6C unless they change their priorities.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said on current trends, emissions would double from 2009 to 2050.

The deputy director of the IEA, Richard Jones, urged ministers: “Please take our warning seriously.”

He was speaking at the Clean Energy Ministerial, a forum for 23 major nations.

Mr Jones said the world could still possibly hold CO2 under 32Gt - the level equated with a 2C temperature rise - but only if nations co-operated urgently on clean technology.

The report Tracking Clean Energy Progress, says: “The current trend of increasing emissions is unbroken with no stabilisation of GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations in sight.” It projects that if this continues, “energy use will almost double in 2050, compared with 2009, and total GHG emissions will rise even more. Long-term temperature rise is likely to be at least 6C.”

Mr Jones presented a traffic light scorecard. Of 11 technologies to reduce emissions, only renewable power - particularly from wind and solar - merited a green for being on track.

Most of the ice being lost from Antarctica is going as a result of warm water eating the fringes of the continent, scientists say.

The researchers used a satellite laser to measure the thinning occurring on ice shelves - the floating tongues of ice that jut out from the land.

The team’s analysis found the shelves’ shrinkage could not be attributed simply to warmer air temperatures.

Rather, it is warm water getting under the floating ice to melt it from below.

This is leading to a weakening of the shelves, permitting more and more ice to drain from the continent’s interior through tributary glaciers.

Previous studies have already indicated that warmer waters are being driven towards the continent by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean.

The researchers say the new understanding has major implications for their ability to reliably project future sea-level rises as a result of Antarctic ice loss.

The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard Library’s Faculty Advisory Council, which says the costs of subscriptions to major research journals “cannot be sustained.” It says that the cost of these journals has gone up by 145 percent over the last six years and, if things continue at that pace, it’ll be forced to cut back.

Just to put this in context, the total cost for subscriptions is $3.75 million a year. As of the end of the last fiscal year, Harvard’s endowment was $32 billion. If it received a similar rate of return on its investments as it did last year, it would take it about five and a half hours for its endowment to cover this cost.

In any case, the Faculty Advisory Council is fed up with rising costs, forced bundling of low- and high-profile journals, and subscriptions that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. So, it’s suggesting that the rest of the Harvard faculty focus on open access publishing. The statement calls on the faculty to “move prestige to open access” and to consider resigning if they’re on the editorial board of a subscription journal.

None of this is binding, and there’s a very good chance that if a researcher gets an opportunity to publish in Nature, they’ll take it. But it’s another sign of a general dissatisfaction with the current state of academic publishing, which was what spawned the open access movement originally, and has more recently given rise to a large boycott of the publisher Elsevier.

That’s a pretty big surprise to most people. They’re used to seeing magnificent detail in Hubble images, stars in galaxies and wisps of gas in beautiful nebulae. But those objects are far, far larger than the Moon. Hubble’s resolution is 0.1 arcseconds no matter how far away an object is. Those wisps of gas appear to be finely resolved, but they’re billions of kilometers across. That’s a bit roomier than the lunar landers were.

So even if we built a colossal sports arena in Tycho crater, Hubble would barely see it at all. The landers, rovers, and other junk left on the lunar surface by the astronauts are totally invisible.

Using a bigger telescope won’t help much. You’d need a mirror 50 times bigger than Hubble’s to see the landers at all, and we don’t have a 100 meter telescope handy.

However, there are two tricks we can use here. One is to look not for the artifacts themselves, but for their shadows. At sunrise or sunset, the shadow from a lander might be long enough to detect, even if the lander itself is invisible. However, this is a very tricky observation and has to be timed just right (and the landscape itself may hide the shadow; crater rims, mountains, and natural dips and bumps might prevent sunlight from hitting the lander until the Sun is high in the sky, and that will shorten the shadows).

Plus, try to convince a committee in charge of hotly-contested and hugely over-subscribed telescopes to give you a night to try this and see how they react. Good luck ever getting an observation again.

The other method is obvious enough: go back to the Moon and take a look. Later this year we will be sending the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the Moon, and it will be able to resolve objects as small as 0.5 meters across (it’s far smaller than Hubble, but it’ll be a lot closer to the Moon). It will easily resolve the landers, and even the rovers.

Manipulating memories of drug use may help reformed addicts avoid a return to a life of drug abuse, according to scientists in China.

They said memories linking “cues” - such as needles or cigarettes - and the pleasurable effects of drugs caused cravings and relapsing.

Authors of the study, published in the journal Science, “rewrote” those memories to reduce cravings.

Experts said targeting memories could become a new avenue for treatment.

Repeatedly showing people drug cues without actually giving patients the drug is a part of some therapies for addicts. It can break the link between cue and craving in the clinic. But this does not always translate to real life.

The researchers at Peking University tried to rewrite the original memory so that it would be as if the link between cue and the craving never existed.

Orangutans show remarkably advanced engineering skills when making nests, researchers say.

The researchers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester, followed and filmed the apes in the forests of Sumatra.

The team also took orangutans’ nests apart to see how they were constructed.

Their study, in the journal PNAS, reveals that the apes select thick branches for a scaffold and thinner branches for a springy mattress.

Roland Ennos from the University of Manchester, a senior member of the research team, told BBC Nature that the behaviour revealed the animals’ “sophisticated tool use and construction skills”.

“They show a lot of engineering know-how in how they build their nests,” he said.

As anyone who has ever tried to snap a live twig from a tree will know, living, green branches do not snap cleanly in half. Dr Ennos explained that the animals “made use” of this, bending and weaving large, flexible branches into a strong nest scaffold.

The animals then filled this scaffold with fine, leafy branches - making a comfortable bed.

Currently, potholes are repaired by packing them with asphalt, which is messy, smelly, time-consuming, and requires specialized personnel and equipment, says Obert. By contrast, the fluid filled bags can be carried around in the trunks of police cruisers or vans and dropped into potholes on the spot by employees with little training or experience. They would then be covered with black adhesive fabric so that drivers don’t perceive them as a hazard. “We definitely don’t want people avoiding them,” says team member Mayank Saksena.

The students have road-tested their designs on a number of Cleveland’s potholes and found that the bags continue to perform well after more than a week of continuous use in high-traffic areas. Although the product has yet to be field tested in an actual Midwest winter, the students say the bags are intended to be sturdy enough that they can stand up to salt and freezing conditions for weeks at a time, until damaged roads can be permanently fixed. Furthermore, when the roads are repaired, the bags can be removed and reused. When they are not needed, they can be stored empty and refilled by mixing additional powder with water, for a very low cost.

The upfront price of the bags may be as much as or more than traditional repair methods, says Obert, but in the long run cities will save on materials and labor because the filling material is very inexpensive. “The bag might cost a hundred dollars but you can reuse it a hundred times, and by that time you’d be saving a ton of money.”

The students plan to patent their invention, so they won’t divulge their exact formulation, but they say it’s biodegradable and safe enough to eat— although not very tasty. If the bags leak or tear, the contents pose no danger to people or the environment.

The city of East Cleveland has offered to help the students test their new pothole fillers, and the students say they have already been approached by several companies interested in working with them.

British scientists have restored the sight of blind mice by transplanting light-sensitive photoreceptor cells into their eyes.

The work is a step towards a new treatment for patients with degenerative eye diseases.

Scientists at University College London Institute of Ophthalmology injected cells from young healthy mice directly into the retinas of adult mice that had night-blindness.

The findings are published in Nature.

The cells transplanted were immature rod-photoreceptor cells, which are especially important for seeing in the dark.

Researchers have succeeded in mimicking the chemistry of life in synthetic versions of DNA and RNA molecules.

The work shows that DNA and its chemical cousin RNA are not unique in their ability to encode information and to pass it on through heredity.

The work, reported in Science, is promising for future “synthetic biology” and biotechnology efforts.

While arguments about gay people getting married tend to center on the so-called “natural” state of the human family, a quick peek around the animal kingdom reveals that sex and animal behavior don’t always break down into neat “one male, one female” units. And even in cases where animals do pair off to produce offspring, the burden of child-rearing doesn’t necessarily fall to the partner with two X chromosomes. Humon, the artist behind the webcomic Scandinavia and the World , uses cartoons to explain animal mating habits that fall outside the bounds of “traditional marriage” by anthropomorphizing the players in her trademark adorable style.
In Scandinavia and the World , Humon portrays different countries as people, much like in the manga Hetalia . In her animal gender roles series, she takes a similar approach, portraying various animals as humans so that we can imagine how their family and mating structures might look among our own species. It seems to work out pretty well, provided you’re not a male hyena. If you take on thing away from these comics, it should be this: female hyenas are frightening creatures. Also, the next time you’re in a threesome, make sure one of the participants isn’t a cuttlefish.

Simply by going out for a walk, I had become a strange being, studied by engineers, inhabiting environments whose physical features are determined by a rulebook-enshrined average 3 foot-per-second walking speed, my rights codified by signs. (Why not just write: “Stop for People”?) On those same signs in Savannah were often attached additional signs, advising drivers not to give to panhandlers (and to call 911 if physically intimidated), subtly equating walking with being exposed to an urban menace—or perhaps being the menace. Having taken all this information in, we would gingerly step into the marked crosswalk, that declaration of rights in paint, and try to gauge whether approaching vehicles would yield. They typically did not. Even in one of America’s most “pedestrian-friendly” cities—a seemingly innocent phrase that itself suddenly seemed strange to me—one was always in danger of being relegated to a footnote.

Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the semantics of the term pedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of “Everybody Walk!,” the “Campaign to Get America Walking” (one of a number of such initiatives). While its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy.

Corals may be better able to cope with ocean acidification than previously believed, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change, providing a glimmer of hope for the future of coral reefs.

As more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, lowering the pH of the water. This process, known as ocean acidification, is occurring at an unprecedented rate. This is causing problems for shell-building organisms, and it raises concerns for corals. Can corals and their symbiotic algae have the ability to adapt or acclimate to such rapid changes in ocean chemistry?

An international scientific team has identified a built-in mechanism that could equip some species of coral and their symbiotic algae to reduce the negative impacts of ocean acidification. They found that stony corals, such as Porites and Acropora, have molecular ‘pumps’ at their site of calcification, allowing them to regulate their internal pH balance. The internal pH changes are approximately one-half of those in the surrounding seawater.

The other good news is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a fitness cost—the stony corals’ pH-buffering capacity enables them to increase their rate of calcification at little additional energy cost. For example, corals with symbiotic algae use less than one percent of the energy generated by photosynthesis in order to buffer pH.

Baboons can recognise four-letter words on a computer screen, according to scientists in France.

Researchers found the monkeys could tell the difference between actual words and nonsense letter combinations.

After being trained, the baboons were able to make this distinction, despite not being capable of reading.

The results suggest the ability to recognise words could more closely relate to object identification than linguistic skill.

The study, completed by Dr John Grainger and Dr Joel Fagot from the Aix-Marseille University was published in the journal Science.

“It was by no means a foregone conclusion that the baboons would be able to master our word-non-word discrimination task, so we were quite excited about the simple fact that they did succeed,” said Dr Grainger.

The researchers tested a group of Guinea baboons in a specially built facility at the university.

And yet they come into my math class and raise their hand half-way through my demonstration of the mean value theorem to ask me when they will ever use this. They want me to justify that I’m not wasting their time.

I never mind answering this question.

Never.

It allows me to give them a glimpse into the beauty that I see when I play with mathematics. To me math is a game. We have a set of rules and we take turns playing this game. When the rules change — say we relax that fifth postulate so that a line can have no parallel lines through a given point — we are playing a different game.

The reason for learning mathematics should never be restricted to how it will help us do something else.

Never.

The hard part is that math is so darned useful. There is math everywhere. It’s easy for us to think about learning the math we need to do science or economics.

A long-standing mystery about how dying stars spew out the material of future planets is now solved, scientists say.

While stars like our Sun are known to eject much of their mass in their final years, it has remained unclear just how the dust is blown away.

Scientists reporting in Nature describe an astronomical study of extraordinary resolution to tackle the mystery.

They found dust grains of nearly a millionth of a metre across, big enough to be pushed out by dying stars’ light.

The team of astronomers from Australian and European universities took a look at three so-called red giant stars - stars that were once like our Sun is now, but that have exhausted their supply of hydrogen and grown to gargantuan proportions.

In a process that is an extreme case of the kind of solar wind that our own Sun experiences, such stars blow much of their mass away in the form of gas and grains of mineral material on their way to becoming white dwarfs.

Lead author of the study Barnaby Norris, of the University of Sydney, told BBC News that the stars were “the galaxy’s great recyclers” - the material that they spit out “goes on to make the next generation of stars and planets”.

But how much should we invest? If I have $50,000 to invest in 50,000 tickets, my odds of winning are only around 1 in 3,500. So 99.97% of the people who “invest” $50,000 in this system will lose everything. How much of our money might we need invest in such endeavors such that we are unlikely to go broke before we get rich?

The answer comes from the Kelly Criterion. Here, it reduces to roughly what one’s odds of winning are: we should invest only around 1/88,000,000 of our net worth. Anything less, and we will likely go broke before we get rich. Knewton’s 70 or so employees should only invest $1 collectively (with each of us contributing an average of $0.014) if all of us together have a net worth of $88 million that we’re prepared to risk. Such an investment would earn us an average of $3.00 to split up, or 4.3 cents each.

Anything more than that, anything that takes up more than 1/88,000,000 of our net worth, and even with an infinite number of favorable lotteries to play, all of us would almost certainly go broke before we ever got rich.

In conclusion, everyone at the company who put up $1 for a ticket in the pool is a fool.

The best way to explain how innefective homeopathy is, is to simply explain how it is supposed to actually work.

Looking at historical records of the battle, Bill and Jon figured out that the weather and soil conditions were right for both P. luminescens and their nematode partners. Their lab experiments with the bacteria, however, showed that they couldn’t live at human body temperature, making the soldiers’ wounds an inhospitable environment. Then they realized what some country music fans already knew: Tennessee in the spring is green and cool. Nighttime temperatures in early April would have been low enough for the soldiers who were out there in the rain for two days to get hypothermia, lowering their body temperature and giving P. luminescens a good home.

Based on the evidence for P. luminescens’s presence at Shiloh and the reports of the strange glow, the boys concluded that the bacteria, along with the nematodes, got into the soldiers’ wounds from the soil. This not only turned their wounds into night lights, but may have saved their lives. The chemical cocktail that P. luminescens uses to clear out its competition probably helped kill off other pathogens that might have infected the soldiers’ wounds. Since neither P. luminescens nor its associated nematode species are very infectious to humans, they would have soon been cleaned out by the immune system themselves (which is not to say you should be self-medicating with bacteria; P. luminescens infections can occur, and can result in some nasty ulcers). The soldiers shouldn’t have been thanking the angels so much as the microorganisms.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is operating again after its winter break.

Early on Thursday, opposing stable beams of protons were smashed into each other at four observation positions.

The total collision energy in these bunches of sub-atomic particles was eight trillion electron volts - a world record.

Scientists expect the big boost in capability to significantly increase the collider’s chances of discovering “new physics”.

The great expectation is that they will definitively confirm or deny the existence of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that would help explain why matter has mass.

“The experience of two good years of running at 3.5 TeV per beam gave us the confidence to increase the energy for this year without any significant risk to the machine,” explained Steve Myers, the director for accelerators and technology at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

“Now it’s over to the experiments to make the best of the increased discovery potential we’re delivering them!”

Since first switching on in 2008, operators at the LHC have cautiously increased the energy contained in each of the bunches of protons sent around the 27km collider, which lies beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

It is planned that the collider will collect data until November, after which it will be upgraded during a shutdown period that will last 20 months.

That should result in an operating proton beam energy of 14 trillion electronvolts, or teraelectronvolts - another great leap in capability.

The LHC collaboration hopes to reach that milestone in 2014, re-starting the hunt for novel physics in early 2015.

In the 2012 run of experiments, the Higgs will be a key focus.

NASA is claiming a breakthrough in the design of supersonic aircraft, with wind-tunnel tests proving it is possible to design configurations that combine low sonic boom with low cruise drag, characteristics once thought to be mutually exclusive.

The tests involved scale models of small supersonic airliners designed by Boeing and Lockheed Martin and aimed at entry into service about 2025. Although the measured shock wave signatures are at the high end of what would be publicly acceptable, they proved the design tools could produce a supersonic business jet capable of unrestricted overland flight, says Peter Coen, NASA’s Supersonic Fixed-Wing project manager.

NASA’s target for the under-track boom from a 2025-timeframe small airliner is a perceived noise level of 85 decibels (PNLdB). Boeing’s design achieved 81 PNLdB, and Lockheed’s 79 PNLdB. “That’s 25dB less than Concorde and 20dB less than the best we achieved under HSR [NASA’s High Speed Research supersonic-transport program, canceled in 1999],” he says.

“This is a breakthrough. It’s the first time we have taken a design representative of a small supersonic airliner and shown we can change the configuration in a way that is compatible with high efficiency and have a sonic signature than is not a boom,” Coen says.

NASA’s original goal was 65 PNLdB; 70 PNLdB is widely regarded as the threshold for public acceptance of routine overland supersonic flight. Boom is proportional to weight, and a small supersonic business is likely to meet that level, he says, while a larger airliner would need further technology development.

Scientists say they have new evidence that our ancestors were using fire as early as a million years ago.

It takes the form of ash and bone fragments recovered from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The team tells the journal PNAS that the sediments suggest frequent, controlled fires were lit on the site.

The ability to use fire is regarded as a key step in human development because it gave us access to cooked foods and new technologies.

Stone tools found at Wonderwerk Cave indicate the ancestor in question may have been Homo erectus, a species whose existence has been documented as far back as 1.8 million years ago.

Establishing precisely when humans first acquired the ability to control fire has been very difficult.

There have been several claims that the skill was in existence even earlier than at Wonderwerk.

But they have all been challenged, with sceptics arguing the fire remains from open sites could have been the result of natural blazes ignited by lightning.

The internal clashes over F.D.A. policy played out against a broader backdrop of regulatory politics. Republicans have made the charge that Mr. Obama is an overzealous and job-killing regulator — a central element of their case against his re-election. And on issues from clean air to investor protections, the White House has been carefully calibrating its election season positions.

In December, Kathleen Sebelius , the secretary of health and human services, drew criticism that she had put politics ahead of science when she overruled an agency decision that would have allowed over-the-counter sales of a contraceptive that helps prevent pregnancy after sexual intercourse, including to girls under age 17.

Scientists advising the F.D.A. had concluded the drug was safe and effective, but Ms. Sebelius, the reserved, no-nonsense former governor of Kansas, expressed concern that 11-year old girls might use it improperly.

It was the first time a cabinet member had ever publicly countermanded a determination by the F.D.A., the agency charged with ensuring the safety of foods and medicines. And it displayed the administration’s awareness that the politics of regulation do not always mesh with ideological or scientific judgments. An examination of these tensions shows how the Obama administration has often been more cautious on regulatory issues than the F.D.A. Its top officials — many of whom have been at the agency for decades — contend that their decisions should be divorced from politics and based solely on assessments of the science.

Three powerful women — Ms. DeParle, Ms. Sebelius and Dr. Hamburg — have been the main players in this struggle. As leading defenders of the health reform law, Ms. Sebelius and Ms. DeParle, deeply loyal to the president, have been in the political trenches. Dr. Hamburg, the polished, cerebral former head of New York City’s health department and a well-known public health advocate, has sought to balance representing the administration and the F.D.A.

Dr. Hamburg declined to respond to specific questions for this article and provided a brief written statement which stressed that the F.D.A. “will continue to work with our colleagues at the White House and across government to protect and promote the health of all Americans.” Ms. DeParle declined to comment for this article.

White House officials describe their disagreements with the F.D.A. as part of the normal, constructive give-and-take over policy that has never undermined the agency’s mission.

“Under President Obama’s leadership, the Food and Drug Administration has new authority and resources to help stop kids from smoking, protect our food supply and approve more affordable prescription drugs,” said the White House press secretary, Jay Carney.

The administration also views the agency’s hostility to its oversight as hopelessly naïve, given a 24-hour news cycle and a ferocious political environment that punishes any misstep.

“They want a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” an administration official said.

Consumer advocates credit the Obama administration with bolstering the F.D.A.’s budget and championing landmark legislation that strengthened the agency’s authority to regulate food and tobacco. But they also express concerns that the administration has been overly cautious, sitting on important regulatory policies regarding foods and medical devices to avoid giving Republicans fodder for attacks.

And some analysts worry that the administration’s increased engagement could erode the F.D.A.’s reputation for regulatory thoroughness and integrity.

(CNN) — The number of children with autism in the United States continues to rise, according to a new report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The latest data estimate that 1 in 88 American children has some form of autism spectrum disorder. That’s a 78% increase compared to a decade ago, according to the report.

Since 2000, the CDC has based its autism estimates on surveillance reports from its Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. Every two years, researchers count how many 8-year-olds have autism in about a dozen communities across the nation. (The number of sites ranges from six to 14 over the years, depending on the available funding in a given year.)

In 2000 and 2002, the autism estimate was about 1 in 150 children. Two years later 1 in 125 8-year-olds had autism. In 2006, the number was 1 in 110, and the newest data — from 2008 — suggests 1 in 88 children have autism.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Rick Santorum, who has sponsored legislation to limit the information that the National Weather Service can provide to the public, told radio reporters this week that Congress should investigate whether the federal agency’s initial warnings on the severity of Hurricane Katrina were adequate.

The Pennsylvania Republican’s remarks drew fire from a union representing employees of the National Weather Service, which is a subsidiary of the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. They also were closely scrutinized by Democrats, who have contended that his legislation is intended to benefit private weather companies, at least one of which has contributed to his campaign.

During a conference call that Santorum conducted with Pennsylvania radio reporters Thursday, a public radio correspondent asked him about the weather service’s performance in preparing Gulf Coast residents for Hurricane Katrina and whether the rescue and recovery response could have been improved if his legislation had been law.

Santorum said he didn’t think the weather service had given “sufficient warning” initially about the hurricane’s path or what its impact would be when it hit Florida. He said he was “not going to suggest there were any major errors,” but that the adequacy of the warnings should to be investigated along with other aspects of how government agencies have dealt with Katrina.

“The expectation was that [the hurricane] was not going to hit Florida with much fury, and it ended up being a Category 1 hurricane and did a lot more damage than I think was ever anticipated,” Santorum said in the recorded radio interview.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who heads the Senate Commerce Committee’s Disaster Prediction and Prevention Subcommittee, yesterday praised the National Weather Service. “After reviewing the actions taken by the National Weather Service, I am convinced that this was one of the most accurate hurricane predictions we have ever seen,” he said in a statement.

Major changes are needed in agriculture and food consumption around the world if future generations are to be adequately fed, a major report warns.

Farming must intensify sustainably, cut waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farms, it says.

The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change spent more than a year assessing evidence from scientists and policymakers.

Its final report was released at the Planet Under Pressure conference.

The commission was chaired by Prof Sir John Beddington, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser.

“If you’re going to generate enough food both to address the poverty of a billion people not getting enough food, with another billion [in the global population] in 13 years’ time, you’ve got to massively increase agriculture,” Sir John told BBC News.

“You can’t do it using the same agricultural techniques we’ve used before, because that would seriously increase greenhouse gas emissions for the whole world, with climate change knock-ons.”

Farming is probably responsible for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, although the figure is hard to pin down as a large proportion comes from land clearance, for which emissions are notoriously difficult to measure.

Although there are regional variations, climate change is forecast to reduce crop yields overall - dramatically so in the case of South Asia, where studies suggest the wheat yield could halve in 50 years.

“We need to develop agriculture that is ‘climate smart’ - generating more output without the accompanying greenhouse gas emissions, either via the basic techniques of farming or from ploughing up grassland or cutting down rainforest,” said Sir John.

The techniques needed in different regions vary according to what is appropriate, said Dr Christine Negra, who co-ordinated the commission’s work.

“In places where using organic methods, for example, is appropriate or economically advantageous and produces good socio-economic and ecological outcomes, that’s a great approach,” she said.

“In places where, using GMOs, you can address food security challenges and socio-economic issues, those are the right approaches to use where they’ve been proven safe.”

Over at Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham asked fellow Creationist Steve Golden to review a book promoting, among other things, the idea that evolution is real but God has a hand in the process.

Of course, this is all blasphemy to them because Christians who buy into theistic evolution are obviously the wrong kinds of Christians:

While we at Answers in Genesis acknowledge that one’s view on the origin of man is not a salvation issue, we do say that it is an authority issue. Believing in theistic evolution as a Christian means you reject the authority of God’s Word, because the creation account in Genesis teaches a literal six-day creation (Genesis 1). Even the idea of “theistic evolution” is problematic, because evolutionary ideas were created to explain a world without God. If we approach Scripture from the standpoint that it teaches absolute truth, then every branch of science must be interpreted in light of biblical teaching — not the other way around.

Because that’s how science works to them: You start with what you’re trying to prove and then try to jam together every piece of evidence you can find to support it, discarding anything that doesn’t fit your hypothesis.

Facts? We don’t need your stinkin’ facts when we got the Bible.

The head of an experiment that appeared to show subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light has resigned from his post.

Prof Antonio Ereditato oversaw results that appeared to challenge Einstein’s theory that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.

Reports said some members of his group, called Opera, had wanted him to resign.

Earlier in March, a repeat experiment found that the particles, known as neutrinos, did not exceed light speed.

When the results from the Opera group at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy were first published last year, they shocked the world, threatening to upend a century of physics as well as relativity theory - which holds the speed of light to be the Universe’s absolute speed limit.

The experiment involved measuring the time it took for neutrinos to travel the 730km (450 miles) from Cern laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland to the lab in Italy.

A US panel has approved the publication of two controversial H5N1 bird flu studies, after they were revised.

The studies, funded by the US government, created strains of the virus that spread easily among ferrets.

The US National Security Advisory Board for Biotechnology (NSABB) had asked for the studies to be edited in case terrorists could use some of the data.

The panel said the publications no longer revealed details that could lead to abuse by terrorists.

Publication of the studies were put on hold in December after the NSABB raised concerns.

Scientists have obtained a fascinating new insight into the evolution of humans and our ability to walk.

It comes from the fossilised bones of a foot that were discovered in Ethiopia and dated to be 3.4 million years old.

The researchers say they do not have enough remains to identify the species of hominin, or human ancestor, from which the right foot came.

But they tell Nature journal that just the shape of the bones shows the creature could walk upright at times.

The fossil haul consists of eight elements from the forefoot - bones such as metatarsals and phalanges.

The specimens were pulled from clay sediments at Burtele in the central Afar region of Ethiopia, about 520km north-east of the capital Addis Ababa.

It is a significant discovery because it demonstrates there was more than one pre-human species living in East Africa between three and four million years ago, each with its own method of moving around.

The other creature was the famous “Lucy” animal (Australopithecus afarensis), whose remains were first identified in the Afar in the 1970s.

Lucy’s body was built for walking. Her big toe was aligned with the other four digits of the foot, and she had a human-like arch that allowed for very efficient locomotion.

The owner of the partial foot from Burtele was not afarensis; that can be said definitively.

In typical electronic devices, temperature is the primary physical variable that controls conductivity. Resistance tends to increase with temperature. However, things are different on the nanoscale. Even at room temperature, the energy difference between quantum levels within a molecule can be much larger than the thermal energy. This means it is possible, in principle, to manipulate the wave function of electrons in a way that tunes the conductive properties of a material on the molecular level.

In a newly published experiment, Constant M. Guédon et al. managed to promote destructive quantum interference between electrons in a single molecule, reducing the molecule’s ability to conduct current in the process. They compared the conductive properties of molecules that have an identical primary structure, but have differences in their electronic quantum states. In a molecule where the electrons interfered destructively, it suppressing the flow of electric current. This experiment opens up the possibility of room-temperature molecular devices based on quantum interference.

The researchers’ procedure involved depositing five different but chemically-related molecules onto a gold substrate. The molecules, being long chains, create a brush-like layer on top of the gold, with each molecule acting as a wire. An atomic-force microscope (AFM) coated in gold acts as a second electrode. The current flows between the substrate and the AFM through the molecules.

The conductive properties of the molecules depend on whether they are linearly-conjugated or cross-conjugated. Linearly-conjugated means electron orbitals offer only one path for transport across the molecule. In contrast, cross-conjugated molecules effectively offer two paths of different lengths. This latter type exhibits destructive quantum interference. Because the paths are of different lengths, the electron wavefunctions overlap. The effect is to throttle electron flow across the molecule, reducing conductivity.

French researchers have shown how to apply the ideas of “optical cloaking” - the endeavour to make a Harry Potter-style cloak - to the thermal world.

The applications for the idea, outlined in Optics Express, stretch beyond hiding from thermal-imaging devices.

It could also be used to direct and move heat around in temperature-sensitive electronics.

There has been a tremendous amount of research into what is called transformation optics since it was first proposed as a means to an invisibility cloak in 2006.

So far, all of the cloaking approaches have limitations that keep them well short of the invisibility promised in fiction. But more recently, similar ideas have been put to use to shield objects from magnetic fields, or even from sound or seismic waves.

All of these approaches aim to manipulate the peaks and troughs of waves to achieve their cloaking effects.

But as Sebastien Guenneau of the Institut Fresnel in France explained, the transfer of heat is a subtly different business.

In 2005, the British medical journal The Lancet attacked the use of homeopathic treatments saying that doctors should be honest about homeopathy’s lack of benefit.

Homeopathic medicines are said to have no side-effects; this is considered a major selling point. It is less often noticed that this is because they have no effects at all. This is why you can’t overdose on homeopathic remedies. (I wouldn’t try this myself, but see here .)

The difference between effects and side-effects is not a difference in the effect, but in our interests and aims. Throw a stone in a pond. What are the effects and what the side effects?

The stone hits the water. This makes a noise; there is a splash; there are ripples; the bird is startled and takes flight, and on and on. Maybe my purpose in throwing the stone is to make it skip; this is the effect at which I aim; relative to this aim, all the rest are just side-effects.

Taking care of yourself is rapidly becoming an economic issue of staggering proportions. In fact, you may want to grab a salad on the way home and get right on the treadmill when you get there. The day is coming in less than 20 years when health care costs may consume your entire paycheck.

In other words, illness will one day soon simply be unaffordable.

A new report by the Annals of Family Medicine suggests that less than 20 years from now, the average American family’s medical costs will surpass their entire income.

It’s no secret that health care costs have been growing faster than just about everything else in this country for decades.

And while that trend has slowed somewhat recently, the authors of this study say medical costs are still going up.

In 2009 and 2010, total spending on health care grew at a slower rate than any time on record. But it still grew, and it’s going to keep on growing.

Then of course there’s so-called Obamacare.

Critics say the president’s controversial health care reform plan will only make matters worse.

The doctors who put this paper together say Obamacare is a “great first step, but it’s not enough to get us where we need to go.”

Nasa’s science chief has told planetary scientists he is “in there fighting for you” after the swingeing cuts proposed to the robotic exploration budget.

Former astronaut John Grunsfeld was speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

He faced more than 1,000 researchers at a special session to explain the 21% cut to planetary science in President Obama’s latest budget request for Nasa.

The decision forced the agency to pull out of joint Mars missions with Europe.

Mr Grunsfeld took over as science chief on 4 January this year, after the key budgetary decisions had already been made. He has previously admitted he was disappointed when he learned of the proposals for planetary science.

“The Nasa budget was really the result of some tough choices and national priorities,” he told his audience.

“The fact that the Nasa’s planetary budget took such a great hit was one of those tough priority settings,” and added: “It was a strategic decision.”

The planetary exploration budget funds robotic missions to other bodies in the Solar System, such as Mars, the Moon and the outer planets.

The proposal for the Financial Year 2013 reduced the planetary science budget from $1.5bn to $1.2bn. The cuts would, in the words of one scientist, plunge the field into its biggest crisis since the 1980s and is considered likely to lead to the loss of up to 2,000 hi-tech jobs.

Although planetary science was a loser in general, Mars exploration was singled out for particular cuts, receiving $360.8m, which amounts to a reduction of almost 40% from the FY2012 estimate.

This kind of funding drop precludes Nasa from starting new missions in this part of its portfolio.

After the speech, Mr Grunsfeld fielded a question from Jim Bell, a planetary scientist and current president of the Planetary Society, a space advocacy organisation in California.

Prof Bell, who was one of the lead investigators on the Mars rovers mission, implored Mr Grunsfeld and Nasa’s director of planetary science Jim Green to “fight back” against the plans, even if “you lose your jobs” because, he said, “it’s the right thing to do”.

In response, Mr Grunsfeld recalled a time in 2004 when he had considered resigning from Nasa’s astronaut corps over a decision not to save the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 individual stars shining in it.

Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic center pull it slightly out of shape.

Globular clusters are thought to harbor some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, born when the universe was just a small fraction of its current age. As well as being far older than the sun — around twice its age — the stars of Messier 9 also have a markedly different composition, and are enriched with far fewer heavier elements than the sun.

In particular, the elements crucial to life on Earth, like oxygen and carbon, and the iron that makes up our planet’s core, are very scarce in Messier 9 and clusters like it. This is because the universe’s heavier elements were gradually formed in the cores of stars, and in supernova explosions. When the stars of Messier 9 formed, there were far smaller quantities of these elements in existence.

As well as showing the individual stars, Hubble’s image clearly shows the different colors of the stars. A star’s color is directly related to its temperature — counter-intuitively, perhaps, the redder it is, the cooler it is; and the bluer it is, the hotter. The wide range of stellar temperatures here is clearly displayed by the broad palette of colors visible in this image.

In order to reduce the use of fossil fuels, we need to increase the use of renewable sources of energy. At least, so the theory goes. However, a new study published in Nature Climate Change challenges this assumption, demonstrating that, rather than displacing fossil fuels, alternative sources of energy barely outpaced increasing demand over the last 50 years.

The paper was written by Richard York, a professor at the University of Oregon. In it, he looks at past energy use and electricity generation from fossil fuels and alternative sources for about 130 countries. Here, “alternative sources” means nuclear, hydro, and non-hydro renewables like wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, biomass, and biofuels.

In the paper, York essentially tries to determine if the added energy/electricity production from these alternatives actually displaced fossil fuels, or if the increase in capacity just kept up with rising demand. To do this, he looked at historical data for energy use and electricity production, and created two models for electricity demand.

The first model controlled for demand just by using per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) over the past 50 years. This was justified because, in general, energy production has roughly paralleled increased economic activity for much of this period. A second model added additional variables to better account for changes in demand, like urbanization, manufacturing, and the ratio of the dependent population (under 16 and over 64) to non-dependents. Due to the need for more complex data, this model was limited to the past 30 years, but the results are similar to the first model.

Essentially, both models fit a curve to the data, where the independent variable was the production from alternative sources. The dependent variable was the total electricity/energy production multiplied by the proportion from fossil fuels, divided by the total population. There would then be a data point for each nation at each year for which data is available.

York found that each kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity generated from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced only 0.089 kWh of that from fossil fuels. To put this in perspective, displacing one kWh of fossil-fuel electricity would require over 11 kWh of electricity from alternative sources. The second, more complex model gave similar, but slightly worse, results.

Using the same models but looking at total energy use—for example, transportation in addition to electricity generation—the data looks a little better. He found that each unit of energy (kilotons of oil or the equivalent) from alternative sources displaced 0.128 and 0.219 units (from the first and second models, respectively) from fossil fuel sources.

These patterns don’t seem to change much over time. In addition, the results are consistent even when considering the varying affluence of different nations—it doesn’t matter if you’re looking at rich or poor nations.

York also looked at the different categories of alternative sources for electricity generation: nuclear, hydro, and non-hydro renewables. Using both models, each kWh of nuclear displaced about 0.2 kWh of fossil fuels, hydro about 0.1, and non-hydro renewables essentially didn’t displace any fossil fuel electricity.

These last results are not surprising. Compared to nuclear plants, which are currently built exclusively to generate electricity, hydropower plants are often constructed for other purposes: flood control, irrigation, etc. On the other hand, the non-hydro renewables like wind and solar haven’t displaced much fossil fuel use because they simply haven’t been deployed significantly yet. Worldwide, these renewables constitute less than four percent of total electricity production.

Based on these results, it’s clear that alternative energy sources have displaced fossil fuels—but just barely. The main takeaway of the study is that if the same pattern of energy use over the past few decades continues into the future, we will need a massive growth of alternative and renewable sources of energy in order to significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

The most important caveat of this study: the analysis considered only past data, and as such the conclusions may not be relevant for the future. However, these results clearly challenge the assumption that simply developing alternative sources of energy will reduce our use or need for fossil fuels. Without changing the current patterns of energy usage, vastly expanding the adoption of alternative energy sources, or finding a way to make fossil fuels unattractive (York proposes a carbon tax), the pattern of the past will continue.

Female personal care and service workers, which include butlers, house sitters and shoe shiners, earned $1.02 for every $1 their male counterparts made in 2010, according to census data compiled by Bloomberg. That job category was the only one of 265 major occupations where the median female salary in the U.S. exceeded the amount paid to men. The six jobs with the largest gender gap in pay and at least 10,000 men and 10,000 women were in the Wall Street-heavy financial sector. Cali Carlin reports on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.”

Global temperatures could rise by 1.4-3.0C (2.5-5.4F) above levels for late last century by 2050, a computer simulation has suggested.

Almost 10,000 climate simulations were run on volunteers’ home computers.

The projections, published in Nature Geoscience, are somewhat higher than those from other models.

The researchers aimed to explore a wider range of possible futures, which they say helps “get a handle” on the uncertainties of the climate system.

People planning for the impacts of climate change need to consider the possibility of warming of up to 3C by 2050, even on a mid-range emission scenario, the researchers say.

The study - run through climateprediction.net with the BBC Climate Change Experiment - ran simulations using a complex atmosphere-ocean climate model.

The representations of physical parameters were varied between runs of the model, reflecting uncertainties about precisely how the climate system works.

And the forecast range was derived from models that accurately reproduced observed temperature changes over the last 50 years.

The low end of their range is similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 report, but the high end is somewhat above the range their analysis produced.

A few years back, the US public’s acceptance of conclusions reached by climate scientists took a dramatic drop. It’s only now beginning to recover. Not a lot has changed about the science during that time, raising questions about what’s driving the ups and downs in the polls. Studies have found correlations with the weather and a role for political leaders in driving these changes, but a new study suggests some of that is misplaced. Instead, its authors come to a conclusion we’ve heard before: it’s the economy, stupid.

The authors use polling data from a variety of sources, which creates a bit of a challenge. Not all polls ask questions that address the same things. For example, one of the studies we linked above asked about the public’s acceptance of a basic fact: has our planet been getting warmer over the past few decades? In contrast, one of the polls used here assessed feelings about climate change by asking its participants whether they felt the media “exaggerate the seriousness of global warming.”

Still, there are ways to convert these specific sentiments into a generalized sense about the seriousness of climate change. Plus, the variety of polls provide some distinct advantages. For example, this survey provides a valuable outgroup to the US population, in that a number of surveys cover all the nations of the European Union. In addition, several of the polls (those performed by the Pew) include ZIP code information, allowing the authors to compare polling trends with record high and low temperatures in the nearby area.

As with another recent survey, they do end up seeing a correlation between acceptance of climate change and the weather. However, the correlation with local weather is rather weak. Instead, the authors found a stronger correlation with the global mean temperature. That’s somewhat surprising. Most years, the global mean isn’t especially well covered by the press, which suggests this correlation might be a bit spurious. (If we accept the economy is an influence, then the correlation will be very difficult to tease apart. Especially considering the coldest global temperature of the last decade happened to correspond to the onset of job losses in the US.)

In any case, the poll numbers indicate there are some things that we probably can’t blame them on. For example, acceptance started to drop prior to the Copenhagen climate conference and the release of the e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia. Both of these may have been big news among people who care passionately about climate change, but they came too late to explain the public’s reduced acceptance of the science.

Based on their statistical analysis, the authors conclude the economy is the strongest influence on the public’s acceptance of climate science. This held when the authors analyzed things separately in each US state based on its local unemployment rate. The effect showed up in European countries, as well. In Gallup polls, this correlation holds all the way back to 1989, when the current string of unusually warm years began. Overall, the authors found unemployment had an effect that was over three times stronger than either the local weather or skeptical coverage of climate in the media.

Put in other terms, each time the local unemployment increased by a point, that state saw its average citizen’s probability of accepting climate change drop by over 10 percent.

Scientists reckon that ‘warp speed’ planets could be flying through the galaxy at speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour.

Computer simulations have shown how the huge gravitational pull of black holes can tear planets from their orbits and ‘sling’ them across space.

The planets would typically move at about seven to 10 million mph - but could travel at up to 30 million mph.

That’s more than 450 times faster than the Earth moves around the Sun.

This theory comes from new research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US.

Astronomers know already that this can happen to stars - the first of these was spotted seven years ago, heading out of the Milky Way at 1.5 million mph.

A Nasa spacecraft has found further tantalising evidence for the existence of water ice at Mercury’s poles.

Though temperatures here can soar above 400C, some craters at Mercury’s poles are permanently in shadow, making them cold enough for water to stay frozen.

Previous work has revealed patches near Mercury’s poles that strongly reflect radar - a characteristic of ice.

Now, the Messenger probe has shown that these “radar bright” patches line up precisely with the shadowed craters .

Messenger is only the second spacecraft - after Mariner 10 in the 1970s - to have visited the innermost planet. Until Messenger arrived, large swathes of Mercury’s surface had never been mapped.

So, can we add all this up? Doshi and his collaborators have attempted to do so, including the impacts of climate, air quality, mercury damages, coal transport deaths, public health issues, subsidies for extraction, and the loss of value of the abandoned land. At the low end, their estimates suggest that coal’s additional costs run about 9.4 cents a kilowatt-hour (¢/kwhr) in the US. Even that compares unfavorably with the typical cost of power in the US, which is about 9.7¢/kwhr.

And that’s the low estimate. Their best estimate places the additional costs at 17.8¢/kwhr—on its own, that’s more than the typical cost of existing wind power (14.9¢/kwhr). The worst case is a staggering 26.9¢/kwhr.

Is it possible to start including those costs into our energy economy? It probably can’t be done quickly without a rather severe disruption, given that coal supplies about 45 percent of the US’ electricity. At the same time, however, it generates 80 percent of the carbon emissions produced by electric generation, so even a small tax on carbon would be sufficient to reduce coal’s use.

In the mean time, there has been very little in the way of new coal capacity in the US for roughly two decades. As the oldest, least efficient, and most polluting plants get retired, at least some of coal’s problems will begin to take care of themselves.

Because when we invest in science, when we invest in space, when we invest in exploration, we always, always get far more back in return than we put in. And not just in dollars and cents.

See that picture above? It shows a new type of rocket engine design. Usually, fuel is pumped into a chamber where the chemicals ignite and are blown out the other end, creating thrust. The design pictured above does this in a new way: as the fuel is pumped into the chamber, it’s spun up, creating a vortex. This focuses the flow, keeping it closer to the center of the chamber. In this way, when the fuel ignite, it keeps the walls of the chamber cooler.

So what, right?

Here’s what: using this technology — developed for rockets for NASA, remember — engineers designed a way to pump water more quickly and efficiently for fire suppression. The result is nothing short of astonishing :

One series of tests using empty houses at Vandenberg Air Force Base compared [this new] system with a 20-gallon-per-minute, 1,400 pound-per-square-inch (psi) discharge capability (at the pump) versus a standard 100-gallon-per-minute, 125 psi standard hand line—the kind that typically takes a few firemen to control. The standard line extinguished a set fire in a living room in 1 minute and 45 seconds using 220 gallons of water. The [new] system extinguished an identical fire in 17.3 seconds using 13.6 gallons—with a hose requiring only one person to manage.

In other words, this new system put out a fire more quickly, using less water, and — critically — with fewer firefighters needed to operate the hose. This frees up needed firefighters to do other important tasks on the job, and therefore makes fighting fires faster and safer .

There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.

If for no other reason that’s why we need to invest in science: in NASA, in NSF, in NOAA, and all the other agencies that explore the world around us. It’s for our own good. And it always pays off.

Incredible as it may seem, and there may be no greater anachronism on earth, there are still “wild” human beings living in some of the remotest corners of the tropics. Known or suspected locations of “uncontacted” groups are mapped and identified at www.uncontactedtribes.org (click on “Where are they?”). Most are around the fringes of the Amazon in the border regions of Brazil, especially in neighboring Perú where there are suspected of being at least fifteen uncontacted groups. Outside of South America, the only remaining uncontacted humans are in the Andaman Islands and Indonesia’s West Papua province (the western half of the island of New Guinea).

“Uncontacted.” What does the term mean? Although definitions would certainly vary, basically it refers to human societies that have no regular intercourse with the modern world, though they might have second- or third-degree contact through trading partners or colinguists. They live with few or no manufactured implements other than perhaps the odd machete or ax acquired through trade. Most speak languages not understood by anyone else. Hence they are isolated by linguistic barriers as well as the physical barrier of remoteness.

In the Amazon, remaining uncontacted groups are isolated by a third barrier, that of abject fear stemming from the horrendous atrocities of the rubber boom. Those events of a hundred years ago remain very much a living memory that is indelibly inscribed into the consciousness of every child living in isolation. Uncontacted Amazonians live a fugitive existence in the farthest headwaters of tributary streams, often above cataracts and beyond where even a small dugout canoe can pass. Here they live in perpetual fear of being detected and enslaved or killed by the white man.

Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at a student teaching hospital with his interns in tow when he remembered that he had a patient upstairs who was near death. He sent a few of the young doctors “to check on Mr. Smith” in Room 301 and to report back on whether he was dead yet. DeVita continued rounds with the remainder of the interns, but after some time had passed he wondered what happened to his emissaries of death. Trotting up to Mr. Smith’s room, he found them all paging through “The Washington Manual,” the traditional handbook given to interns. But there is nothing in the manual that tells new doctors how to determine which patients are alive and which are dead.

There’s a bit of climate news I want to clarify before the usual suspects start misleading people about it.

There are three big global temperature records used by climatologists. One is called HadCRUT (Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit Temperatures), and was recently revised by scientists at Hadley. This newly-revised database, called HadCRUT4 , uses better measurements of land air temperatures and sea-surface temperatures than before. In the former case, more measuring stations have been added (giving better coverage) and have been standardized better. In the latter case, the revised database accounts better for measurement uncertainties from things like the method used to collect water (including, of all things, how the buckets used to scoop up water alter the temperature of the water collected).

The two most important things that have come out of this new database: 1) the Earth is still warming up, and at the same rate as has been determined before, and 2) (according to a BBC report ) 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record. 2010 is.

A team of scientists did exactly this , using SOHO, which is a solar observing and solar-orbiting satellite. Because it’s in space, it doesn’t suffer from the problems of peering through a murky, dancing atmosphere. They were able to measure the timing of Mercury’s passage of the Sun to an accuracy of 3 seconds in 2003 and 1 second in 2006. They had to take into account a large number of effects (the Sun’s limb is darker than the center, which affects timing; they had to accurately measure the position of Mercury; they had to account for problems internal to SOHO like focus and the way it changes across the detector; and, of course, correct for the fact that Mercury cut a chord across the Sun and didn’t go straight across the diameter — but that only took knowledge of Mercury’s orbit and some trig) but when they did, they got the most accurate measure of the Sun’s diameter ever made: 1,392,684 /- 65 km , or 865,374 /- 40 miles .

The planet Mercury was once an active and dynamic planet, according to new evidence from a Nasa spacecraft.

Data from the American Messenger probe shows that impact craters on the planet’s surface were distorted by some geological process after they formed.

The findings, reported in Science magazine, challenge long-held views about the closest world to the Sun.

Another study looking at Mercury’s gravity field shows that the planet has an unusual internal structure.

As well as being published in the journal Science, the research has also been presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

“Many scientists believed that Mercury was much like the Moon - that it cooled off very early in Solar System history, and has been a dead planet throughout most of its evolution,” said Maria Zuber, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“Now, we’re finding compelling evidence for unusual dynamics within the planet, indicating that Mercury was apparently active for a long time.”

Dr Zuber and her colleagues used laser measurements from Messenger to map out a large number of impact craters, and found that many had tilted over time.

This suggests that geological processes within the planet have re-shaped Mercury’s terrain after the craters were created.

Observations of Caloris Basin, the planet’s largest impact feature, show that portions of the crater floor stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within Mercury’s interior pushed the surface up after the initial collision event.

The researchers also identified an area of lowlands near Mercury’s north pole that could have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. A process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface.

SpaceX’s Company President Gwynne Shotwell used the Satellite 2012 Conference to announce that it has a thin launch window on April 30 that would get it to a scheduled May 3 berthing slot at the International Space Station. The mission, known as COTS 2/3, carries a political payload far larger than the food and clean underwear inside the spacecraft.

For Congress and the Administration, the launch might help make the case that the company’s Dragon spacecraft is a viable option for ferrying astronauts to the Station some day. Moreover, it might prove that the six-year-old COTS program, which allows NASA to partner with corporations to gain access to low Earth orbit, can actually transition to a backbone for manned and unmanned spaceflight.

The upcoming flight is a maneuvering and docking test, but some time this year (probably after the November elections) Congress will vote on the 2013 NASA budget. This will include funding for CCiCap (the successor acronym to CCDev), NASA’s commercial partnership for manned low Earth orbit flights. When that time comes, one or two successful private cargo flights would strengthen the case for human crews flying on domestic commercial rockets. It would also make a better case for justifying the full $850M NASA budget request for Commercial Crew.

Not least, SpaceX also hopes to continue to prove it can carry out a possible $3.2 billion in space station resupply flights. The company has twelve resupply flights on its launch manifest, the first scheduled tentatively for July of this year. Counting the first COTS mission and three DragonLab missions, that’s 16 SpaceX/unmanned Dragon spacecraft flights currently scheduled from now through 2015.

One of the main changes is the inclusion of more data from the Arctic region, which has experienced one of the greatest levels of warming.

Another change is the way sea surface temperature (SST) is recorded, accounting for technological advances now available to researchers.

The update is reported in the published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Despite the revisions, the overall warming signal has not changed. The scientists say it has remained at about 0.75C (1.4F) since 1900.

However, the amendments have resulted in a change in the dataset’s “warmest year on record”.

Previously, it was 1998. However, the revised data now lists 2010 as the warmest, with 1998 recorded as the third warmest.

When you submit a sample for genetic analysis you are not just making a decision for yourself.

You are also making a decision for all of your children, their offspring *and* all of your ancestors, your brothers and your sisters and their offspring.

In fact, you’re making a decision for everybody that is a blood relative.

With the number of bits present in a typical genetic sample this is still more than sufficient to identify people that have not consented (or that might not even exist yet, or any more) to having their genetic data analyzed if you did not submit your sample in an anonymous way. And even that has its limits, after all, your genes *are* your identity. They identify you with much more precision than any other piece of information. Effectively, you can’t anonymize genetic data at all.

The typical privacy policy of companies that analyze genetic samples apply to the person whose data is being sampled, but not to any conclusions drawn from that data affecting others.

There are many ways in which this could be abused, I can imagine that it could for instance be determined that a disease that runs in the family is an elevated risk, and this could be a reason to deny coverage to sibilings, children or parents of the person tested.

A small Mississippi solar panel factory that, until this week, had been working in semi-secrecy, claims that its unique manufacturing process allows photovoltaic panels to be produced at almost half the cost of conventional methods. The key, according to Twin Creeks Technologies, is in the thinness of its monocrystalline wafers, dramatically reducing the material required.

Where conventional solar wafers can be sliced down to about 180 micrometers in thickness, Twin Creeks is able to produce laminas only 20 micrometers wide using what it calls its “Hyperion” manufacturing system.

This system employs a technique Twin Creeks calls Proton Induced Exfoliation. During this process, hydrogen ions are embedded into layers within standard silicon monocrystalline wafers without altering the wafer’s inherent characteristics. The ions are embedded using a high-voltage, high-current ion accelerator which Twin Creeks CEO Siva Sivaram told Technology Review is “10 times more powerful” than any accelerator commercially available. The embedded depth is precisely controlled via the voltage of the accelerator beam.

It is unconscionable that our health care providers should have to misrepresent medical facts to women seeking abortions because of a vocal anti-choice minority. When will Americans acknowledge that, in the words of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts”?

We now have yet another indication that neutrinos cannot travel faster than the speed of light after all, provided by a neighbor of the OPERA detector that set off the fuss in the first place. OPERA’s detector sits deep underground at Gran Sasso in Italy, where it receives neutrinos from a beam generated at CERN, 730km away on the French-Swiss border. Because the neutrino beam spreads out over the intervening distance, it’s possible to run multiple detectors at the same site, all listening in on the same beam. The team running one of Gran Sasso’s other detectors (called ICARUS) has now performed time-of-flight measurements on neutrinos and determined that they don’t seem to be moving faster than light.

These results are significant because they largely took advantage of precisely the same infrastructure used to generate the OPERA results. ICARUS used the short, widely spaced bunches of neutrinos produced by CERN to help narrow down potential errors in the earlier results (read our discussion of these errors). The ICARUS team also used the same timing and position infrastructure used by OPERA, which gives them uncertainties of only nanoseconds and centimeters, respectively. WIth all that in place, the ICARUS team captured data from the arrival of seven neutrinos.

With just about everything but the detector itself identical between the two tests, the ICARUS team concluded, “The result is compatible with the simultaneous arrival of all events with equal speed, the one of light.” (Neutrinos have such a small mass that it’s relatively easy to accelerate them to a speed that is only marginally slower than light.)

One difference between the two detectors is the technology used to detect the arrival of neutrinos—OPERA uses a photographic emulsion, while ICARUS uses liquid argon. It’s possible that this difference may provide an indication of why the results differed.

Our view of the Universe just grew quite a bit more detailed as NASA JPL released the compendium of results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbital telescope. WISE was launched into a 525 km orbit on December 14, 2009 and gathered data until the WISE team ran out of funding on February 17, 2011.

With hardware over 1,000 times more sensitive than prior infrared space surveys, WISE surveyed 99 percent of the sky at 4 different wavelengths. Over 15 terabytes of data and 2.7 million images revealed 560 million stars, galaxies, comets, asteroids, and various other objects too cool or red-shifted to show up in anything but the infrared. Astronomers saw Y-dwarfs for the first time, which are nearly-invisible brown dwarf stars too cool to see outside the infrared. The first Earth trojan asteroid also revealed itself to WISE—it scouts Earth’s orbit 60 degrees ahead of us around the Sun.

Our view of the solar system also grew quite a bit more detailed, as WISE identified or confirmed over 90 precent of the Near Earth Asteroids. One thing WISE was not able to do was see very much in the Kuiper belt; that task and many others remain for the James Webb Space Telescope now scheduled to be launched in 2018. The JWST will be several times more sensitive yet.

UC Berkeley has published many WISE images as they become available, and Cal Tech hosts JPL’s WISE website .

Scientists have mapped the boundary globally between the Earth’s crust and its mantle - the so-called Moho boundary - in unprecedented detail.

They used gravity measurements from the European Space Agency’s Goce satellite to model its location.

The famous “discontinuity” lies some 10-70km below the surface and marks a sharp change in rock properties.

It was first identified by the Croatian geophysicist Andrija Mohorovicic in 1909.

He determined the boundary’s existence from the distinct behaviour of seismic waves produced by shallow earthquakes.

Goce can be used to sense the Moho’s depth because it is able to detect subtle variations in the Earth’s gravitational field.

These differences result from the uneven distribution of mass inside the planet - a signal that also reflects the major shift in rock density that occurs at the boundary.

“At the Moho, there is a discontinuity between the compositions of rock - there are rocks of different density,” explained Dr Daniele Sampietro from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy .

“The crust has a smaller density while the mantle has a bigger density. And since the change in density means there will be a change in mass, I can use Goce to observe the Moho.”

The new global map shows clearly that the boundary’s depth is greatest under the big mountains, and at its shallowest under the oceans.

That reaction is among the reasons why the technicians at the Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate consider the Active Denial System one of their most impressive weapons. But it’s a troubled system. Some of the Pain Ray’s woes are technical. Others are more fundamental.

Usually the Active Denial System is described as a “microwave” weapon. That’s not really correct. True, Pete and Ralph’s guts contain a gyrotron, the older brother of your microwave’s magnetron, through which energy passes through a magnetic field to become heat. But millimeter waves don’t penetrate nearly as deeply as microwaves — only 1/64th of an inch. Even though the weapon uses much, much more energy than a microwave, the Directorate has tried and failed to use it to cook a turkey.

That’s not all the Active Denial System has failed at.

The system’s gone through battery after battery of tests, including one that put an airman in the hospital . (The Directorate’s rejoinder: it’s tested the Pain Ray 11,000 times and only two people, including that airman, got hurt.) But its “attenuation” — that is, its potency — goes down when it’s raining, snowing or dusty, concedes one of its chief scientists, Diana Loree of the Air Force Research Laboratory, without specifying the degree of reduction. And that’s not its biggest design flaw.

Loree says the boot-up time on the Pain Ray is “sixteen hours.” So if the system is at a dead stop on a base and, say, the locals protest the burning of a Koran , guards at the entry points won’t be burning anyone. The Directorate says that in a realistic deployment, the Active Denial System will be kept in ready mode — that is, loudly humming as its fuel tanks power it, or hooked up to a base’s generator. But that makes it a gas guzzler, at a time when the military’s trying to reduce its expensive fuel costs.

“That’s something we’ve really got to look hard at, how do we make the system as efficient as possible,” says Marine Col. Tracy Tafolla, the head of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, “to make sure that we’re not running a lot of fuel.”

Another problem is less technological and more fundamental. In 2010, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, sent the Pain Ray back to the States after a deployment of mere weeks. His reasoning: it was too great a propaganda boon to the Taliban, who’d say the U.S. was microwaving Afghans, giving them cancer, making them sterile, and so forth.

In other words, a sizable portion of the U.S. population accepts as a given that an unseen world of magical paranormal power exists, and all that remains is to discover how to take advantage of it. Some pay handsomely in that vain — I mean this in both senses of the word — pursuit.

Personality traits, psychological motivation, flawed cognition, emotional instability, local demographics, social influences — all these could contribute to what might be called Lack of Reason Syndrome. Let’s add as well: basic ignorance. But experimental psychology has yet to fully explain why essentially rational beings seem to need to be at least a little irrational.

But we humans are gullible and not terribly perceptive. In my world these handicaps, and an audience’s innate desire to believe, combine to, well, make magic. The trick is really over before it begins because the magician has, without your knowledge, manipulated your behavior to suit his needs.

That’s just good fun. The stakes in the real world are much higher.

While the science establishment hasn’t always been vociferous enough about paranormal silliness and schemes, make no mistake: my respect for real science knows no bounds. Yes, my work inescapably points out where science has, for one reason or another, sometimes failed to police its own. But I believe — I know — that science is a glorious, righteous pursuit.

Great Lakes ice coverage declined an average of 71 percent over the past 40 years, according to a report from the American Meteorological Society.

The amount of decline varies year to year and lake to lake, according to the report’s lead researcher, Jia Wang, an ice research climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Wang’s report said that based on Coast Guard scanning, satellite photos and other research from 1973 to 2010, ice coverage dropped most on Lake Ontario, 88 percent; the second-largest loss was on Lake Superior, at 79 percent.

This led us to ask, if in the worst case users chose multi-word passphrases with a distribution identical to English speech, how secure would this be? Using the large Google n-gram corpus we can answer this question for phrases of up to 5 words. The results are discouraging: by our metrics, even 5-word phrases would be highly insecure against offline attacks, with fewer than 30 bits of work compromising over half of users. The returns appear to rapidly diminish as more words are required. This has potentially serious implications for applications like PGP private keys, which are often encrypted using a passphrase. Users are clearly more random in “passphrase English” than in actual English, but unless it’s dramatically more random the underlying natural language simply isn’t random enough. Exploring this gap is an interesting avenue for future collaboration between computer security researchers and linguists. For now we can only be comfortable that randomly-generated passphrases (using tools like Diceware ) will resist offline brute force.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi are changing the recipes for their drinks to avoid putting a cancer warning label on the bottle, to comply with California laws.

The new recipe for the drinks’ caramel colouring will have less 4-methylimidazole, a chemical California has added to its list of carcinogens.

The change to the recipe has already been introduced in California.

But the companies say rolling out the new recipe across the US makes the drinks more efficient to manufacture.

“While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning,” Coca-Cola representative Diana Garza-Ciarlante told the Associated Press news agency.

The chemical has been linked to cancer in mice and rats, according to one study, but there is no evidence that it poses a health risk to humans, said the American Beverage Association, which represents the wider industry.

The US Food and Drug Administration claims a person would need to drink 1,000 cans of Coke or Pepsi to take in the same dose of the chemical that was given to the animals in the lab test.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo account for nearly 90% of the fizzy drink market, according to one industry tracker, Beverage Digest.

A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes.

The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say.

They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week.

It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear.

The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas.

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Although scientifically intriguing, the results won’t immediately result in ultra-efficient commercial LEDs since the demonstration works only for LEDs with very low input power that produce very small amounts of light.

A study purporting to show a causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems has fundamental analytical errors that render its conclusions invalid, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Guttmacher Institute. This conclusion has been confirmed by the editor of the journal in which the study appeared. Most egregiously, the study, by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues, did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders.

The study by Coleman and colleagues was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009. A letter to the editor by UCSF’s Julia Steinberg and Guttmacher’s Lawrence Finer in the March 2012 issue of the same journal details the study’s serious methodological errors. Significantly, the journal’s editor and the director of the data set used in the study conclude in an accompanying commentary that “the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit,” that the Coleman paper utilized a “flawed” methodology and that “the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support [the authors’] assertions.”

For the tl;dr crowd, let’s get this out of the way right away: asteroid 2012 DA14 is almost certainly not going to hit the Earth next February. And by “almost certainly”, I mean it: the odds of an impact are so low they are essentially zero. This does not rule out an impact at some future date, but for now we’re safe.

But when German-born 3D Designer Markus Kayser first set his eyes upon the Egyptian desert, he saw possibilities. He imagined harnessing the resources which existed in great abundance here, sunlight and sand. And here he talks with Green Prophet about his 3D printer that runs on sun and sand.

Some like to point to cycles when dismissing climate change, brushing off warming as simply being the thing that happens right before cooling. In this view, concern about climate change is akin to the naïve worry that half of schools are performing below average. This is why we need context. We need to know whether an observed change is more like a world premiere or a familiar re-run.

A new paper in Science examines the geologic record for context relating to ocean acidification , a lowering of the pH driven by the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The research group (twenty-one scientists from nearly as many different universities) reviewed the evidence from past known or suspected intervals of ocean acidification. The work provides perspective on the current trend as well as the potential consequences. They find that the current rate of ocean acidification puts us on a track that, if continued, would likely be unprecedented in last 300 million years.

Myhrvold and Caldeira ask the right question: What effect will deployment of clean energy have on global temperature ? They take for granted that economic growth will continue as it has in the past (no small assumption, granted) and thus that 10-30 terawatts of carbon-neutral power will be needed by 2050 to meet global energy needs while limiting atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 450 ppm. (Always worth noting: 450 ppm would, according to the latest science, itself be quite dangerous .)

In their results, Myhrvold and Caldeira highlight a few poorly appreciated but crucial features of energy transitions. The first is that they take quite a while to have an appreciable effect on CO2 concentrations. The world’s oceans have considerable “thermal inertia” — it takes them a long time to absorb heat and a long time to release it. Even after CO2 concentrations start falling, it will take the oceans a while to stop releasing the excess heat they’ve already absorbed. Also, the building of a clean-energy infrastructure itself involves enormous expenditures of energy and thus CO2 emissions. For a given power source, the emissions released during its construction put it into “carbon debt” and it takes a while of generating carbon-free energy for it to work itself to the break-even point. Only then does it begin producing net reductions in CO2. Combine thermal inertia and carbon debt and you get a fairly long time lag between the energy transition and its carbon effects.

The second is that so much CO2 accumulation is already “baked in” that temperature will continue to rise for a while even in the context of rapid emission reductions. We’ve already gotten drunk on fossil fuels; there’s no way to avoid the hangover.

The consequences of this time lag are twofold. First, substantially affecting global temperature in the first half of the century is all but impossible; even to secure temperature reductions in the second half of the century, a rapid transition to clean energy needs to begin immediately . Second, lower -carbon energy — like, say, natural gas — just won’t do it. If we transitioned to something with half of coal’s emissions, it would take more than a century to produce even a 25 percent decline in CO2 relative to the status quo baseline. By then we’d be cooked.

In summary, Myhrvold and Caldeira have shown in pretty stark terms that, if we’re not willing to substantially reduce population growth or economic growth, we’re going to need an absolutely gargantuan amount of zero-carbon energy, without delay.

In every field, at every level of education, men earn more than women. That’s the grim takeaway of this new report [PDF ] from the U.S. Census Bureau , which assesses the value of a higher education in the United States—and illustrates the persistent pay gap between male and female employees who hold comparable degrees. In short, education is valuable, but it’s most lucrative if you’re male.