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By Lisa Maria Garza DALLAS (Reuters) - An ice storm that hit wide parts of Texas and neighboring states on Monday knocked out power to thousands of people, led to hundreds of traffic accidents and caused nearly 1,400 flight cancellations nationwide. The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for northern Texas, including Dallas, southern Oklahoma and western Arkansas. The storm that packed high winds and dumped freezing rain has covered highways in the area with sheets of ice, and authorities advised commuters to stay off the roads....

Many people with diabetes prick their fingers several times a day to measure blood sugar levels and decide on the insulin doses they need. Implants of pancreatic cells that normally make insulin in the body— so-called islet cells—can render this cumbersome process unnecessary. Likewise, cellular implants could transform treatment of other disorders, including cancer, heart failure, hemophilia, glaucoma and Parkinson’s disease. But cellular implants have a major drawback: recipients must take immunosuppressants indefinitely to prevent rejection by the immune system....

The heaviest rain bursts within a storm happen when it’s warmest, according to new research that suggests rising temperatures could exacerbate flooding as intense downpours are concentrated into smaller windows. The analysis by two Australian engineers shows that storms are becoming more unruly. They’re prone to fits of faster rainfall during condensed periods of severity, and lessening rainfall during calmer, cooler times within the same event. In other words, storms are being reorganized, said Ashish Sharma, a professor at the University of New South Wales who co-authored the study....

Editors’ note: Last year the Foundational Questions Institute’s third essay contest posed the following question to physicists and philosophers: “Is Reality Digital or Analog?” The organizers expected entrants to come down on the side of digital. After all, the word “quantum” in quantum physics connotes “discrete” —hence, “digital”. Many of the best essays held, however, that the world is analog. Among them was the entry by David Tong, who shared the second-place prize....

What can a simple newt do that humans are trying to learn? The tiny amphibian can regenerate an entire lopped-off limb, or a whole organ, by taking normal, differentiated body cells–bone, skin, muscle and so on–and winding back their clocks to an undifferentiated state of stemness. Newts create these instant stem cells at the site of an injury, then immediately begin rebuilding the missing body part. In contrast, once a mammal’s cells have gone down the path of becoming bone or skin or brain cells, there is normally no turning back....

Dear EarthTalk: What are the environmental pros and cons of corn-based plastic as an alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastic? – Laura McInnes, Glasgow, Scotland Polylactic acid (PLA), a plastic substitute made from fermented plant starch (usually corn) is quickly becoming a popular alternative to traditional petroleum-based plastics. As more and more countries and states follow the lead of China, Ireland, South Africa, Uganda and San Francisco in banning plastic grocery bags responsible for so much so-called “white pollution” around the world, PLA is poised to play a big role as a viable, biodegradable replacement....

The next time you walk past a poplar or a black gum tree on a busy city street, think twice before taking a long, deep breath. Although these trees produce oxygen, they also release compounds that can react in the air to create lung-damaging ozone. “It is kind of a surprise,” says Galina Churkina, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, who studies urban tree emissions....

A trip to a coral reef off the coast of the Florida Keys, an outdated nautical chart and an argument with a boat captain led biogeochemist Kimberly Yates to make a starting discovery: The seafloor around parts of the continent is breaking away, much more than scientists had previously assumed. Yates, an oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey’s St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center, was in the region for a research trip....

While rising carbon dioxide emissions are a primary concern of those worried about climate change, emissions of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, have also risen in recent years. Curbing these emissions would help reduce warming, but scientists have found it difficult to determine exactly how much methane comes from human sources. It’s also challenging to trace the methane back to the source and find out whether it is coming from cows, coal mines or gas patches....

In a split second someone can be transformed into a patient-in-waiting. A genetic scan ordered to test for one suspected condition picks up an elevated risk for a different, unexpected disease. Or a brain scan for a concussion detects a suspicious shadow. There’s no guarantee that those abnormalities may develop into something. There may not even be a treatment or therapy for the resulting condition. The pressing question then is: Should the patient be told about the results of such incidental findings?...

In the early days of research on black holes, before they even had that name, physicists did not yet know if these bizarre objects existed in the real world. They might have been a quirk of the complicated math used in the then still young general theory of relativity, which describes gravity. Over the years, though, evidence has accumulated that black holes are very real and even exist right here in our galaxy....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Visitors to Naples and its surrounding area could be overwhelmed by the number of archaeological wonders to see. Buried for centuries beneath tons of volcanic ash and debris, the archaeological sites scattered along the coast of Naples are among the most spectacular and best-preserved remains of the ancient Roman-Italic world....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. All too often, the Eastern perspective on the Trinity is mistakenly overlooked by Western society in the study of Church History. This is unfortunate, for men like Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390 CE) and John of Damascus (676–749 CE) offered insightful understandings in the first centuries of early Christianity regarding the theological understanding of the Trinitarian relationship in the Hebrew and Greek biblical texts....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Portuguese colonization of the Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) Islands began from 1462. Initially envisaged as a base to give mariners direct access to West African trade, the Central Atlantic islands soon became a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade. Slaves were used on the sugar plantations of the islands and sold on to ships sailing to the Americas....

There’s an old uranium mine on rancher Larry Gordy’s grazing land near Cameron, Ariz. Like hundreds of other abandoned mines in the Navajo Nation, the United States’ largest Indian reservation, it looks as if it might still be in use—tailings, or waste products of uranium processing, are still piled everywhere, and the land isn’t fenced off. “It looks like Mars,” said Marsha Monestersky, program director of Forgotten People, an advocacy organization for the western region of the vast Navajo Nation, which covers 27,000 square miles in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico....

Rappers making up rhymes on the fly while in a brain scanner have provided an insight into the creative process. Freestyle rapping — in which a performer improvises a song by stringing together unrehearsed lyrics — is a highly prized skill in hip hop. But instead of watching a performance in a club, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, neuroscientists at the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues had 12 rappers freestyle in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine....

What differentiates mere talent from creative genius? No one knows for sure. We do know, however, that many artistic advances and scientific discoveries come from men and women in their 20s—just old enough to have sufficient technical skills yet young enough to be unencumbered by the habits of older generations. Psychological studies also indicate that highly creative people share an elevated risk of serious mental illness. For certain individuals, such ailments may actually contribute to their soaring achievements....

Innovation, economic growth and climate change are just a few of the challenges and opportunities that face the U.S. They are also firmly linked to science. For example, research findings provide a basis for understanding how to respond to climate change, and technological progress fuels economic growth. Science is a vital to many government policies, and thus Scientific American has joined a swelling chorus of voices and partnered with ScienceDebate.org, a grassroots organization....

By Shereen Lehman (Reuters Health) - Children exposed to tobacco smoke at home are up to three times more likely to have attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) as unexposed kids, according to a new study from Spain. The association was stronger for kids with one or more hours of secondhand smoke exposure every day, the authors found. And the results held when researchers accounted for parents’ mental health and other factors....

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that only a handful of outdated coal-burning power plants emit a sizable amount of the mercury pollution generated in the U.S.? If so, is anything being done to clean these sites up or shut them down?—Frank Pearson, Wichita, Kans. Our nation’s coal-fired power plants are increasingly being retrofitted with technologies to mitigate the output of various forms of pollution. But a number of bad apples do continue to cause more than their fair share of mercury emissions....