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Business is the solution to environmental progress, not its enemy, said the head of one of the world’s largest corporations. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, accepted the 2013 Commitment to Development “Ideas in Action” Award from the Center for Global Development last night. Unilever was recognized for its work in reducing deforestation through its sustainable sourcing of palm oil and pulp and paper products. “First and foremost I am a businessman; I cannot deny that,” said Polman in his acceptance speech....

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazineThere’s a showdown brewing in the state of Texas – and it could get ugly. On one side stands the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is clamping down on the proliferation of unapproved stem-cell treatments being offered to Americans. On the other is state governor Rick Perry, who is riding high in the polls as the Republican party’s favored candidate for the 2012 presidential elections – and a staunch advocate of the stem-cell treatments....

Pell Grants, charter schools, home schooling, SATs, report cards, and yes, even permanent records. The language of education is familiar to most everyone, but the science of education is much more elusive. Educators, academics and scientists have struggled with issues like how to make learning approachable yet challenging, what to include in the curriculum and when, what the optimal class size is and so on. In this collection Scientific American explores the many, many ways that learning is also a scientific process and offers the latest theories of teaching and learning....

Just over a month ago, on November 14, orderlies at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, Ore., wheeled a six-year-old child with an incurable disorder of the nervous system into an operating theater. During the next eight hours surgeons used computers to guide a surgical procedure the likes of which the world has never seen: injections of neural stem cells directly into the brain of a human subject. In this phase I clinical trial, doctors affiliated with Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) are collaborating with scientists at Stem Cells, Inc....

PARIS (Reuters) - A U.N. health worker was discharged from a French hospital on Sunday and left the country after recovering from Ebola, the French Health Ministry said in a statement. The U.N. worker, whose name and nationality have not been disclosed, had been flown to France from Sierra Leone and was in isolation at the Begin military hospital in the eastern Paris suburb of Saint-Mandé. The death toll in the Ebola epidemic has risen to 5,459 out of 15,351 cases identified in eight countries by the end of Nov....

Six speedy stars rocketing through space at up to 2 million miles per hour were likely ejected from the giant black hole at the Milky Way’s heart, astronomers say. They represent the first known “hypervelocity stars” with masses similar to that of our sun. The discovery, unveiled last month, could shed light on how stars form in the dust-shrouded core of our home galaxy. Black hole suns The galactic center is cloaked in a halo of dust that obscures all but the brightest stars from astronomers’ telescopes....

Most people have heard of pheromones, those mysterious chemicals that animals secrete to attract members of the opposite sex. But pheromones can also do a lot more. Here are few of their more interesting properties.– Compiled by R. Douglas Fields Sex Effects True to their reputation, pheromones affect reproduction in mammals. Name Result Whitten effect Male pheromones induce estrus, or sexual receptivity and fertility, in females Vandenbergh effect Male pheromones accelerate puberty of females...

People are often confronted with feelings of disappointment, frustration and anger as they interact with government officials, co-workers, family and even fellow commuters. Most can control their actions to the extent that relatively few of these interactions end in violence. The attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D–Ariz.) last weekend shows, however, sometimes the cognitive control mechanisms required to guide one’s behavior are either nonexistent or ignored, with disastrous consequences....

The lure of sweets is the downfall of many a dieter. Cats, however, are indifferent to sugar, a trait that is rare in the mammal kingdom. Now scientists have figured out why. Felines apparently carry a defect in a gene that encodes part of the mammalian sweet taste receptor. A lack of interest in sweets has been observed not only in house cats, but also in wild ones such as lions, tigers and jaguars....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Rock art (also known as parietal art) is an umbrella term which refers to several types of creations including finger markings left on soft surfaces, bas-relief sculptures, engraved figures and symbols, and paintings onto a rock surface. Cave paintings, above all forms of prehistoric art, have received more attention from the academic research community....

More than 1.5 billion people around the world suffer from chronic aches and pains. Often these discomforts are felt daily, and their effects can be debilitating. Unlike the agony associated with a specific injury or illness, chronic pain often persists regardless of any evident damage to the body. The underlying cause can be mysterious—and treatment is therefore challenging. Fortunately several approaches to chronic pain management may bring some relief. Yoga The mental and physical discipline of contorting the body into geometric shapes not only limbers ligaments, it may also alleviate painful conditions....

Extraordinary discoveries inspire extraordinary claims. Thus, James Watson reported that immediately after he and Francis Crick uncovered the structure of DNA, Crick “winged into the Eagle (pub) to tell everyone within hearing that we had discovered the secret of life.” Their structure–an elegant double helix–almost merited such enthusiasm. Its proportions permitted information storage in a language in which four chemicals, called bases, played the same role as 26 letters do in the English language....

African-American schoolchildren who completed a brief writing assignment designed to reaffirm their sense of self-worth received higher grades at the end of the semester than those given a control intervention, a new study finds. These better-performing children closed the grade gap with their white peers by 40 percent, apparently because the assignment interrupted the harmful effects of declining performance early in the semester. Researchers have invoked a concept called stereotype threat to help explain why black students in the U....

Sep Kamvar is a consulting professor of computational mathematics at Stanford University and computer scientist who specializes in data mining. He is also the co-founder, with artist Jonathan Harris, of the popular website “We Feel Fine,” which combs blogs for expressions of emotion, and then displays the results in swarms of vivid color. The site provides a way to explore the emotional contours of our shared virtual world, and has also attracted the interest of psychologists and other scientists....

The late President George H.W. Bush is the reason why President Trump has been asked about climate change in the last week more than at any other time in his presidency. Through legislation he signed in 1990, Bush started the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping study documenting climate change’s impacts on the United States. The Trump administration released the latest iteration on Black Friday and has since downplayed its definitive body of research, making false claims about its accuracy and inadvertently drawing more attention to the clear science that shows Americans will be increasingly at risk as a result of climate change....

COPENHAGEN – Denmark’s prime minister, the host of next month’s U.N. climate change conference, has proposed pushing back the deadline for binding greenhouse gas emission targets until next year in hopes of salvaging a political agreement at the upcoming talks. Speaking in Singapore at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit yesterday, Lars Løkke Rasmussen proposed that next month’s talks result in a political declaration on emission cuts and financing while leaving a legally binding treaty for later....

The human heart beats more than 100,000 times every day, pumping almost 2,000 gallons of oxygen-rich blood through the aorta to the rest of the body. About 5 percent of that flow finds its way to two major vessels—the coronary arteries—which channel it to a network of progressively smaller blood vessels that feed each fiber of the cardiac muscle. If something—such as a blood clot or a thick buildup of fatty material (atherosclerotic plaque) in the walls of the arteries—interrupts the circulation at one or more points in the coronary vessels, the blockage robs nearby cardiac cells of oxygen and nutrients....

Key concepts Geology Soil Density Ecology Introduction Have you ever noticed how much work it is to dig a hole in really hard soil? It’s much easier to dig a hole in soft, loose soil. But why is that? Soil that is hard and dry is often compacted, which means that it has been packed down, making it denser and thereby difficult to penetrate. Soil that has become compacted is not only harder for you to dig a hole in, but it can also be much harder for a lot of other organisms, such as helpful earthworms, to survive in....

Astronomers have for the first time managed to detect the rotation of an extrasolar planet, by analysing the way its atmosphere filters light. This technique could also provide clues about planet formation. Ignas Snellen and his colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands report in Nature that a gaseous planet orbiting the star β Pictoris rotates at 25 kilometers per second at its equator — faster than any planet in the Solar System and about 50 times faster than Earth....

If there was a way of telling who in our society is sexually attracted to children, are we entitled to know? A recent study from Georg-August-University Göttingen in Germany suggests that we may need to grapple with this question. Phallometric testing, also known as penile plethysmography, is considered the gold standard in measuring male sexual arousal, and particularly, deviant sexual interests such as pedophilia, which is the sexual interest in prepubescent children, roughly aged 3 to 10....