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CHICAGO, June 8 (Reuters) - Michigan on Monday said Canadian geese in the state tested positive for a lethal strain of bird flu, bringing the worst outbreak of the disease in U.S. history to a 21st state. Three young geese collected in Sterling Heights, Michigan, about 20 miles (30 km) north of Detroit, were infected with the highly pathogenic H5N2 flu strain, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The state is now focusing on preventing the spread of the disease to poultry, Director Keith Creagh said....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Written by a former Greek slave, in the late to mid-6th century BCE, Aesop’s Fables are the world’s best known collection of morality tales. The fables, numbering 725, were originally told from person-to-person as much for entertainment purposes but largely as a means for relaying or teaching a moral or lesson....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Hymn to Nisaba (c. 3rd millennium BCE) is a poem praising Nisaba, the Sumerian goddess of writing and accounts who also served as scribe of the gods. The poem is officially dedicated to Enki, the god of wisdom (sometimes given as her father, sometimes as “patron”), but the majority of the text focuses on Nisaba and her attributes....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

Remember synergy? It was one of the buzziest buzzwords energizing the dot-com era of the late 1990s. The Internet was making it easier than ever to pull people and organizations into cooperative networks, and legions of start-up companies exuberantly leapt in to take advantage of the new efficiencies and marketing opportunities. Expectations were rife that the whole would exceed the sum of the parts, although proponents were sometimes vague about how (and how to build a real business proposition around it)....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Q. Getting B-12 injections seems to be a hot new fad. Can B-12 shots really boost your energy? Are they safe? Could you get the same benefit from an oral supplement? A. Taking B-12 can definitely help boost your energy if you have a B-12 deficiency. Fatigue is a common side effect of B-12 deficiency....

BOWDOINHAM, Maine (Reuters) - The number of baby lobsters in the Gulf of Maine has dropped by half since 2007, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists as the population of adult lobsters remains near a record high, contributing to robust catches. Scientists note that baby lobsters take eight years to reach harvestable size, meaning the dip could yet be felt by the state’s 4,200 lobstermen, who last year hauled in a record catch worth $365 million, representing nearly 70 percent of Maine’s total seafood harvest....

There is a growing possibility that the U.S. will pass no climate change legislation in this session of Congress: the uphill climb is at least as steep, and probably steeper, as it is for health care legislation. President Barack Obama cannot presume to hold his own party in line on climate change. Several Democratic senators have already asked him to stop pushing for a bill in 2010, given the proximity to the midterm elections....

Six years ago I learned an important lesson about mountains and weather–from a farmer’s horse. I was studying the geology of the ancient Kingdom of Mustang, now part of Nepal. Mustang lies high on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, at the headwaters of the remarkable Kali Gandaki River, which carves a deep valley between the 8,000-meter-high peaks of Annapurna I and Dhaulagiri as it descends south to the Himalayan foothills....

Seeking healthful foods, Americans are eating more soy than ever. But recent research with animals shows that consuming large amounts could have harmful effects on female fertility and reproductive development. Soy is ubiquitous in the American diet. Over a quarter of all infant formula sold is made with it, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration promotes it in foods to reduce the risk of heart disease. School lunch programs across the country are even adding soy to hamburger patties....

From its position 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius, the red M dwarf star Gliese 667 C doesn’t look like much. Its dim light is lost to the naked eye, washed out by two brighter companion stars. Yet this tiny, exceedingly average star could play a crucial role in establishing that small, potentially Earth-like planets are common throughout our galaxy. Researchers have announced that seven planets orbit that star—and, if their mathematical analyses are correct, three of them could be habitable....

Modern science has introduced the world to plenty of strange ideas, but surely one of the strangest is the fate of a massive star that has reached the end of its life. Having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it starts collapsing catastrophically. Modest stars like the sun also collapse, but they stabilize again at a smaller size....

By Jane Wardell SYDNEY, March 9 (Reuters) - The disclosure that an underwater locator beacon battery in the flight data recorder of MH370 had expired could be key in legal action against Malaysia Airlines over the fruitless search for the jetliner, lawyers for families of the passengers said on Monday. U.S. law firm Kreindler & Kreindler LP, which is representing around 20 families, said the expired battery was “potentially very significant” in determining compensation if it had hurt the search for the missing plane....

An Indian casino and the U.S. State Department appear on a new list of drone license applicants uncovered through a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration. Organizations must currently apply for an FAA license to fly robotic drones over the U.S. homeland. The nonprofit digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been using lawsuits to get the FAA to release information about drone license applicants, so that Americans can begin thinking about privacy issues and considering legal privacy protections....

When inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen launched his FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition two decades ago, he hoped to turn engineering into a contact sport and engineering students into superstars. Judging by the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) held recently in New York City—which included waving mascots, bleachers filled with screaming fans, and dozens of robots throwing down—he has succeeded. In particular, the FIRST competitions (there are four in total open to ages six through 18) have attracted a few all-girl teams, despite the fact that adolescent and teenage girls can be a hard-to-reach demographic when it comes to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education....

By Will Boggs MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who initiate highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) or who have their first prenatal visit in the third trimester are more likely to have HIV detected at delivery, researchers say. “We found that a quarter of women who started treatment in the third trimester of pregnancy had a detectable viral load at delivery,” Dr. Ingrid T. Katz from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told Reuters Health by email....

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India has quarantined a man who was cured of Ebola in Liberia but continued to show traces of the virus in samples of his semen after arriving in the country, the Indian Health Ministry said on Tuesday. The ministry said in a statement that the Indian national tested negative for Ebola in tests conforming to World Heath Organization guidelines but was quarantined when he arrived at New Delhi airport as a precautionary measure....

The Obama administration leaned heavily on Saudi Arabia to associate itself with the Copenhagen Accord climate change agreement, confidential State Department memos show. The handful of climate-related cables – among the hundreds of thousands of secret and unclassified messages released by the whistle-blower organization Wikileaks – show the United States put climate change at the center of its foreign policy relationship with the oil-producing giant in the months after last year’s blowout U....

As computer chips become ever more prodigious in their data-processing capacities, the task of shuttling all those gigabits around inside a chip becomes an increasing challenge. Help may be on the way in the form of photonic components, which deal in pulses of light instead of slower packets of electric charge. For several years researchers have been making so-called silicon optical waveguides, in which light speeds along inside the ridge between two channels as if along an optical fiber....

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People Mahzarin R. Banaji Anthony G. Greenwald Delacorte Press, 2013 ($27) When journalist Brent Staples walks down the street, he whistles classical music. Staples, who is African-American, does not do this to share his love of Mozart. Rather he wants to ease the fears of white pedestrians who might not realize how nervous they feel when passing a black man. As psychologists Banaji and Greenwald discuss in Blindspot, Staples is attempting to counteract unconscious bias....