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Bacteria can really stink. It is a truth acknowledged by anyone whose nostrils have confronted a carton of curdling milk or a pair of socks still saturated with memories of a marathon. But a new paper suggests that bacteria do not just reek odor—they also can smell it. Bacterial colonies detect pungent ammonia molecules released by neighboring colonies and respond by coating themselves in protective slime, according to a study published August 11 in Biotechnology Journal (BTJ)....

By Corie Lok of Nature magazine"Oh crap, this really puts us in the spotlight!" thought Robert Lanza when he first heard the news. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), the biotechnology company in Marlborough, Massachusetts, of which Lanza is chief scientific officer, had for more than a year been operating in the shadow of Geron, a rival company in Menlo Park, California. Geron was bigger and better funded than ACT, and it was the first company to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test a therapy in humans based on embryonic stem (ES) cells....

Researchers are normally hard-pressed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the so-called superheavy elements at the far edge of the periodic table. Now a team has gone a step further and studied the chemistry of short-lived element 112, which seems to bond with other elements in the same way as its mundane relatives zinc and mercury. “In principle, we are proving whether the good old basic systematics of chemistry—the periodic table—is a valid ordering principle also for transactinides,” or superheavy elements, says chemist and team leader Robert Eichler of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and the University of Bern....

When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, Iryna Stavchuk, like so many other Ukrainians, had her world turned upside down. At the time, she was the deputy minister of environmental protection and natural resources and had been in the midst of working to help the country meet European standards on issues such as recycling and waste disposal. But when bombs began to fall on Kyiv, she immediately shifted her focus to emergency wartime operations....

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–Christopher Henshilwood empties a tiny plastic bag and hands me a square of worn blue cardstock to which 19 snail shells no larger than kernels of corn have been affixed in three horizontal rows. To the casual onlooker, they might well appear unremarkable, a handful of discarded mollusk armor, dull and gray with age. In fact, they may be more precious than the glittering contents of any velvet-lined Cartier case....

IN ONE VERY STRIKING ILLUSION, you can become convinced that you can feel a rubber hand being touched just as if it were your own. To find out for yourself, ask a friend to sit across from you at a small table. Use blocks or coffee cups to prop up a vertical partition on the table, as shown in the illustration on the opposite page. A flat piece of cardboard will do....

A frigid globe covered in a wet sand of organic compounds and sculpted by a liquid, most likely methane–that is the picture of Saturn’s moon Titan emerging from data collected by the Huygens probe, which touched down on its surface in January. Nature published the first analyses in a series of papers published online yesterday. Although conditions on Titan’s surface are a frosty -179 degrees Celsius, it is the only body in the solar system other than Earth that has a nitrogen-rich atmosphere....

It is tempting to say that we live in the “age of influence,” though of course every age is an “age of influence”—ours has just been super-charged by social media. Tali Sharot, the founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London, set out to understand the neuroscience behind influence. Why do some things move our opinions, while others leave us cold? Her book, “The Influential Mind,” is an exploration of these and other puzzles....

Life expectancy in most countries took a hit during the COVID pandemic. But the U.S. has seen a sharper drop-off than most European countries and Chile—and it still hasn’t recovered. Worldwide life expectancy was dramatically extended during the past century by decades of progress in medical science and public policy, such as advances in cancer screening and treatment, better prevention and treatment for heart disease, tobacco regulation and safety improvements in the automobile industry....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The first plantations in the Americas of sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, and cotton were maintained and harvested by African slaves controlled by European masters. When African slavery was largely abolished in the mid-1800s, the center of plantation agriculture moved from the Americas to the Indo-Pacific region where the indigenous people and indentured servants were forced to grow sugarcane, tea, coffee, and rubber....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Cratinus was a highly successful writer of Attic Old Comedy, but the very fragmentary nature of his surviving plays means that he is not as well remembered as Aristophanes (eleven of whose plays come down to us intact). Despite this, it is possible to uncover significant information regarding this sometimes forgotten comic poet by looking at his own comic fragments, what Aristophanes says about Cratinus in his plays, and by using later sources and records....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

BEIJING (Reuters) - Nearly 90 percent of China’s big cities failed to meet air quality standards in 2014, but that was still an improvement on 2013 as the country’s “war on pollution” began to take effect, the environment ministry said on Monday. The Ministry of Environmental Protection said on its website (www.mep.gov.cn) that only eight of the 74 cities it monitors managed to meet national standards in 2014 on a series of pollution measures such as PM2....

Where there’s oil, there’s a way. This summer the federal government showed that it is willing to approve drilling operations in U.S. waters off Alaska. In addition to legislation, other barriers to Arctic development are disappearing: summers at the North Pole could be ice-free as soon as 2020, reducing the need for ice-breaking vessels and opening the way for faster and cheaper trading routes. An increase in shipping across the top of the world, however, could have “significant regional impacts by accelerating ice melt,” according to a recent government report by the Canadian Northwest Territories....

The world’s most worrisome military flash point is arguably not in the Taiwan Strait, the Korean peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any globe. The contested territory? The no-man’s-land of Earth’s orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name. About 1,300 active satellites now reside in the region of outer space immediately surrounding our planet, where they provide worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting, and more....

Biodiesel may not become the airplane fuel of the future but it did prove effective enough to recently power a 1968 L-29 Czechoslovakian jet—dubbed BioJet 1—up to 17,000 feet (5,180 meters) over 37 minutes. A three minute, 15-second test the day before was the world’s first flight entirely fueled by cooking oil. “She flew and she flew just fine,” says physicist Rudi Wiedemann, president and CEO of Biodiesel Solutions, Inc., whose company provided the fuel for the historic October flight: fresh canola oil refined into biodiesel....

Can you make a sociopath—either through brain injury or other types of trauma? — Chris Daly, via e-mail Jeannine Stamatakis, an instructor at various colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, explains: Psychologist John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, once said, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select....

The choice of a biometric trait or traits to use in a security system depends on the application; the strengths and weaknesses of each of the four most common biometric identifiers are summarized in the table below. For example, compared with fingerprint recognition, iris recognition allows access to the wrong people less often but currently requires larger and costlier sensors and thus cannot be as easily incorporated into a laptop or other consumer device....

BEFORE AGRICULTURE, MOST OF THE PLANET WAS COVERED WITH PLANTS THAT LIVED YEAR after year. These perennials were gradually replaced by food crops that have to be replanted every year. Now scientists are contemplating reversing this shift by creating perennial versions of familiar crops such as corn and wheat. If they are successful, yields on farmland in some of the world’s most desperately poor places could soar. The plants might also soak up some of the excess carbon in the earth’s atmosphere....

Click! Click-clickity-click-click. Unghhhh. Cliiiiiiiiick! A bottlenose dolphin tries to communicate with nearby friends, but they cannot hear the calls. There are too many ships in the water making noise. CLICK! To be heard over man-made din, whales and dolphins must effectively raise their voices, which they do by changing the frequency, amplitude or duration of their vocalizations or simply by repeating their calls over and over. Unfortunately, that acoustical alteration also affects the animals’ health....