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National and state air regulators, in a notice mailed to Volkswagen AG on Friday, accused the company of installing software in about half a million cars designed to pass federal emissions tests but release higher-than-acceptable levels in everyday driving situations. In the violation notice, issued to the car company and subsidiaries Audi AG and Volkswagen Group of America Inc., U.S. EPA said the company built and installed these computer algorithms in approximately 482,000 diesel cars sold since 2008....

Is altruism a genetic trait? —Daniel Hall, Oceanside, Calif. Nicholas R. Eaton, a doctoral student in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, responds, writing in collaboration with professor of clinical psychology Robert F. Krueger and doctoral students Jaime Derringer and Abigail Powers: PEOPLE OFTEN GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO HELP perfect strangers for no apparent personal gain. Many of us assume that altruism is something that parents teach—be nice, don’t talk with your mouth full, do unto others…....

The lush green expanse of the outfield. The pop of horsehide ball hitting cowhide mitt. The search for hastily discarded syringes. Yes, baseball is back. On the sacred day when I first discovered the game, the holy trinity of stats was AVG (batting average), HR (home runs) and RBI (runs batted in). Today we have OBP, OPS, UZR and WAR—and plenty more alphabet soup. To become more nimble with these numbers, back in January I headed to a little collectible store on East 11th Street in Manhattan called Bergino Baseball Clubhouse to hear a talk by Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, co-author with former New York Mets number cruncher and current Smith visiting math prof Benjamin Baumer of The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. View from Staircase of Central Pillar and Loculi, Columbarium 1, Vigna CodiniFrancesca Santoro L’hoir (CC BY-NC-SA) A columbarium is an underground chamber, which the Romans used for preserving the ashes of the dead. During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, hundreds of columbaria lined the consular highways leading out of Rome, although now only some two dozen are extant....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, Iroquois Five Nations, or the Iroquois League, was one of the most powerful Native American polities north of the Rio Grande. They arrived in the historical record in the 16th-century CE when European colonists began interacting with the Haudenosaunee’s five constituent nations – the Onondaga, Mohawk (who called themselves the Kanienkehaka), Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca – in both war and trade....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. During the early years of Christianity, many of the church leaders or “Fathers” wrote down admonishments and instruction on what it meant to be a follower of Jesus as well as what liturgical ceremonies should be followed as a believer in these early Christian communities. One of these apostolic fathers, whose identity is unknown, wrote such a document entitled, The Teaching of the (Twelve) Apostles, or as it is commonly referred to today—The Didache....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Nebra Sky Disk is one of the most fascinating, and some would say controversial, archaeological finds of recent years. Dated to 1600 BCE, this bronze disk has a diameter of 32cm (about the size of a vinyl LP) and weighs around 2 kg. It is patinated blue-green and embossed with gold leaf symbols which appear to represent a crescent moon, the sun (or perhaps a full moon), stars, a curved gold band, interpreted as a sun boat, and a further gold band on the edge of the disk which probably represent one of the horizons (another gold band on the opposite side is missing)....

Sometime just before my second child was born, I read that if you stick your tongue out at a newborn, he will do the same. So in young Nicholass first hours, even as my wife was still in the recovery room after 40 hours of labor and a C-section, I tried it. Holding the gooing, alert lad before me in my hands, I stuck my tongue out at him. He immediately returned the gesture, opening his mouth and subtly but distinctly moving his tongue....

Come September 10, the current iPhone rumor season will end and a new one will begin. That’s because that’s the day Apple will unveil the next incarnation of its iconic device – that is, if All Things D’s unnamed sources have it right. ATD’s Ina Fried reported the date late Saturday, adding that the unveiling of Apple’s Mac OS X, aka Mavericks, isn’t expected at the purported September 10 event, and that there’s no indication that an Apple television or smartwatch project is “close to debuting....

A group of physicists says that it is still detecting the presence of dark matter—the mystery substance thought to make up 85% of matter in the Universe—20 years after it saw the first hints of such a signal. DAMA, a collaboration of Italian and Chinese researchers, has announced long-awaited results from six years of data-taking, which followed an upgrade to the experiment in 2010. The findings are a boost for the multiple groups attempting to reproduce DAMA’s results, which have been controversial and contradict those of other experiments....

The turbines at Moss Landing power plant on the California coast burn through natural gas to pump out more than 1,000 megawatts of electric power. The 700-degree Fahrenheit (370-degree Celsius) fumes left over contain at least 30,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the primary greenhouse gas responsible for global warming—along with other pollutants. Today, this flue gas wafts up and out of the power plant’s enormous smokestacks, but by simply bubbling it through the nearby seawater, a new California-based company called Calera says it can use more than 90 percent of that CO2 to make something useful: cement....

When it comes to computing, the “cloud” may rain efficiency benefits. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University unveiled a modeling tool yesterday that estimates the energy savings of moving local network software and computing into the server farms that make up the cloud. The tool, available to the public online, is called the Cloud Energy and Emissions Research Model (CLEER). It aims to give scientists a better understanding of how energy use changes as the world moves away from storing and processing information in local networks and moves toward outsourcing these tasks to centralized facilities....

If you’ve never watched bees carefully, you’re missing out. Looking up close as they gently curl and uncoil their tapered mouths toward food, you sense that they’re not just eating, but enjoying. Watch a bit more, and the hesitant flicks and sags of their antennae seem to convey some kind of emotion. Maybe annoyance? Or something like agitation? Whether bees really experience any of these things is an open scientific question....

The seemingly complex phenomenon by which fruit flies (Drosophila) learn from bad experiences has been reduced to the actions of a mere 12 neurons, according to research by a team of UK- and US-based scientists. Manipulating this cluster of cells with a laser, the scientists were able to trick the flies into having associative memories of events they had not actually experienced.Flies learn from smells and other signals in their environment....

At the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Fredrik Lanner is preparing to edit genes in human embryos. It’s the kind of research that sparked an international frenzy in April last year, when a Chinese team revealed that it had done the world’s first such experiments. But Lanner doesn’t expect his work, which will explore early human development, to cause such a fuss. A year of discussion about the ethics of embryo-editing research, and perhaps simply the passage of time, seems to have blunted its controversial edge—although such work remains subject to the same ethical anxieties that surround other reproductive-biology experiments....

Last January, Hawaii signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) that would make the Aloha State the country’s most aggressive in pursuing renewable energy. By 2030, it plans to obtain 70 percent of its power from clean energy (40 percent from renewables and 30 percent from energy efficiency). Outstripping California’s goal of 33 percent by 2020, the Hawaii initiative is a green light for clean-tech experts and enthusiasts to set up shop in the heart of the Pacific and may become a blueprint (or greenprint) for the rest of the country....

A significant melt event is unfolding in Greenland this week. With temperatures nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than usual in some areas, the southern part of the ice sheet is melting at its highest rate this season. Forecasts suggest that the melting on Greenland’s South Dome—one of the highest elevations on the ice sheet—may be the strongest for early June since 1950. It worries experts that Greenland could be priming for another big melt season....

IN RECENT YEARS, underground chemists have increasingly made small chemical tweaks on known recreational drugs to skirt laws, creating novel designer versions. Instead of cannabis, for instance, these chemists could offer up XLR-11, or instead of PCP they might have 3-MeO-PCE. Novel designer drugs, also called research chemicals or legal highs, still produce physiological and psychological effects, though experts say that they can come with a slew of risks. Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, for instance, are increasingly cited among the number of opioid-related deaths in the United States, which reached more than 75,000 this year....

William Menke, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, explains. The Richter scale was developed in 1935 by American seismologist Charles Richter (1891-1989) as a way of quantifying the magnitude, or strength, of earthquakes. Richter, who was studying earthquakes in California at the time, needed a simple way to precisely express what is qualitatively obvious: some earthquakes are small and others are large. An earthquake is a violent shaking of the ground that is usually caused by sudden motion on a geological fault....

In February 2009, two space satellites orbiting at speeds of almost 17,000 mph collided at a height of 482 miles over Siberia. One was an operational U.S. communications satellite, Iridium-33. The other was a heavier, obsolete Russian military satellite called Cosmos-2251. For space scientists, the collision was a rude awakening to a worrisome kind of new math. The ultra-high-speed collision turned two space orbiters in a cloud of debris with 2,300 objects....