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Two decades ago, the discovery of neuropeptide Y (NPY), a peptide in the mammalian brain involved in food-seeking behavior, sparked a search for a weight-loss remedy that could interfere with its activity. Eventually the promise of other drug targets, along with the possible side effects of targeting NPY, put a damper on the effort—until now. New findings about the action of this appetite-promoting peptide could bring NPY back to the front burner....

The trippy twist stretching across your screen is a doctored flower—though you won’t see this creation at a wedding reception anytime soon. Each spiral is a product of an editing technique called slit-scan photography. In this documentation method, a photographer takes a video or string of back-to-back images as a scene rushes by. Then they cut a narrow strip out of the same place in each photograph or filmed scene and stack the slits in sequential order....

At CES 2013, T-Mobile and CEO John Legere played up the company’s change in strategy.(Credit:Lori Grunin)T-Mobile continues to rev up the changes it’s got in store for customers.The wireless carrier today seems to have finally done away entirely with contracts for wireless customers. This follows earlier moves that had allowed options including either a traditional two-year contract or no contract at all.The shift is part of a broader transformation that CEO John Legere hinted at during his Consumer Electronics Show press conference in January, changes that are intended to make the carrier more competitive in the industry....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Although Galileo demonstrated the contrary more than three hundred years ago, people still believe that if a flea were as large as a man it could jump a thousand feet into the air,” wrote the biologist J.B.S. Haldane in his delightful 1926 essay, On Being the Right Size. Galileo’s square-cube law had established that as objects get larger (by, say, some linear factor n), their surface area and volume increase far faster (by n2 and n3, respectively)....

(Reuters) - In a scene that could open the film “Snakes on a Jet Ski,” New Jersey animal control workers have set traps to snare a reported 20-foot-long serpent slithering through the waters of Lake Hopatcong. Tales of the giant snake brought the state Department of Environmental Protection to the fresh water lake in northern New Jersey - the state’s largest at 4 square miles (10 square km) - but the mystery has only deepened, DEP spokesman Bob Considine said on Monday....

Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe and North America stopped their creeping advance. Within a few hundred years sea levels in some places had risen by as much as 10 meters—more than if the ice sheet that still covers Greenland were to melt today. This freshwater flood filled the North Atlantic and also shut down the ocean currents that conveyed warmer water from equatorial regions northward....

U.S. Rep. Gary Peters is locked in one of the nation’s closest Senate races, and he’s gambling that climate change will help him win it. But he’s not rushing to support the landmark carbon standard being released today by the White House. The Michigan Democrat has shed his party’s once-muffled approach to the thorny issue of climate, fulfilling the view of environmental strategists who believe that candidates should confidently promote the science behind warming and attack those who reject it....

Layer by layer, inch my inch, the world’s first 3-D printed vehicle seemingly emerged from thin air this week on the floor of the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago. The Strati, named after the Italian word for layer, was printed in one piece over 44 hours using a process called direct digital manufacturing—the seamless fabrication of components from computer design to physical object. This is the first time this method has been used to make a car, one that also happens to be fully electric....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Any visitor to Rome will want to see and explore the popular historical and cultural sites - the Colosseum, the Forum, the Trevi Fountain and, of course, the Vatican. But a large part of the city’s ancient history actually lies underground in the tomb-lined tunnels or catacombs that weave beneath the streets of Rome....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pirates in the so-called Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1740) used all manner of weapons to attack ships and relieve them of their precious cargoes. Heavy cannons, muskets, pistols, cutlasses, and grenades were just some of the weapons pirates employed to wreak havoc on the High Seas. Besides all of these, perhaps the best pirate weapon of all was the black flag they raised, like a Jolly Roger, or an all-red flag, which meant a vessel should surrender immediately or face dire consequences....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In December 2018, scientists at Google AI ran a calculation on Google’s best quantum processor. They were able to reproduce the computation using a regular laptop. Then in January, they ran the same test on an improved version of the quantum chip. This time they had to use a powerful desktop computer to simulate the result. By February, there were no longer any classical computers in the building that could simulate their quantum counterparts....

Michael Skinner, a professor of biology at Washington State University, ignited a firestorm of debate in 2005 when he and colleagues published a paper in Science describing how a brief, one-time exposure of pregnant rats to common agricultural chemicals led to heritable changes to their descendants, including great great-grandpups. The controversy arose around their assertion that these changes were not passed down through mutations to the DNA, but rather by changes to so-called epigenetic marks, such as small molecules that attach to the DNA and modulate how genes work....

By Jeff TollefsonInternational delegates at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen on Saturday formally recognized a bare-bones mandate to curb greenhouse-gas emissions–a multilateral political deal brokered the day before by leaders of the United States, China, India, South Africa and Brazil.Under the accord, greenhouse-gas commitments proposed by industrialized nations and the major emerging economies–as well as anyone else who cares to sign up–would be placed into a registry for monitoring and verification....

By Sid Perkins of Nature magazine Landslides claim an order of magnitude more lives each year than has been previously recognized, a study reports. Yet this annual toll of several thousand deaths worldwide may still underestimate the long-term average. Although landslides, rockfalls and other ‘debris flows’ are common, the number of lives lost to them has been poorly quantified. This is mainly because databases tend to classify relevant fatalities as caused by the earthquake or weather event that triggered the landslide, rather than the landslide itself....

Just in time for swimsuit season, federal researchers are touting a faster, more accurate water-quality test to keep beaches open and people healthy. But it’s expensive, and most of the nation’s cash-strapped cities and counties can afford it. Local officials traditionally check for bacteria in ocean and lake water with tests that take about 24 hours to complete. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is recommending testing at the molecular level – tagging DNA and counting bacteria – which provides results within hours....

Animal reef-building evolved millions of years earlier than previously thought, researchers report today in Science. Scientists have discovered fossils indicating that animal, or metazoan, reefs date to as far back as about 548 million years ago, some seven million years earlier than previously estimated. This suggests they appeared prior to the Cambrian explosion, a wellspring of diverse life that is generally thought to have driven the proliferation of reef-building. “This succession of rocks that we’ve been looking at in Namibia encompasses a period of time important in animal life,” says Amelia Penny, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and first author of the study....

A consensus has emerged in recent years that psychotherapies—in particular, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—rate comparably to medications such as Prozac and Lexapro as treatments for depression. Either option, or the two together, may at times alleviate the mood disorder. In looking more closely at both treatments, CBT—which delves into dysfunctional thinking patterns—may have a benefit that could make it the better choice for a patient. The reason may be rooted in our deep evolutionary past....

The first results from a powerful gamma-ray telescope launched into orbit earlier this summer show it is on track to unlock new secrets of the most energetic explosions in the universe. That was the message from NASA researchers speaking at a teleconference this afternoon to present the findings and to announce the mission’s new name. Jon Morse, director of the space agency’s astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., announced that GLAST, or the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, would now be known as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, after the late Nobel laureate physicist, Enrico Fermi....

The flu takes a formidable toll every year. Researchers and health workers save lives by routinely rolling out seasonal vaccines and deploying drugs to fight the virus and its secondary infections. But in the U.S. alone, the flu still kills tens of thousands of people and hospitalizes hundreds of thousands more. A big part of the problem has been correctly predicting what strains of the influenza virus health officials should try to combat in a given season....

A glorious picture of the true-life story inside the New York City subway system is now a little more complete with the identification of DNA fragments swabbed from such system surfaces as benches, poles and turnstiles. Researchers identified nearly 1,700 species of bacteria, viruses and eukaryotes to create a “metagenomic” map of the city. One cluster of points on this grid offered a reminder of exactly how inundated and overwhelmed the city was more than two years ago when Superstorm Sandy hit....