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A nice mathematical puzzle, with a solution anyone can understand, is to determine the direction a bicycle went when you come upon its tracks. The answer involves thinking about tangent lines, geometric constraints and the bicycle’s steering mechanism. Once you learn the trick, you’ll find yourself using it every time you happen upon a bike trail. The question goes back to the early days of the bicycle age and a 1903 Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called “The Adventure of the Priory School....

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming will fail to reduce high winter death rates as some officials have predicted because there will be more harmful weather extremes even as it gets less cold, a British study showed on Sunday. A draft U.N. report due for publication next month says that, overall, climate change will harm human health, but adds: “Positive effects will include modest improvements in cold-related mortality and morbidity in some areas due to fewer cold extremes, shifts in food production and reduced capacity of disease-carrying vectors....

As you’ve probably noticed, the Moon doesn’t always look the same. In fact, the Moon goes through a “moonthly” cycle lasting about 29.5 days (yes, that’s where the word “month” comes from). This cycle takes the Moon through its full range of phases and eventually leaves it back in the phase it started in. As you’ve probably also noticed, the Moon is occasionally visible during the day. In fact, if you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that it’s visible during the day a lot....

CLIMATEWIRE | The Senate budget reconciliation deal could open the door to a green power grid, a key ingredient in slashing emissions enough to meet the country’s near-term climate ambitions. The electricity provisions in the deal — announced this week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — largely mirror the proposal laid out in last year’s failed “Build Back Better Act.” They would extend tax credits for renewables; provide new subsidies to technologies like energy storage and hydrogen; and offer bonuses to clean energy developers that pay the prevailing wage, use domestically manufactured materials and build projects in fossil fuel-reliant communities....

Growing algae for use in biofuels has a greater environmental impact than sources such as corn, switch grass and canola, researchers found in the first life-cycle assessment of algae growth. Interest in algae-based biofuels has blossomed in the past year, sparking major investments from Exxon Mobil Corp. and Dow Chemical Co., and it has gained steam on Capitol Hill, as well. But the nascent industry has major environmental hurdles to overcome before ramping up production, according to research published this week in Environmental Science and Technology....

Men and women have very different gaits—and viewers tend to perceive stereotypically masculine motion as approaching, whereas a feminine saunter seems to move away. As reported in September in the journal Current Biology, volunteers were asked to guess the direction of motion of point-map figures, in which the image of a walker’s body is reduced to a few dots at his or her major joints (below). The figures are the same from the front and back—so they could theoretically be perceived as walking either toward or away from the viewer—but volunteers perceived the swaying hips and protruding elbows of a feminine walk as moving away, and they saw neutral and masculine gaits as coming nearer....

Astronomers have established a new timeline for the solar system that is helping to pinpoint when gas giants Jupiter and Saturn likely formed. Approximately 4.6 billion years ago, a swirling cloud of hydrogen gas and dust known as the solar nebula collapsed in on itself, giving way to the birth of the sun. The leftover material from this massive explosion then clumped together to form the planets, in a process called core accretion....

First came the earthquake, centered just off Japan’s east coast, near Honshu. The added horror of the tsunami quickly followed. Now the world waits as emergency crews attempt to stop a core meltdown from occurring at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor, already the site of an explosion of the reactor’s housing structure. At 1:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on March 12, American nuclear experts gathered for a call-in media briefing. Whereas various participants discussed the policy ramifications of the crisis, physicist Ken Bergeron provided most of the information regarding the actual damage to the reactor....

The grief is indescribable. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other unarmed Black Americans dying at the hands of police is unacceptable. It is happening repeatedly, and we are fed up. I will be forever haunted by the images of a police officer’s knee being used, not in protest, but to asphyxiate a fellow American. While I had to watch parts of it on mute to keep from hearing the calls of Mr....

Science has largely neglected pregnancy’s effect on the brain, even though it involves dramatic surges in steroid hormones, which are known to alter the organ. A decade ago neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema, then a young postdoctoral fellow thinking about having her first child, and two of her female colleagues set out to bridge the knowledge gap. “There’s this enormous event involving such strong hormone changes,” says Hoekzema, now at Amsterdam University Medical Center....

Calming inflammation in the body might be just as important for fighting heart disease as lowering cholesterol, according to two studies released in January. Some experts see the findings as evidence to more aggressively monitor and perhaps even treat inflammation in patients. But others are not yet convinced that doing so would extend more lives. A key mediator in atherosclerosis, inflammation damages the lining of the artery walls and contributes to the formation and rupture of fatty plaques....

In its push for putting zero-emission cars on the road, the Department of Energy is launching new programs to study the infrastructure needed to run vehicles on hydrogen. “Recently, there’s a renewed focus on getting these technologies out on the road and into the hands of consumers,” said Daniel Dedrick, hydrogen and fuel cell program manager at Sandia National Laboratories. Last week, Sandia signed a five-year memorandum of understanding with private research firm SRI International to collaborate on testing alternative fuels like natural gas and hydrogen in vehicles, breaking ground on a new testing facility called the Center for Infrastructure Research and Innovation (CIRI)....

From Nature magazine On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel....

The medical establishment has long advised people to stay out of the sun. Findings published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggest that people may not be heeding the message. According to the report, the incidence of some types of skin cancer is increasing in people under the age of 40. A team of researchers led by Leslie J. Christenson of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., analyzed medical records of patients under the age of 40 in the state’s Olmsted County between 1976 and 2003....

View the Treating TB in Russia Slide Show Tuberculosis (TB) is back in a big way in a big country. The economic collapse that followed the end of communism in Russia in the early 1990s has given rise to a TB epidemic in vast regions of the continent-size country. Researchers say that squalid living conditions, skyrocketing prison populations and rampant drug and alcohol use, coupled with the decline of social services, led to this spike in TB cases....

On May 23, 1707, a child was born in the Swedish countryside who would go on to alter the course of science forever. Carl Linnaeus is considered the father of modern taxonomy. He created the modern naming system for organisms, known as binomial nomenclature, which prescribes how scientists recognize and classify new organisms. In honor of Linnaeus’s upcoming birthday, the International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry published a list on May 21 of the top 10 new species discovered in 2014....

By Dan Whitcomb (Reuters) - A private drone trying to film a wildfire that has charred nearly six square miles in Northern California briefly disrupted firefighting efforts, although workers had gained the upper hand against the blaze, officials said on Monday. Fire officials spotted the drone over the so-called Sand Fire on Sunday and immediately called police to find the drone’s owner and have the toy grounded to avoid a possible mid-air collision, a California fire official said....

Tempers flare as temperatures rise — across the globe and throughout human history, researchers have found. The result is consistent with a growing body of research suggesting that climate change somehow incites human conflict. Small changes in temperature and rainfall substantially raise the risk of conflict of many types, from interpersonal spats — such as aggressive horn-honking by automobile drivers — to full-blown civil war and societal collapse, researchers report today in Science....

Apple CEO Tim Cook at WWDC in June.(Credit:James Martin/CNET)For Apple, Tuesday’s looking a bit like a time warp.Rewind back to October 2011, and the company invited media to its headquarters to introduce an enhanced version of the hit smartphone it launched the year before. The same is expected at Tuesday’s event, where all eyes are Apple to announce the iPhone 5S – a souped up version of 2012’s iPhone 5.The big difference this time around is that Apple is expected to roam into new territory, adding on top of that with an entirely new model to the iPhone family: one designed not necessarily to wow with specs, but instead with a price tag that could be Apple’s lowest yet for a new mobile device....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Professor Emeritus David Gitlitz is one of the world’s leading experts on Jewish-Catholic interactions in Iberia and the Americas. While initially drawn to the literature of the Spanish Golden Age as a student at Oberlin and Harvard, the history and culture of Spanish and Latin American Jewry later caught Gitlitz’s interest....