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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has upset a great many people this year. Since June, newspapers have been using documents leaked by former intelligence worker Edward Snowden to show how the secretive but powerful agency has spied on the communications of US citizens and foreign governments. Last month, the media reported that the NSA, which is based in Fort Meade, Maryland, had undermined Internet security standards. The revelations have sparked international outrage at the highest levels — even the president of Brazil canceled a visit to the United States because of the spying....

Ovulating strippers make bigger tips Strippers looking to shake their moneymakers most profitably may need only swing to the beat of their menstrual cycles. In a revealing study, University of New Mexico researchers (three altruistic guys) recruited 18 subjects (scantily clad women dancers) to log their work shifts, earnings and menstrual cycles (phone numbers, too?) on a Web site for two months, or about 5,300 lap dances. The naked truth: participants scored $335 per five-hour shift while ovulating compared with $260 per shift during the luteal phase after ovulation and $185 while menstruating....

By exploiting the tricks of quantum physics, researchers say they could build a worldwide network of atomic clocks that are much more accurate than any single clock in existence today. This global hook-up would enable countries to synchronize timekeeping standards and improve space navigation. It could also aid the exploration of fundamental physics concepts, such as the long-sought gravitational waves thought to be rippling through space and time. “We’re trying to be a little bit visionary,” says co-author Eric Kessler, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts....

At the heart of our Milky Way and of virtually every other large galaxy lurks a deep cosmic mystery—a supermassive black hole. Squeezing millions to billions of times more mass than our sun into regions smaller in size than our solar system, these objects are so bizarre as to seem almost mystical. No one yet understands exactly how nature has managed to compress so much matter into such small spaces. What is clear is that the hidden gravitational hands of supermassive black holes reach out to shape their surrounding galaxies in profound yet subtle ways....

The source of the deadly E. coli outbreak in Europe that has infected more than 2,100 and killed at least 22, is still a mystery. First, German authorities said it could be cucumbers. Then, sprouts. But as of Monday, preliminary tests from a sprout farm in Northern Germany had come back negative, and they were still searching. In the meantime, Germans have also been warned against eating tomatoes and lettuce, until more is known....

Researchers have unearthed the graves of three Stone Age infants that may ultimately bear on the question of whether humans interbred with Neandertals. The rare find, from a 27,000-year-old site in Austria, includes two bodies that might be twins sheltered under a mammoth’s shoulder blade. The team discovered the skeletons in two separate burial pits: One uncovered last year contained two infants side by side–twins, apparently. A second pit containing a single body was found this year about a meter from the first pit....

Late one night on the cusp of the 20th century, Magnus Hirschfeld, a young doctor, found a soldier on the doorstep of his practice in Germany. Distraught and agitated, the man had come to confess himself an Urning—a word used to refer to homosexual men. It explained the cover of darkness; to speak of such things was dangerous business. The infamous “Paragraph 175” in the German criminal code made homosexuality illegal; a man so accused could be stripped of his ranks and titles and thrown in jail....

Big Oil is bracing for modest operating budgets this year and next, but weak global demand and $50 per barrel crude will not keep the industry from developing expensive deepwater offshore and unconventional oil and gas plays, industry officials and experts say. Leaders of energy companies, including ConocoPhillips, EOG Resources and National Oilwell Varco Inc., which builds and maintains drilling rigs, this week told energy investors and analysts at the Howard Weil Energy Conference in New Orleans that they expect global economic and oil price recoveries to be sluggish....

On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d’oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, “a welcome reception for future time travelers,” a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible....

An asteroid circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has for the first time been shown to harbor water ice and organic compounds. Those traits had been associated with comets, which spring from colder, more distant reservoirs in the outer solar system, but not their asteroidal cousins. The finding supports the notion that asteroids could have provided early Earth with water for its oceans as well as some of the prebiotic compounds that allowed life to develop....

Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked National Security Agency secrets publicly in 2013, is now getting attention for an odd subject: aliens. In a podcast interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Snowden suggested that alien communications might be encrypted so well that humans trying to eavesdrop on extraterrestrials would have no idea they were hearing anything but noise. There’s only a small window in the development of communication in which unencrypted messages are the norm, Snowden said....

With 100 billion neurons and trillions of synapses, your brain spins neural webs of staggering complexity. It propels you to breathe, twitch, and butter toast, and yet we remain largely ignorant of how the brain does even these simple tasks—let alone how it stirs up consciousness. To peer inside this three-pound lump of flesh, scientists manipulate a subtle trait of the body—its susceptibility to magnetic fields. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has exposed the brain in stunning anatomical detail, and a sibling method, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has offered insight into the mind at work....

By Caroline Humer Major drug companies took hefty price increases in the U.S., in some cases more than doubling listed charges, for widely used medications over the past five years, a Reuters analysis of proprietary data found. Prices for four of the nation’s top 10 drugs increased more than 100 percent since 2011, Reuters found. Six others went up more than 50 percent. Together, the price increases on drugs for arthritis, high cholesterol, asthma and other common problems added billions in costs for consumers, employers and government health programs....

We can, thankfully, remove one threat to the future existence of the human male from our worry list: The male Y chromosome, after dwindling from its original robust size over millions of years, apparently has halted its disappearing act. But don’t start cheering yet. Contrary to cultural assumptions that boys are stronger and sturdier, basic biological weaknesses are built into the male of our species. These frailties leave them more vulnerable than girls to life’s hazards, including environmental pollutants such as insecticides, lead and plasticizers that target their brains or hormones....

The list of planets around distant stars continues to grow, but because many of these planets orbit stars much larger than our sun, they pose a bit of a conundrum. Theory and observation agree that smaller stars like our sun form in the midst of vast protoplanetary disks [like the false-color one pictured at right] that swirl for millions of years before planets accrete within them. But the much greater power of more massive stars might simply vaporize such disks, never allowing planets to form....

Nature’s Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds and Beasts Tell Us about Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves by Menno Schilthuizen. Viking, 2014 The science of genitals is a relatively new field for biologists, who have long overlooked the evolutionary importance of species’ private parts. Biologist Schilthuizen balances the silly and the serious to describe researchers’ latest efforts to understand how “evolution has graced the animal kingdom with such a bewildering diversity of reproductive organs....

Key concepts Physics Balance Mass Introduction Have you ever wondered why it is harder to keep your balance with a heavy backpack on? Or why it is difficult to make a toddler’s sippy cup tip over? Or how tightrope walkers manage their impressive circus acts? Or perhaps you want to know how to make your toy car less prone to toppling over when racing through a sharp curve. In this activity you’ll get to investigate balance using marshmallows, skewers and toothpicks....

A cheap, widely available drug used to treat mental illness cuts both the risk of death from COVID-19 and the need for people with the disease to receive intensive medical care, according to clinical-trial results. The drug, called fluvoxamine, is taken for conditions including depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder. But it is also known to dampen immune responses and temper tissue damage, and researchers credit these properties with its success in the recent trial....

Babies must crawl before they walk, parents and pediatricians agree. Crawling has also been held up as a prerequisite to the normal progression of other aspects of neuromuscular and neurological development, such as hand-eye coordination and social maturation. But new research may knock the legs out from under this conventional wisdom. According to anthropologist David Tracer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, babies of the Au hunter-gatherers of Pa­pua New Guinea do not go through a crawling stage....

The year is 1974, and Harry Caul is monitoring a couple walking through a crowded Union Square in San Francisco. He uses shotgun microphones to secretly record their conversation, but at a critical point, a nearby percussion band drowns out the conversation. Ultimately Harry has to use an improbable gadget to extract the nearly inaudible words, “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” from the recordings. This piece of audio forensics was science fiction when it appeared in the movie The Conversation more than three decades ago....