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By Yoshifumi TakemotoTOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s government is finalizing plans to borrow an additional 3 trillion yen ($30 billion) to pay for compensating Fukushima evacuees and cleaning up the area outside the wrecked nuclear plant, said people with knowledge of the situation.The additional borrowing would mark both a recognition of the project’s mounting costs and the difficulty of hitting initial targets for reducing radiation levels in the towns and villages hardest hit by the fallout from the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl....

Earlier this spring the Billboard pop music chart marked a milestone of sorts. Three of its top 10 hits prominently featured the same four-letter word: Cee Lo Green’s “Fk You,” Pink’s “Fkin’ Perfect” and Enrique Iglesias’s “Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You),” where the curse word appeared in the chorus. What’s going on here? When it comes to popular culture, experts say, swearwords make fans feel as though they are part of a select club....

Editor’s Note (11/12/18): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published June 1, 2018, in light of devastating wildfires that have been raging in California since Thursday. The horrific Tubbs Fire in California’s Sonoma and Napa counties last October tore through more than 36,000 acres, killing 22 people and destroying nearly 6,000 buildings. It was the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history in terms of structures lost, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection....

JUNEAU Alaska (Reuters) - A magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck deep under the ocean floor near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, triggering shaking felt over vast distances and setting off a small tsunami, the National Tsunami Warning Center said. A tsunami warning, later downgraded to an advisory, prompted the evacuation of about 200 residents of the town of Adak to higher ground, city manager Layton Lockett said. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the quake, which was initially measured at a magnitude of 8....

Archaeologists have discovered several medieval cities, buried beneath the forest floor in Cambodia: the largest is said to rival the modern Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, in size. It’s a monumental discovery, based on two major archaeological surveys of the area around Siem Reap, not far from the famous temple complex of Angkor Wat in the heartlands of the ancient Khmer culture. Once, an archaeologist would have spent their entire career hacking through the jungle, machete in hand, in order to map these ruins....

Once quantum computers become functional, experts warn, they could perform calculations exponentially faster than classical computers—potentially enabling them to destroy the encryption that currently protects our data, from online banking records to personal documents on hard drives. That’s why the National Institute of Standards and Technology is already pushing researchers to look ahead to this “postquantum” era. Most recently, IBM successfully demonstrated a quantum-proof encryption method it developed. To send secure messages online or encrypt the files on a computer, most modern systems employ asymmetric, or public-key, cryptography....

FOOD HISTORIAN FRANCINE SEGAN asserts that pasta emerged more than 5,000 years ago when an enterprising chef happened upon the now seemingly obvious idea of mushing flour and water together to create something that looked surprisingly like lasagna. “It breaks my heart to tell you this,” says Segan, invoking her own Italian heritage, “but the first to make those noodles might have been the ancient Greeks. Lots of references in ancient Greek writing—even in 3,000 B....

The waters of the Jersey Shore may soon become home to the nation’s first deepwater wind turbines. New Jersey officials recently announced the state would help fund an initiative by Garden State Offshore Energy to build a 350-megawatt wind farm 16 miles (26 kilometers) offshore. The state wants by 2020 many more of these parks, at least 3,000 megawatts worth, or about 13 percent of the state’s total electricity needs. “This is probably the first of many ambitious goals to be set by states,” says Greg Watson, a senior advisor on clean energy technology to the governor of Massachusetts....

A French hybrid of an aspen tree may one day rid water supplies of the industrial degreaser—and human carcinogen—trichloroethylene (TCE), one of the most common contaminants at toxic waste sites in the U.S. And the tiny, but tractable, Arabidopsis plant may mop up the residue of RDX, a military explosive blasted into the soils at firing ranges. “Plants are a good method for remediating soil and water,” says Stuart Strand, an environmental engineer at the University of Washington who has worked on creating the genetically modified pollution-gobbling aspen tree....

In everyday life, people often search their memory for specific information: “Where did I leave the car keys?” “Did I really turn the oven off?” Other times they actively reminisce about the past: “Remember that crazy night out last week?” Not all recall is a choice, however; some forms of memory are involuntary. Perhaps the most famous example is a scene from French novelist Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (also called Remembrance of Things Past)....

A battered diamond that survived a trip from “hell” confirms a long-held theory: Earth’s mantle holds an ocean’s worth of water. “It’s actually the confirmation that there is a very, very large amount of water that’s trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth,” said Graham Pearson, lead study author and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada. The findings were published today (March 12) in the journal Nature....

In the 1999 Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix, intelligent machines have imprisoned the human race in a state of virtual reality. They feed a computer program, the Matrix, into every brain to simulate an external real world and then harvest the imprisoned humans’ biochemical electricity for their own energy needs. To the humans, their existence seems normal and mundane, but in fact, they are living an illusion. Although the Matrix is fictional, our mind runs on its own type of virtual reality....

As sophisticated as machines are today, they still cannot navigate an automobile through crowded city streets as well as experienced human drivers. But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working to change that with an eye toward sending automated robotic ground vehicles into battle to evacuate wounded soldiers, collect reconnaissance and carry out other dangerous missions. This weekend DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s central research and development arm, will move closer to that goal when it hosts the final round of its 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a competition testing the driving prowess of experimental unmanned autos....

Psychology researchers have recently found themselves engaged in a bout of statistical soul-searching. In apparently the first such move ever for a scientific journal the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced in a February editorial that researchers who submit studies for publication would not be allowed to use a common suite of statistical methods, including a controversial measure called the p-value. These methods, referred to as null hypothesis significance testing, or NHST, are deeply embedded into the modern scientific research process, and some researchers have been left wondering where to turn....

Quick—what’s the first thought that pops into your head when you hear the word “experiment”? Odds are that what did not bubble up was the image of a 16th-century Italian nobleman who lived for 30 years on a platform suspended from a large straight-beam balance. But it should have. Historians of medicine consider Santorio Santorio—aka Santorio Santorii, aka Sanctorius of Padua—the first physician to have knowingly submitted his theoretical speculations to the rigor of experimental testing that today is taken for granted....

What happens down on the farm could soon pose bigger problems downriver. Water undergoes deadly changes when enough fertilizers seep into rivers, lakes and streams. Algae growth explodes, oxygen levels drop and fish either leave the waterway or suffocate. Since the 1970s, large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico have transformed into so-called dead zones — covering an average area about the size of Connecticut — as agricultural runoff filters from the Mississippi River....

When a patient leaves her doctor’s office she does not normally head home with additional prescriptions for patients her clinician never met. An innovative approach to treating sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), however, allows patients to snag certain medications for an unlimited number of recent sexual partners. The strategy aims to keep the spread of such diseases in check. Under this system the patient visit would typically proceed as usual with one twist: After the patient is diagnosed by a medical professional and given a prescription to fill at the pharmacy, the clinician would also write prescriptions for each sexual partner the infected patient may have been involved with in the past 60 days or so....

What’s a difference in opinion worth? When it comes to interpreting a climate pledge by richer countries to help poorer ones tackle the problem of climate change, about $60 billion last year. That’s the difference between the amount of money that developed countries provided to those in earlier stages of development in 2014 to help them deal with global warming—depending on how the figure is calculated. By one interpretation, $62 billion was provided last year....

The traditional lie detector, the polygraph, has existed for many years. It relies on physiological reactions–increased heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and sweating–to indicate that a person being questioned is fearful of getting caught and is therefore lying. Although this machine has been used in criminal investigations, critics insist it can easily be defeated. Some people are very good at controlling their physiological responses. Others secretly invoke alternative sensations at the same time, which can confuse the polygraph....

Carnivorous plants’ peculiar strategies for snagging live prey have long captured the public imagination. But even within this strange group, in which food-trapping mechanisms have evolved multiple times independently, some oddities stand out. For example, the visually striking pitcher plant Nepenthes gracilis, native to Southeast Asia, can harness falling rain’s energy to ambush animals. A new study in Biology Letters demonstrates how the structure of the plant’s pitcher component, itself a modified leaf, makes the unusual strategy work....