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Researchers building the world’s next top particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that straddles the Franco-Swiss border, may not get a chance to work out the bugs before they fire up the machine in earnest. The experiment is still on track to begin hunting for the long sought Higgs boson next March, says LHC project leader Lyn Evans of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). But a crucial upgrade of 16 superconducting magnets around the accelerator will likely prevent a full test run planned for this December, he says, meaning researchers will have to troubleshoot glitches on the fly....

They may run, swim or fly. They may weigh less than a penny or more than a dozen school buses. From humans to whales to bats, the placental mammals—so named for the placenta that nourishes the fetus during development—are mind-bogglingly diverse. (The placental mammals are one of three major groups of mammals; the other two are the egg-laying monotremes and the pouched marsupials.) For years researchers have been attempting to piece together when the placentals originated and when the group’s modern orders, such as the primates and the bats, first emerged....

After nearly five years of debate the European parliament has finally approved a new law that will allow EU nations to restrict or ban the cultivation of GM crops within their borders. While supporters of the new opt out law applauded it as the best possible compromise solution on GM for Europe, the staunchest proponents and opponents of GM cultivation are both sharply critical of the legislation. ‘This is a bad move for Europe,’ the agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto said in a statement....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Friday will announce a $3 billion U.S. contribution to the green climate fund, an international effort to help poor countries cope with the effects of climate change, according to an administration official. Obama is expected to announce the pledge at this weekend’s meeting of G-20 industrial nations in Australia. The contribution would make the second major move on climate change taken by Obama after big Democratic losses in last week’s midterm elections....

The marathon working shifts expected of first-year medical residents, called interns, are putting patients in danger, according to the first study to identify mistakes that injured patients. After five 24-hour-plus shifts a month, the study found that interns were seven times more likely to harm a patient through error than if they had not worked any long shifts, and four times more likely to make a mistake that resulted in a patient’s death....

Blame it on paper currency. The development of banknotes in China more than a millennium ago accelerated wealth accumulation, deficit spending and credit extension—paving the way for our present-day financial crisis. When Chinese merchants started using paper money in the Tang Dynasty (which spanned A.D. 618 to 907), they could have hardly foreseen such difficulties. At the time, the introduction of notes that could be redeemed for coins at the end of a long journey was a boon....

By Dana Feldman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California’s drought is so severe that the state will roll back some environmental protections and loosen the rules on transferring water to farmers, Governor Jerry Brown said on Friday. Issuing his second emergency proclamation on the drought in just three month, Brown said the state would redouble its efforts to conserve and distribute water fairly, and called on residents to avoid washing their cars, watering their lawns and even accepting glasses of water in restaurants if they are not thirsty....

Forty years ago—on December 5, 1969—the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.), the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah for the first time. This doubled the size of the embryonic ARPANET, the network that would grow over the years into the global nexus of interconnected computers we know today as the Internet....

Levees are as varied in the United States as the people they guard. They’re shaped like snakes, rings and spurs that can be tough, flimsy or a century old. No one knows for sure where all of these earthen walls are, who built them or what type of rocky mixture lies shrouded inside their bulk. Some help protect homes from flooding, while others ring industrial zones containing chemical plants and refineries....

In many developing countries, teenage girls’ days are filled with hard labor as they enter into an adulthood of second-class citizenship. Now, a study finds, climate change threatens to make girls’ lives even harder. The report from the nonprofit Plan U.K., as well as the U.K. Department for International Development, focuses exclusively on the developing world’s 500 million adolescent girls. They are the ones, the authors note, who walk hours to find water and increasingly rare firewood, and are disproportionately killed or displaced in natural disasters....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Gorgias of Leontini (l. c. 427 BCE) was a famous Greek Sophist who claimed that nothing exists and, even if it does, its nature cannot be understood and, even if it could be, one is not able to communicate that understanding to another person. He makes these claims in his work On Nature, of which only a fragment exists today....

At least 35 small pyramids, along with graves, have been discovered clustered closely together at a site called Sedeinga in Sudan. Discovered between 2009 and 2012, researchers are surprised at how densely the pyramids are concentrated. In one field season alone, in 2011, the research team discovered 13 pyramids packed into roughly 5,381 square feet (500 square meters), or slightly larger than an NBA basketball court. They date back around 2,000 years to a time when a kingdom named Kush flourished in Sudan....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill....

CONSIDER the classic hypothetical: Your house is on fire, and you can rescue only three things before the structure is engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly—from a hand-scrawled love note to a valuable coin collection or even a threadbare T-shirt that anyone else would consider worthless. The tendency to consider commonplace objects worthy of reverence and protection—to treat rookie cards like rosaries—is a universal human experience....

How many species are there? For decades scientists have been asking—and trying to answer—this question. Guesses, estimates and calculations have been as low as half a million and as high as 100 million. But despite increasingly sophisticated models and a greater understanding of ecology, we’re no closer to a number, or even a range, than we were several decades ago, argues a new paper published in the April Trends in Ecology & Evolution....

A tree’s leaf, a blade of grass, a single algal cell: all make fuel from the simple combination of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide through the miracle of photosynthesis. Now scientists say they have replicated—and improved—that trick by combining chemistry and biology in a “bionic” leaf. Chemist Daniel Nocera of Harvard University and his team joined forces with synthetic biologist Pamela Silver of Harvard Medical School and her team to craft a kind of living battery, which they call a bionic leaf for its melding of biology and technology....

Reprinted from The Joy of X: A guided tour of math, from one to infinity by Steven Strogatz. Copyright ©2012 Steven Strogatz. Reprinted with permission from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Every decade or so a new approach to teaching math comes along and creates fresh opportunities for parents to feel inadequate. Back in the 1960s, my parents were flabbergasted by their inability to help me with my second-grade homework. They’d never heard of base 3 or Venn diagrams....

The sudden, often violent, extinguishing of human life or our works by accident, malice or the capricious forces of nature is not only tragic but is in some way incomprehensible to victims and survivors alike. The havoc that can be wrought on our social fabric and our carefully constructed mechanical systems is a cause for much emotion, too, as we contemplate the speed and violence with which these things can be suddenly and completely shredded by uncaring nature, human stupidity or hostility....

The centerpiece of classroom mischief will come into its own this weekend when amateur aviation engineers test the mettle of their paper planes at the non-for-profit Public Art Fund’s New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest in New York City. As many as 200 participants are expected to battle it out for such titles as the paper creation that flies the farthest, is the most beautiful—and even the one that puts in a performance deemed the most “spectacular failure....

For a millennium, traders brought silk fabrics from the Far East along the Silk Road to Europe, where the beautiful yet tough material was fashioned into dazzling clothes. Today bioengineers are infusing the natural protein fibers spun by silkworms with enzymes and semiconductors. They are processing the modified strands under varying temperature, shear and acidic conditions to create novel materials with remarkable properties. Physicians like silk sutures because they are strong and compatible with human tissue, meaning the body’s immune system doesn’t reject them....