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A new study suggests that pumping pure oxygen into patients’ noses and mouths during a stroke or other medical emergency may exacerbate rather than reduce potential brain damage. Medical personnel routinely slap an oxygen mask on people struggling to breathe as well as on stroke victims left oxygen-deficient in some parts of their brains. Until recently, doctors believed this was the fastest and most effective way to deliver oxygen to needy lung or brain tissue....

Solid-state light source lightbulb: Light-emitting-diode (LED) bulbs produce more light with less energy than incandescents, could potentially claim a lamp life much longer than 10 years, and, unlike compact fluorescents, are free of mercury. But they have other drawbacks. To obtain that lengthy life, LED devices need to stay relatively cool. And to successfully replace current bulbs, LEDs would need to broadcast their rays widely, yet many currently on the market give off light unidirectionally, like a flashlight....

On a summer evening in June 2005, Susan Wallace-Babb went out into a neighbor’s field near her ranch in Western Colorado to close an irrigation ditch. She parked down the rutted double-track, stepped out of her truck into the low-slung sun, took a deep breath and collapsed, unconscious. A natural gas well and a pair of fuel storage tanks sat less than a half-mile away. Later, after Wallace-Babb came to and sought answers, a sheriff’s deputy told her that a tank full of gas condensate—liquid hydrocarbons gathered from the production process—had overflowed into another tank....

His finalist year: 1996 His finalist project: Taking measurements to determine the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy What led to the project: Simon DeDeo was born and raised in London, where his American father worked in the advertising industry. He read and reread Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and by the time his family moved back to the U.S. when he was in high school, he was fascinated by the universe and how it worked....

It’s a cool November day near Bologna, Italy. We are strolling through the woods with truffle hunter Mirko Illice and his little dog, Clinto. Clinto runs back and forth among the oak trees sniffing the ground, pausing, and then running again. Suddenly, he stops and digs furiously with both paws. “Ah, he’s found an Italian white truffle,” Mirko explains. “He uses both paws only when he finds one of those.” Mirko gently pulls the excited dog from the spot and pushes through the soil with his fingers....

Although they sound like the stuff of the future, manufacturers have been working on developing automated cars for decades. Advocates say such vehicles could help alleviate traffic, prevent accidents and reduce emissions. But as Steven Shladover of the University of California, Berkeley’s PATH program argues in the June Scientific American, industry and media have oversold the promise of so-called “self-driving” cars. Automated cars are coming—and that’s a good thing—but they will be different from what the hype suggests....

Some people speak the same language at home as they do in the office, even if the office is filled with microarrays and next-generation sequencing machines. Two science diplomas in the den means one can mention “loss of heterozygosity” or “Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium” without pausing to explain to the other what that means—which gives them more time to decide which new Netflix series they’re going binge watch. It’s no surprise that many couples meet at work....

If you have ever chosen a profile picture for an online dating site, you have probably tried to pick a shot that gets across some of your key traits—energetic, friendly, silly, warm. Yet recent research suggests that the people who see your photograph are probably not accurately gauging your personality. A new study finds that a short video can leave a much more accurate first impression. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin put together a speed-dating pool of about 200 men and women....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. At the beginning of time, the god Atum stood on the primordial mound in the midst of the waters of chaos and created the world. The power which enabled this act was heka (magic) personified in the god Heka, the invisible force behind the gods. The earth and everything in it was therefore imbued with magic, and this naturally included human beings....

Two decorated covers of coffins that once contained mummies have been seized by Israeli authorities, authenticated and dated to thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt. Inspectors of the Unit for Prevention of Antiquities Robbery found the artifacts while checking shops in a marketplace in the Old City of Jerusalem. The inspectors confiscated the items under suspicion of being stolen property. The ancient covers are made of wood and adorned with “breathtaking decorations and paintings of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,” says the Israel Antiquities Authority....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

Scientists have successfully sequenced the genomes of three deadly parasites that together threaten half a billion people annually around the globe. According to reports published in the current issue of the journal Science, the parasites responsible for African sleeping sickness, Chagas’s disease and leishmaniasis–illnesses with very different symptoms–share a core of a few thousand genes. Scientists hope that the results will prove useful for identifying novel drug or vaccine targets....

Astronomers are edging closer to discovering what causes brief, powerful flashes in the sky known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), after a Canadian telescope discovered eight more of the most intriguing type of these blasts—those that repeat their signals. FRBs are intensely energetic events that flare for just milliseconds, seemingly all over the sky and from outside the galaxy. But their cause has remained a mystery since the first FRB was identified in 2007....

For people racked by the dreaded ‘Beijing cough’, it is all too clear that particles in the city’s thick smogs pose a public-health problem. But much less clear is the impact — or even the identity — of the microbes that also drift through the brown haze. Chinese researchers have now used genome sequencing to identify about 1,300 different microbial species in an exceptionally soupy smog that hit Beijing in January 2013 (ref....

Thirty-two years ago this month an explosive eruption reshaped Mount Saint Helens in a matter of seconds. An earthquake under the volcano in Washington State on May 18, 1980, triggered the largest landslide in recorded history as billions of cubic meters of mountainside tumbled away, initiating a massive release of gas, lava and ash. The cataclysm killed 57 people and sent a plume some 20 kilometers into the sky. The 1980 eruption was not totally unexpected....

Customs inspectors at a pier in New York City send a sealed cargo container just taken off a ship from Istanbul through a radiation scanner. A dozen new tractors seem to be inside. Although the detector senses no radiation, the inspectors open the container anyway. Their handheld units show no radiation either, so they allow the container to leave. A private hauler drives it to a small Midwestern city. There terrorist cell members remove what was their final shipment of highly enriched uranium, concealed as 10 metal washers in the tractor engines, together weighing two kilograms....

Despite the pointless political assassinations of vaccine workers or the police officers who guard them in a few deeply troubled areas, enough progress has been made against polio in the past year that health experts are now planning for the grand finale—its complete eradication by 2018. The official to-do list of what needs to be done and when to obliterate the crippling childhood disease—which goes by the name Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan 2013–2018 (pdf)—will be formally presented at an international health meeting in Abu Dhabi on April 25....

SAVANNAH, Ga.—A belowground experiment at the South Pole has now discovered three of the highest-energy neutrinos ever found, particles that may be created in the most violent explosions of the universe. These neutrinos all have energies at the absurdly high scale of peta–electron volts—roughly the energy equivalent of one million times a proton’s mass. (As Albert Einstein showed in his famous E = mc2 equation, energy and mass are equivalent, and such a large amount of mass converts to an extreme level of energy....

Key concepts Absorption Paper Water Molecules Introduction We all know that washing hands throughout the day can help keep colds and flu at bay. So several times a day we lather up, scrub, rinse and then use a paper towel—then another one, maybe even three or four to dry them off. Because who wants wet hands? But could there be a way to conserve some of that paper by getting a paper towel to go the extra mile, allowing you to dry your hands with just one single sheet?...

Not all volcanoes belch lava. Some erupt mud—lots of it. Most mud volcanoes just gurgle up bits of muck from time to time, but one is particularly known for frequent, powerful explosions. New research explains what powers these intense eruptions and just how strong they can get. University of Oslo mud volcanologist Adriano Mazzini and his colleagues studied Lokbatan, a mud volcano in Azerbaijan. Mazzini calls this small country just north of Iran “the kingdom of mud volcanoes....