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Fugitive former software mogul John McAfee accidentally gave away his own whereabouts yesterday (Dec. 3) after he let a website post a photo of him with the geolocation metadata still attached. Vice Magazine, a gonzo-journalism publication based in Brooklyn, put up a story yesterday morning proclaiming, “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers.” The real sucker turned out to be McAfee himself, founder of the anti-virus software company that bears his name and a person of interest in the recent killing in Belize of his neighbor, a fellow American named Gregory Faull....

Young doctors in their first year out of medical school regularly toil beyond highly publicized new limits on their working hours, according to newly published results from a Web-based survey. The work limits, which went into effect three years ago, were meant to address the concern that hospitals overburdened these physicians in training, or residency, thereby putting patients at risk of serious medical errors. Another survey finds that the extended hours made first-year residents more likely to jab or cut themselves with a needle or scalpel....

Next-generation DVDs, due out at year’s end, promise to store at least three times as much data as today’s silvery disks, enabling them to offer enough extras to keep film buffs bleary-eyed. But researchers are already working on follow-up technology and have demonstrated an approach that could boost the capacity by 40 times more. A conventional DVD encodes 0s and 1s in the form of pits, which are read by a red laser....

From Nature magazine The experimental cancer drug ibrutinib has wowed in clinical trials, beating deadly blood cancers without the painful side effects of currently approved therapies. And it has raced through development and regulatory hurdles, in part thanks to a US program to accelerate the development of particularly promising drugs, says its developer Pharmacyclics, based in Sunnyvale, California. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the ‘breakthrough therapy’ designation in 2012, and the label has been eagerly embraced by the pharmaceutical industry....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Quantum Computing with Ions” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. An alternative approach to trapped-ion computing is to link the ions using the photons they emit. Two remotely located trapped ions (purple), each isolated in a vacuum tube (photograph left), are excited with laser pulses and emit photons into optical fibers. The frequencies of the photons depend on the magnetic orientation of the ions; a photon emitted by an ion in a 50–50 superposition state—half up, half down—would be in a superposition of frequencies (half red and half blue in this example)....

A tiny dark-haired girl bedecked in a brown dress with a crinoline skirt sits calmly on the rug in front of her class of fellow kindergartners; her pink boots, dotted with sparkles, are tucked neatly under her legs. Wielding a small metal rod, she taps on a triangular chime. At the tone, her classmates clasp their hands together like a cup, with the back of one hand in the palm of the other, close their eyes, fall silent, and proceed to say and do apparently nothing....

The last (and only) defense against the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is tiny—billions of hydrocarbon-chewing microbes, such as Alcanivorax borkumensis. In fact, the primary motive for using the more than 830,000 gallons of chemical dispersants on the oil slick both above and below the surface of the sea is to break the oil into smaller droplets that bacteria can more easily consume. “If the oil is in very small droplets, microbial degradation is much quicker,” says microbial ecologist Kenneth Lee, director of the Center for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, who has been measuring the oil droplets in the Gulf of Mexico to determine the effectiveness of the dispersant use....

It’s the classic piece of chemical tomfoolery: take a lump of sodium or potassium metal, toss it into water and watch the explosion. Although this piece of pyrotechnics has amazed generations of chemistry students, until now it has been misunderstood, a paper in Nature Chemistry reveals. The explosion, say Pavel Jungwirth and his collaborators at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, is not merely a consequence of the ignition of the hydrogen gas that the alkali metals release from water....

The report highlights the urgent need to change prescribing practices in states with particularly high rates of painkiller prescriptions, because the overprescribing of these drugs can result in fatal overdoses, the CDC said. In 2012, there were 259 million prescriptions written for opioid painkillers in the United States, which is enough for every adult in the country to have a bottle of pills, the report said. [How 8 Common Medications Interact with Alcohol]...

On the other side of the world, six Indigenous Quechua communities of the Peruvian Andes govern the Parque de la Papa (Potato Park) in Pisac, Cusco, a mountainous landscape that is one of the original homelands of the potato. They protect the region as a “biocultural heritage” territory, a trove of biological and cultural riches inherited from ancestors, and conserve more than 1,300 varieties of potato. When I visited in 2008 with other researchers and activists, I was stunned into silence by the diversity....

CHICAGO—The National Institutes of Health would like six vials of your blood, please. Its scientists would like to take a urine sample, measure your waistline, and have access to your electronic health records and data from the wearable sensor on your wrist. And if you don’t mind sharing, could they have your Social Security number? It is a big ask, the NIH knows, and of an equally big group—the agency eventually hopes to enroll over 1 million participants in the next step of what four researchers referred to in a 2003 paper as “a revolution in biological research....

By Yasmeen Abutaleb (Reuters) - Government-funded clinical trials are under way of an improved anthrax vaccine requiring fewer doses and that has the potential to boost immunity faster, top health officials said on Monday. The Department of Health and Human Services said it signed a 30 month, $31 million agreement with Maryland-based Emergent Biosolutions Inc to develop a vaccine that would require only two doses to confer immunity. Emergent currently has a Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccine called BioThrax that requires three doses....

Go into any busy coffee shop and you are likely to see people engrossed in conversation, waving their hands around. A man at the counter describes the coffee he wants to buy – in a mug, not a to-go cup – and his hand takes a familiar shape, as if he were already holding the cozy mug. Nearby, two sisters laugh, as one tells a story about a trip to the barrier reef and all of the fish that she saw, her hands wiggling and darting in an invisible sea in front of her....

By Richard A. LovettIn the most comprehensive study of mountain glaciers and small ice caps to date, a team of US and Canadian scientists has projected that most of the world’s smaller glaciers will be gone by 2100. The finding confirms that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the scientific group assessing climate risk – was correct in estimating that by that date, complete or partial melting of smaller glaciers will contribute about the same amount to sea-level rise as meltwater from the giant ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient Egyptian military is often imagined in modern films and other media as a heavily armed and disciplined fighting force equipped with powerful weapons. This depiction, however, is only true of the Egyptian army of the New Kingdom (c. 1570-1069 BCE) and, to a lesser extent, the army of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1782 BCE), when the first professional armed force was created by Amenemhat I (c....

You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further, that it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. So kick off your week right with this GIF-able science. Enjoy and loop on. Brand-Spanking-New Black Hole Visualization Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Jeremy Schnittman It’s hard to imagine how a black hole works, let alone what one looks like....

There is nothing cuter than a newborn sticking out its tongue in response to you doing the same. Now research suggests that such mimicry might be just a coincidence, at least in the youngest babies. The study challenges the prevailing notion in developmental psychology that imitation is ingrained at birth. Psychologists Janine Oostenbroek, Virginia Slaughter and their colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia tested 64 infants at one, three, six and nine weeks old for their ability to imitate nine gestures and facial expressions that previous studies have suggested infants can mimic....

Women exposed to air pollution from freeways and congested roads are much more likely to give birth to premature babies and suffer from preeclampsia, according to a study by University of California scientists published Wednesday. The findings, based on pregnant women in the Long Beach/Orange County region of Southern California, add to the growing evidence that car and truck exhaust can jeopardize the health of babies while they are in the womb....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineAs Earth’s biggest “ear” on the Universe, the giant 305-meter radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has played a part in groundbreaking discoveries, searches for alien civilizations and the occasional Holly¬wood movie. Now a different sort of drama is shaking up the facility, with the news that Cornell University, which has managed Arecibo since the observatory was switched on 1963, has lost its bid to continue to do so....

From a climate change perspective, China’s carbon footprint is huge: It consumes nearly as much coal as every other country in the world combined. And it’s the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. But it may be possible for China to shake most of its reliance on fossil fuels, in part by producing more than 85 percent of its electricity and more than 60 percent of its total energy needs from renewables by 2050, according to a study published Monday....