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Peter Callahan was caught between two police lines in the West Florissant section of Ferguson, Mo., on Sunday night, when something fiery hot singed his leg. A nearby protester’s shirt briefly caught fire. Callahan, a Washington D.C.-based journalist, deduced that he had been hit by a flash-bang device. “I was also at Occupy Wall Street,” he said. “This is a lot worse.” Among the debris protesters and journalists have picked up in the days since Michael Brown was killed are canisters of the 7290 flash-bang made by Combined Tactical Systems, a “less lethal” diversionary device that has made its way into law enforcement agencies’ toolkits to carry out search warrants, and less frequently, to disperse crowds....

1972 Molten Moonglow “Thermocouples placed in two holes drilled on the surface of the moon by the astronauts of Apollo 15 show that heat is flowing outward at about three times the rate that had been expected. The source of the heat is presumed to be the decay of radioactive elements and confirms the high level of radioactivity previously measured in samples of lunar soil. The puzzling aspect of the measurements is that if the entire moon were as radioactive as the surface soil, the entire body, in the words of one investigator, ‘would be just a molten puddle....

A Scottish woman named Joy Milne made headlines in 2015 for an unusual talent: her ability to sniff out people with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative illness that is estimated to affect about 10 million people worldwide. Since then, scientists in the U.K. have been working with Milne to pinpoint the molecules that give Parkinson’s its distinct olfactory signature. They have now zeroed in on a set of molecules specific to the disease—and created a simple skin-swab-based test to detect them....

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has lent his genome to science. In a confluence of developing-world politics and high-tech science the South African cleric, whose voice stood out in the long fight against apartheid, voluntarily shed some blood so that a high-tech sequencing machine could decode every letter of his DNA. “The interest of Archbishop Tutu in participating in this project is that he wants to see a medical benefit extended to the southern African population,” says Stephan C....

From Nature magazine Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart. “Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work....

Most U.S. kids do not sit safely in cars, either because they are not properly restrained in car seats or booster seats, or because they sit in the front seat, according to a new study. Researchers observed nearly 22,000 children and found that just 3 percent of children between ages 1 and 3 who were restrained at all were sitting in a proper, rear-facing car seat, and only 10 percent of 8- to 10-year-old children were properly restrained in a booster seat or a car seat....

The human eye is limited in its vision. We cannot see objects much thinner than a human hair (a fraction of a millimeter) or resolve motions quicker than a blink (a tenth of a second). Advances in optics and microscopy over the past millennium have, of course, let us peer far beyond the limits of the naked eye, to view exquisite images such as a micrograph of a virus or a stroboscopic photograph of a bullet at the millisecond it punched through a lightbulb....

The Obama Administration on Tuesday released a report showing climate disruption is already leaving deep imprints on every sector of the environment and that the consequences of these changes will grow steadily worse in coming decades. The 196-page report crisscrosses the United States and finds that global warming has touched every corner: Heavier downpours, strengthened heat waves, altered river flows and extended growing seasons. These changes, the report notes, will place increasing stress on water, health, energy and transportation systems and have, in several instances, already crossed tipping points to irreversible change....

SPANISH PAINTER EL GRECO often depicted elongated human figures and objects in his work. Some art historians have suggested that he might have been astigmatic—that is, his eyes’ corneas or lenses may have been more curved horizontally than vertically, causing the image on the retina at the back of the eye to be stretched vertically. But surely this idea is absurd. If it were true, then we should all be drawing the world upside down, because the retinal image is upside down!...

SPAIN Summer’s powerful drought revealed a more than 4,000-year-old oval of at least 100 standing stones called the Dolmen of Guadalperal, which had been submerged since 1963 in an engineered reservoir. GERMANY An underwater environmental-monitoring station 48 feet below the surface of Eckernförde Bay disappeared in August. Researchers found only a frayed cable at the site of the more than 1,750-pound observatory, and the search continued with additional dives and ship-based sonar....

It’s human to fear new technology. We instinctively worry about almost anything that is unknown, probably for sound evolutionary reasons. And in the Fear of the Unknown Department, technologies probably top the list. It’s nothing new. In the 1970s microwave ovens were said to leak radiation and cause birth defects. In the 1950s TV was supposed to rot our brains. In the 1930s people worried that radio would be too stimulating for children’s excitable minds, harming their school performance....

From Nature magazine General anesthetics induce a coma-like state within seconds, allowing patients to be operated on without feeling pain or discomfort. Yet very little is known about how these drugs work. Now research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that they change the activity of specific regions of the brain and make it difficult for the different parts to talk to each other....

Tomatoes fresh from a roadside stand, sliced, glistening, and served with nothing more than salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil—a sacred pleasure of summer. To die for? Possibly so. Almost every year for the past decade or so, public health investigators on the East Coast have tracked down one or two Salmonella outbreaks and identified local tomatoes as the culprit. These outbreaks are typically small, affecting 10 to 100 people....

Humans often make irrational choices when faced with challenging decisions. Ant colonies, however, can make perfectly rational selections when confronted by tough dilemmas. This isn’t because lone ants are especially knowledgeable—they’re not. Instead, when ants are grouped together, a kind of “wisdom of the crowds” avoids the kind of mistakes that individuals can make, new research shows. In terms of evolutionary biology, animals strive to maximize their fitness. Still, actions that seem counterproductive and irrational occur not only in human societies, but also all over the animal kingdom....

Good science education at the earliest grades is supremely important, but in most classrooms it gets short shrift. Studies have found that children in kindergarten are already forming negative views about science that could cast a shadow across their entire educational careers. When researchers interviewed kindergartners from typical classrooms, barely a third of the children showed any knowledge of science, whether from school or other sources. Many children said that science was for older kids and adults, not kindergartners like them....

I know the feeling because it happened to me in 1985 on the long climb out of Albuquerque during the 3,000-mile, nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. On the outskirts of town I had caught up with the second-place rider (and eventual winner), Jonathan Boyer, a svelte road racer who was the first American to compete in the Tour de France. About halfway up the leg-breaking climb, that familiar wave of crushing fatigue swept through my legs as I gulped for oxygen in my struggle to hang on....

The chief veterinary officer of the Netherlands has defended the country’s decision to cull thousands of goats in an effort to control an unprecedented outbreak of Q fever.The Netherlands “can’t take a chance”, Christianne Bruschke told Nature after a meeting in Breda – a city near the heart of the outbreak.At the meeting, scientists from other countries questioned the tactic. But Bruschke said that in other countries the authorities have been able to ignore the disease because there have been relatively few cases....

By Alla KatsnelsonResearchers looking for the genetic roots of disease have long dreamed of inspecting a patient’s entire DNA sequence for telltale changes–now achievable thanks to the falling cost of sequencing. So the first in-depth comparison of the genomes of identical female twins–one with multiple sclerosis (MS) and the other free of the disease–is something of a milestone. But the study shows that even deep genetic analysis doesn’t always yield clear answers....

The nuclear crisis in Japan provides an impetus for Congress to confront a failed national policy on dealing with spent fuel from U.S. reactors, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee yesterday. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ernest Moniz called for an accelerated transfer of spent nuclear fuel rods from storage in water-covered pools at reactor sites to concrete and steel “dry” casks. Secondly, Moniz said, the federal government should create several regional facilities to store the containers for an extended period until a new strategy for managing nuclear waste fuel can be put in place – a position he and MIT colleagues have argued for since before the emergency at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex....

That simple question probably is asked more often today than ever. In our clock-studded, cell-phone society, the answer is never more than a glance away, and so we can blissfully partition our days into ever smaller increments for ever more tightly scheduled tasks, confident that we will always know it is 7:03 P.M. Modern scientific revelations about time, however, make the question endlessly frustrating. If we seek a precise knowledge of the time, the elusive infinitesimal of “now” dissolves into a scattering flock of nanoseconds....