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The biofuels industry is coming down hard on a study it feels has unfairly characterized ethanol from corn stover as being worse for the climate than gasoline and far from qualifying for U.S. EPA’s coveted advanced biofuel designation. Last week, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, researchers published a paper in Nature Climate Change finding that fuels made from corn residue – the tough, fibrous stalks, corncobs and leaves left atop fields after harvest — could remove carbon from the soil, leading to a net increase of greenhouse gas emissions compared with conventional gasoline over a five-year cycle (ClimateWire, April 21)....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineMen can breathe a sigh of relief–their sex-determining chromosomes aren’t going anywhere. A study of human and rhesus monkey Y chromosomes questions the notion that the Y is steadily shedding genes and is doomed to degenerate.In fact, the version of the Y chromosome that every human male carries around has lost just a single gene in the 25 million years since humans and rhesus macaques shared a common ancestor....

All NASA spacecraft sent to other planets must undergo meticulous procedures to make sure they don’t carry biological contamination from Earth to their destinations. However, a step in these planetary protection measures wasn’t adhered to for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, now en route to the Red Planet, SPACE.com has learned. The incident has become a lessons-learned example of miscommunication in assuring that planetary protection procedures are strictly adhered to....

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazineFor physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, the nearly massless particles called neutrinos hold special weight. A proposed project called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) aims to use neutrinos to sort out some puzzles of fundamental physics, and ensure that US particle physics has a centerpiece experiment for the future.Yet, faced with serious budget constraints, Fermilab is drastically scaling back its plans....

Physics has always been one of the most globalized of professions. Physicists think of themselves as supranational, rising above national and cultural concerns. They may not always live up to this ideal, but at least they try. I got a glimpse of this as a college student in 1987, when I spent my spring break at Bell Labs. High-temperature superconductors had just been discovered, and I had some fun levitating magnets (and collaborated on a published paper)....

QUANTUM WEIRDNESS In “Quantum Weirdness? It’s All in Your Mind,” Hans Christian von Baeyer describes quantum Bayesianism (QBism) as a model of quantum mechanics in which the wave function exists only as a mathematical tool employed by an observer to assign his or her personal belief that a quantum system will have a particular property. But what about the famous two-slit experiment in which the wave function of an electron interferes with the portion of itself going through the other slit?...

As a young girl, I was lucky to never explicitly hear that science was not for girls. Instead I was encouraged to build soccer-playing robots, to set things on fire, and to spend hours gazing through microscopes and telescopes. And yet I was still scared away from science as a career by the constant, subtle insistence from all around me that my purpose was not to be a scientist but rather a wife and mother—as if these things were incompatible....

If it surprises you to hear that NASA has recently been firing up test engines for the biggest American deep-space rocket since the Saturn 5, a vehicle that could take flight in as little as three years from now, you are probably not alone. Despite the space agency’s success putting robots on Mars, the U.S. human spaceflight program has long been foundering. The space shuttle was retired in 2011 after twice being stuck by tragedy and Pres....

The surprise magnitude-5.8 earthquake that stuck central Virginia and rattled cities up and down the US East Coast last year was a record-breaker in more ways than one. Not only was it felt by more Americans than any previous tremor, it triggered landslides over a wider area than any other recorded quake anywhere in the world, scientists say. A detailed analysis of ground motions triggered by the event also indicates that Washington DC and other affected population centers could be at a higher risk of major ground movement than previously recognized....

By Jim Drury (Reuters) - Typing text messages, scrolling web pages, and checking your email on your smartphone could be changing the way your thumbs and brain interacts, new research hints. Dr. Arko Ghosh, of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland, led the research which involved using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the cortical brain activity in 37 right-handed people, 26 of whom were touchscreen Smartphone users and 11 users of old-fashioned cellphones....

Imagine a landscape composed of microscopic triangular structures that constantly rearrange themselves into new patterns. Seen from afar, the landscape looks perfectly smooth, but up close it is a churning cauldron of strange geometries. This deceptively simple model is at the heart of a new theory called causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), which has emerged as a promising approach to solving the most vexing problem in physics–unifying the laws of gravity with those of quantum mechanics....

A stunning, first-of-its-kind photo shows a huge, newfound alien world taking shape in the disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star. The image is the first confirmed direct observation of such a young exoplanet, discovery team members said. “These disks around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” discovery leader Miriam Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said in a statement....

Many mothers offer their young children a hand to squeeze as they brave a vaccination in the doctor’s office. We instinctively know that contact with a loved one can help mitigate pain—and the scientific evidence concurs. Now two recent studies show that a mere reminder of an absent beloved—a photograph—can deliver the same relief. A Psychological Science study in 2009 first showed the effect. Psychologist Sarah Master of the University California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues studied 25 women and their boyfriends of more than six months....

Yesterday, North Korean Olympic shooter Kim Jong Su was stripped of silver and bronze medals after he tested positive for propranolol. The drug is prescribed for a variety of conditions, from high blood pressure to migraines. You’ve heard of various doping drugs such as EPO, but why would an Olympian use propranolol? (It probably wasn’t to treat a hangover, despite some myths about its use for that condition.) For an answer, ScientificAmerican....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A Supervisor’s Advice to a Young Scribe is a Sumerian composition relating a dialogue between an elder scribe and a young graduate from his school. The piece is dated to the Old Babylonian Period (c. 2000-1600 BCE) and, although originally interpreted as an accurate depiction of the life of a scribe, might also be understood as satire....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. More than 2,000 years ago, extremely wealthy Romans lived on the sunny shores of the Bay of Naples at Pompeii and in opulent villas nearby, unconcerned about Mount Vesuvius in the distance. Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE), Augustus (r. 27 BCE - 14 CE), Cicero (106-43 BCE), and Emperor Nero (r....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The sophists in ancient Greece were a class of teachers who, for a fairly high fee, would instruct the affluent youth in politics, history, science, law, mathematics and rhetoric as well as the finer points of grammar and history. They professed to be able to make a young man suitable for political office and, of equal importance among the litigious Greeks of the time (especially in Athens) to be able to make a strong case, whether in prosecution or defense, in court....

BEIJING (Reuters) - A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck southwestern China on Sunday, killing at least 150 people in a remote mountainous area of Yunnan province, causing some buildings, including a school, to collapse. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake registered at a shallow depth of less than 1 mile (1.6 km). Chinese state media said was felt most strongly Yunnan, as well as in the neighboring provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan....

Will Joe Biden be a successful science president? It’s not certain, but early signs are pointing that way. More significantly, though, will Congress and the public accept his science-based policies? That’s a dicier question, and the answer in part depends upon what he does to build trust in science. When Biden convenes his Cabinet in the coming weeks, science will have a seat at the table. That’s extremely important, as history shows....

California’s perpetual problem of groundwater depletion has gotten so dire that people are actually working to solve it. In California, groundwater deposits are getting saltier as cities and farms extract more water than is replenished naturally, allowing ocean water into the porous aquifers. One of the worst areas for it is the Pajaro Valley, a small farming community near Santa Cruz. In a state that has long touted itself as the nation’s No....