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It happens to all of us: we suddenly and inexplicably feel cheery or blue, even though our mood was quite different just moments before. Often the culprit is a subliminal cue, or, as psychologists call it, priming. But we do not have to be at the mercy of these unconscious cues. Recent research suggests that simply recognizing the phenomenon can help us take control. Researchers usually test the effects of priming by making participants believe they are taking part in a study of some other variable....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineCyclist Borut Bozic drew his hands to his chest with a look of joy, disbelief and exhaustion after defeating some of the world’s best sprinters in the Swiss village of Tobel. His stage victory at the week-long Tour de Suisse last month netted the 30-year-old Slovenian a EUR4,000 (US$5,600) bonus and probably helped to secure his spot in this month’s Tour de France, cycling’s most prestigious race....

An ancient face is shedding new light on our earliest ancestors. Archaeologists have discovered a 3.8-million-year-old hominin skull in Ethiopia—a rare and remarkably complete specimen that could change what we know about the origins of one of humanity’s most famous ancestors, Lucy. The researchers who discovered the skull say it belongs to a species called Australopithecus anamensis, and it gives researchers their first good look at the face of this hominin....

Modern science relies upon researchers sharing their work so that their peers can check and verify success or failure. But most scientists still don’t share one crucial piece of information — the source codes of the computer programs driving much of today’s scientific progress. Such secrecy comes at a time when many researchers write their own source codes — human-readable instructions for how computer programs do their work — to run simulations and analyze experimental results....

By Naomi LubickFor the past few weeks, seismologists at the University of Washington in Seattle have been on high alert. Any day now, they expect a flurry of microtremors deep under the nearby Olympic Peninsula, just as occurs roughly every 12-14 months. And when that wave of vibrations comes along, the researchers will be ready to catch it.Over the past year, the seismology team has set up an elaborate net–an array of more than 100 seismic sensors planted in the ground throughout the peninsula’s mountains....

On a clear day in September 1991 a couple hiking along a high ridge in the Alps came upon a corpse melting out of the ice. When they returned to the mountain hut where they were staying, they alerted the authorities, who assumed the body was one of the missing climbers lost every year in the crevasses that crisscross the glaciers of the region. But after the remains were delivered to nearby Innsbruck, Austria, Konrad Spindler, an archaeologist from the university there, ascertained that the corpse was prehistoric....

Cancer, in all its forms, is most treatable when caught early. But despite the vast resources aimed at finding ways to detect the disease in its initial stages, many people who qualify for existing screenings still do not receive them. Some are unfamiliar with the constantly evolving guidelines on when and where to get tested. Others have never been informed that they need exams in the first place. And still others cannot get their physicians to refer them for screening even when they request it....

By Daniel CresseySince the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in April, vast quantities of dispersant chemicals have been sprayed onto the resulting slick. The chemicals–alongside corralling floating oil with booms and setting it aflame in “controlled burns”–are an attempt to reduce the environmental damage of oil still spewing out of a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of 5,000 barrels (about 800,000 liters) per day....

Glaciers in one of the world’s last tropical ice caps will be gone within a matter of years, rather than the decades thought previously, according to an Ohio State University researcher who has spent his career probing the world’s ice fields. When they go, a unique record of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon that drives climate patterns in the tropics could disappear, too, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson said. The cap, perched on a 16,000-foot-high mountain ridge in Indonesia, “was riddled with crevasses and lacked any substantial snowfall,” Thompson said of his most recent trip, earlier this summer....

Journalist Miles O’Brien earlier this week related a harrowing experience that began when a piece of TV equipment fell on his left forearm, leaving it sore and swollen but not enough for him to seek medical treatment. Two days later, after the pain and swelling had increased, a doctor delivered some terrible news to O’Brien. A sharp increase in pressure inside the journalist’s injured forearm was killing the nerve cells and damaging the arteries and veins....

In the sport of skeleton, where athletes called “sliders” hurtle face first atop a sled the size of a seat cushion down an iced-over concrete track at speeds upwards of 110 kilometers per hour, the smallest details separate success and failure. Any aspect of a skeleton run that is not completely in sync—including the slider’s outfit, helmet, body position or the sled’s orientation—can cost hundredths of a second, an eternity in this sport....

Ed Vul is a graduate student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Intitute of Technology. He’s also the lead author of a recent paper, “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience,” which explored the high correlations between measures of personality or emotionality in the individual—such as the experience of fear, or the willingness to trust another person—with the activity of certain brain areas as observed in an fMRI machine....

The atom was an unknowable mystery in the early 20th century when pioneers such as Niels Bohr began to pin down its nature. Scientists first “split the atom” in 1917 and realized that it had constituent parts of its own. Bohr was the first to suggest that the electrons, carriers of the negative charge in the atom, circle the positively charged nucleus in different orbits called “energy levels” and gain or lose energy by jumping from one level to another....

The Biden administration will roll out a $5 billion program today to help states build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by decade’s end. The newly dubbed National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program was established by President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, which Congress passed last November. The administration announced the program yesterday, and it also released guidance to help states begin drafting their five-year deployment plans for building the chargers....

Swine flu is sweeping—if not the nation, then at least the nation’s media. But what is special about this virus and what, if anything, should ordinary citizens do about it? The new flu, which has elements of pig, bird and human flu viruses in it, has been circulating for at least a month in Mexico. In the past week, it has popped up north of the border (with 45 cases confirmed in New York City, 10 in California, six in Texas, two in Kansas and one in Ohio), according to the U....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Sumerian poem, The Descent of Inanna (c. 1900-1600 BCE) chronicles the journey of Inanna, the great goddess and Queen of Heaven, from her realm in the sky, to earth, and down into the underworld to visit her recently widowed sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead. The poem begins famously with the lines:...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Phoenician is a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. Very little is known about the Canaanite language, except what can be gathered from the El-Amarna letters written by Canaanite kings to Pharaohs Amenhopis III (1402 - 1364 BCE) and Akhenaton (1364 - 1347 BCE). It appears that the Phoenician language, culture, and writing were strongly influenced by Egypt (which controlled Phoenicia for a long time), as king Rib-Adda of Byblos admits in one of his letters to the pharaoh....

From Nature magazine Bacteria living naturally within the gut provide a gateway to flab, according to a few reports this week. These bacteria may explain how antibiotics fatten farm animals and perhaps people too, and how certain genes predispose organisms to obesity. In a study published 22 August in Nature, researchers mimicked what farmers have been doing for decades to fatten up their livestock: they fed young mice a steady low dose of antibiotics....

The victim of a car accident can require as many as 100 pints of blood—that’s blood from 100 generous donors across the country, meticulously matched for blood type and screened for diseases. More than 38,000 blood donations are needed daily in the U.S., but only 38 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, and of those, only 8 percent actually do. The list of eligibility criteria that a donor must meet is long, ranging from simple characteristics such as age and weight requirements to more complex ones surrounding medical and travel history....

Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-mega-watt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility—a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers—represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuels. To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite—which is even more polluting than the harder black ­anthracite variety—burns in the presence of pure oxygen, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2)....