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By Zoë Corbyn of Nature magazineSmall earthquakes are a recognized risk of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a procedure in which companies unlock energy reserves by pumping millions of liters of water underground to fracture shale rock and release the natural gas trapped inside. Researchers now say that they can calculate the highest magnitude earthquake that such an operation could induce–though it won’t determine the likelihood of a quake occurring.The model is crude, but it should be “good enough” to use in the field, says Arthur McGarr, a geologist at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, who presented the work yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco....

The 10-year budget framework that President Barack Obama released in February, called “A New Era of Responsibility,” is as much a philosophy of government as a fiscal action plan. Gone is the Ronald Reagan view that “government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Obama rightly sees an expanded role for government in allocating society’s resources as vital to meeting the 21st century challenge of sustainable development....

SIR C. LEONARD WOOLLEY’S 1922 excavation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur—a Sumerian site located in modern-day Iraq—was, by early 20th-century standards, a major media event. Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia, who had achieved fame for his dashing exploits during the Arab Revolt several years earlier, helped to organize the expedition. British mystery writer Agatha Christie paid a visit to the site and penned Murder in Mesopotamia as a tribute (she would later marry Woolley’s assistant)....

Göran Gustafsson looks at people and thinks of cars—the ageing models that rolled off assembly lines a few decades ago. Today, says Gustafsson, cars are packed with cutting-edge sensors, computers and sophisticated communications systems that warn of problems when they are still easy to fix, which is why modern vehicles rarely surprise their drivers with catastrophic breakdowns. “Why don’t we have a similar vision for our bodies?” wonders Gustafsson, an engineer whose team at the Swedish electronics company Acreo, based in Kista, is one of many around the world trying to make such a vision possible....

Before video games and robotics competitions, toys were much simpler: girls got dolls; boys got model trains and bicycles. Toys that promoted learning and experimentation were rare until one inventor, Alfred Carlton (“A. C.”) Gilbert, started making toys that taught children about science and engineering. His most famous, the Erector set, became one of the best -selling toys of its day and inspired children across the country to build everything from bridges to robots....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. We always knew that Ebola would come to Liberia. For us it was just a matter of when. As the current outbreak erupted in Guinea this past winter, we braced for an incoming epidemic. People travel between our two countries daily. We started to stock up on needed personal protective equipment and quietly disseminated information about how to handle Ebola cases....

Why did sleep evolve? —James Ridgeway, via e-mail Christopher French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, replies: This is a fascinating question, and the honest answer is that no one knows for sure. At first sight, sleep appears to be incompatible with survival because it prevents feeding and procreation and could expose the sleeper to attack by predators. Sleep must confer some essential benefits to outweigh these serious disadvantages....

Dear EarthTalk: I understand that, despite the popularity of organic foods, clothing and other products, organic agriculture is still only practiced on a tiny percentage of land worldwide. What’s getting in the way?—Larry McFarlane, Boston Organic production may still represent only a small fraction of agricultural sales in the U.S. and worldwide, but it as been growing rapidly over the last two decades. According to the latest global census of farming practices, the area of land certified as organic makes up less than one percent of global agricultural land—but it has grown more than threefold since 1999, with upwards of 37 million hectares of land worldwide now under organic cultivation....

You’re on a plane packed with other businesspeople, reading your electronic version of the Wall Street Journal on your laptop while downloading files to your BlackBerry and organizing your PowerPoint presentation for your first meeting when you reach New York. You relish the perfect symmetry of your schedule, to-do lists and phone book as you notice a woman in the next row entering little written notes into her leather-bound daily planner....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The royal city of Ayutthaya (ah-you-tah-ya) was a small kingdom in Siam (modern Thailand), and it was an unrivalled commercial and maritime power from 1350-1767 CE. Ayutthaya became the second capital of Siam in 1438 CE when it absorbed the Sukhothai kingdom in northeast Thailand. Ayutthaya is in the valley of the Chao Phraya River and is believed to have been established because of a smallpox outbreak....

In 2014 the South African government counted 1,215 rhinos that met their deaths at the hands of poachers. The final number will almost certainly increase as more data arrives. Whatever the total, it means that more than 1,200 rhinos needlessly were killed for their horns—tapered shafts of keratin, the same stuff that’s in your fingernails. The count, once finalized, will be about twice as many animals as were killed in 2012 and over a thousand more than were poached in 2008, which marked the real start of the rhino poaching crisis....

Gene therapy offers the possibility of a cure for previously untreatable diseases. But although the science and technology behind it are awe-inspiring, the costs can be daunting. Treatments are likely to have a price tag in the neighbourhood of US$1 million or more — a cost that is ultimately borne by all individuals, not just patients, through taxes and insurance premiums. In the United States, which lacks government-administered provision of universal health care, there is a strong expectation that health insurers will pay for therapies that have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), particularly if a treatment is the only effective one for a given malady....

WASHINGTON/HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army will grant the final permit for the controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline after an order from President Donald Trump to expedite the project despite opposition from Native American tribes and climate activists. In a court filing on Tuesday, the Army said that it would allow the final section of the line to tunnel under North Dakota’s Lake Oahe, part of the Missouri River system. This could enable the $3....

The third in a series of stories on Bangladesh and climate migration. DHAKA, Bangladesh – The towering new orange condominium glistens in the sun, beckoning the city’s wealthy to enjoy its luxurious rarities: central air conditioning and a heated pool. In the trash-strewn, sprawling shantytown just below, thousands of the city’s poorest live crammed in rows of metal shacks the size of packing crates. There are sharp contrasts here. The newest-model BMW competes for lane space with ancient wooden rickshas....

Walking upright separates humans from most other creatures. Our bipedal gait is a wonder of balance but it remains unclear exactly how our brains manage to maintain this posture and use it to arrive at desired destinations. Now researchers have shown that the balance mechanisms of our inner ears play a decisive role in directing the human walk, as well as demonstrating that blindfolded volunteers can be steered by simple electrical current....

When video gamers armed with the world’s most powerful supercomputers take on science and its most vexing riddles, who wins? Sometimes, it’s the gamers. Humans retain an edge over computers when complex problems require intuition and leaps of insight rather than brute calculation. Savvy programmers and researchers at the University of Washington have tapped into this human “supercomputer” with Foldit, an online game that poses complex puzzles about how proteins fold, one of the hardest and most expensive problems in biology today....

And is there any better way to start your weekend than with free stuff? I’ve got two pretty darn good giveaways, one for fun, the other for, um, “fun.” First up: Bundle Stars is giving away Anomaly: Warzone Earth (Win/Mac/Linux) on Steam when you visit their Facebook page and get to liking. Yep, you need to be a Facebook user, though you can cancel out both the Coupons install request and the later request to share the deal on your wall; you’ll still be able to get the redemption code you need to snag the full game on Steam....

Iranian space officials announced they will make another attempt to launch a live monkey into space within the next month, according to news reports. “Testing phase of these living capsules has ended and monkeys to be sent to space are now in quarantine,” Hamid Fazeli, head of the Iranian Space Agency, was quoted as saying by the country’s Mehr News Agency on Tuesday (Jan. 15). “These monkeys will be sent into space according to a timetable on Fajr Ceremonies,” Fazeli said, referring to a 10-day period in the beginning of February when the Iranian Revolution is commemorated....

KEY CONCEPTS Massive computing power can now be delivered to anyone’s doorstep inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. The box provides up to 250 servers boasting seven terabytes of active memory and two petabytes of storage—enough resources to support 10,000 desktop users. Sun Microsystems says its turnkey system can be operational for one-hundredth the cost of building a traditional data center. The beefy boxes could also quickly expand the Internet’s computing and storage capacity, ushering in so-called cloud computing, where individuals rely on nimble personal devices that are unencumbered with basic software and instead use programs that reside on the Net....

Several years ago an elderly man came into the emergency room at Cook County Hospital in Chicago with a large, painful abscess (boil) on the back of his neck. When I told him he needed a minor procedure to lance the boil and drain it, he became ashen, asking, “Doc, is this going to hurt?” I told him that if at any time the treatment hurt too much, he could tell me to stop—and I would....