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NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine was almost giddy when he unveiled the White House’s budget request in February. The Trump administration wanted to boost NASA’s annual spending by 12 percent for the fiscal year beginning on October 1, bringing it to $25.2 billion—a level not seen since the 1960s–1970s-era Apollo program. Most of the bump would go toward fast-tracking a project to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024. Just four weeks later, on March 9, Bridenstine somberly announced the closing of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Phone-based surveys show that nearly four of every 10 kids and teens in the U.S. were exposed to violence or abuse over the previous year, researchers have found. “Children are the most victimized segment of the population,” said study leader David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “The full burden of this tends to be missed because many national crime indicators either do not include the experience of all children or don’t look at the big picture and include all the kinds of violence to which children are exposed,” Finkelhor told Reuters Health by email....

HIS FINALIST YEAR: 1992 HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Studying the genetics of the Arizona cypress tree What led to the project: After Patrick saw Jaws when he was about five years old, he wouldn’t take a bath. In fact, “I wouldn’t put my face in the water to wash it for several days after that,” he remembers. To work through his fears, he started working his way through his Chula Vista, Calif....

Inside, shopkeepers heat the miners’ clumps of gold ore, releasing mercury vapors that waft into the shop, and then outside, into the streets crowded with townspeople. In Puerto Maldonado, a jungle town in Madre de Dios, one of Latin America’s most productive gold mining areas, researcher Luis Fernández in 2009 detected mercury levels at a gold shop that were more than 20 times higher than an international worker safety standard. This February, his follow-up testing found mercury levels inside one shop that were so extreme his monitor couldn’t measure them....

Physicists routinely describe the universe as being made of tiny subatomic particles that push and pull on one another by means of force fields. They call their subject “particle physics” and their instruments “particle accelerators.” They hew to a Lego-like model of the world. But this view sweeps a little-known fact under the rug: the particle interpretation of quantum physics, as well as the field interpretation, stretches our conventional notions of “particle” and “field” to such an extent that ever more people think the world might be made of something else entirely....

Does a blind person reading Braille process words in the brain differently than a person who reads by sight? Mainstream neuroscience thinking implies that the answer is yes because different senses take in the information. But a recent study in Current Biology finds that the processing is the same, adding to mounting evidence that using sensory inputs as the basis for understanding the brain may paint an incomplete picture. Researchers in Israel, Canada and France used brain imaging to observe the neural activity of eight blind subjects as they read Braille....

Around 67 million years ago in what is now North Dakota, a duck-billed dinosaur keeled over and died, and crocodiles’ ancient relatives descended on the carcass, tearing holes through the skin and marking up the bones. Today, evidence of the predators’ feast can still be seen in the dino’s fossilized remains, which include remarkable “mummified” skin. These lingering bite marks may help explain how the dinosaur became a mummy in the first place, a new study suggests....

Two Samsung phones shot past those of arch-rival Apple in a new survey measuring satisfaction among smartphone users. The Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 both took home grades of 84 out of 100 in a study released Wednesday by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The Galaxy S4 was not included because the survey was conducted just prior to its debut. Apple’s iPhone 5 wound up in third place with a score of 82, followed by the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4....

By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep....

Rediscover the Standard Model The first goal of the collider is not to probe the new but to confirm the old. The machine will produce familiar particles in prodigious numbers (several top quarks per second, for example) and scrutinize them with increasing refinement. Not only does this test the machine and its instruments, it sets precise benchmarks for determining whether new phenomena are indeed new. Determine what breaks the electroweak symmetry The collider will seek the Higgs boson (or what stands in its place) and determine its properties....

Could the Gulf Stream be used as a renewable energy source to supply much-needed electricity to Florida’s heavily populated southern region? That’s what a team of researchers from Florida Atlantic University (F.A.U.) in Boca Raton are hoping to find out from four acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCP) that they dropped into the Atlantic Ocean between five miles (eight kilometers) and 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the sands of Dania Beach. The ADCPs, which were placed in the water in February at depths between 725 feet (220 meters) and 2,115 feet (645 meters), use high-frequency, low-power sonar to measure the Gulf Stream’s water velocity at different locations, according to the school’s Center for Ocean Energy Technology (COET)....

As I type this column, several recent storms are weighing on my mind. Winter snowfalls around the country have sparked questions about climate change yet again. Skeptics ask, How can warming be happening if we’re getting big snows? As if we could determine the world’s condition during a single season. In fact, one symptom of a changing climate could be more varied or more extreme weather—but a couple of heavy snows wouldn’t prove that either....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to the February 2015 issue of Scientific American Classics: Conquering Space. I was eight years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. As Apollo 11 touched down on that gray, cratered surface, I was already dreaming of following those astronauts into space. The moon missions made me—and millions of others around the world—feel as though we could do anything, go anywhere....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth Grossman’s book Chasing Molecules. Even hundreds of miles from the nearest industrial or agricultural activity, the sea ice, ocean, and Arctic plants and animals regularly yield evidence of elemental and synthetic chemical contamination. This contamination includes not only herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides—chemicals that are used in open air, may have washed directly into rivers or are released from factories—but also metals, among them mercury as well as flame retardants and water repellants, among other substances that are, at least in theory, incorporated into the materials of the products they’re designed to enhance....

An off-kilter body clock can throw off our sleep-wake cycle, eating habits, body temperature and hormones—and mounting evidence suggests a malfunctioning clock may also underlie the mood cycles in bipolar disorder. In a new study led by psychiatrist Alexander Niculescu of Indiana University, researchers found that children with bipolar disorder were likely to have a mutated RORB gene, which codes for a protein crucial to circadian clock function. The team’s previous work identified alterations to this gene and other clock genes in animal models of the disorder....

The biggest mystery concerning the history of our universe is what happened before the big bang. Where did our universe come from? Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein searched for steady-state alternatives to the big bang model because a beginning in time was not philosophically satisfying in his mind. Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole....

If a woman wins the Nobel Prize in Physics next week, she will be the first to do so in more than 50 years. Over the same period, just one woman has won in chemistry. This gender imbalance is the subject of increasing criticism, much of which is aimed at the Nobel committees that award the honours. In the awards’ history, women have won only 3% of the science prizes (see ‘Nobel imbalance’), and the overwhelming majority have gone to scientists in Western nations....

Not many years ago, there wasn’t enough wind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying. A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region’s wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Glazed blue ceramic tiles or azulejos are everywhere in Portugal. They decorate the winding streets of the capital, Lisbon. They cover the walls of train stations, restaurants, bars, public murals, and fountains, churches, and altar fronts. Azulejos can be seen on park benches and paved sidewalks or adorning the facades of buildings and houses in towns and municipalities all over the country....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Like many great civilisations, the origins of the Chola, a Tamil Hindu dynasty in southern India, are shrouded in the temporal mists of uncertainty and obscurity. It is however known that they were influential from at least the 3rd century CE, emerging as a vassal state of the Pallava dynasty in the 9th century, holding sway over Tanjavur (in the modern state of Tamil Nadu) with respectful allegiance to Pallava supremacy....