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NEW YORK – New York state is beginning to take the threat of sea level rise attributed to climate change seriously as a new government prepares to settle in next year. Starting Monday, state officials in Albany will gather with members of the public to discuss a recently released 93-page report that recommends major changes to development planning and conservation along coastlines from the tip of Long Island all way up the Hudson River Valley....

Pres. Barack Obama has his head in the game—that game being football. And soccer. And actually any sport that fuels an elevated risk of head injury, as will be the focus of a summit set for Thursday on sports concussions. The gathering of some 200 sports officials, clinicians, parents, coaches, school officials and youth athletes will feature discussions on how to address head injuries in youth sports as well as new biomedical findings on youth concussions....

A few years ago the renowned chef Ferran Adrià presented diners at his restaurant, elBulli, with a simple dish of bright-orange caviar—or rather what looked like caviar: when the guests bit into the orbs, they burst into a mouthful of cantaloupe juice. Since that legendary bit of culinary trompe l’oeil, Adrià and other avant-garde chefs have created many more otherworldly dishes, including mussels that Adrià encases in transparent globes of their own juice....

In fall 2009 Jeannine Brown Miller was driving home with her husband after a visit with her mother in Niagara Falls, N.Y. She came upon a police roadblock near the entrance to the Niagara University campus. Ambulance lights flashed up ahead. Miller knew her 17-year-old son, Jonathan, had been out in his car. Even though she couldn’t make out what was happening clearly, something told her she should stop. She asked one of the emergency workers on the scene to check whether the car had the license plate “J Mill....

By Mark Blinch BUFFALO (Reuters) - The area around Buffalo, New York braced on Sunday for potential flooding as warming temperatures began to melt up to 2 meters of snow that fell in a record snow storm last week in which 13 people died. More than 650 members of the New York National Guard were in Erie county and Buffalo to help with snow removal and flood prevention, and hundreds of volunteers fanned out over the city to help dig out homes still buried in snow....

On August 1, 1971, while exploring the eastern edge of the lava plain known as Mare Imbrium on the silent, serene lunar surface, Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin found something remarkable: a profoundly old piece of lunar crust, a relic more than four billion years old that carried clues to the moon’s formation. Seeing the glint of ancient crystals embedded in what would later be called the Genesis rock, Scott immediately knew its potential importance for solving the mystery of how the moon was made....

As is well known, Spider-Man’s airborne flights through the city hang on a thread - well, a few threads. They keep him from falling down and help him steer. Spider-Man defies both physics and biology on many levels during his travels through the city, so instead let’s imagine a man with a long whip. In honor of another series of motion pictures, we’ll call him Indie. In these problems, there is a series of obstacles and a goal....

If you look out of the window of an aeroplane and see its shadow on the cloud tops, you might be lucky enough to also see a ‘glory’: a bull’s-eye pattern resembling a small, circular, pastel-colored rainbow surrounding the shadow. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express space probe has now taken the first picture of the same phenomenon on another planet. The image was captured on 24 July 2011 and released this week....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The rarity of the appearance of Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms in ancient literature is one of the reasons why those states are so little-known today. Indo-Greek literature did exist, but none has been found that speaks about the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek states. Classical authors tell us very little about Indo-Greek kingdoms, as they were far away from the Mediterranean world, cut off from other Greeks by the mighty Parthian state....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Elements of Norse mythology abound in The Lord of the Rings, and none is so compelling as the ring itself. The One Ring is reminiscent of magic rings in Norse lore, especially Odin’s Draupnir or Andvaranaut from the legend of the Volsungs, although Tolkien’s ring has a will of its own and cannot be used for the good....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. As the Stone Age covers around 99% of our human technological history, it would seem there is a lot to talk about when looking at the development of tools in this period. Despite our reliance on the sometimes scarce archaeological record, this is definitely the case. The Stone Age indicates the large swathe of time during which stone was widely used to make implements....

If galaxies are all moving apart at ever increasing speed, how can they collide? —J. Gow, Fairfax, Va Cosmologist Tamara Davis, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia and an associate of the Dark Cosmology Center in Denmark, brings together an answer: The dynamics of the universe are governed by competing forces whose influence varies with scale, so local forces can override universal forces in discrete regions. On scales larger than galaxy clusters, all galaxies are indeed moving apart at an ever increasing rate....

▪We got the beat: Babies preferred listening to musical rhythms to which they were bounced or rocked, suggesting that the experience of physical movement helps develop the perception of musical beats. Science, June 3 ▪The detection of stars extending from the Andromeda galaxy’s main disk indicates that the galaxy is 220,000 light-years across, three times bigger than previously thought. The Milky Way spans about 100,000 light-years. Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, May 30 ▪A mosquito carrying West Nile virus could infect other mosquitos feeding next to it via the insect’s saliva....

Comb jellies, or ctenophores, look like tiny disco balls and propel themselves around oceans using specialized hairs, lapping up small prey with their sticky tentacles. “They are aliens who’ve come to Earth,” says Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida in St Augustine. The genome of the Pacific sea gooseberry (Pleurobrachia bachei), which Moroz and his team report online today in Nature, adds to the mystery of ctenophores (L....

Modern medical devices rely on software for almost every aspect of their operation. In a machine used for cancer therapy, even the “emergency stop” button is not an actual electrical switch but a software program: hitting it causes about 15,000 lines of code to execute and shut the system down–unless, of course, there is a bug or design flaw in the software. That is where Alloy comes in–it analyzes programs to find the design problems....

In quantum mechanics particles can escape from their confines, even if a barrier stands in their way, via a process known as tunneling. Tunneling is no mere quantum curiosity—tunneling electrons, for instance, are harnessed by scanning tunneling microscopes to observe on the smallest scales. Those probes can image a surface at the atomic level by detecting the tunneling of electrons from the surface across a small gap to the microscope’s tiny scanning tip....

By Janelle Weaver One of the puzzles of last year’s H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic–which caused thousands of deaths worldwide–was that seemingly healthy middle-aged adults were hit hardest. A study has now shown that previous infection with other, seasonal, influenza strains primed patients’ immune systems to harm their bodies rather than to mobilize against the new threat.The study, published online December 5 in Nature Medicine, began with a hunch that antibodies from past encounters with pathogens might have determined the severity of H1N1 cases....

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Concussion, Arthritis, Torn Anterior Cruciate Ligament and The Pile. It’s football season–for me, anyway. True, this is the April issue, which coincides with the start of the baseball season, thank goodness. But I’m writing these words in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, so football is on my mind–specifically the way the game chews up and spits out the bodies of its participants, willing though they be....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Delegations from the United States, Russia, and China and other countries struck a deal on Thursday to refrain from commercial fishing in the high Arctic seas, one of world’s fastest-warming places, until scientists can determine what fish are there and whether they can be harvested sustainably. Once signed by the governments of all the parties, the agreement will protect an area of the central Arctic Ocean roughly the size of the Mediterranean Sea, for at least 16 years....

ECUADOR Scientists have identified a new hummingbird species in the Ecuadorian Andes. But very few of the birds exist, and the species is considered critically endangered. Its habitat is shrinking as nearby communities burn the native landscape to make way for cattle grazing. GERMANY Germany has launched the world’s first hydrogen powered trains in an effort to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. The trains, which can reach speeds up to 140 kilometers per hour, have fuel cells that convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity....