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In 2009, Miley Cyrus reportedly made an astonishing 25 million dollars. Most of that money came from album sales, which were reported to be slightly over 4 million during that year. Four million…Four million?! Have you heard Miley Cyrus sing? Are there really four million kids out there willing to spend their hard-earned babysitting money on a Miley Cyrus album because they deeply love listening to her sing? Well, according to the findings of a study recently published in Neuroimage, selling four million albums does not translate to having four million people like your music....

In the mid-1800s English doctor John Langdon Down was appointed director of a home outside London for mentally handicapped children, where he studied their symptoms. In 1862 he described the case of one of his wards who was short and had stubby fingers and unusual eyelids. The boys condition was later labeled with his surname. But the genetic cause of Down syndrome was not uncovered for another century. In 1959 French pediatrician Jrome Lejeune discovered that these children have three copies of chromosome 21, instead of the standard two....

Lawmakers yesterday introduced legislation designed to speed the development of new, safer therapies for brain and nervous system disorders and injuries, which affect an estimated 100 million Americans and costs an estimated $1.3 trillion annually to treat. The National Neurotechnology Initiative Act (NNTI), which has bipartisan support, calls for $200 million in federal funds to be set aside annually to research potential treatments and to establish a clearinghouse for information from federal agencies to help them better coordinate efforts....

A team of researchers has fabricated a micron-scale device that deforms significantly under the force of light, a technology that could form the basis for tiny light-actuated switches or filters in future optical devices. In recent years several groups have engineered novel structures on scales so small that the force of light passing through them actually wields an appreciable force. The devices harness the so-called gradient optical force, by which a light beam can exert a push or pull in a direction transverse, or perpendicular, to the direction of the light’s propagation....

US research on artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing would see dramatic boosts in funding for 2021, under a proposed budget released by the White House on 10 February. The budget request issued by President Donald Trump makes cuts across most science agencies for the 2021 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October 2020. Although Congress has repeatedly rebuffed such requests for cuts—and has, in fact, increased science spending in the enacted budgets—the 132-page document from the White House offers a view into the administration’s priorities and ambitions leading up to the November election....

A combination of climate-driven sea level rise and stronger tropical cyclones is putting New York City at risk for more and higher floods like those seen during Hurricane Sandy, a group of researchers has found. In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers compared sea level and storm surge heights from 850 to 1800, before significant human influences on the climate, to the period from 1970 to 2005....

The woman who put former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on the spot about farming in a Democratic town hall this week says she is frustrated that agriculture has been largely ignored among the presidential hopefuls. Jana Linderman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, told ClimateWire yesterday that O’Malley gave a “perfectly fine answer” to her question. But, she said, the general lack of attention to agriculture among candidates is surprising, particularly since all three Democrats in the running have mentioned the importance of climate change (ClimateWire, Jan....

In the last few years NASA has built and launched two world-class climate satellites, both of which promised invaluable new data on the natural and human influences on Earth’s changing climate. Neither of them, however, will ever deliver the data that climate scientists so eagerly expected from them. Both spacecraft, in fact, are at the bottom of the ocean, having succumbed to nearly identical rocket mishaps that prevented them from reaching orbit....

President Trump has mocked and dismissed climate science. Now researchers seem increasingly inclined to correct the record. NOAA, the federal agency that studies the Earth, tweeted what appeared to be a rebuttal to Trump’s assertion Monday night that cold weather disproves long-term warming on a planet that’s seen average global temperatures rise about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. “Not only are severe snowstorms possible in a warming climate, they may even be more likely,” NOAA officials wrote in a tweet that appeared to challenge the nation’s top executive....

A pioneering flight around the world will use nothing but sunshine for fuel. In the dusty peach dawn of a desert day the Solar Impulse 2 airplane took flight at 11:12 PM Eastern time on March 8 from the United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi on the first leg of a bid to fly around the world exclusively powered by electricity generated from sunlight. At a top speed of 45 kilometers-per-hour the single-seat airplane flew to Muscat in neighboring Oman over roughly 10 hours, touching down at roughly 2:13 PM Eastern time, after a few hours spent circling and waiting for the right weather conditions to land....

Excerpted with permission from A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees, by Dave Goulson. Available from Picador. Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House Group, Ltd. Copyright © 2014. Let us travel back in time 135 million years. The vast supercontinent of Gondwana was beginning to break up, with South America drifting off to the west of Africa, and Australia moving majestically off to the east....

The symbol H+ is the code sign used by some futurists to denote an enhanced version of humanity. The plus version of the human race would deploy a mix of advanced technologies, including stem cells, robotics, cognition-enhancing drugs, and the like, to overcome basic mental and physical limitations. The notion of enhancing mental functions by gulping down a pill that improves attention, memory and planning—the very foundations of cognition—is no longer just a fantasy shared by futurists....

The obesity epidemic has led to increased scientific interest in how the brain controls human feeding behavior. Why do we get hungry? What biological mechanisms tell us what to eat and when to stop eating? It’s long been assumed that two neurobiological mechanisms largely govern food intake: one that controls the need to eat and one that controls the desire to eat. The hypothalamus in the brain regulates the homeostatic control of food intake by receiving, coordinating and responding to metabolic cues and signals from the digestive system....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Portland Vase is a Roman two-handled glass amphora dating to between the second half of the 1st century BCE and the early 1st century CE. The vase has a cameo-like effect decoration which perhaps depicts the marriage of Peleus and Thetis from Greek Mythology. After a long history of changes in ownership, disaster struck in 1845 CE when the vase was smashed to pieces in the British Museum....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

Particulates, ozone and smog coupled with extreme temperatures form a more dangerous health threat than these problems would be individually, researchers have found. The combined threat is apparent in both hot and cold ends of the temperature spectrum. Scientists have long understood that air pollution is a serious health threat. The World Health Organization reported that in 2012, 1 in 8 deaths worldwide stemmed from air pollution. These concerns were the foundation of sweeping legislation like the Clean Air Act, the same law under which the Obama administration is seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions (ClimateWire, June 3)....

EACH TIME A PHOTON hits light receptors on the retina, it triggers a Rube-Goldbergian chemical reaction that takes tens of milliseconds to reset. We don’t notice this interruption—our brains smooth it over into an apparently fluid stream of visual information—but the delay provided just the opening animators like Walt Disney needed. Animators, of course, were not the first to notice this perceptual quirk, often called persistence of vision. Aristotle found that when he stared at the sun, the burned-in image faded away slowly....

The scientists, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Peruvian Ministry of Health, made their finding during a search for emerging infectious diseases harbored by bats. They surveyed two communities, Truenococha and Santa Marta, which are respectively two and six hours away from the closest health post and only reachable by boat. “Generally the communities don’t appreciate the risk of rabies from a bite,” says Amy Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, who co-led the work....

Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History by Donald E. Canfield Princeton University Press, 2014 The earth’s present atmosphere, made up of 21 percent oxygen, in eons past had very little if any of this life-giving gas, effectively making our planet a hostile, alien world for most of its existence. In Oxygen, Canfield, a noted geoscientist, weaves personal anecdotes and cutting-edge research into two epic narratives: how the earth’s initially anoxic air transformed over billions of years into the stuff we breathe today and how he and generations of other scientists have laboriously pieced together this atmospheric puzzle....

From Nature Medicine’s “Spoonful of Medicine” blog: A compound already sitting on the shelves of biomedical laboratories and emergency room supply closets seems to interrupt the formation of neurodegenerative protein clumps found in Huntington’s disease, according to a preliminary animal study published August 7 in the Journal of Neuroscience. This versatile agent, called methylene blue, gets a mention in medical literature as early as 1897 and was used to treat, at one time or another, ailments ranging from malaria to cyanide poisoning....