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Sergio Ortelli, the mayor of the tiny, idyllic island of Giglio, about 12 miles off Italy’s Tuscany coast, has become a maritime salvage expert since the massive Costa Concordia cruiseliner crashed onto his island’s shores the night of January 13, 2012. The island’s permanent population is just under 900, and when the Concordia capsized with 4,229 passengers and crew on board, the wave of humanity that poured onto the island sent the residents into a state of shock they have not yet recovered from....

With government budgets for space exploration under strain, a UK consortium has embarked on a project to raise money for a robotic Moon mission by offering the public the chance to stash their memories and even a hair sample on the Moon. The aim of Lunar Mission One is to put a lander on the Moon’s south pole within the next decade. The robotic probe would to drill 20–100 meters into the surface, seeking insights about the origins of the Earth and the Moon, and paving the way for establishing a lunar base....

Off the coast of American Samoa, the tropical sun beats down on a shallow tidal lagoon, heating the water to a sizzling 35 °C for a few hours each day. Such temperatures would kill off most coral reefs, and yet the Samoan lagoon hosts courtyards of antler-like branching corals and mound corals the size of refrigerators. “The fact that they’re there means they’ve adapted to survive,” says Steve Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University in California....

For consumers in California, New York City, Portland and Seattle, it might not come as a surprise that Starbucks’s raspberry scone contains 500 calories or the foot-long meatball marinara sandwich at Subway has about 1,160. But because these few local and state governments have introduced mandatory menu labeling in chain restaurants, have people been cutting back on the calories in their orders? Consumers across the country will start seeing these numbers on menu boards when labeling requirements roll out nationwide as part of the new health care reform law....

By Haruka SaijoTOKYO (Reuters) - As they hauled in their net on the frigid seas of northern Japan, Shigenori Goto and the crew of his boat were hoping for a good catch of yellowtail. Instead, what slowly appeared was a mammoth squid, still alive.Giant squid, mysterious creatures thought to have inspired the myth of the monstrous “kraken”, make occasional appearances near the Japanese archipelago. Last year, a Japanese-led team made history when it released the first live images taken of one, nearly 1 km (3,280 feet) beneath the surface....

APRIL 1958 THE MATTER— “Anti-matter may exist in our galaxy, but it cannot exceed about one part in 10,000,000 of ordinary matter if it is there. It is most unlikely that any of the stars in our galaxy can be made of anti-matter. Outside our galaxy, other galaxies in remote parts of the universe may consist entirely of anti-matter. The nearest approach to direct proof of the existence of such bodies is the presence of strong radio sources whose energy is difficult to explain by any known process but might be explained by the annihilation of anti-matter....

Mercury levels in the upper ocean have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and human activities are to blame, researchers report today in Nature. Although several computer models have estimated the amount of marine mercury, the new analysis provides the first global measurements. It fills in a critical piece of the global environmental picture, tracking not just the amount of mercury in the world’s oceans, but where it came from and at what depths it is found....

Nearly every vehicle on the road today is powered by some version of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine patented by Nikolaus Otto in 1876. Otto exploited the findings of French physicist Sadi Carnot, who in 1824 showed that the efficiency of an engine depends critically on the temperature differential between a hot “source” of energy and a cold “sink.” The four-stroke engine compresses an air-fuel mixture and ignites it with a spark, thus creating a fleeting but intense source of heat....

Fans of the spacetime continuum can now uncover gravitational ripples at their desks thanks to the February launch of Einstein@Home. The project is one of the latest of at least 60 “@home” projects now on the Internet, in which personal-computer users can donate spare processor power to help solve scientific problems. And no need to choose one mission over another: @home software can now multitask, and enough microchip muscle exists to handle many more distributed-computing projects....

Eight years ago, when Erik Ramsey was 16, a car accident triggered a brain stem stroke that left him paralyzed. Though fully conscious, Ramsey was completely paralyzed, essentially “locked in,” unable to move or talk. He could communicate only by moving his eyes up or down, thereby answering questions with a yes or a no. Ramsey’s doctors recommended sending him to a nursing facility. Instead his parents brought him home. In 2004 they met neurologist Philip R....

A massive wind turbine—capable of turning the breeze into two million watts of power—has 40-meter-long blades made from fiberglass, towers 90 meters above the ground, weighs hundreds of metric tons, and fundamentally relies on roughly 300 kilograms of a soft, silvery metal known as neodymium—a so-called rare earth. This element forms the basis for the magnets used in the turbines. “Large permanent magnets make the generators feasible,” explains materials scientist Alex King, director of the U....

While oil shortages grab the headlines, water scarcity is creating at least as many headaches around the world. The most dramatic conditions are in Asia, where the world’s two megacountries, China and India, are grappling with deepening and unsolved water challenges. China’s great northern plain, home to more than 200 million people, is generally subhumid or arid and depends on unsustainable pumping of underground aquifers for irrigation. The Yellow River has been diverted to the point that it no longer flows to the sea....

The year is 1906. a small, nattily dressed man walks over to the giant Diplodocus skeleton in the entrance hall of the British Museum of Natural History. He gently lifts one of the dinosaur’s huge toe bones out of its iron mount, flips it over and carefully slips it back into place. Later he would note in correspondence to a colleague that his effort was not appreciated. The museum officials should have known better....

Microprocessors are the engines performing the logic functions that make computers, cell phones and countless other indispensable electronic gadgets run. Improvements in microprocessor speed and power allow us to use sophisticated software on our cell phones and process loads of multimedia data on our laptops that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible. To continue to meet our growing technological demands—such as using a cell phone like a secure credit card or to download and watch an entire movie—processors must become ever more powerful even as they shrink....

Hillary Clinton is heading for a landslide victory over Donald Trump. But wait. Trump is pulling ahead and could take the White House. No, Clinton has a clear lead and is gaining ground. Nearly every day, a new poll comes out touting a different result, leaving voters wondering what to believe. The results of recent elections give even more reason for scepticism. In 2013, the Liberal Party of Canada confounded expectations when it won the provincial elections in British Columbia....

Thinking of something else is a time-honored method for coping with pain. Indeed, psychologists have demonstrated repeatedly that what you think about can modulate the pain you experience. But what’s less clear is how exactly that effect plays out in the body. In a study published today in Current Biology, neuroscientists have found that distraction does more than merely divert your mind; it actually sends signals that bar pain from reaching the central nervous system....

Have you heard enough already about global warming? It’s so … last year’s news! Plenty of people are “doing something” about it. Becoming carbon-neutral has gone as mainstream as Girl Scout cookies; help is on the way. Can we move on, please? Unfortunately not. For all the consciousness-raising value of grassroots initiatives, the world is still far from squarely facing up to the issues. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise on their Web sites to reduce carbon emissions to just 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—a laudable goal....

Oh, to be a fly on the auditory cortex! That, in a manner of speaking, is exactly what a group of researchers working in Berkeley and San Francisco have done. Measurements of electrical signals in the region of the brain that processes speech enabled the group to decode the words a subject was hearing—in essence, a form of neural eavesdropping. The goal was far nobler than finding out what your boss really thinks of you or what is going on in the neighboring cubicle....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Herodotus’ Histories with their historical, geographical, ethnographic, and religious aspects, have always been a source of delight and interest, not only for generations of readers, students, and storytellers, but also for artists. A complete list of the painting representing scenes from Herodotus’ Histories is a task for a large community of scholars from different fields....

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 Protestant Reformation emerged in France in the early 16th century, the city of Meaux became one of the first centers of controversy. Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet II undertook a campaign to reform the Catholic Church from within and called Lefèvre d’Étaples, a leading figure in French humanism, to lead missionary efforts....