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Fabiola Gianotti, the Italian physicist who announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, will from January 1 take charge at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, where the particle was found. Gianotti spoke to Nature ahead of taking up the post, to discuss hints of new physics at the upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC), China’s planned accelerators and CERN’s worldwide ambitions — as well as how to deal with egos....

From Nature magazine From museums to Hollywood films, dinosaurs are portrayed as highly active animals, but how they maintained this lifestyle isn’t clear. For decades, palaeontologists have debated whether the physiology of non-avian dinosaurs was akin to that of today’s cold-blooded reptiles or warm-blooded mammals. An important clue has now been uncovered — not in Triceratops and its relatives, but in herbivorous mammals. Palaeontologists have often examined bone microstructure in their investigations of dinosaur growth and physiology....

China aims to establish a large manned space station within the next decade, officials have said, and the latest reports suggest that this outpost could host not only Chinese astronauts, but European spaceflyers as well. A plan is afoot for China and Europe to cooperate on the venture, which might see the European Space Agency (ESA) building technologies, including a rendezvous and docking system, for the station, in exchange for opportunities for its astronauts to visit the facility....

Coughing Up Clues This new research on the inadequacies of the whooping cough vaccine was published in PNAS. The referenced 2012 study on the vaccine’s waning immunity can be found in The New England Journal of Medicine. Geologic Miracle on Ice Background and schedules for the sport of curling in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, can be found here. What Is It? This story about gracefully aging freshwater polyps is based on a study in Nature....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has received White House approval to begin tracking the race and ethnicity of people who apply for disaster relief so the agency can analyze whether there is discrimination in the distribution of billions of dollars of federal aid. FEMA published a notice yesterday inviting the public to comment over the next two months on the agency’s plan, including discussing whether collecting such demographic information is necessary and helpful....

A hectic pace of development spurred by expiring national and state incentive programs has caused multiple reliability problems among the world’s most advanced solar energy plants, according to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Hurrying to complete plants and meet operational and financial deadlines often left crews assigned to operate the plants with too little training about how to deal with glitches. The sprawling facilities with mirrors arrayed in the shape of large circles are referred to as concentrating solar power (CSP) projects....

Slime mold might not seem like a terribly advanced life form, but these single-celled social amoebae are adept at joining forces to increase their chances of passing on their genes. Loners for most of their lives, thousands of these organisms will together to form a multicellular, sluglike unit to seek out and populate new habitat when resources become scarce. Some populations of these eukaryotes have upped their survival odds even further by bringing their favorite bacterial food along with them to create a fresh crop that is seeded and consumed in the new habitat....

Even though U.S. financial markets have cooled in 2008, investments in “clean technology” from firms such as Silicon Valley–based Khosla Ventures have remained hot. Clean technology—products and services that harness renewable resources and limit environmental impacts—has emerged as one of the top three asset classes for venture capitalists. “The past five years have seen significant increases in interest and investment in this area,” says Ron Pernick, co-author of The Clean Tech Revolution....

The Obama administration is moving to accelerate Endangered Species Act listing decisions for hundreds of plants and animals, some of which have languished on a waiting list for more than 25 years. At issue are 250 or so “candidate species,” a designation that offers no legal protections for affected species and is intended to be temporary. But nearly 100 species have been on the ESA waiting list for more than 10 years, and 73 have been waiting more than 25 years, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group....

His finalist year: 1963 His finalist project: Trying to show that every even number can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers What led to the project: Joel Kugelmass had some interesting reading tastes as a child growing up in the 1950s. He read Euclid’s writings on geometry as a 11-year-old seventh grader. (He had skipped grades.) He soon turned his attention to number theory, reading everything he could about this “elegant” branch of mathematics that is concerned with the properties of numbers....

Discounting the Future In “The Ethics of Climate Change,” John Broome argues on moral grounds against economists who claim that the need to take immediate action against climate change is not urgent. But Broome does not adequately scrutinize the common assumption of economists that future generations will be wealthier. In light of continued global-level ecological degradation and climate change pressures, surely we must face the possibility that those who come after us will be worse off....

The Christchurch mosque shootings, which left 51 dead and 49 injured on March 15, were a modern-day horror by any measure—from the pain and suffering of the 100 victims to the agony of their hundreds of family members and friends and the howls of grief and outrage from a wounded city and country. Now, as if all that were not nightmare enough, George Washington University researcher Neil Johnson and his colleagues point out in a new paper that, in the sum of its details, the Christchurch massacre epitomizes the border-defying complexity of what they call “online hate ecology,” the global networks that link groups of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other extremists....

People who fake symptoms of mental illness can convince themselves that they genuinely have those symptoms, a new study suggests. People will also adopt and justify signs of illness that they never reported themselves when presented with manipulated answers, according to the study published online July 9 in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. Not only do the findings demonstrate that deliberately feigning illness can evolve into an unconscious embellishment of symptoms, they indicate that self-perception of mental health is susceptible to suggestion....

Researchers using brain scans have found new evidence that biology—and not environment—is at the core of sexual orientation. Scientists at the Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that gay men and straight women share similar traits—most notably in the size of their brains and the activity of the amygdala—an area of the brain tied to emotion, anxiety and aggression. The same is true for heterosexual men and lesbians....

When envelopes containing the bacterial spores that cause anthrax started arriving in media offices and on Capitol Hill in the fall of 2001, a new era in biological warfare began. To pinpoint the source of the attacks, federal agents quickly sought out specialists to perform cutting-edge molecular fingerprinting on the ultrafine powdered spores. That evidence, which helped the government to finger a lone army scientist as the culprit, is now being reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences....

Imagine walking into a hospital emergency room, with its hand-sanitizer-adorned walls and every surface meticulously scrubbed free of contaminants, only to encounter the stench of rotten eggs. Distasteful though this juxtaposition might sound, the toxic gas synonymous with that smell—hydrogen sulfide (H2S)—may well become a fixture in such settings in the future. Over the past decade scientists have discovered that H2S is actually essential to a number of processes in the body, including controlling blood pressure and regulating metabolism....

By Elie DolginUniversity administrators are looking to sharpen their monitoring of export violations, officials said last week at a meeting of the National Council of University Research Administrators in Washington DC.The move comes in the wake of the first US conviction, last year, of a university professor for trafficking military-sensitive information. In July, John Reece Roth, formerly an engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was sentenced to four years in prison for breaching the Arms Export Control Act; he remains free pending an appeal....

Soon after Atlanta City Auditor Amanda Noble logged onto her work computer the morning of March 22, she knew something was wrong. The icons on her desktop looked different—in some cases replaced with black rectangles—and she noticed many of the files on her desktop had been renamed with “weapologize” or “imsorry” extensions. Noble called the city’s chief information security officer to report the problem and left a message. Next, she called the help desk and was put on hold for a while....

Reprinted from Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love, by Amir Levine, M.D., and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A., with permission of J. P. Tarcher, a member of the Penguin Group USA. Copyright 2010 by Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller. A few years ago our close friend Tamara started dating someone new: I first noticed Greg at a cocktail party at a friend’s house....

Aftershocks—larger than any quake to hit the mainland U.S. in years—continue to rattle a beleaguered Japan. Thursday’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake was among the largest so far, but experts had not immediately reported major additional damage, and a tsunami warning, issued shortly after the 11:32 P.M. local time quake, was called off within two hours.* The island nation is frequently rocked by tremors, owing to its location on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire....