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By Nicola Jones of Nature magazineThis month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas.The pilot experiment will explore the possibility of mining' from gas hydrates: cages of water ice that hold molecules of methane. Such hydrates exist under the sea floor and in sandstone deep beneath the Arctic tundra, holding potentially vast reserves of natural gas....

Nineteenth-century American clergyman and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand, and a machine is but a complex tool.” These words presaged, by more than a century, a line of scientific research into “embodiment”: how humans’ wealth of sensory inputs—including the touch and visual perception involved in manipulating a tool—modify the sense of one’s physical self. Embodiment implies that when one holds a screwdriver, for example, the brain morphs its representation of a “hand” until that representation reaches all the way to the very tip of the tool....

The Trump administration today will officially announce the end of the Clean Power Plan, a regulation limiting planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But the conservative crowd that’s skeptical about climate change says its work is just beginning. U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt argued yesterday that the climate rule is a reflection of President Obama’s antagonism toward the fossil fuel industry, describing it as an unlawful interpretation of the Clean Air Act (Greenwire, Oct....

By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI, Feb 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Water scarcity could lead to conflict between communities and nations as the world is still not fully aware of the water crisis many countries face as a result of climate change, the head of the U.N. panel of climate scientists warned on Tuesday. The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a rise in global temperature of between 0....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Dogs were highly valued in ancient Rome, as they were in other cultures, and the Roman dog served many of the same purposes as it did in, say, Egypt and Persia - as hunters, guardians, and companions - but with a significant difference in focus. Like the Egyptians, the Romans created their own artistic dog collars – some of gold – and, although dogs did not feature in the Roman afterlife (as they did with the Persians), they were considered the best protection against ghosts or evil spirits....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are revolutionizing the ways in which the public interacts, understands, and appreciates the importance of cultural heritage around the world. They are additionally enabling sustainable tourism to flourish in an era of unprecedented globalization. In this interview, James Blake Wiener of Ancient History Encyclopedia speaks to Professor Lorenzo Cantoni - the chair holder of the UNESCO Chair in ICT at the Università della Svizzera italiana to develop and promote sustainable tourism in World Heritage Sites - about the ways in which ICT is altering how we see the past and travel around the world....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Roman army underwent dramatic changes in Late Antiquity. Civil war and external conflicts led to the creation of new legions while existing legions were either split or disbanded. Although there was an increase in the number of legions, these legions were much smaller. Field armies numbered around 1,000 to 2,000, while cavalry units were around 600....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. We had a 4-day national holiday. Meaning what? No clinic and no hospital! I said to myself, “It’s been a long time since I have visited Babylonia.” I drove my car for about 11 hours, continuously. Finally, I was there. I went to my uncle’s house, which lies about a quarter of an hour from the ancient city of Babylon....

After years of disappointment, clinical-trial results released on July 22 suggest that antibody treatments may produce small improvements in people with Alzheimer’s disease. The drugs — Eli Lilly’s solanezumab and Biogen’s aducanumab — target the amyloid-β protein that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Many researchers question whether the findings will hold up, given that antibody drugs against amyloid have failed in every previous test against the disease. Details of the results were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Washington DC....

For Australia’s native guava, death came in the form of a fungus. Just 10 years ago, a virulent strain of the fungus Austropuccinia psidii arrived in New South Wales. First observed in Hawaii in 2005, the fungus causes a devastating plant disease called myrtle rust, which has quickly and mysteriously spread around the world—most likely through industrial shipping and other elements of our global economy. Each species that encounters the fungus displays different levels of resistance, but many plants experience deformed leaves, defoliation, stunted growth and even death....

Migraines are not the only culprits when it comes to extraordinary head pain. Cluster headaches have long puzzled researchers, too, although studies are slowly revealing the parts of the brain involved when those punctuated bursts of pain occur. The excruciating headaches tend to turn up in bouts lasting six to eight weeks. During these cycles, afflicted individuals—more often men—experience intense daily headaches on one side of the head, each lasting an hour or two, explains headache expert Peter Goadsby, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco....

Google’s online translation service, Google Translate, will soon be using a new algorithm that is entirely based on deep learning, the company announced on September 27. The algorithm, which is also described in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv, is the first widely-available computer system for translating languages that relies on the increasingly popular AI technique. Compared to the firm’s existing service, the algorithm reduces errors by around 60%, Google computer scientists say....

Music can be about physics and math as well as art. This year’s Grammy Award for Best Historical Album went to a team that included University of New Hampshire mathematician Kevin M. Short and sound engineer Jamie R. Howarth for restoring a fragile, live 1949 wire recording of legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie. The technique developed for the restoration cleverly exploits background noise present in a recording. The story began with two rolls of steel wire—a bootleg recording sent to the Woody Guthrie Archives in 2001....

Studies of thousands of pregnant women that were set up to probe the link between Zika and birth defects may not provide definitive answers because of a sharp drop in the number of new cases, researchers have warned. The unexpected development is making the disease harder to study, and threatens to hamper trials of experimental vaccines that might protect pregnant women in future outbreaks. “We’re seeing few, if any, cases, particularly in southern Brazil, which we thought might be the next big area to be hit this year,” says Oliver Brady, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine....

Fish in lakes tainted with metals are losing their sense of smell, stoking concern among experts that the problem could devastate populations. But if the fish can just get into cleaner water – even if they’ve been exposed to pollutants their whole life – they start sniffing things properly again, according to new research out of Canada. Fish use their sense of smell to find mates and food, and to avoid getting eaten....

The ethics of human-genome editing is in the spotlight again as a large international meeting on the topic is poised to kick off in Washington DC. Ahead of the summit, which is being jointly organized by the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society and held on December 1–3, we bring you seven key genome-editing facts. Just one published study describes genome editing of human germ cells In April, a group led by Junjiu Huang at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, described their use of the popular CRISPR–Cas9 technology to edit the genomes of human embryos....

LAS VEGAS, NEV.—Kids carry technology with them wherever they go, so why shouldn’t this extend to the classroom? That’s the idea behind budding programs designed to put low-priced simplified PCs into the hands of kids worldwide, especially in developing countries. Chipmaker Intel on Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show will unveil its new Classmate netbook PC, which is faster than its predecessors and features a touch screen for easier use. As netbooks pick up steam and tech companies launch their latest and greatest at the Consumer Electronics Association’s annual trade show, being held here this week, Intel and its partners are applying Classmate PC technology in schools worldwide....

Every summer nobel laureates converge on Lindau, Germany, to share their wisdom with, and to learn from, up-and-coming scientists hailing from many corners of the globe. This year the 62nd meeting focuses on physics. In honor of that event, the two of us have selected excerpts from some of the most fascinating articles that Nobel winners have published in the magazine over the years, on topics ranging from cosmology to particle physics to technology....

Black holes, by definition, emit no light. They are unseeable. But astronomers would like to get as close as they can by zooming in on the region immediately surrounding a black hole. That is the objective of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of linked radio telescopes around the globe. An actual event horizon—the point beyond which light and matter alike become hopelessly lost to a black hole’s pull—remains out of sight, but the telescope has now succeeded in piercing the veil of a nearby supermassive black hole to peer into unprecedented depths of its turbulent surroundings....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Rubik’s Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math’s “Simple Groups” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. M12 Puzzle Mathieu puzzle M12, which represents the sporadic simple group M12, was designed by the authors to be played on the Internet. The puzzle begins with a scrambled version of the numbers 1 through 12. The object is to unscramble them using combinations of just two moves, both conveniently executed at the click of a button....