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From mining projects to oil and gas operations, human activity has set off earthquakes around the world and in many geological settings. Research now highlights how big these quakes can get — and how little scientists agree on which ones are caused by people. The Human-Induced Earthquake Database, or HiQuake, contains 728 examples of earthquakes (or sequences of earthquakes) that may have been set off by humans over the past 149 years....

By Maggie Lu YueyangSYDNEY (Reuters) - Severe Antarctic weather was slowing an Australian icebreaker’s bid to reach a Russian ship trapped in ice since Christmas eve with 74 people onboard, the Australian maritime rescue agency said on Monday.The Aurora Australis was currently about 11 nautical miles from the stranded Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy, said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), which is co-ordinating the rescue.“The area is currently experiencing snow showers, resulting in poor visibility....

At the backs of your eyeballs, on the living projector screens called retinas, your corneas display upside-down 2-D images of the world around you. With some complex mental origami, your brain transforms those flat worlds into a beautiful 3-D model of everything you see. In a new study, researchers changed how monkeys perceived 3-D optical illusions by stimulating particular clusters of neurons in their brains. The researchers think the region they tweaked is where 3-D modeling happens....

Now some theorists suggest most—if not all—of those universes are actually forbidden, at least if we want them to have stable dark energy, the supposed force accelerating the expansion of the cosmos. To some, eliminating so many possible universes is not a drawback but a major step forward for string theory, offering new hope of making testable predictions. But others say the multiverse is here to stay, and the proposed problem with all those universes is not a problem at all....

We all know the maddening experience of not being able to think of a certain word that is undoubtedly in our repertoire. Now researchers have discovered an association between a specific region in the neural language system and these tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences, which are a normal part of aging. Deborah Burke of Pomona College and her team found that TOT moments became more frequent as gray matter density in the left insula declined....

To participate in today’s global economy, ordinary people must accept an asymmetrical bargain: their lives are transparent to states, banks and corporations, whereas the behavior and inner workings of the powerful actors are kept hidden. The boundaries between the consumer and the citizen have irreversibly blurred. Harvard University social scientist Shoshana Zuboff has called this one-sided, extractive interaction “surveillance capitalism,” and it is a major structural issue. The very institutions whose charter is brokering social trust—banks and governments—have in many parts of the world spectacularly failed to do so, especially during the lifetimes of those younger than 35....

But while the new film Radioactive rightly celebrates Madame Curie’s brilliance, it also reveals her courage as a female scientist struggling with the male-dominated scientific community. She had to fight for even the most rudimentary of laboratory space and face-down those who stood in her way. Fortunately, she found a scientific partner and later husband, Pierre Curie, who shared her passions and fought along with her for scientific justice.
The movie also allows Curie to step down from her scientific pedestal as she faces the tragic early death of Pierre in 1906 at 46 and an international scandal over her 1911 affair with a married colleague, Paul Langevin, which drew punishing newspaper headlines and an angry mob at her doorstep, screaming epithets and urging her to “go home” to her native Poland....

For many diabetics, the unpleasant chore of drawing blood several times a day in order to check blood glucose levels is a part of life. Efforts to develop devices that can test blood glucose without the need to repeatedly prick fingers have faltered thus far due to questions about accuracy as well as complaints about skin irritation. One company is hoping to solve these problems with a biochemical sensor that adheres to the skin like a bandage and sends continuous blood glucose readings to a handheld wireless device....

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to transform human skin cells into stem cells in 2007 came the frustration of actually trying to make a sufficient amount of these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.* The process is so inefficient that scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human skin, or fibroblast, cells to form iPS cell colonies after they infect fibroblasts with the retroviruses used to induce pluripotency....

By Brendan O’Brien (Reuters) - Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Wednesday signed a bill into law that bans the manufacturing and sale of personal care products containing tiny plastic beads that are known to pollute waterways. The law makes Wisconsin one of seven states including Illinois and New Jersey to ban the tiny pieces of non-biodegradable plastic known as microbeads, often used as an exfoliant in soaps and toothpaste. It bans manufacturing of microbead products at the beginning of 2018 and their sale at the beginning of 2019....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Wine has been made for over 7,000 years, and effervescent wine for just as long since sealing wine before the fermentation is complete will naturally produce it. True sparkling wine, though, a wine that is clear from cloudy impurities, was invented in the Champagne region of France in the 17th century....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Illuminated manuscripts are, as their name suggests, hand-made books illumined by gold and silver ink. They were produced in Western Europe between c. 500 and c. 1600 CE and their subject matter is usually Christian scripture, practice, and lore. The books are elaborately illustrated and their illumination comes from the use of brightly-colored inks painted on top of or ornamented by gold and silver ink....

Before the pandemic grounded most of us, if you’d ever ridden the subway or a bus, flew on a commercial flight or, heck, been anywhere in public with lots of other people, chances are you’d have seen a familiar thing: all heads around you bowed, eyes locked intently on a cell-phone screen. If people had near constant phone fixation in the prepandemic times, it might be safe to call it a flat-out phone addiction in the age of rolling lockdowns and perpetual social distancing; one survey found that average U....

A rainforest katydid has ears that evolved to be remarkably like those of humans and other mammals. The insect’s hearing organ, although tucked in the crook of its front legs, has components that echo the structures of our own middle and inner ear, researchers have discovered. In humans the outer portion of the ear gathers sound waves and funnels them toward the thin membrane of the eardrum, also called the tympanic membrane....

LONDON—A walk through the U.K.’s capital day and night during these Olympic Games reveals a world of centuries-old architecture blended with new construction on the very edge of modern engineering. Olympic cities invest heavily to welcome the world’s athletes. Designs, budgets, environmental impact reports and sustainability studies immediately followed the 2005 decision to award the 2012 Games to London; multiple projects already were in preplanning stages in anticipation of beating Paris in the final round for the bid....

Six days before Prince died, the iconic pop star was hospitalized after possibly overdosing on Percocet. His death on April 21 involved overdosing on another painkiller, fentanyl. Both are among the prescription opioids that alleviate the pain of millions of Americans every year—often at the price of their needing ever greater amounts and the risk of overdose. The U.S. “is in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services....

The best actors, directors and screenwriters receive Oscars; the top scientists, Nobel Prizes. Society doles out a multitude of awards every year to celebrate the creative achievements of individuals. Such events feed a popular conception that creativity is a gift only certain people possess and constitutes the apotheosis of individuality. Albert Einstein once observed, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom....

TAIPEI, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The death toll from a TransAsia Airways plane that crashed into a Taipei river shortly after taking off has risen to 31, Taiwanese officials said on Thursday, and could rise further with 12 people still missing. TransAsia Flight GE235, carrying 58 passengers and crew, lurched between buildings, clipped an overpass with its port-side wing and crashed upside down into the shallow river shortly taking off from a downtown Taipei airport on Wednesday....

Since World War II, taxpayers have spent $107 million to rebuild eroding beaches at Palm Beach, Fla., home of President Trump’s private club and estate Mar-a-Lago. Now those efforts spanning seven decades and 12.5 million cubic yards of sand may prove to be futile. Hurricane Dorian ate the beach, experts say, along with what could be dozens of other beach replenishment projects along the southern Atlantic coast. “That list of beach nourishment projects will be a long one—pretty much every project from central Florida to the North Carolina Outer Banks,” said Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University....

Occasionally it is a treat to remind ourselves how remarkable some of our most common gadgets are. A typical microwave oven ramps up the electricity from a 120-volt wall outlet to an incredible 3,000 volts or more and safely cooks food in just a minute or two, yet it costs less than a pair of good shoes. And we can watch the show through the handy window. The key component is the magnetron....