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A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving. The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness....

YES — ROBERT B. HORSCH, vice president of international development partnerships at Monsanto Company, received the 1998 National Medal of Technology for his pioneering experiments in the genetic modification of plant cells. He talks about the promise of GM crops. How did you become interested in the genetic modification of plants? I started in this field with a strong interest in plants but with what you might call an academic interest in agriculture....

Imagine that only a couple of dozen police officers patrol all of Manhattan and protect something that heavily armed criminals are willing to kill for. That is roughly what it is like these days at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in central Kenya. The 36,000-hectare nonprofit wildlife reserve is home to endangered black and white rhinos, elephants, lions, chimpanzees and Grevy’s zebras, as well as four of the world’s last seven northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni)....

By Sharon Bernstein GROVELAND Calif. (Reuters) - Firefighters gained ground on Tuesday against a blaze burning on the western edge of Yosemite National Park and an adjacent national forest, where flames have forced the evacuation of several dozen homes and the closure of three campgrounds. The El Portal fire has scorched more than 3,000 acres since it erupted on Saturday, destroying a duplex home and threatening dozens of other dwellings around the western park boundary, a spokesman for the federal fire command said....

Billions of people today owe their lives to a single discovery now a century old. In 1909 German chemist Fritz Haber of the University of Karlsruhe figured out a way to transform nitrogen gas—which is abundant in the atmosphere but nonreactive and thus unavailable to most living organisms—into ammonia, the active ingredient in synthetic fertilizer. The world’s ability to grow food exploded 20 years later, when fellow German scientist Carl Bosch developed a scheme for implementing Haber’s idea on an industrial scale....

There is a line of psychological research that studies precisely this, by measuring how accurate we are at making probability judgments. One way to study this is to control the nature of information itself and see whether people are accurate judges of its strength. Interestingly, people’s responses tend to be conservative: they are less sure of their conclusion than the evidence justifies. Yet we are not just affected by the strength of the evidence, but by how it is presented....

January 1965 Synapse Transmission “Since we do not know the specific transmitter substance for the vast majority of synapses in the nervous system we do not know if there are many different substances or only a few. The only one identified with reasonable certainty in the mammalian central nervous system is acetylcholine. We know practically nothing about the mechanism by which a presynaptic nerve impulse causes the transmitter substance to be injected into the synaptic cleft....

Last week researchers released the first results from the UK Biobank Imaging Study, a massive effort that ultimately aims to scan the brains of 100,000 people and use the data in conjunction with detailed health information to investigate disease progression during aging. The findings from their first 5,000 subjects offer an early peek at an enormous data set that includes a treasure trove of health information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and other measures....

For Benjamin Bartelle, the first sign that Hurricane Sandy was no ordinary storm came when each of the lab’s windows popped open, scattering papers across the floor. It was about 7.30 p.m. on 29 October, and Bartelle was on the fifth floor of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, part of the New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center in Manhattan. Outside, in exposed parts of the city, winds were gusting at up to 160 kilometers per hour as the storm made landfall....

I still remember the excitement and fear of April 12, 1961, the day Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space. I was seven years old: too young to fully appreciate the thrill many people felt that the mysterious universe beyond Earth had suddenly been conquered and that the adventures of the swashbuckling Flash Gordon were now one step closer to reality. I was old enough, however, to vividly remember concern that the first person in space was Russian and not American....

A PATIENT NAMED SALLY recently suffered a stroke that damaged her right parietal lobe without affecting other parts of the brain. The left side of her body—controlled by the right hemisphere—was paralyzed. But she was mentally normal and continued to remain the talkative, intelligent woman that she was before the stroke. Yet Sally’s father observed other disturbing symptoms to which—oddly enough—Sally herself seemed oblivious. When she attempted to move around the room in her wheelchair, she would sometimes bump into objects on her left....

Researchers have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind is smaller than a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms—making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs—­by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms are swimming freely in a petri dish....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger by Jeff Wise, published on December 8 by Palgrave Macmillan (Scientific American is a Macmillan publication). Extreme Fear explores the neural underpinnings of this powerful and primitive emotion by relating instances in which people were forced to act under duress and presenting the latest findings from cognitive science. In the following passage from the chapter entitled “Superhuman” a seemingly ordinary man performs an extraordinary feat of strength to rescue a cyclist who has been run over by a car....

Miriam Rossi, a professor of chemistry at Vassar College, offers the following reply: Snowflakes are symmetrical because they reflect the internal order of the water molecules as they arrange themselves in the solid state (the process of crystallization). Water molecules in the solid state, such as in ice and snow, form weak bonds (called hydrogen bonds) to one another. These ordered arrangements result in the basic symmetrical, hexagonal shape of the snowflake....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Janet Jansson first started to wonder about the vast universe of underground life as a student at New Mexico State University in the late 1970s. A handful of soil contains about 10 billion bacteria, but at the time, earth scientists knew very little about what these microbes were and what they did. Later, as a young microbial ecologist at Stockholm University in Sweden, she started to catalog the microorganisms she collected during soil sampling trips, deciphering their genetic code so she could understand both their internal workings and how they fit into their underground habitat....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The crossbow was introduced into Chinese warfare during the Warring States period (481-221 BCE). Developing over the centuries into a more powerful and accurate weapon, the crossbow also came in versions light enough to be fired with one hand, some could fire multiple arrows, and there evolved a heavier artillery model which could be mounted on a rotating and movable base....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Early Three Kingdoms Period in ancient China, from 184 CE to 190 CE for the purposes of this article, was one of the most turbulent in China’s history. With an ailing Han government unable to control its empire, brutal localised wars, rebellions and uprisings were rife. The capital would soon fall, followed by the Han dynasty itself, split asunder by rival dynastic factions at court, scheming eunuchs, and intractable Confucian literati....

In the Arctic, sea ice is vanishing, even faster than models of global warming have predicted. The disappearing act could affect far-away weather patterns, as changes at the sea surface affect air currents that steer powerful weather-makers such as the jet stream. And without ice protection, erosion of fragile coasts could speed up. Such erosion could dump carbon molecules into the water that increase ocean acidification and affect sea life. Newly open waters will also change shipping lanes, affect oil exploration, and create new challenges to national security....

On Friday afternoon, a wildfire swept across Interstate 15, a busy freeway that connects Los Angeles and Las Vegas in Southern California, setting dozens of vehicles on fire. “I have been doing this for 15 years, I have seen vehicles burn, but I have never seen anything of this magnitude,” said Justin Correll, who commanded one of the fire engines on the scene. “I have never seen so many vehicles impacted so quickly....

Currency wars have pushed climate talk even further on the back burner of the G-20 meeting in Seoul, Korea, this week as President Obama and other world leaders spar over the global economic recovery. Attempts to convince countries to phase out fossil fuel subsidies – a major goal of last year’s summit – appear at a standstill. Meanwhile, the midterm election that delivered House control to Republicans and gave the GOP a stronger voice in the Senate has created a string of question marks for other nations about the United States’ commitment to international climate action....