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New images of a weird weather phenomenon known as a roll cloud have surfaced from Richland, Miss. The images, taken on a camera phone by Mississippi resident Daniel Blake Fitzhugh, reveal a seemingly endless roll cloud, or arcus cloud, a low cloud formation that forms over the sea or at the edges of thunderstorms. Fitzhugh sent in an image and video of the cloud to LiveScience after seeing an earlier report of a roll cloud off the coast of Brazil....

Cramps, diarrhea, vomiting…. Interviewing people about their food poisoning symptoms isn’t a glamorous job. Yet, the investigative work of a group of public health graduate students who work for the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) has helped find the sources of the country’s two most recent major salmonella outbreaks, in peanuts earlier this year and in jalapeño peppers (previously blamed on tomatoes) in 2008. Dubbed “Team Diarrhea,” or “Team D,” the students’ work has played a major role in solving cases that had kept health officials in other states stumped for months and sickened thousands of people....

APRIL 1960 RADIATION— “With the new measurement of the mean lethal dose for reproductive function of mammalian cells, it is now possible to explain the relatively low mean lethal dose of 400 to 500 roentgens for the entire body. Such a dose leaves only about 0.5 per cent of the body’s reproducing cells still able to multiply. Death, however, will not be immediate. The cells have each absorbed an almost infinitesimal amount of radiation energy....

The video is simple enough. A man changes facial expressions before moving his head up and down then side-to-side in a clip that looks a bit like a moving daguerreotype captured more than a century and a half ago. The camera used to capture this head shot is cutting edge, however, using a new light-powered technology, which could lead to battery-free cameras that never shut down. That concept includes combining a camera image sensor’s ability to collect and measure light with a photovoltaic cell’s capacity to convert some of that light into energy....

Aside from a small pilot program along the coast of Finland, offshore wind turbines have not been placed in waters that freeze during winter. Moving ice can act like a battering ram, pushed by storms and unpredictable currents, knocking into masts that hold up spinning blades. A major test could be coming soon in Lake Erie near Cleveland. If the six turbines in the Icebreaker Windpower project are built, they could usher in a new era of offshore power in freshwater lakes, rather than salty coastal seas, which has never been done....

Children born today will face a lifetime of climate change-related health problems, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals warns in a report released yesterday. The Lancet’s “Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change” says the new era of climate change will “define the health of an entire generation” — unless there is significant intervention. The health impacts flagged by the report start at the prenatal level with a heightened risk of low birth weight and neonatal death and continue through childhood and adolescence with potential lung problems, asthma attacks and insect-borne diseases....

Given the inky blackness of space, I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that we can’t detect the parts of the cosmos that do not glow like the stars or radiate other types of energy. Cosmologists, observing galaxies rotating at speeds too fast to be possible given those observable components, have hypothesized unseen particles called dark matter. What is it doing, and what is its composition? In “Mystery of the Hidden Cosmos,” Bogdan A....

Twenty-one years ago Rwanda was torn apart by violence. Members of the Hutu majority slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, killing hundreds of thousands of Tutsi minorities in only four months. Once the massacre finally stopped, a difficult question arose: Was there a way to right these monstrous wrongs without igniting a murderous cycle of revenge and retribution? Such a cycle would be the epitome of the ancient “eye for an eye” notion of justice, in which punishment is commensurate with the crime, an approach that still underlies most modern legal systems, including that of the U....

March 8 (Reuters) - Firefighters on Sunday were still working to extinguish the last of a series of fires that erupted when a BNSF Railway train loaded with crude oil derailed two days ago in a rural area south of Galena, Illinois, a local official said. The incident marked the latest in a series of derailments in North America involving trains hauling crude oil, heightening focus on rail safety. Nobody was injured in the fiery Thursday wreck, in which 21 cars of a 105-car BNSF train that originated in North Dakota derailed about 3 miles outside Galena, a town of just over 3,000 near the border with Wisconsin....

Some ants live longer than others—way longer. And the mapping of the first full genome sequences of ants helps to reveal how two ants from the same colony, and with much the same genetic material, can have such different life histories. The work may also provide insights into longevity in another social species with which ants share about one third of their genes: humans. Researchers sequenced the genomes of two ant species: Jerdon’s jumping ant (Harpegnathos saltator) and the Florida carpenter ant (Camponotus floridanus), which have quite different levels of social—and hence, biological—mobility....

Until the arrival of new treatments based on circadian rhythm science, the best advice for travelers remains the same as it has been for many years: Get over jet lag more quickly by scheduling your exposure to light and perhaps taking melatonin at bedtime. • If traveling just a few time zones eastward, say three to five hours, seek more light in the morning and none at bedtime when you arrive at your destination....

The well-known knight’s tour problem is the challenge of placing a chess-piece knight at a starting position on a chessboard and having it visit every square on the board exactly once. (You will recall that in chess, a knight performs L-shaped moves that go two squares in one direction and then one at right angles to it. Recall also that it doesn¿t matter if there are pieces on any of those intermediate squares....

I LIVE in a town with hundreds of restaurants serving many of the world’s cuisines: sushi bars, pizza parlors, pho, tapas, KFC, you name it. My family eats out a fair amount, and we appreciate these tastes, so we could conceivably explore a different menu every outing. But we don’t. Some years ago we discovered a neighborhood caf that we all really like, and that’s pretty much where we go. It is our place....

When Mary Davis nearly died from the drug used to treat her breast cancer, she issued a challenge to her scientist husband: would he switch his research focus to the design of better cancer treatments? As a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Mark Davis was creating solid catalysts for use in chemical synthesis. But in 1996, after Mary’s experience with the highly toxic chemotherapy drug doxorubicin — dubbed the ‘red death’ — he heeded her plea and went to work....

In more than two decades of U.N. climate talks, some annual negotiating sessions are invariably described as a stop on the road to another, more decisive session. So it goes with the 19th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP 19, which will be held in a soccer stadium in Warsaw, Poland, later this month. With a new global agreement—a treaty, maybe, or something looser if the U....

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has modified the way a controversial lab studies stress in monkeys in response to criticism by animal-rights activists and members of Congress who say that the research is inhumane. At issue are experiments led by Stephen Suomi, a psychologist at the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Poolesville, Maryland. Suomi’s lab studies how removing newborn rhesus macaques from their mothers affects biological processes such as brain activity and gene expression, and behaviours such as alcohol consumption in the infants....

For years, scientists have warned that climate change is taking its toll on Earth’s ice, thawing not just the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica but mountain glaciers and ice caps from the Andes to the Alps. But with few long-term measurements of ice outside the polar regions, getting a handle on just how fast it was melting was tricky. Now a new study, published yesterday in the journal Nature, attempts to solve that problem by using data from NASA satellites to provide a uniform, up-to-date survey of mountain glaciers and ice caps....

Many people think of the past decade in particle physics as an era of consolidation, but in fact it has been a vibrant time, setting the stage for revolutions to come. A NEW LAW OF NATURE Experiments have tested the electroweak theory, a key element of the Standard Model, over a staggering range of distances, from the subnuclear to the galactic. NEUTRINO MASS Particle detectors have established that neutrinos can morph from one type to another....

Chimpanzees may comfort others in distress in ways very similar to how people do, according to what may be the largest study of consolation in animals by far. The new findings in our closest living relatives could help shed light on the roots of empathy in humans. The spontaneous consolation of someone in distress with a hug, a pat on the back or other friendly display of physical contact has been studied in human children as a sign of sympathetic concern for others for decades....

University science professors preach a gospel of seeking truth through data and careful experimentation, yet when they walk into a classroom, they use methods that are outmoded and ineffective. The overwhelming fraction of undergraduate science courses are taught by a professor lecturing to students, even in the face of many hundreds of studies showing that alternative teaching methods demonstrate much greater student learning and lower failure rates. These different methods go by a number of names, including active learning....