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By Steve Quinn JUNEAU Alaska (Reuters) - A ship strike killed a protected humpback whale off Kodiak, Alaska, but an investigation could not conclude whether a state ferry was responsible and no charges will be filed, federal officials said on Wednesday. The state ferry Kennicott hit the 30-foot (9-meter), 25-ton (22.6-tonne) female whale as it was coming into harbor on July 26, and the probe had sought to determine if the giant mammal was already dead at that point....

FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS What a fantastic article by Jennifer Crocker and Jessica J. Carnevale, “Self-Esteem Can Be an Ego Trap.” I am always interested in new insights into self-esteem. As a youth worker for many years, I believe it is a major area to explore. Sometimes I work with people who do not grasp the alternatives to their mind-set. I reflect with them about what we find essential that other people survive without: closure, explanation, certainty, hope, and so on....

If you find yourself in a crowded building during an emergency, perhaps the last thing you want to see is an obstructed exit. But a new study by a group of Japanese researchers shows that wide-open exits are not always the most efficient at speeding pedestrians through. A judiciously placed obstacle, such as a column, can actually reduce bottlenecking and evacuation times. Daichi Yanagisawa, a graduate student in the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues examined various ways of reducing conflicts—friction, essentially—between individuals as they try to squeeze through an exit....

In 2004 the Web 2.0 era officially began. Scores of Internet surfers have abandoned AOL and some plucky first-movers have forsaken home pages altogether, opting instead to get their content from RSS feeds, social bookmarking sites—such as Digg.com—and collaborative tagging schemes, like photo-sharing hub Flickr. A team of physicists from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” sought to determine the underlying statistical properties of this new information paradigm by studying the behaviors of tags—single words used to describe the content of a linked article or photo—on the social bookmarking/collaborative tagging sites del....

More than three-quarters of new HIV infections worldwide are acquired through sexual contact, nearly all of which involve at least one male. As researchers have been uncovering a growing number of differences between the semen-based virus and blood-borne populations—and the number of people with the virus continues to rise rapidly—the race to piece together a better understanding of the virus’s makeup and behavior in the male genital tract has grown ever more urgent....

By Victoria Cavaliere NEW YORK (Reuters) - Successive winter storms led to critical shortages of rock salt in the U.S. Northeast on Tuesday including Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, while New Jersey scrambled to secure a huge shipment stuck at a port in Maine. The scarcity hit as the East Coast was slammed by a third winter storm system in a single week, leaving many states over-budget for snow removal and running low on supplies like rock salt, which is used to help melt ice and snow on roads and public areas....

It’s been 10 years since Michael Wigler had a breakthrough revelation in autism genetics—one that arguably launched the field as we know it. In April 2007, Wigler and his then colleague, Jonathan Sebat, reported that ‘de novo’ mutations—those that arise spontaneously instead of being inherited—occur more often in people with autism than in typical people. The mutations they noted were in the form of ‘copy number variants’ (CNVs), deletions or duplications of long stretches of DNA....

It’s possible that hot sauce and salsa could be key ingredients to the success of a manned mission to Mars. The kicked-up condiments already came close to causing a mutiny on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002 when astronaut Peggy Whitson threatened to bar entry to the crew of the visiting shuttle Atlantis unless they came bearing a promised resupply of the spicy stuff. Only when shuttle commander Jeff Ashby announced that he had the goods did Whitson say, “Okay, we’ll let you in then....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Rollright Stones is the collective name for a group of enigmatic prehistoric monuments located next to an ancient ridgeway known as the Jurassic Way, on the border between the English counties of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. The name ‘Rollright’ derives from Hrolla-landriht, ’the land of Hrolla.’ The complex of monuments at the site consists of three main elements, the ‘King’s Men’ – a circle of about seventy stones, probably dating to around 2500 BCE, the ‘King Stone’ – a solitary weathered monolith dated to 1792 BCE, and the ‘Whispering Knights’ – the remains of the burial chamber of a Middle to Late Neolithic portal dolmen, estimated to date to between 3800 and 3000 BCE....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Martin Luther’s speech at the Diet of Worms (also known as the Here I Stand Speech) is considered one of the greatest pieces of oratory in world history. It was given in response to the council’s questions on whether Luther would stand by his doctrine or recant. His refusal to recant is a classic defense of personal freedom....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The 390 BCE battle at the Allia River was fought between the city state of Rome and Gauls from northern Italy. When the Gauls laid siege to the Etruscan city of Clusium, the Romans intervened on behalf of the latter. The Gauls withdrew but returned to advance on Rome itself....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli, Italy, is an opulent, sprawling garden-villa covering some 120 hectares (296 acres). It was built by Emperor Hadrian (76-138 CE) between 125-134 CE for use as his country estate, although the land may have originally belonged to his wife, Vibia Sabina (m. 100-136 CE)....

Polarizing film has an axis (in our diagrams we depict its direction with lines on the film), and the film allows passage of light that is oscillating parallel to the axis. You can think of light as being like a wave on a rope held between two people; the wave can make the rope move up and down or side to side or at any angle in between. The angle of the oscillation is the polarization of the wave....

More than one million people in the U.S. suffer from a poorly understood, difficult-to-diagnose condition that can leave them debilitated by unshakable exhaustion, pain, depression and cognitive trouble. Researchers, however, are still unsure what causes chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), how to treat it, how best to diagnose it and even what to call it. A new study is now providing hope for better understanding—and potentially better diagnosing—the disease. It has revealed a striking pattern of brain inflammation in CFS patients....

Since 1500, more than 150 bird species have disappeared from the world, including the much lamented dodo. This ground bird disappeared from its island home before Carl Linnaeus, the father of scientific taxonomy, even described it in the 18th century. Given that many of the nearly 10,000 known bird species have only recently been described–including those only available from remains like the dodo–some biologists suggest that current extinction rates have been seriously underestimated and will rise rapidly in the coming century....

By Laura ZuckermanSALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - The first statewide competition in decades to hunt wolves and coyotes in Idaho has sparked outrage among wildlife conservationists, who condemned it as “an organized killing contest.“The so-called coyote and wolf derby is slated for the weekend of December 28-29 in the mountain town of Salmon, Idaho, where ranchers and hunting guides contend wolves and coyotes threaten livestock and game animals prized by sportsmen.The tournament offers cash and trophies to two-person teams for such hunting objectives as killing the largest wolf and the most female coyotes....

One of the costliest storms in the past decade struck indiscriminately along the southeast coast of the United States in 2016. The government’s response showed more bias. The federal agency that distributed $492 million in disaster loans after Hurricane Matthew based its approvals on a method known to harm some racial groups. The outcome was stark in two communities. In a flooded urban area of Jacksonville, Fla., the Small Business Administration approved only 26% of the applications for low-interest disaster loans to rebuild a home or business....

Sir david attenborough, the well-known naturalist, stands at the lectern of the royal Society in Carlton House Terrace in London, on July 6, 2009, about to bring the afternoon’s speaker to the stage. A ripple of expectation passes through the audience, eagerly anticipating a lecture entitled “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?” Then Sir David introduces J.E.N. Veron, the then 64-year-old former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science....

A shift from briny to fresh in Antarctica’s ocean waters in recent decades could explain the shutdown of the Southern Ocean’s coldest, deepest currents, a new study finds. The cold currents, called the Antarctic Bottom Water, are chilly, salty rivers that flow from the underwater edge of the Antarctic continent north toward the equator, keeping to the bottom of the seafloor. The currents carry oxygen, carbon and nutrients down to the deepest parts of the ocean....

A tiny coral reef lightens the azure waters off Papua New Guinea’s Kimbe Island. For its diminutive size, the 0.3-square-kilometer (0.11-square-mile) reef supports abundant populations of orange clown fish and vagabond butterfly fish, two species separated by both appearance and reproductive strategies. Whereas the clown fish prefers to lay its eggs on a patch of bare rock that the parents then guard, the butterfly fish releases its eggs and sperm directly into the water, letting the current carry them where they may....