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1971 When Time Began “Specially designed equipment has been set up in two widely separated locations: my laboratory at the University of Maryland and the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Within the past two years simultaneous increases in the output of detectors at these sites have provided evidence of bursts of gravitational radiation emanating from the center of our galaxy. These findings have stimulated much theorizing and a good deal of disagreement among astrophysicists....

Human emotion metrics for navigation plans and maps: Imagine choosing not just the quickest path to your destination but the one that is most likely to lift your mood. Patent no. 8,364,395 fuses advances in mapping and traffic data with those in mood detection to form an emotionally intelligent navigation system. Route-planning devices and maps already allow users to choose a path that avoids tolls or traffic jams. And some technologies can gauge mood: microphones detect vocal stress in drivers asking for directions or screaming expletives; sensors detect a driver’s pulse and sweaty palms on the steering wheel; and software mines social-media streams for users’ emotions and locations....

When I went car shopping recently, I was amazed by the autonomous technologies in most new models: automatic lane-keeping, braking to avoid collisions and parallel parking, for example. But I was appalled by the state of dashboard technology. Technology sells, so car companies are all about touch screens and apps these days. Unfortunately, they’re truly terrible at designing user interfaces (UIs)—the ways that you, the human, are supposed to interact with it, the car....

In this month’s Scientific American column I drafted a “Cellular Bill of Rights.” It documents all the ridiculous ways that cell phone carriers gouge, cheat and double-bill us. One of the most egregious tactics—one that’s bugged me for years—is the 15-second recording that the carrier makes us listen to when we’re leaving a voice-mail message. Especially when you’re in a hurry, having to sit through these idiotic instructions is deeply irritating....

The short answer is yes: you can learn to think more rationally but only about specific subjects. Enhancing rational thinking overall is much more difficult. Before exploring the question in more depth, we first need to define rational thinking. For this discussion, let’s stick with a relatively straightforward interpretation—rational thinking encompasses our ability to draw justifiable conclusions from data, rules and logic. Schooling can indeed improve rational thought, research suggests. A recent analysis of many studies showed that college courses contribute to critical thinking abilities....

All human societies have been shaped by religion, leading psychologists to wonder how it arose, and whether particular forms of belief have affected other aspects of evolved social structure. According to one recent view, for example, belief in a “big God”—an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions—has been instrumental in bringing about social and political complexity in human cultures. But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia—the network of small and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island—challenges that theory....

By Megan Rowling BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Deaths, economic losses and other negative impacts from disasters have caused losses equivalent to 42 million “life-years” annually since 1980, a measure that is comparable to the burden of tuberculosis worldwide, the United Nations said. More than 90% of the total life-years lost in disasters between 1980 and 2012 were in low and middle-income countries, representing a serious setback to their development, the U....

If the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once declared, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought that truth home for the world’s mathematicians, who have been galvanized by the rapid spread of the coronavirus. So far this year, they have been involved in everything from revealing how contagious the novel coronavirus is, how far we should stand from each other, how long an infected person might shed the virus, how a single strain spread from Europe to New York and then burst across America, and how to ‘‘flatten the curve’’ to save hundreds of thousands of lives....

The past 11 months have been the hottest such months in 135 years of recordkeeping, a streak that has itself set a record and puts in clear terms just how much the planet has warmed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. New global temperature data released on Friday by NASA put March at 2.3°F (1.28°C) above the 1951-1980 average for the month, making it the warmest March on record....

From Nature magazine Officials in Hungary united this week to condemn ongoing ethnic violence and anti-Semitic attacks, including an assault on the former Chief Rabbi on 5 June. But a cause for further soul-searching has emerged: a scientific scandal recalling discredited notions of racial purity. Hungary’s Medical Research Council (ETT), which advises the government on health policy, has asked public prosecutors to investigate a genetic-diagnostic company that certified that a member of parliament did not have Roma or Jewish heritage....

In research that could give doctors a way to reassign sex in cases of unclear gender, scientists report this week that they have figured out why some children with genes that should make them boys are instead born as girls. The study, published in Nature, explains why some embryos with X and Y chromosomes—which should be born as male—develop ovaries and eventually become girls. The key is whether a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, is active....

It’s no secret that binge drinking and faulty decision-making go hand in hand, but what if poor judgment lingered long after putting the bottle down and sobering up? A new study with rats suggests that heavy alcohol consumption in adolescence could put people on the road to risky behavior. Several studies have associated heavy drinking in youth with impaired judgment in adulthood, but these studies didn’t resolve whether alcohol abuse actually predisposes people to develop bad decision-making skills, or if the people who indulged in excessive inebriation were risk-taking types to begin with....

Language seems to override an innate ability to understand spatial relations. Researchers compared Dutch adults and children, who describe a spatial relation from the point of view of the speaker, with a group of adults and children from a hunter-gatherer community in Namibia, who rely on a viewer-independent description of a space. Researchers hid a block under one of five cups in front of them and asked the subjects to find a similar block under their own set of five cups in front of them....

Mars may one day have rings similar to Saturn’s famous halo, new research suggests. In a few tens of millions of years, the Red Planet may completely crush its innermost moon, Phobos, and form a ring of rocky debris, according to the new work. Phobos is moving closer to Mars every year, meaning the planet’s gravitational pull on the satellite is increasing. Some scientists have theorized that Phobos will eventually collide with Mars, but the new research suggests that the small moon may not last that long....

If during that soporific hour after lunch, you succumb to the temptation of a quick nap, you are liable to earn your boss’s displeasure. But judging by the latest results from sleep research, you should be getting a pat on the back. Mountains of evidence reveal that sleep enhances memory. Now Olaf Lahl of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany and his colleagues have struck a blow for power-napping by showing that falling asleep for only six minutes is enough to significantly enhance memory....

One of America’s great public health achievements in the 20th century was removing lead—an extremely useful but incredibly toxic metal—from gasoline, paint, water pipes and food cans. Children are particularly vulnerable to the damage the element inflicts on nerve cells and the brain. Swallowing very large amounts can trigger convulsions and ultimately kill someone in a matter of days, but eating or inhaling a little lead here and there over longer periods can result in lower IQ, hearing loss, and behavioral problems, such as hyperactivity....

Limited funding and a dearth of newly discovered particles are forcing physicists to cut back plans for their next major accelerator project: a multibillion-dollar facility known as the International Linear Collider (ILC) in Japan. On November 7, the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), which oversees work on the ILC, endorsed halving the machine’s planned energy from 500 to 250 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), and shortening its proposed 33.5-kilometre-long tunnel by as much as 13 kilometres....

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Industrialized nations’ greenhouse gas emissions fell by 1.3 percent in 2012, led by a U.S. decline to the lowest in almost two decades with a shift to natural gas from dirtier coal, official statistics show. Emissions from more than 40 nations were 10 percent below 1990 levels in 2012, according to a Reuters compilation of national data submitted to the United Nations in recent days that are the main gauge of efforts to tackle global warming....

Ask why most people are right-handed, and the answer might fall along the same lines as why fish school. Two neuroscientists suggest that social pressures drive individuals to coordinate their behaviors so that everyone in the group gets an evolutionary edge. Approximately 85 percent of people prefer their right hand, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. One theorized benefit of locating a particular function in one hemisphere is that it frees the other to deal with different tasks....

Global warming is altering—and threatening to erase—much more of the Marshall Islands than the shorelines of this independent Micronesian nation that once served as a Pacific Ocean nuclear weapons test site for the U.S. It is changing the vocabulary and heightening the risk of extinguishing the language and culture of daily life. Locals already have integrated the phrases “climate change” and “seawall” into the nation’s two predominant dialects of the Marshallese language, which is unique to this archipelagic country....