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By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineEach year, thousands of macaques and other monkeys are flown into Europe and North America to supply academic and industrial research labs – more than 18,000 to the United States in 2011 alone. But in a campaign that could affect scientists across the West, the few major air carriers that still transport non-human primates are coming under unprecedented pressure to halt the practice.One key route under threat is from China, which last year shipped more than 70 percent of the research primates sent to the United States (see “Up in the air”)....

What causes shin splints? —E. BACHMAN, AUSTIN, TEX. Claude T. Moorman III, director of sports medicine at Duke University Medical Center, offers an answer: “Shin splints,” the layman’s term for the painful sensations felt at the front of the shinbone (tibia) after exercise, occur when the constant pounding and stresses placed on the muscles, bones and joints overwhelm the body’s natural ability to repair damage and restore itself. We commonly see shin splints in athletes, military recruits and even in middle-aged weekend warriors, especially at the beginning of milder weather....

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. – Tiffany Mellers jogs behind her two daughters as they pedal their bikes along a ribbon of packed sand along Long Island Sound. “They are good girls,” Mellers said. “They deserve a healthy life.” Behind them, a 500-foot tall candy-stripe smokestack, a fixture of Bridgeport’s waterfront for nearly five decades, rises in the distance. A third generation of residents is now growing up in its shadow. But today this old giant is merely a vestige of the region’s coal-fired past....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Paul Knauth scrambled up a steep, rocky canyon in the Black Mountains of Death Valley National Park, sporting gloves and a walking stick to help navigate the sharp scree. The desert floor shimmering below holds the record as the hottest place on Earth, but in late February, wildflowers were sprouting from tiny fissures. We stepped carefully, lest we endanger their fragile existence — or our limbs....

PROFILE NAME Gino Strada AGE 65 TITLE Surgeon; Founder of Emergency (an Italian NGO) LOCATION Khartoum, Sudan Building on the success of your Salam Center for Cardiac Surgery in Sudan, you plan to open 10 free hospitals throughout Africa. Funding will come from Emergency, the NGO you founded in 1994. Can you talk about your approach? If I look at the health indicators in Africa, I see something that is very, very similar to what the situation was in Europe 200 years ago....

When a scent diffuses into the air, it does not form a perceptible perimeter that intensifies as a tracker gets closer to its source. An odor in a nonturbulent medium would essentially be traceable via a consistent concentration gradient—a process called chemotaxis—but in flowing air the smell would instead dissipate as small, occasional plumes, as happens to pheromones from female moths. When a male moth picks up a female’s fractured scent, he appears to dart wildly as he homes in on the potential mate....

The New York Times Company saves energy at its 52-story headquarters by using the oldest lighting technology in the world: the sun. Floor-to-ceiling windows let daylight flood in, and sensors then dim internal lights to save electricity. Compared with other buildings in New York City, the Times Building has reduced its energy use by 24 percent, notes a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (lbnl). The energy used to light, cool and vent buildings in cities around the world accounts for roughly 40 percent of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions, the greenhouse gas primarily responsible for climate change....

Despite the number of key world leaders expected to be absent from the U.N. secretary-general’s world leaders’ summit on climate change this month, the incoming president of the next round of global warming negotiations predicts success. Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal told ClimateWire that he is not overly concerned by reports that the leaders of India, China, Australia and Germany are reportedly sending ministers to the Sept. 23 summit in New York....

In the late 1960s a team of researchers began doling out a nutritional supplement to families with young children in rural Guatemala. They were testing the assumption that providing enough protein in the first few years of life would reduce the incidence of stunted growth. It did. Children who got supplements grew one to two centimeters taller than those in a control group. But the benefits did not stop there. The children who received added nutrition went on to score higher on reading and knowledge tests as adolescents, and when researchers returned in the early 2000s, women who had received the supplements in the first three years of life completed more years of schooling and men had higher incomes....

Earth’s climate can be sensitive, changing after a variety of events. A volcanic eruption or meteorite impact, for instance, can send enough particles into the air to block the sun and cool the climate. A thickening blanket of greenhouse gases can trap heat. And, more commonly, according to some scientists, slight changes in Earth’s orientation toward the sun can cause it to cool or warm in so-called Milankovitch cycles (named after the Serbian engineer who first described them)....

Most humans think of the placenta as something that gets tossed out after childbirth. In fact, its appearance millions of years ago was a significant evolutionary development that gave rise to the vast majority of mammals alive today, from bats to whales to humans. Until now, scientists believed that placental mammals first appeared some 125 million years ago. At that point, they branched off from the lineage that developed into modern marsupials, which nourish their young in their pouches instead of through placentas....

On a sunny spring day one of us (Dixon) entered the London Underground at the Mile End station on his way to Heath­row Airport. Eyeing a stranger, one of more than three million daily passengers on the Tube, he idly wondered: What is the probability the stranger would emerge at, say, Wimbledon? How could you ever figure that out, given that the person could take any number of routes? As he thought about it, he realized that the question was similar to the knotty problems that face particle physicists who seek to make predictions for particle collisions in modern experiments....

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Although the authors are both on the side of science, they have not always agreed about the best ways to oppose religiously motivated threats to scientific practice or instruction. Krauss, a leading physicist, frequently steps into the public spotlight to argue in favor of retaining evolutionary theory in school science curricula and keeping pseudoscientific variants of creationism out of them. An open letter he sent to Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, urging the pontiff not to build new walls between science and faith, led the Vatican to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s acceptance of natural selection as a valid scientific theory....

The threat of total nuclear annihilation seems to have receded since the demise of the Soviet Union. China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, the U.K. and even Russia are U.S. allies or, at worst, nonbelligerent competitors with (Russia notwithstanding) limited nuclear arsenals. North Korea and Iran, although both enemies of the U.S., do not as yet possess the weaponry to inflict massive nuclear harm on this nation. In fact, the most pressing nuclear threat appears to be a “dirty bomb”—a conventional explosive packed with radioactive material—or a small nuclear explosive smuggled into the country....

Key concepts Physics Forces Motion Centrifugal force Circular motion Acceleration Introduction Have you ever wondered what keeps you in your seat when you’re riding a giant loop-de-loop roller coaster? Surprisingly, it’s not only the seat belt! You’re kept in your seat because of something called centripetal force. Centripetal force actually does much more than make a ride on a roller coaster’s loop possible—it keeps satellites in orbit and you in your bicycle when taking a turn!...

Inflammation has become one of the hottest buzzwords in medical science, pointed to as a culprit in causing or aggravating conditions ranging from allergy to autism to Alzheimer’s disease. But it’s far from clear that standard anti-inflammatory drugs, which have been around for decades, will help patients with those conditions, especially since they often come with dangerous side effects. So in labs across the country, scientists are trying to puzzle through the basic biology, understanding how inflammation leads to disease — and whether it’s possible to develop drugs that could interrupt that process....

Dr. Richard Cytowic is one of the leading researchers of synesthesia, a condition in which two normally separated sensations - such as sight and sound, or touch and taste - occur at the same time. As a result, a synesthetic person might experience the taste of a dish on her fingertips, or be convinced that the letter X is a vibrant turquoise. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Cytowic about his new book, Wednesday is Indigo Blue, which he co-wrote with David Eagleman....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Just as in other ancient civilizations, the first banks in Rome began in the temples consecrated to the ancient Gods. Many temples held in their basements the Romans’ money and treasure, and were involved in banking activities such as lending. Because they were always occupied by devout workers and priests and regularly patrolled by soldiers, wealthy Romans felt they were safe places to deposit money....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Life for monks in a medieval monastery, just like in any profession or calling, had its pros and cons. While they were expected to live simply with few possessions, attend services at all hours of the day and night, and perhaps even take a vow of silence, monks could at least benefit from a secure roof over their heads....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Propaganda played an important role in Octavian (l. 63 BCE - 14 CE) and Mark Antony’s (l. 83 – 30 BCE) civil war, and once victorious at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), Octavian returned home to become the first Roman emperor. The decade preceding their civil war was a decisive one....