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In 1688 Irish philosopher William Molyneux wrote to his colleague John Locke with a puzzle that continues to draw the interest of philosophers and scientists to this day. The idea was simple: Would a person born blind, who has learned to distinguish objects by touch, be able to recognize them purely by sight if he or she regained the ability to see? The question, known as Molyneux’s problem, probes whether the human mind has a built-in concept of shapes that is so innate that such a blind person could immediately recognize an object with restored vision....

Bighearted Burmese pythons can get into cardiac shape just by eating. These snakes typically go weeks to months without food. Once they swallow their prey, they boost their metabolism to digest the meal by temporarily making fresh heart muscle. Their cardiac growth is the fastest ever measured, reports a team from the University of California at Irvine in a study of 18 pythons. Size of (rat) meal, as a percent of python mass: 25 Mass of heart when fasting, in grams: 0....

Bats have been pinpointed as a source of the coronavirus that has infected 94 people, killing 47 of them, since it emerged in the Middle East in April last year. An international team of researchers has found a tiny genetic fragment that seems to be from the virus in a faecal sample from an Egyptian tomb bat. The scientists surveyed 96 bats in Saudi Arabia in October and April, after the first cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) were reported there....

In 2007 the Harvard professor Robert Putnam published a paper that appeared to challenge the benefits of living in a racially diverse society. Putnam’s study, which used a large, nationally representative sample of nearly 30,000 Americans, found that people living in more diverse areas reported lower levels of trust in their neighbors. They also reported less interest in voting, volunteering, and giving to charity. In other words, greater diversity seemed to be linked to both feelings and behaviors that threaten a sense of community....

NOVEMBER 1957 SPACE AGE BEGINS— “The earth’s first man-made satellite, called sputnik (Russian for ‘fellow traveler’), became spaceborne around midnight (Moscow time) on October 4. The U.S.S.R. gave no advance notice of the launching, and in the first days of sputnik’s flight little information about the satellite was released to the rest of the world. The ‘bird’ itself was a sphere with a diameter of 58 centimeters (about 23 inches). It carried two radio transmitters....

Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles....

Surface 2 is a stellar piece of hardware, but Microsoft needs to be more open about where RT is headed. (Credit: Microsoft) It might be a good idea now for Microsoft to be more public about the direction of its tablet operating system so consumers know what they’re buying into. I like the Surface 2 and the Nokia Lumia 2520. A lot. As hardware, they’re two of the best tablets out there....

Over just a few weeks, I received e-mail messages from several banks warning me that my online banking services were in danger of being deactivated, from eBay telling me that I needed to change my password, from Apple complaining that I had unpaid bills for music downloads, from an airline offering me the opportunity to earn a quick $50 for filling out a survey and from the Red Cross asking me to contribute money to help earthquake victims in China....

Fortunately, I knew something that most of these people didn’t: I could grab an item off the shelf, scan it with my iPhone and walk right out. Thanks to the free Apple Store app, I didn’t have to wait in line or even find an employee. The purchase was instantly billed to my Apple account. I was in and out of there in two minutes. Apple, in other words, has reached new heights in reducing friction—which benefits it as much as its customers....

LONDON – The world’s cities are mushrooming at the rate of around 1 million people a week as the planet’s population heads toward 9 billion people by 2050 from 7 billion now. Urban areas are set to sprawl over an extra area equivalent to most of Europe within 20 years, yet little is being done to prepare for the major challenges that expansion will bring, scientists said Tuesday. Already more than half the world’s population is urbanized – a fraction, they said, that would surge to some two-thirds by midcentury if current projections hold true....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Europe’s new data privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation, have taken effect, but what they actually mean remains to be discovered. And whether the GDPR, as it’s known, really helps protect your private data may depend on complaints that Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist, filed against Google, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on the day the regulation went into effect....

The end of the cold war and ongoing arms-control efforts by the U.S., Russia and other countries have greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear annihilation. But rogue nations and continued tensions make a local exchange of nuclear firepower all too real. A single detonation can cause horrible death in several ways. The Hiroshima blast—equal to about 15 kilotons of TNT—generated supersonic wind speeds that crushed concrete buildings near ground zero....

Organic chemists Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs, and Richard Schrock have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their groundbreaking research on a reaction called metathesis, which breaks the bonds of carbon-based molecules so that they can be combined with other elements including hydrogen, oxygen and chlorine to form new molecules. Not only has the process resulted in new compounds used to make everything from living tissue to plastics to therapeutic drugs for treating Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis and HIV/AIDS, but it also produces fewer environmentally hazardous byproducts than previous methods did....

I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. —George Washington, letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, 1784 That is one view of privacy. Here is another: We must all watch one another. —Rev. Robert Browne, guiding principles, 1582 Browne was an Anglican minister, and his dark view of the human spirit as weak and prone to wickedness without the constant “support” of a community of spies and informers had enormous influence on the New England Puritans....

The universe just got a new speeding ticket. The most precise measurement ever made of the speed of the universe’s expansion is in, thanks to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and it’s a doozy. Space itself is pulling apart at the seams, expanding at a rate of 74.3 plus or minus 2.1 kilometers (46.2 plus or minus 1.3 miles) per second per megaparsec (a megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years). If those numbers are a little too much to contemplate, rest assured that’s really, really fast....

A decade ago Willy Ssengooba began crisscrossing Uganda, training health-care workers on how to use a new machine to detect tuberculosis. The deadly lung disease infects around 90,000 people in the East African nation annually, but it can sometimes take months to diagnose using traditional methods such as culturing samples of coughed-up sputum. These new machines used rapid molecular testing to yield results within a couple of hours, meaning patients who tested positive could immediately be referred for lifesaving treatment....

Several projects coordinated by MIT’s Senseable City lab have revealed the powerful urban insights that can occur when people are linked via networks of sensors. Video and animations about a selection of such projects can be seen below. LIVE Singapore uses real-time data recorded by myriad communications devices, microcontrollers and sensors to analyze the pulse of the city, telling residents how they can reach their homes fastest, reduce their neighborhood’s energy consumption and find a taxi when a rainstorm hits....

A new kind of hollow, pea-sized robot can roll, flip and jump to navigate its surroundings. It can transition from dry surfaces to pools of liquid with ease, making it fully amphibious. Its ability to use different types of motion in multiple environments—while carrying a cargo—sets it apart from other wee machines, most of which can only move in a single way. The new bot’s versatility also makes it uniquely adept at working its way through, over and around obstacles....

Last year, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) voted overwhelmingly to amend its by-laws so that it could expel members for harassment or other types of misconduct. Nearly 16 months later, no one has been ousted and no one has used the new system to report known harassers within the NAS’s membership, Nature has learned. Marcia McNutt, president of the NAS, confirmed that although the academy has reviewed two or three reports of other types of misconduct since amending its by-laws, it has not received any reports concerning harassers....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Mulan (“magnolia”) is a legendary character in Chinese literature who is best known in the modern day from the Disney filmed adaptations (1998, 2020). Her story, however, about a young girl who takes her father’s place in the army to help save her country, is hundreds of years old...