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True to their name, glasswing butterflies sport remarkably transparent wings that help them hide in plain sight. New work shows how narrow, bristlelike scales and a waxy, glare-cutting coating combine to make parts of the wings nearly invisible. Most moths and butterflies get their vibrant colors from flat scales that tile the wing surface like shingles; relatively few species have clear wings. Nipam Patel, an evolutionary and developmental biologist at the Marine Biology Laboratory, first investigated the wings of several such species with his students in an embryology class....

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted 15-8 to approve a sweeping energy bill today after months of work, sending the measure to the Senate floor, where many are vowing to make changes. Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Robert Menendez of New Jersey voted against the bill, and Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Bob Corker of Tennessee supported it....

Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, dotes on his eight huskies. On winter weekends he takes them dogsledding on the snow-covered trails near his house in Ottawa. As the number of dogs has grown, though, so have the chores. Pychyl dreads one duty above all others: clipping their claws, all 150 (or so) of them. “One of my dogs takes two or three people to pin him down, that’s how much he doesn’t like it,” Pychyl recounts....

Major U.S. cities may be leaking far more methane into the atmosphere than government estimates suggest. New measurements found that up to twice as much gas is being released from six cities on the East Coast — Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Boston; New York; Providence, R.I.; and Baltimore — than estimates recorded by EPA. Their combined methane emissions are higher than those at some of the nation’s biggest natural gas production centers, including the Four Corners region and the Bakken Shale in the Dakotas....

The space shuttle era is finished, its vehicles museum-bound. The deep-space forays of Apollo astronauts are long gone, their final moon voyage nearly 40 years in the past. And still, space today is more crowded than ever. Since the space age began, the orbital realm has become increasingly littered with the detritus of skyward human striving—spent rocket boosters, dead satellites, stray pieces of hardware. And in the past decade that debris has piled up with such speed that it has become an inescapable threat to the space-faring endeavors that spawned it in the first place....

By Carey Gillam and Lisa Baertlein (Reuters) - The Vermont Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would make it the first U.S. state to enact mandatory labeling of foods made with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Unlike bills passed last year in Maine and Connecticut, which require other states to pass GMO labeling laws before they can be enacted, Vermont’s contains no such trigger clause. Vermont’s effort comes as the developers of genetically modified crops and the $360 billion U....

There seems to be a simple way to instantly increase a person’s level of general knowledge. Psychologists Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan recently asked two groups of people to answer questions. People in one group were told that before each question, the answer would be briefly flashed on their screens — too quickly to consciously perceive, but slow enough for their unconscious to take it in. The other group was told that the flashes simply signaled the next question....

Antibiotics save lives, but they are not fail-safe. Even when microbes haven’t acquired drug-evading genetic mutations—a hallmark of antibiotic resistance—the medications don’t always clear infections. A new study identifies a surprising reason why: At infection sites, antibiotics change the natural mixture of chemicals made by the body in ways that protect infecting bacteria. They also thwart the ability of the host’s immune cells to fight off the intruders. These findings, published Thursday in Cell Host & Microbe, could help scientists “build more effective treatments,” says James Collins, a biological engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and senior author of the paper....

Even as electronics have shrunk more and more, motors, hydraulics and other gadgets used to drive motion have stubbornly resisted the trend. It is difficult to make and assemble minuscule mechanisms that can provide the forces and handle the stresses needed to drive exceptionally small moving parts. This week in Science, several teams of researchers present studies describing advances in making small artificial muscles—all of which use tiny twisted fibers to store and release energy....

Treating Ebola patients with blood transfusions from survivors of the disease should be the immediate priority among all the experimental therapies under consideration for this outbreak, World Health Organization (WHO) experts said Friday after reviewing the status of all the potential experimental therapies and vaccines. “We agreed that whole-blood therapies and convalescent serum may be used to treat Ebola virus disease and that all efforts must be invested into helping affected countries use them safely,” Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director general for health systems and innovation at WHO told reporters....

Organophosphorous chemical weapons, such as sarin and soman, interfere with signals between nerve cells, and have recently been used to deadly effect in places such as Syria. Researchers are therefore trying to develop techniques that detect these chemical weapons in the environment, and destroy them. Mike Ward and his group at the University of Sheffield in the UK may have found a way, using self-assembled supramolecular cages—large, hollow molecular structures that can act as a host to smaller molecules....

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta – On a chilly December night in Alberta, in the heart of the country’s oil boom, cab driver Milan Malusic complains about the gasoline-like odors from oil sands facilities that seep through his car windows on a daily basis. The 46-year-old says he hates the drives past the massive pit mines and accompanying smokestacks processing the gooey form of petroleum known as bitumen. Canada holds the second-largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia, and the majority of that is buried underneath sandy earth in an area the size of Florida in this province....

Like many of her fellow undergraduates at the University of British Columbia, Lauren Emberson relied on public transportation to get around town. All too often, Emberson encountered a seemingly inescapable nuisance inside TransLink—Vancouver’s crowded mass transit buses and trains: other passengers’ cell phone conversations. “They drove me up the wall,” Emberson says. “There was no way to tune them out. I would be trying to read or listen to music and I felt like I couldn’t continue with those tasks....

In the city that never sleeps, the lights burn all night. And New York City needs energy for those lights, as well as for heating, air-conditioning and many other services. To meet these demands, the Big Apple belched nearly 60 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2005. Eight years later, despite a rise in population and new construction, emissions of greenhouse gas pollution had dropped by more than 11 million metric tons....

Buried in the Interior Department’s plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is an admission that oil and gas development may lead to extinctions in the remote expanse of Alaska. The final environmental impact statement for oil and gas leasing in ANWR, released on Thursday by the Bureau of Land Management, downplays the impact that drilling would have on the climate. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are cast as part of a natural cycle reaching back to the ice age, while human emissions are described as being indirect effects of oil drilling....

Astronomers have in the past 20 years located several hundred planets orbiting distant stars, and they have only scratched the surface. In a small patch of stars—less than 1 percent of the sky—in the Northern Hemisphere, NASA’s Kepler mission has already found more than 100 planets, along with strong hints of thousands more. Stars across the sky ought to be similarly laden with planets. A recent study indicated that each star hosts, on average, 1....

The orchestra crescendos as a woman of ample proportions strides to the front of the stage, blonde braids trailing from under a horned helmet. Her gilded bosom heaves as she inhales, opens her lipsticked maw and lets loose an earthshaking high note. Champagne flutes shatter, monocles crack and the chandelier explodes as the power of her voice wreaks havoc on the concert hall. The scene is in countless cartoons and comedies, but is this parody based on reality?...

Aids researchers and advocates were devastated in 2007, when a much anticipated vaccine against HIV unexpectedly failed to protect anyone in a clinical trial of 3,000 people. Even worse, the experimental inoculation, developed with money from the Merck pharmaceutical company and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, actually increased the chances that some people would later acquire HIV. Millions of dollars and more than a decade of research had gone into creating the vaccine....

By Helen Thompson of Nature magazineFor Ohio, a Midwestern state hit hard by recession, the promise of an energy boom driven by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking', would seem to be a sure route to financial health. Far less certain is whether the technique has an impact on human health. Fracking uses high-pressure fluids to fracture shale formations deep below ground, releasing the natural gas trapped within. With the number of gas wells in Ohio that use fracking set to mushroom from 77 to more than 2,300 in the next three years, the state is the latest to try to regulate a rapidly growing industry while grappling with a serious knowledge gap....

Do you ever have that moment where you step back and think about how something you use every day actually works? More specifically have you ever wondered how the heck computers actually communicate wirelessly? Well, that’s exactly the question we’re going to be tackling in today’s podcast. What Is WiFi? First, let’s cover some of the basics. WiFi stands for Wireless Fidelity and is the same thing as saying WLAN which stands for “Wireless Local Area Network....