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True neuroprosthetic limbs—artificial limbs that feel and behave like the real thing—may be in the distant future. But the results of a new study have brought the technology one step closer to reality. A team led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh has electrically stimulated the brain of a paralyzed man, allowing him to feel the sensation of touch in his hand again. Recreating that sense fully is one of the greatest challenges facing the field of neuroprosthetics....

Imagine this: you have an opportunity to make a little extra money and you can double your earnings if you lie. Would you do it? If you’re like most people, your decision would depend on the circumstances. What would you be lying about? To whom? And how much money would be at stake? Yet for some, the decision would also depend on the time of day. According to recent research, some people are more likely to lie in the afternoon than in the morning....

When boa constrictors and other strangling snakes wrap their prey in a deadly embrace, they don’t just exert pressure on their victim; they put the squeeze on their own lungs as well. Now new research shows how these remarkable reptiles use a sophisticated breathing technique to avoid suffocating themselves. Instead of using a diaphragm muscle to inflate their lungs as mammals do, snakes activate a series of muscles around their extremely long rib cage....

Dr. Yancy’s and NitroMed’s responses makes several unexceptionable observations about the nature of heart failure and the value of providing BiDil as an adjunctive therapy to help reduce mortality from this debilitating and ultimately fatal disease. In this we find ourselves in agreement. Our primary area of disagreement is my conclusion that doctors should consider prescribing BiDil (or its generic equivalents) to everybody, regardless of their race. I fail to see how it is a “misguided passion” or “negative rhetoric” to argue that more, not fewer, patients should have this therapy be made available to them....

About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a small-scale model of a room that was part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room, with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on....

CLIMATEWIRE | New policies established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency aimed at helping individuals qualify for disaster aid have resulted in nearly 100,000 people receiving assistance who would have been ineligible previously, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said yesterday. FEMA last summer expanded the types of documentation that people can use to show that they live in an area that was declared a federal disaster or own a home that was damaged in a disaster and are eligible for cash assistance, hotel stays and other emergency aid....

Researchers have developed a lightweight, reusable sensor that clips onto a mask to monitor how well it’s working. The device, called FaceBit, senses leaks and records wear time while continuously measuring a wearer’s heart and breathing rate. Its developers hope it will aid research and help health care workers and others who wear face coverings throughout the day to battle the transmission of diseases such as COVID. Every time mask wearers cough, scratch or make certain facial expressions, their face covering shifts—and a busy worker may not have time to recheck mask fit each time one of these movements occurs....

Social networking over the Web has helped connect millions of Internet users, but all of this online interaction can also have a serious downside: a proliferation of pedophiles who use code words to trade in child pornography or prowl chat rooms and befriend underage victims, peppering their messages with words like “kewl” and other youthful colloquialisms. In a move that pits technology against criminals (and, some fear, privacy), a group of researchers at Lancaster University in England and law-enforcement officials at the United Kingdom’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP) is developing software that tracks the Web’s evolving child pornography lexicon as well as predators’ chat strategies to help law-enforcement agencies catch the most secretive of these criminals before they strike....

SAN FRANCISCO—Not every year can be a record setter in the Arctic. But records are only one small piece of a larger puzzle that shows persistent change in the Arctic. And that change hasn’t slowed according to this year’s Arctic Report Card released at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting on Wednesday. Long-term trends in rising temperatures, spiraling sea ice loss, and ecosystem shifts paint a picture of a region in transition due to climate change that is transpiring at a much faster rate than the rest of the globe....

Each of us has a rich inner mental life, one that seems inaccessible to everyone else. To others, we believe, we represent a kind of human terra incognita. After all, how can anybody really know what is on our mind? As it turns out, however, our feelings and thoughts are only too visible to those who know how to look. You will learn why in our special report, “The Body Speaks....

To ancient peoples of the American Southwest, a macaw’s brilliant feathers weren’t just adornments. They were status symbols and spiritual emblems—so precious, in fact, that macaws were kept in captivity and deliberately plucked of their plumage, new evidence suggests. Macaw skeletons from three prehistoric pueblos in New Mexico bear signs of feather harvesting, according to analysis presented on March 31 at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada....

Migrating terns may alter their flight plans based on a keen sense of approaching typhoons, escaping the brunt of the storms but still benefiting from feeding opportunities in their wakes. Researchers at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology examined data recorded by tracking devices on six black-naped terns from Okinawa, Japan, to learn more about the birds’ migrations over multiple years. The terns flew across part of the Philippine Sea’s “typhoon highway” to get to the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi and varied their departure times—often apparently waiting to leave until a large typhoon was about to cross their projected path....

In February 2021, seven Russian poultry-farm workers were reported to have been infected with H5N8 avian influenza. This subtype of bird flu had never been known to infect people before, and the virus’s genetic sequence was quickly uploaded to the genetic data repository GISAID. For Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC, it presented an opportunity. “I immediately thought, ‘I want to run this through FluLeap’,” he says....

For most of the 140 years since it was named, the disorder known as burning man syndrome has operated in near-total obscurity. Even today it afflicts perhaps 200 to 500 people in all of North America and a few thousand worldwide. Until about three years ago, essentially all medical knowledge about it was contained in its name, erythromelalgia, which translates as “painful red extremities.” Few doctors knew of it, only a handful had seen it, and none knew what caused it or how to treat it....

Editor’s Note (8/11/16): The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is announcing today that it will keep marijuana illegal for any purpose (classified as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act), but the government will soften rules for marijuana research to make it easier to grow the plant for scientific study. The following article was originally published in the lead-up to this decision. Speculation is growing about the possibility that the U....

Russia’s placement of its nuclear arsenal on high alert during the war in Ukraine has unearthed fears of nuclear holocaust. As governments across the world consider their own roles in lessening the risk of nuclear war, the U.S. cannot excuse itself. We should talk about stemming a future nuclear impact, but equally important is reckoning with our past. Between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. nuclear testing program drenched the Marshall Islands with firepower equaling the energy yield of 7,000 Hiroshima bombs....

Ticks that spread Lyme disease don’t always deliver their misery neat. They can serve up a cocktail of pathogens with one infectious bite. “They are nature’s dirty needle,” said Kathryn Fishman, who suffered for years from fatigue and mental confusion before blood tests revealed she had Lyme and two other lesser-known pathogens. She is office manager for her physician husband’s practice in Maryland and Virginia that focuses on tick-borne diseases. Lyme disease has gotten the headlines....

When a baby passes through its mother’s birth canal, it is bathed in a soup of microbes. Those born by caesarean section (C-section) miss out on this bacterial baptism, and researchers are sharply split on whether that increases the risk of chronic health problems such as obesity and asthma. A wave of clinical trials now under way could help to settle the question—and feed into the debate over whether seeding babies born by C-section with their mother’s vaginal bacteria is beneficial or potentially harmful....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Chariot racing was very big business in ancient Rome. There was a whole industry built around the factions, the four professional stables known by their team colour – Blue, Green, Red, and White –, providing all that was required for a race: horses, stable managers, blacksmiths, doctors, assistants to the charioteers, operators for the gate starting mechanisms....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Join World History Encyclopedia as they talk to author and professor Greg Woolf all about his book Rome: An Empire’s Story, Second Edition, published by Oxford University Press. Kelly (WHE): Do you want to just tell everyone what the book is about? Advertisement Greg Woolf (Author): Well, it is what it says on the cover!...