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As he was walking to a math class during his freshman year at Ohio State University, R. J. Kromer spotted a poster for a student-run team designing a fuel-cell-powered car. He had never built anything more complex than Lego-based robot kits, but he sent an e-mail to the group asking to join anyway. To his surprise, the team members responded immediately. “I thought there would be all kinds of requirements,” Kromer recalls, “but they said, ‘No, just show up....

A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved fishbowls. The sponsors of the measure explained that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl because the curved sides give the fish a distorted view of reality. Aside from the measure’s significance to the poor goldfish, the story raises an interesting philosophical question: How do we know that the reality we perceive is true?...

Last August Tadhgh Rainey, division manager at the Hunterdon County Division of Public Health Services in Flemington, N.J., received an odd phone call. An assistant in a nearby building excitedly explained to him that a woman had walked into their office covered in tiny ticks—far more than they had ever seen on one person. “She’s really scared—and now we’re kind of scared, and her pants are in our freezer,” the assistant said....

In 1940 Action Comics introduced a brilliant supervillain named Lex Luthor who tries to kill Superman to advance his plot to rule the world. More recently, news articles have portrayed Bernard Madoff as an “evil genius” because of his Ponzi scheme that siphoned some $20 billion from investors. We think of an evil genius as someone who devises a clever plan for wrongdoing on a large scale. According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely of Duke University, however, the genius of the perpetrators often manifests itself not in elaborate planning of misdeeds but in almost the exact opposite: an unplanned escalation of a minor wrong they imaginatively have justified to themselves....

You’re walking down a narrow corridor. Someone is walking toward you, so you step to one side. But in that moment, they step to the same side. You make eye contact, grin awkwardly and then, without a word, negotiate a way around each other. Our lives are full of these delicate social dances. Whether we’re having a conversation, playing a game or trying to avoid collisions with passersby, our social interactions are reciprocal....

The capacity for violence is an illness with a cure in this graphic novel. Society restricts the few “incurables” to a lawless region called the Quarantine Zone, patrolled by enforcers who keep the incurables out and the disease contained. When an enforcer is exposed to the virus that allows aggression, he ends up on the run in the zone and discovers that having an ability for evil does not necessarily mean people will choose to act on it....

Self-Cleaning Solar Panels The best places to collect solar energy are also some of the dustiest on Earth. When dirt settles on a solar panel, it blocks sunlight, preventing the panel from efficiently converting rays into electricity. A solution, according to new research by Malay Mazumder, a research professor in Boston University’s department of electrical and computer engineering, is to coat solar cells with an electrically charged material that repels the dust particles....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pets in Colonial America were kept by the colonists for the same reasons they were in Europe: for companionship and, in the case of dogs, for protection, hunting, and herding. Cats controlled vermin in homes and barns until the 18th century when they became valued as house pets....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Steam power was one of the most significant developments of the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) in Britain. First invented as a pump in the 1690s, a host of inventors tweaked designs and tinkered with machinery until an efficient and powerful alternative to muscle, water, and wind power attracted commercial users....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient site of Megiddo was the scene of a number of battles in antiquity and is best known as the source of the word armageddon, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Har-Megiddo (‘Mount of Megiddo’) from the biblical Book of Revelation 16:16. Revelation 16:16 is the only use of the word in the Bible and designates the site of the final battle between the forces of the Christian god and those of his adversary Satan....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Almost 700 years of continuous Roman occupation have left impressive traces in the Spanish landscape. Spain was then known as ‘Hispania’ and is now a fascinating location for the archaeological traveller. Stage Building of the Theatre of Augusta Emerita (Mérida, Spain)Carole Raddato (CC BY-NC-SA) The Spanish provinces were amongst the first to be conquered by Rome in its relentless expansion through the Mediterranean....

New DNA sequencing data reinforce the notion that the X and Y chromosomes, which determine biological sex in mammals, are locked in an evolutionary battle for supremacy. David Page, a biologist who directs the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues explored the Y chromosomes carried by males of several species, mapping stretches of mysterious, repetitive DNA in unprecedented detail. These stretches may signal a longstanding clash of the chromosomes....

In the past few years, a number of studies have suggested that pricing algorithms can learn to offer different prices to different consumers based on their unique purchasing history or preferences. And some research suggests that this strategy, referred to as “personalized pricing,” can unintentionally lead an algorithm to set higher prices for disadvantaged minority groups. For instance, brokers often charge higher interest rates to racial and ethnic minorities, and one possible factor is where people live: programs could target areas that have less competition....

An ambitious new mapping project has given scientists one of their most complete looks yet at the movement of glaciers all around Antarctica. The key finding: Far more glaciers are losing ground than gaining ice. The study fuels a growing concern among scientists about the factors affecting the Antarctic ice sheet—namely, that warm ocean waters are helping to melt glaciers and drive greater levels of ice loss, particularly in West Antarctica....

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reaffirmed its ban on research that involves gene-editing of human embryos. In a statement released on April 29, NIH director Francis Collins spelled out the agency’s long-standing policy against funding such research and the ethical and legal reasons for it. The statement comes after Nature’s report last week that researchers in China had used a gene-editing technology called CRISPR to remove disease genes from a human embryo....

Twila Tardif, a linguist at the University of Michigan, remembers the day she and her Mandarin-speaking babysitter watched as Tardif’s 11-month-old daughter crawled over to a pen that had just fallen on the floor and pointed to it. “Pen!” Tardif told her daughter in Mandarin just as her sitter said, “Grab!” also in Mandarin. Then they looked at each other in puzzlement. Tardif realized that caregivers in different cultures might be influencing which words babies learn first....

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that some baby bottles contain chemicals that can cause health problems for babies? If so, how can I find alternatives that are safer? – Amy Gorman, Berkeley, CA No links connecting specific human illnesses to chemicals oozing out of baby bottles have been proven definitively. Nonetheless, many parents are heeding the call of scientists to switch to products with less risk. A 2008 report by American and Canadian environmental researchers entitled “Baby’s Toxic Bottle” found that plastic polycarbonate baby bottles leach dangerous levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic chemical that mimics natural hormones and can send bodily processes into disarray, when heated....

At a crowded party or a noisy restaurant, most of us do something that is remarkable. Out of all the voices surrounding us, our brains pick out the one we want to hear and focus on what that person has to say. People with hearing loss are not so fortunate. Noisy situations are especially difficult for them and hearing aids and cochlear implants do not help much. Such technology generally either amplifies all voices or mushes them together so they are indistinguishable....

Since its discovery in the early 1990s, functional MRI has been the basis for more than 19,000 studies of the living, working brain. The technique allows scientists an unprecedented glimpse of the brain regions that are most active during particular tasks or states of mind, but it does not do so directly: the scans measure blood flow, which seems to increase around neurons that are firing. Neurons are not directly connected to blood vessels, however, so until now the mechanism underlying fMRI’s robust success has been a mystery....

Just below the ocean’s surface, coral reefs are under constant assault by seaweeds that seek to take control by stealing the corals’ prime sunlit location for themselves. Many of these plant invaders come equipped with deadly chemical weapons that knock down the corals’ metabolism, which might come off as an unfair fight against a seemingly unarmed foe. But corals are not defenseless: as a recent paper in Science shows, they have fish bodyguards at the ready to mount a defense....