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Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ireland is filled with historical sites and monuments. The ‘Emerald Isle’ always has something new in store for those who venture there and are eager to learn about its fascinating past. Many sites have a mystical past told through legends of gods, goddesses, and supernatural beings, and the sites often became sacred to Christian converts and saints....

Your walls, clothes and teeth not white enough for you? Good news: scientists have identified the source of the dazzling whiteness of a beetle called Cyphochilus, and harnessing that knowledge could help make everything from paints to t-shirts more blindingly white. It turns out that the bug’s scales contain a porous network of random protein fibers that scatter all wavelengths of light strongly, the prerequisite for an intense white color....

By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - With California facing its worst drought in decades, farmers, environmentalists and government officials begged lawmakers Monday to invest in projects to shore up the state’s water supply. The demands from Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, The Nature Conservancy and Northern California water districts are an effort to help break a deadlock in the state legislature over how to prevent future water shortages. The demands range from environmental restoration work for rivers and wetlands to building new reservoirs....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Monday it would give rewards amounting to 5 billion yuan ($816.91 million) for curbing air pollution in six regions where the problem is serious, underscoring government concern about a source of public anger.The Finance Ministry said the regions eligible for the rewards were Beijing and its neighboring city of Tianjin, the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong, as well as the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region....

Mike Marshall, the 1974 National League Cy Young Award winner and an associate professor of physical education, most recently at West Texas A&M University, winds up and delivers an answer to this one. When baseball pitchers with various length pitching arms apply the same amount of force, the ones with shorter arms actually achieve higher release velocities. The muscles of players with shorter pitching arms apply their force with greater leverage—so, in order for pitchers with longer arms to achieve the same release velocity, they have to apply a greater force....

The insides of today’s rocket engines can reach a blistering 1,600 degrees Celsius—hot enough to melt steel. And tomorrow’s engines will need to be even more scorching. Hotter engines are more fuel-efficient, produce more thrust and can carry larger loads—all key for Mars-bound spacecraft and advanced aircraft. Fuzzy fibers: silicon carbide nanotubes could make rocket engines more heat-resistant. Credit: Ajayan Research Group Rice University In the quest for rocket materials that can tolerate more heat, engineers have been trying to devise tough, lightweight composites made of silicon carbide fibers, a small fraction of the width of a human hair, embedded in a ceramic material....

Six states announced they will join the climate pact organized by California, New York and Washington state in response to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The move followed growing calls for states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the wake of Trump’s announcement and illustrated the extent to which the president’s decision has roiled local politics in some parts of the country. Republican governors in blue and purple states found themselves confronting a gulf between a president of their own party and voters frustrated with his decision to shelve the global carbon-cutting deal....

Climate change is already happening, but scientists need to do a better job of getting that message to the public, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said Friday. “I think scientists have seriously underestimated the importance of explaining what we know about climate change and climate variability in ways that are understandable to most people,” Lubchenco told reporters in a wide-ranging interview to mark her first anniversary on the job....

Astronomers have discovered more than 3700 exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system, including over 600 multi-planet systems, with another nearly 5,000 candidate dedications awaiting confirmation. These exoplanet discoveries include massive planetssimilar to our Jupiter, smaller Earth-sized planets, and even a solar system home to 7 rocky planets similar in density to Earth, Venus, and Mars. Many of these discoveries owe thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission and its successor K2, a project surveying our galactic neighborhood for small, Earth-sized planets using a dedicated space-based telescope....

The Hubble Space Telescope turned its powerful eyes to a celestial visitor to our skies—Comet NEOWISE, which put on a stunning show in the Northern Hemisphere earlier this summer. On Aug. 8, the famed telescope obtained images of the comet’s coma, which is the cloud of gas and dust bleeding off the icy comet as the sun’s energy strikes the surface. At 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) from the camera, Comet NEOWISE was a triple milestone for Hubble’s imaging capabilities....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). The nuclei from a half-million human cells could all fit inside a single poppy seed. Yet within each and every nucleus resides genomic machinery that is incredibly vast, at least from a molecular point of view. It has billions of parts, many used to activate and silence genes—an arrangement that allows individual cells to specialize as brain cells, heart cells and some 200 other different cell types....

Every person who has ever felt pain has their origin story, and I certainly have mine. While performing a bench press more than a decade ago when I was in medical school, I heard a loud click and felt my whole body go limp, and the weights came crashing down. As pain gripped my entire body in a vise, I was rushed to emergency room where I got intravenous painkillers and was told the pain would eventually disappear....

EDITORS’ NOTE: All patient names in this article are pseudonyms. When I first met Julia, she was the most anxious, depressed child I had ever seen. Twelve years old, she had stopped going to school and seldom left her apartment. Her eyes were big with fright. When she spoke, it was in a very soft, crackly whisper, and she would stammer, as if struggling to find words. Julia was terrified that anyone who might see her would know instantly that something was wrong with her....

FAITH The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering. W.W. Norton, 2010 ($26.95) Why do so many people believe in God? Evolutionary psychologist and Scientific American blogger Jesse Bering has a novel answer to this tired question. In The Belief Instinct, he explains that although the evolution of language was beneficial—allowing us to communicate easily and disseminate important information—it also brought with it a deeply troubling problem for early humans. Language allowed onlookers to report on someone else’s behavior long after the event had occurred....

To the untrained listener, a bunch of babbling baboons may not sound like much. But sharp-eared experts have now found that our primate cousins can actually produce humanlike vowel sounds. The finding suggests the last common ancestor of humans and baboons may have possessed the vocal machinery for speech—hinting at a much earlier origin for language than previously thought. Researchers from Grenoble Alpes University and Aix-Marseille University, both in France, and their colleagues recorded baboons in captivity, finding the animals were capable of producing five distinct sounds that have the same characteristic frequencies as human vowels....

How would you feel if your fate was in the “hands” of a computer? The idea may not be as far-fetched as you think: A new study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) says that computers, using a mathematical formula, could determine the wishes of incapacitated patients as accurately as?if not better than?their family members or close friends. “We thought with the surrogate decisions, is that the best we got?...

It’s a problem faced by Yogi Berra, welders and surgeons: How do you sneeze with a mask covering your face? Catchers and welders, however, only have to deal with the unpleasant bounce-back effect. Surgeons need to worry about ejecting multitudinous microbes directly into the gaping hole they’ve carved in a patient. Not good. And with “uh-oh” being among the worst words a surgeon can say at work (“Where’s my watch?” is also bad, as is the simple and direct “oops”), how best then to avoid an uh-oh following an achoo?...

Editor’s note: This article was originally published with the title “Generation Ketamine” in the February/March issue of our new publication Scientific American Health&Medicine. When researchers showed in 2006 that the anesthetic ketamine—also known as the club drug Special K—was a rapid and potent antidepressant, big pharmaceutical companies quickly jumped into the game. Extensive efforts to improve on decades-old antidepressants had floundered, but ketamine finally promised a novel mechanism of action and the potential to help treatment-resistant patients....

LONDON − It is widely acknowledged that the planet’s political leaders and its people are failing to take enough action to prevent catastrophic climate change. Next year, at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris, representatives of all the world’s countries will be hoping to reach a new deal to cut greenhouse gases and prevent the planet overheating dangerously. So far, there are no signs that their leaders have the political will to do so....

For more than half a century, the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica has provided researchers with the data needed to study everything from local amphibian and reptile populations to global warming. To meet a growing demand for La Selva’s treasure trove of biological and environmental data, the main facilities are getting a $785,000 high-tech makeover that includes wireless access to measurement systems that collect and transmit data and provide a dynamic 3-D analysis of the rainforest canopy....