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Editor’s Note: We are posting this story from our September 2007 issue as part of our in-depth report on the recent salmonella outbreak. Given the billions of food items that are packaged, purchased and consumed every day in the U.S., let alone the world, it is remarkable how few of them are contaminated. Yet since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “food defense” experts have grown increasingly worried that extremists might try to poison the food supply, either to kill people or to cripple the economy by undermining public confidence....

By Arran FroodSmoking cannabis has long been associated with poor short-term memory, but a study now suggests that the strain of cannabis makes all the difference. In a test of short-term memory skills, only users of “skunk”-type strains exhibited impaired recall when intoxicated, whereas people who smoked hashish or herbal cannabis blends performed equally well whether they were stoned or sober.The findings suggest that an ingredient more plentiful in some types of marijuana than in others may help to reduce the memory loss that some users suffer....

Milky Way Time In “Is Time an Illusion?” Craig Callender discusses the difficulty of telling if two events are simultaneous or not and thus of establishing a universal, standard measure of time. This argument always seems unconvincing to me. We know how fast our galaxy is rotating, we know our sun’s position and velocity, and we know Earth’s position and velocity. It seems to me that we could easily define a “Milky Way Standard Time” much as was done when we agreed on Greenwich Mean Time way back in the late 1800s, which made it easy to decide what time it was in California when something happened at a certain time in Chicago....

The most powerful explosions in the universe just got even more potent, two teams of astronomers report today in Nature. Almost every day, without warning, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) wash over Earth from somewhere in the vast depths of the cosmos. Each is thought to signal the cataclysmic birth of a black hole, through either the collapse of a massive star or the merging of neutron stars. Because a typical GRB emits in mere seconds more energy than our sun will produce across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime, it can be seen across almost the entirety of the visible universe....

Just a few years ago Camden was caught in a cycle of perpetual violence. So New Jersey’s seventh-largest city (current population: 77,332) took a radical step: in 2011 it fired 163 officers, approximately half of its police force. The next year proved especially deadly, with one person shot every 32 hours. But Mayor Dana Redd had a plan. She disbanded the rest of the department to make way for a new countywide force and hired John Timoney, a former Miami police chief, and police consultant Joe Cordero and asked them to design strategies that could develop stronger inroads with the local community On May 1, 2013, Scott Thomson, who was previously running the city’s squad, was sworn in as chief of the all-new Camden County Police Department....

To many Americans, the cold war is ancient history. Yet only a few decades ago the planet was dangerously divided between West and East, and the antagonism between the U.S. and the Soviet Union defined global politics. Flare-ups such as the Korean “police action,” which killed millions of people in the early 1950s, and the Cuban missile crisis, 10 years later, drew the American and Soviet governments and their proxies to the threshold of nuclear war....

Unless you’re a robot, your speech has a musical quality to it. This pitch-and-rhythm variation, known as prosody, conveys emotion. A new study suggests that people whose speech is most sing-songy may have a stronger ability to empathize with others. Using functional MRI, scientists at the University of Southern California measured brain activity as volunteers perceived or produced speech with intonations that sounded happy, sad, questioning or neutral. They found that specific parts of the brain region known as Broca’s area (a well-known speech center in the brain) are active both when listening to and when producing lilted speech....

Can a building be as easy on the environment as it is on the eyes? Without a doubt, says The American Institute of Architects (AIA), a professional association based in Washington, D.C. To prove it, for the past 12 years, the organization and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have awarded the top 10 green projects across the globe. At the same time, science is providing new ways to build green buildings—from using paints with low VOCs (volatile organic compounds) to high-efficiency ventilation—as well as revealing just how important a pleasing and healthy environment is to our interiors....

You will either take this tale as one that shows even burglars have a heart. Or you will take it as a surprise that people still want to steal PCs. Still, the facts seem to show that some miscreants performed a touch of Tom Cruise and entered an office building east of L.A. through the ceiling. They stole some PCs and a laptop. The next morning, they appear to have broken in again....

Monarch butterfly populations have been declining since the 1990s, and several studies have linked this to the proliferation of crops genetically engineered to tolerate the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Crops are routinely doused with it, killing all but the engineered plants—and the casualties include milkweed, on which monarchs exclusively lay their eggs. Some 850 million milkweed plants—representing 71 percent of monarchs’ support infrastructure—have vanished from corn and soybean fields in the past 20 years, according to one estimate....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Daily life in ancient China changed through the centuries but reflected the values of the presence of gods and one’s ancestors in almost every time period. Villages like Banpo show evidence of a matriarchal society, where there was a priestly class dominated by women who governed and were the religious authorities....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pigs (sometimes called “suids” of the suidae family) have long played an important part in Chinese culture. Pigs symbolize good fortune and happiness as they seem to live a care-free existence and have a long relationship with the humans who have seen them this way. A 2010 CE study, in fact, found that modern-day pigs in China are the direct descendants of the first pigs domesticated thousands of years ago....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The beauty of being an archaeologist is having the good fortune to find something on an archaeological dig that remains in a relatively good state of preservation. In various degrees, there are those who study how nature can actually help the conservation of artifacts and buildings and those who study the natural agents of destruction, such as a particular pH in the soil, a series of floods of a river or other catastrophic events....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Once the largest library in the ancient world, and containing works by the greatest thinkers and writers of antiquity, including Homer, Plato, Socrates and many more, the Library of Alexandria, northern Egypt, is popularly believed to have been destroyed in a huge fire around 2000 years ago and its volumous works lost....

Dear EarthTalk: Which are the most fuel-efficient hybrid and/or all-electric cars available to consumers today (just the affordable ones, please!)?—Jack Madison, Chicago Given increased environmental awareness, high gas prices and a continually slumping economy, it’s no wonder that more fuel efficient cars are all the rage these days. The best deal going may be Honda’s hybrid, the 42 miles-per-gallon (MPG) Insight ($18,350). Meanwhile, the newest version of Toyota’s flagship hybrid, the Prius ($23,015), garners an impressive 50 MPG....

Earth is a finite place. The more people who inhabit it, the more they must compete for its resources. Although human population has grown steadily, developments in recent decades have been encouraging. Globally, women today give birth to an average of 2.5 children, half as many as in the early 1950s. In 40 percent of the world’s nations, the fertility rate is at or below the “replacement” level of 2.1 children per woman, the number at which offspring simply take the place of their parents....

By Gene Emery (Reuters Health) - Treating Ebola victims with blood plasma donated by Ebola survivors failed to significantly increase the odds of recovering from the deadly virus, according to a field test of the experimental treatment. The conclusion is based on the cases of 84 people treated with plasma in Conakry, Guinea, in the hope that the antibodies in the fluid would help patients fight off the virus the way they did in the surviving donors....

Later this month, a Chinese spacecraft will travel to the Moon to scoop up lunar rocks for the first time in more than 40 years. The mission, named Chang’e-5, is the latest in a series of increasingly complex trips to the lunar surface led by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), following its first touchdown of a craft, Chang’e-4, on the Moon’s far side last year. “To take it to the next level and return samples from the Moon is a significant technological capability,” says Carolyn van der Bogert, a planetary geologist at the University of Münster, Germany....

As chemotherapy and radiation treatments improve, children with cancer are living longer. The average five-year survival rate for a range of childhood cancers increased from 58 percent to 81 percent between 1975 and 2005, according to statistics from the National Cancer Institute. But although many of these children now survive cancer-free into their reproductive years, their fertility might not. In young women and girls, direct radiation and chemotherapy drugs can stop egg production by the ovaries—meaning that along with the tumor, hopes for pregnancy are often eradicated....

In a rare tale of technology, bio­terrorism and chocolate, scientists are racing to sequence the cacao tree genome. They fear that without the genome in hand they will be unable to stop the spread of two virulent pathogens that threaten to devastate the world’s cocoa crop. Cacao trees were first domesticated more then 1,500 years ago by Mayans living in what is now Central America, but fungal diseases such as witch’s broom and frosty pod have largely chased the bean out of its native habitat....