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We all have weaknesses, and we all know hardship. But it’s difficult, even on a good day, to admit we are struggling, to ask for help or to apologize when we are out of line. After two years of overwhelming stress caused by a global pandemic, many of us have become all too familiar with feeling vulnerable, and we have also grown adept at avoiding difficult conversations. We may blow up to let off steam, for instance, and not take responsibility for the harm our actions cause....

Treatment with the hormone oxytocin improves social skills in some children with autism, suggest results from a small clinical trial. The results appeared today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Oxytocin, dubbed the ‘love hormone,’ enhances social behavior in animals. This effect makes it attractive as a potential autism treatment. But studies in people have been inconsistent: Some small trials have shown that the hormone improves social skills in people with autism, and others have shown no benefit....

Reading Drexlers Engines of Creation in 1990 went into the making of the world in Queen City Jazz my first novel, though the book drew from many other sources: Shakers, ragtime, jazz, American literature, even Krazy Kat. So writes Kathleen Ann Goonan in the Summer 2001 SFWA Bulletin the quarterly of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in a brief essay about her award-nominated novel Crescent City Rhapsody the third book of her musically structured Nanotech Quartet....

NASA ended its space shuttle program in 2011, in part to focus on other goals such as putting humans in deep space and on Mars. But the agency still needs a reliable and cost-effective way to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). For the past several years it has been paying Russia to do just that. But soon, it will no longer have to do so. Since 2010 private companies have been competing for a lucrative opportunity: to provide routine transport of American astronauts and cargo to the ISS as well as deliver other low Earth orbit payloads....

On November 8, 2016, tens of million of Americans went to vote at about 110,000 polling places. Most were in and out in under 10 minutes, but many still waited in line a long while—in some cases, for hours. Until now, a comprehensive nationwide account of how much time voters spent waiting was out of reach. In a new study led by economist Keith Chen of the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers matched anonymous location data from 10 million smartphones to 93,000 polling places to create the most extensive map to date of voter wait times across the U....

Japan’s flagship astronomical satellite Hitomi, which launched successfully on February 17 but tumbled out of control five weeks later, may have been doomed by a basic engineering error. Confused about how it was oriented in space and trying to stop itself from spinning, Hitomi’s control system apparently commanded a thruster jet to fire in the wrong direction — accelerating, rather than slowing, the craft’s rotation. On 28 April, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) declared the satellite, on which it had spent ¥31 billion (US$286 million), lost....

Superman may be faster than a speeding bullet, but there is a neutron star in our galaxy that can compete for the title of fastest space traveler. Astronomers have tracked the movement of a pulsar, making the first direct measurement of its impressive speed. B1508+55 is a spinning neutron star, or pulsar, currently located approximately 7,700 light-years from Earth. Using the Very Long Baseline Array Telescope, scientists found both its speed and position by measuring the powerful beams of radio waves it emits....

By Meredith WadmanCandace Kerr was working late on 23 August when a postdoc sent her the link to a CNN story in an e-mail entitled: “Bad news for stem cell researchers.” Kerr, a stem-cell scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, says that as her eyes flew down the screen, she thought: “This can’t be real. This can’t be right.” Earlier that day, in Washington DC, a district-court judge had put a temporary stop (pdf) on government funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells, pending resolution of a suit that is seeking to make the hold permanent (see ‘The legalese behind the funding freeze’)....

A program that gives commercial fishers both a short- and long-term financial stake in the health of the industry offers the promise of preserving fish populations, according to new research. Fish stocks around the world have been decreasing for decades, primarily due to overfishing, and some scientists estimate that our seafood sources will dry up within three decades. In an effort to prevent that, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzed a global database of fisheries and fish catches to determine whether an incentive program known as “catch shares” could help marine ecosystems....

Americans are used to thinking that their nation is special. In many ways, it is: the U.S. has by far the most Nobel Prize winners, the largest defense expenditures (almost equal to the next 10 or so countries put together) and the most billionaires (twice as many as China, the closest competitor). But some examples of American Exceptionalism should not make us proud. By most accounts, the U.S. has the highest level of economic inequality among developed countries....

In that recent press conference, Psaki outlined the effort the Biden administration has made to improve both the availability of at-home testing and the cost, noting that, after insurance, many people would pay nothing. But the reporter, Mara Liasson, asked why we couldn’t make it simple, make them free and give them out as needed? Psaki’s response, delivered with an unmistakably condescending tone, was: “Should we just send one to every American?...

By Nina Chestney and Susanna Twidale LONDON (Reuters) - Europe’s ageing nuclear fleet will undergo more prolonged outages over the next few years, reducing the reliability of power supply and costing plant operators many millions of dollars. Nuclear power provides about a third of the European Union’s electricity generation, but the 28-nation bloc’s 131 reactors are well past their prime, with an average age of 30 years. And the energy companies, already feeling the pinch from falling energy prices and weak demand, want to extend the life of their plants into the 2020s, to put off the drain of funding new builds....

It is no small task to predict which of the hundreds of thousands of unknown pathogens existing naturally in animals will spill over to people and cause the next pandemic. But one thing is clear: A major factor driving spillover events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic is the trade in live and fresh wildlife for human consumption (whether legal or illegal). Removing wild animals from nature and transporting them to commercial markets where the close proximity of animals and people poses a significant public health risk is a practice that can no longer be tolerated....

Problems at the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, once the world’s largest, have come to a head, leaving the virtual currency and peer-to-peer payment system in a state of flux and threatening to undermine much of the acceptance bitcoins have garnered over the past year or so. The Mt. Gox Web site has been shut down, and the organization’s Twitter feed has been cleared amid reports that the exchange was hacked, resulting in the theft of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins....

The human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one’s risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution. The best evidence that the microbiome may play this critical role comes from studies of insects....

Checking on daily tallies about COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths has become a daily ritual for many Americans. Less visible, however, are the statistics for the mental health toll that has come in the wake of family tragedies, job losses and social isolation. More than a quarter of American adults know someone who has been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the Pew Research Center. In another survey, Pew found that a third of Americans experienced a high degree of psychological distress in periods of extended social distancing measures during March and April—a percentage that rose to more than half for those who have faced financial hardship....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Between the 9th and the 10th century CE, in an unknown European abbey, an anonymous author told the story of an Irish monk and his 14 companions who embarked on a dangerous journey in the 5th century CE. The monk’s name was Brendan, and his destination was the Terra repromissionis sanctorum, the Promised Land of the saints....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Spanish conquistadors might have gained a lasting reputation as the great gold-seekers of history, but they were actually far more successful in acquiring silver. Over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the Americas from 1492 to 1560, but the quantity of silver ultimately shipped in the treasure fleets back to Spain dwarfed that figure....

Throughout human history, intelligence and consciousness have been two closely allied concepts. If you have lots of the former, you are assumed, in some ill-defined way, to be more conscious than the dim-witted guy down the street. A smart gal would also be a very conscious one, somebody who could tell you in detail about her experiences (for that is what consciousness is, the ability to experience something, anything, whether it’s a toothache, the sight of a canary-yellow house or searing anger)....

By the time they are four months old, most babies can organize visual information in at least three ways: by brightness, by shape and by how close together objects are. Emily Farran, a psychologist at the University of Reading in England, tested infants by showing them images on a computer screen while cameras tracked how long they gazed at various patterns. Her results indicate that perception of brightness emerges first, by two months, in line with previous work....