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Just before introducing a brand-new model of the iPad on Tuesday, Apple made it a point to show off the many things people can do with iPads. From work to play to athletic training to taking a nap on the side of a mountain, the company’s tablet can help just about anyone do just about anything, the company claimed. Related stories: iPad Air First Take Hands-on with the iPad Air (pictures) iPad Mini (with Retina Display) First Take Apple’s crisp and clear iPad Mini with Retina Display (pictures) Apple announces new, faster MacBook Pros with Haswell chips, Thunderbolt 2, starting at $1,299 Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display First Take Complete coverage of Apple’s Oct....

By Kevin Murphy (Reuters) - A wildfire forced the evacuation of more than 500 homes and about 1,200 residents in a rural area east of the California state capital Sacramento on Saturday, a day after the blaze broke out, fire officials said. The wind-swept fire burned more than 3,000 acres (1,200 ha), destroying five residences and two outbuildings and causing one minor injury, said Lynne Tolmachoff, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire)....

Wind farms typically generate most of their energy at night, when most electricity demand is lowest. So a lot of that “green” energy is wasted. So the big question is: How do you bottle that power for air conditioners and other appliances that are busiest during the day? There are many companies moving to fill the energy gap. Using federal loan guarantees and $4 billion in “smart grid” stimulus cash, they are working on utility-scale storage units that they hope will help balance intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar and let electric grid operators match power supplies with demand....

More efficient cars, trucks and airplanes. Less-polluting electric power plants. So many solar and wind farms that no transcontinental road trip in an electric car could take place beyond the sight of one. Those may be the most obvious changes everyone sees if and when America’s proposed climate policies fully bloom in the next decade or so. The biggest of those policies, the Clean Power Plan, was announced a year ago and is slated to take effect in 2016....

Time for climate scientists to lawyer up? One of the world’s premier science associations is offering the option. The American Geophysical Union, representing more than 62,000 Earth, atmospheric and space scientists worldwide, has teamed with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to make lawyers available for confidential sessions with scientists at its annual meeting next month. Legal counseling is not a typical agenda item for a science confab, but it’s become an important one in today’s political climate, scientists say....

When they think they’ll be discriminated against, people do their best to put on a good face for their group, new research finds. An obese person, for example, might focus on dressing nicely to combat stereotypes of slovenliness. A black man, used to assumptions that he’s violent, might smile more. The new study reveals both that people are well aware of stereotypes and that they try to combat them. “People often think of prejudice as a simple, single phenomenon — general dislike for members of other groups — but recent research suggests that there are actually multiple, distinct types of prejudice,” study researcher Rebecca Neel, a graduate student at Arizona State University, said in a statement....

Researchers have extracted the oldest complete genome sequence of a pathogen yet, from the body of the 5,300-year-old ice mummy Ötzi. According to a January 7 paper in Science, the ‘Iceman’ was infected with the bacteriumHelicobacter pylori, which also plagues modern humans. Few corpses have drawn more attention from researchers than Ötzi’s, discovered in 1991 encased in ice at an altitude of more than 3,000 metres, by hikers exploring the Tyrolean Alps in Italy....

Web sites serviced by DNS and hosting provider Go Daddy were down today. A hacker using the “Anonymous Own3r” Twitter account claimed credit for the outage. “Go Daddy is experiencing intermittent outages. This is impacting our site and some customer sites,” company spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll told CNET in a phone interview. “We are working to restore all services and some are back online as we speak.” Driscoll said she could not say how many sites were affected, whether it was thousands or millions, or whether the outage had affected just sites hosted by Go Daddy or those who use its DNS services as well....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - A new mammal discovered in the remote desert of western Africa resembles a long-nosed mouse in appearance but is more closely related genetically to elephants, a California scientist who helped identify the tiny creature said on Thursday. The new species of elephant shrew, given the scientific name Macroscelides micus, inhabits an ancient volcanic formation in Namibia and sports red fur that helps it blend in with the color of its rocky surroundings, said John Dumbacher, one of a team of biologists behind the discovery....

Our solar system is like a 4.6-billion-year-old crime scene. Crater-ridden surfaces, misaligned planetary orbits and streams of interplanetary debris are the cosmic equivalents of blood spatters on the wall and skid marks from a getaway car. These and other clues tell of a chaotic beginning for our planetary family. Buried in those clues are hints of a lost sibling: a ninth planet (no, not Pluto) that was kicked away in a gravitational tug-of-war that reshaped the early solar system....

Solutions: Let’s consider again the three children that a family could have and associate the number at which they would stop. (As a thought experiment, we imagine that they have three children in a certain order, but “undo,” or send away, the extras once they have a boy.): 000—3 001—3 010—2 011—2 100—1 101—1 110—1 111—1 So, the average number is under two (14/8). Of the eight scenarios above, 6/8 (or 3/4) would have one boy and one girl....

Adapted from Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? … And Other Reflections on Being Human, by Jesse Bering, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (North America), Transworld Ltd (UK), Jorge Zahara Editora Ltda (Brazil). Copyright © 2012 by Jesse Bering. Once, while in a drowsy, altitude-induced delirium 35,000 feet somewhere over iceland, I groped mindlessly for the cozy blue blanket poking out beneath my seat, only to realize—to my unutterable horror—that I was in fact tugging soundly on a wriggling, sock-covered big toe....

A comet will give Mars a historically close shave next weekend, and NASA aims to be ready for the dramatic cosmic event. The space agency has already trained a number of its science assets on Comet Siding Spring, which will zoom within 87,000 miles (139,500 kilometers) of Mars on Oct. 19 — about one-third the distance between Earth and the moon. And NASA’s fleet of Red Planet orbiters and rovers will be watching on the big day, studying the comet and its influence on Mars’ atmosphere....

Key concepts Taste Olfaction Gustation The five senses Introduction Thanksgiving brings a feast of flavors. But when you imagine the mouthwatering meal—the tang of ruby-red cranberry sauce or sweet, cinnamon-scented pumpkin pie—you might notice that you are combining sensory cues. Clearly the senses work together in your recollection, but how much is taste influenced by other sensory information as you eat? In this activity you’ll find out by looking at two senses in particular....

10. (TIE) The Uncharted Territory of Ebola Credit: CDC Global Ebola lingers. Health workers attempting to beat back a massive epidemic across Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone in west Africa continued to learn that hard lesson in 2015. The virus has killed more than 11,300 people and left an indelible mark on the global stage. But active cases are not the only concern. From studying thousands of Ebola survivors and their close contacts, clinicians are now learning that the virus remains in the body and sexual fluids much longer than they suspected and public health officials have found evidence that suggests the virus has already been sexually transmitted....

EL MONTE, Calif. — The chickens are used to the needles. They don’t fuss when vector ecologist Tanya Posey pulls opens the door of a coop in a community garden here, firmly grasps a Leghorn, and pulls a blood sample out of its wing vein. She’s so good, she can bleed a chicken in about 30 seconds. That’s helpful, because she has a lot of chickens to test. More than six dozen sentinel chickens, living in coops dotted around Los Angeles, make up one of the first lines of defense in this sprawling county’s fight against West Nile virus....

This is the fifth of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters. When Deb Roy and his wife have overnight guests that might encounter their two-and-a-half-year-old son—the couple is withholding his name to protect his privacy—the first thing they do is ask their visitors to fill out a consent form. Unusual, for sure, but the couple is merely trying to make people aware that their actions and voices may be captured by the 11 fish-eye cameras and 14 microphones hidden around their Cambridge, Mass....

Dear EarthTalk: Are plans to mine uranium near the Grand Canyon, as proposed by the Bush administration in 2008, still underway? – Denton Chase, Half Moon Bay, CA The Obama administration has been quick to overturn several anti-environmental moves ushered in during the 11th hour of George W. Bush’s presidency, but halting uranium exploration and mining near the Grand Canyon has not been one of them. Last fall, Bush’s Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, circumvented a prohibition on mining activities by authorizing uranium exploration within a million acre buffer zone around Grand Canyon National Park....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called Polio: Pushed to the Brink (click the link to see a table of contents). Published this summer, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. When I began my career in public health in the 1960s, poliomyelitis was one of the most feared diseases in the world. Even just 25 years ago the virus infected more than 350,000 people, causing paralysis and irreversible disfigurement....

At age 13, jazz great Thelonious Monk ran into trouble at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The reason: he was too good. The famously precocious pianist was, as they say, a “natural,” and by that point had won the Apollo’s amateur competition so many times that he was barred from re-entering. To be sure, Monk practiced, a lot actually. But two new studies, and the fact that he taught himself to read music as a child before taking a single lesson, suggest that he likely had plenty of help from his genes....