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ONE ATTOSECOND (a billionth of a billionth of a second) The most fleeting events that scientists can clock are measured in attoseconds. Researchers have created pulses of light lasting just 250 attoseconds using sophisticated high-speed lasers. Although the interval seems unimaginably brief, it is an aeon compared with the Planck time—about 10−43 second—which is believed to be the shortest possible duration. ONE FEMTOSECOND (a millionth of a billionth of a second) An atom in a molecule typically completes a single vibration in 10 to 100 femtoseconds....

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Chinese icebreaker is expected a reach a Russian ship trapped in thick Antarctic ice with 74 people on board by Saturday, Russia said.The Snow Dragon was one of three icebreakers dispatched to free the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, which became stranded far south of Tasmania on Tuesday in ice driven by strong winds.“The first, a Chinese icebreaker, is expected to arrive at the scene of the accident on December 28,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement....

Some time ago, women in solitude cried into vials. Their tears were special. They held a chemical whisper that could rob desire from men…. Though this sounds like some kind of fairy tale, it’s in fact the description of a fascinating and important experiment by Noam Sobel’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Using a combination of brain scanning and other testing, these researchers have shown that women’s tears contain a compound that covertly inhibits sexual desire in men....

Glenn McGee, the founder of the Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI)—part of Albany Medical College (AMC)—has left his post as director of the AMBI. The institute and the renowned bioethicist, author and columnist parted ways sometime last month, according to a college spokesperson and confirmed by McGee. “He is no longer director,” said Greg McGarry, AMC’s vice president for communications. McGarry would not comment on the circumstances of the split or whether the bioethicist remains in good standing with the school....

Egyptians earlier this week took to the Web—Facebook and Twitter, in particular—as a means of organizing their protests against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade-old government. As of Friday morning, however, there no longer was much of a Web to take to—at least not in Egypt. In an unprecedented turn of events, at 12:34 A.M. local time in Cairo five of the country’s major Internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their connections to the Internet....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. This article is part of The Conversation’s series this month on hurricanes. You can read the rest of the series here. “Don’t focus on the skinny black line” was the trademark admonition of former National Hurricane Center (NHC) director Max Mayfield dating back to the 1990s. It’s advice that media and residents of southwest Florida would have done well to heed when Hurricane Charley crossed Cuba in August 2004....

Honeybees can tell one another when they find a particularly sweet patch of flowers by using an intricate back-and-forth motion called a “waggle dance.” Their highly attuned ability to identify the best spots for pollination in their immediate surroundings holds potential for helping naturalists to determine the health of a particular ecosystem. In a new study, published today in Current Biology, scientists have used bee dances to find out which parts of a patchwork landscape the insects prefer to visit....

By Zoran Radosavljevic POSTOJNA, Slovenia (Reuters) - Cars stand entombed in a crystal-like casing near the deserted railway station in Postojna. Trees and electricity pylons lie felled in the snow by the sheer weight of ice enveloping them. The damage wrought in western Slovenia by a freak ice storm and blizzards could take weeks or months to repair in a tiny EU member-state already going through its worst economic crisis in two decades as an independent state....

Geophysicists call it the new core paradox: They can’t quite explain how the ancient Earth could have sustained a magnetic field billions of years ago, as it was cooling from its fiery birth. Now, two scientists have proposed two different ways to solve the paradox. Each relies on minerals crystallizing out of the molten Earth, a process that would have generated a magnetic field by churning the young planet’s core. The difference between the two explanations comes in which particular mineral does the crystallizing....

America’s carbon dioxide emissions have fallen consistently over the last 15 years in large part because power companies have swapped coal for natural gas. Now it appears that those CO2 reductions might be smaller than previously thought. A recent study by the Environmental Defense Fund found that 3.7% of natural gas produced in the Permian Basin leaked into the atmosphere. That’s enough to erase the greenhouse gas benefits of quitting coal for gas in the near term....

Last week, Scientific American reported on the decline of nature-derived compounds in the pharmaceutical pipeline, in part because of the cost of isolating and identifying compounds that may have already been described and are therefore not patentable. “You may invest a year of work screening these new compounds,” says computational biologist Pavel Pevzner of the University of California, San Diego. “Then a year later you figure out this work is wasted because somebody on the other side of the planet discovered it 10 years ago....

The market for alternatives to expanded polystyrene food and beverage containers got a significant boost last week when New York City finalized its ban on these materials, despite heavy lobbying by the chemical industry. The city’s Department of Sanitation announced Friday its determination that single-use expanded polystyrene containers cannot be recycled economically. It also found that no market exists now for postconsumer polystyrene foam collected in curbside recycling. “While much of the waste we produce can be recycled or reused, polystyrene foam is not one of those materials,” Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia says....

The long necks protruding from a geoduck’s giant shell have led some to believe that the world’s largest burrowing clam is an aphrodisiac. Whether or not that is true, the sea creature may offer another—albeit less sexy—benefit for humanity, according to new research. The long-lived geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”) could help us deduce what climate conditions were like hundreds of years ago and more accurately predict future patterns. “Unlocking climate and ecosystem records in the marine environment is equally as useful as tree rings are in the terrestrial environment,” says Bryan Black, a tree-ring analyst at Oregon State University....

Rural residents who drink water from private wells are much more likely to have Parkinson’s disease, a finding that bolsters theories that farm pesticides may be partially to blame, according to a new California study. Nearly one million people in the United States–one of every 300–have the incurable neurological disease. Beginning with a slight tremor, Parkinson’s often progresses to severe muscle control problems that leave patients struggling to walk and talk....

Key Concepts Crystals Saturation Evaporation Introduction Did you know you can grow your own crystals at home? You can—and it’s easy! Crystals have a definite geometric pattern and if all goes well, the crystals you grow will be sharply defined, with crisp right angles and smooth faces that vary in size. Background Table salt is made of many tiny crystals. When you mix these salt crystals with water, they dissolve, losing their crystalline form....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Silicon translates sunshine into electricity—and Earth receives enough sunshine in a daylight hour to supply all of humanity’s energy needs for a year. But despite being as common as sand, photovoltaic panels made from silicon—or any of a host of other semiconducting materials—are not cheap, especially when compared with the cost of electricity produced by burning coal or natural gas. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) aims to change that by bringing down the cost of solar electricity via a new program dubbed “SunShot,” an homage to President John Kennedy’s “moon shot” pledge in 1961....

Last week two brothers plead guilty to federal criminal charges related to the United States’s worst foodborne illness outbreak in the past 25 years. The unusual charges indicate that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is gearing up for an era of tighter food safety regulations and more serious consequences. The Colorado farmers, Eric and Ryan Jensen, were charged with counts of introducing adulterated food to interstate commerce. They face penalties that could include up to six years in jail and $1....

Just watching television footage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was enough to cause clinically diagnosable stress responses in some people who did not even live near the attacks—let alone the millions of people who did. Like many other major disasters, 9/11 brought with it a host of psychological repercussions, one of the most severe of which has been post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is characterized by trouble sleeping, difficulty controlling anger, losing interest in activities, flashbacks, emotional numbness and/or other symptoms....

It was just over 20 years ago—a blink of a cosmic eye—that astronomers found the first planets orbiting stars other than our sun. All these new worlds were gas-shrouded giants like Jupiter or Saturn and utterly inhospitable to life as we know it. But for years each discovery was dutifully reported as front-page news, while scientists and the public alike dreamed of a day when we would find a habitable world....

One of creationists’ favorite arguments is that so intricate a device as the eye—with a light-regulating iris, a focusing lens, a layered retina of photosensitive cells, and so on—could not have arisen from Darwinian evolution. How could random mutations have spontaneously created and assembled parts that would have had no independent purpose? “What good is half an eye?” the creationists sneer, claiming the organ as prima facie proof of the existence of God....