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On October 31, 2011, a particularly special person will be born—the seven billionth human alive, according to United Nations demographers. He or she could be delivered by a starving mother in the growing wastelands of Somalia, a failed-state gripped by famine and war. The best odds are that the child will be born in India, which has the highest rate of births per minute in the world. She may even be an American girl, heiress to a complex legacy that is in no small part responsible for the fact that, for better or worse, people are shaping the destiny of the planet that engendered humanity....

Dear EarthTalk: I saw a cover line on a magazine that said, “The next world war will be over water.” Tell me we’re not really running out of water! – Nell Fox, Seattle, WA Today fully one-sixth of the world’s human population lacks access to clean drinking water, and more than two million people—mostly kids—die each year from water-borne diseases. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent organization that provides economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States, predicts that by 2025, one-third of all humans will face severe and chronic water shortages....

Jackdaws switch between two sets of flocking rules with differing results, a new research has found. Flocks flying to winter roosts are orderly no matter how many birds they contain; those rallying to ward off predators are initially disorganized when their numbers are small and then suddenly flip to order once enough birds join in. Swimming bacteria, marching locusts, schooling fish and flocking birds all function as cohesive units. This phenomenon can emerge when individual agents following identical rules come together, says Alex Thornton, who studies cognitive evolution at the University of Exeter in England....

Her finalist year: 1986 Her finalist project: Developing a method to come up with equations that read the same way forward and backward What led to the project: As a preschooler, Jessica Boklan used to follow her father, a hematologist, around on his hospital rounds near their Roslyn, Long Island, home near New York City. That interest in biology and medicine stayed with her. Between her junior and senior years of high school in 1985 she did a research project at Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor, Maine, on the preservation of mouse embryos using cryogenics—very low temperatures....

The blood-brain barrier, a dense layer of tightly packed cells that line brain capillaries like a regiment of infantrymen, has always been the bane of neuromedicine. True, this line of defense protects the brain from all manner of potentially harmful chemicals. But it keeps most medications out, too. Scientists have spent decades searching for ways to breach the barrier just long enough for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or antitumor drugs to slip through....

In late February, Rosie Costello, a mother from Vancouver, Wash., pleaded guilty to Social Security fraud and conspiring to defraud the government. Her crime? For 20 years, Costello had been forcing her two healthy children to fake mental retardation to collect disability benefits. Parents such as Costello, who criminally exploit their children for money, may be responsible for more juvenile lawbreaking than our society currently recognizes, according to experts such as forensic psychologist Kathryn Seifert of Eastern Shore Psychological Services in Maryland, who has been studying youth delinquency for 30 years....

Inherited forms of anemia may soon be treated by turning on a gene normally active only in the womb. Researchers report today in Science that they have discovered the molecular switch for activating the fetal form of hemoglobin—the iron-containing protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen—which could help alleviate the symptoms of genetic blood disorders, including sickle-cell anemia, which affects an estimated 70,000 people (mostly African-Americans) in the U.S....

One by one the world’s best snowboard jumpers will hurl themselves down a steep ramp, fly off a giant cliff of a jump and—while hurtling through the air—execute sequences of flips and twists so fast and intricate that you’ll need slow-motion replay to even see them happen. Big air snowboarding makes its Winter Olympics debut this month in Pyeongchang, South Korea, along with mass start speed skating and curling mixed doubles....

Prions, the misfolded proteins that are known for causing degenerative illnesses in animals and humans, may have been spotted for the first time in plants. Researchers led by Susan Lindquist, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, report that they have found a section of protein in thale cress (Arabidopsis) that behaves like a prion when it is inserted into yeast. In plants, the protein is called Luminidependens (LD), and it is normally involved in responding to daylight and controlling flowering time....

The number represented by pi (π) is used in calculations whenever something round (or nearly so) is involved, such as for circles, spheres, cylinders, cones and ellipses. Its value is necessary to compute many important quantities about these shapes, such as understanding the relationship between a circle’s radius and its circumference and area (circumference=2πr; area=πr2). Pi also appears in the calculations to determine the area of an ellipse and in finding the radius, surface area and volume of a sphere....

Not all of the puzzling bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres are alike. The closest-yet images of the gleams, taken from 45,000 kilometres away, suggest that at least two of the spots look different from one another when seen in infrared wavelengths. The Hubble Space Telescope spied many of the bright spots from afar years ago, but the observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft—which began looping around Ceres on March 6—are the first at close range....

Trailers – the big cargo carriers that transport much of the nation’s goods – could see major improvements in efficiency if the Obama administration chooses to regulate them. The president’s call for fuel efficiency standards for large trucks and buses yesterday will allow vehicle manufacturers to tackle crucial energy savings left out in the first phase of the regulation, said industry experts yesterday. “I think it’s virtually certain that they’re going to regulate trailers,” said Pat Quinn, executive director of the Heavy Duty Fuel Efficiency Leadership Group, an alliance of companies in the trucking industry....

At the center of our galaxy is a sleeping giant, a black hole more than four million times as massive as the sun. The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is mostly quiet, nibbling on small objects at the galactic center and giving off only faint belches of radiation as it digests its prey. But in the past the sleeping giant may have been wide awake—and wreaking havoc. Astrophysicists at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have uncovered evidence of two ghostly but enormous beams of gamma rays, each extending some 30,000 light-years from the galactic center, that seem to mark a violent episode of black hole consumption relatively recently in cosmic history....

Mo Costandi of Nature magazineResearch showing that action video games have a beneficial effect on cognitive function is seriously flawed, according to a review published this week in Frontiers in Psychology.Numerous studies published over the past decade have found that training on fast-paced video games such as Medal of Honor and Grand Theft Auto that require a wide focus and quick responses has broad ’transfer effects’ that enhance other cognitive functions, such as visual attention....

Congress’s unprecedented effort to cap spending on specific scientific research projects has created a stir that has reached as high as the White House. The Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act of 2014 H.R. 4186 (pdf) seeks greater accountability from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the way it spends its $7-billion annual budget—a reasonable goal that few have argued against. The controversy is over the less-than-scientific approach that FIRST would take to decide which projects get funded....

Share Your PhotosUpload People still argue about whether breakfast is the most important meal of the day. (Short answer: Yes for kids—particularly those whose diets may be lacking important nutrients; it’s a toss-up for adults.) But ever since eating cold pizza for breakfast in college (more than once), I’ve wondered why we choose certain foods over others for the first meal of the day. Granted, the Kellogg brothers changed what millions of Americans eat first thing with their invention of cornflakes more than a century ago, but what’s considered a traditional breakfast meal still varies widely in different countries and climates—not to mention amongst college students....

(Reuters Health) - In a major shift, the American Cancer Society is recommending that women at average risk of breast cancer get annual mammograms starting at age 45 rather than at age 40, and that women 55 and older scale back screening to every other year. The new guidelines, published on Tuesday in JAMA, fall more closely in line with guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-backed panel of experts that recommend biennial breast cancer screening starting at age 50 for most women....

By Ewen CallawayA retrovirus that has lain dormant in chimpanzees and their ancestors for at least one million years is surrendering its secrets. A team of scientists has resurrected a key portion of the virus and determined how it infects cells.Ordinarily, endogenous viruses–ancient viruses that were long ago engulfed into their host’s genome–are studied on the basis of their DNA sequence alone. Increasingly, however, researchers are bringing such viruses “back to life” and putting them through the same laboratory tests that contemporary viruses are subject to....

Hypospadias, one of the most common birth defects among baby boys, apparently is not increasing in the U.S., casting doubt on whether boys are harmed by phthalates and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals thought to trigger reproductive abnormalities. Researchers have reported that the hypospadias rate stayed the same in New York State between 1992 and 2005. An earlier study also found no increase in California boys between 1984 and 1997. Hypospadias, a condition in which the urethra opening is on the underside of the penis rather than the tip, occurs in roughly one of every 250 male births....

The adapted virus that immunized hundreds of millions of people against smallpox has now been enlisted in the war on cancer. Vaccinia poxvirus joins a herpesvirus and a host of other pathogens on a growing list of engineered viruses entering late-stage human testing against cancer. After a decade of development of so-called oncolytic viruses, the newest strains hold the most promise yet, researchers say. This new generation of viruses has been genetically “targeted and armed,” says Winald Gerritsen of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, who is involved in an early human trial of an engineered adeno-associated virus that attacks glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer....