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As society’s reliance on information technology surges, software has become an indispensable component of any disaster response effort. This includes programs for maneuvering robotic subs (as with the efforts to contain BP’s Deepwater oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico) or sophisticated mapping tools for emergency-response crews using mobile devices to assess earthquake damage (as in Haiti). With the understanding that emergency, health care and other services’ reliance on software will only grow over time, Microsoft has for the past eight years hosted a global competition that challenges high school and college students to develop applications that address some of the planet’s most urgent needs....

Share Your PhotosUpload Forget the idea that Elvis is still among us. It’s rock star scientist Albert Einstein who truly lives on. He may have died awhile ago (at least, that’s the story), but his likeness keeps popping up around the world. We’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by inviting readers to submit photos of “the man” in all kinds of places. We’re looking for photos of Einstein dolls and bobble heads that may have been placed by certain people (you!...

Doping scandals have rocked the world of athletics competitions repeatedly. Lance Armstrong’s dramatic fall took his seven Tour de France titles with it, and the BALCO scandal embroiled athletes from professional baseball and football and Olympic track-and-field sports. More recently, the International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs track competitions globally, drew fire after it required Olympic running champion Caster Semenya to medically reduce her testosterone levels if she wanted to compete....

The entrance exam to medical school consists of a six-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow or even shut down entirely. The experience—known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms—is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer’s block or struggled through a lengthy exam....

I’ve been a consumer technology critic for over 10 years. During that time, hate mail has been part of my job every day. In the early days I thought I understood it. Back then, it was all about Microsoft versus Apple. It was easy to see why people took sides: Apple was the underdog taking on an established giant. It was fun to root for one side or the other. Today, though, there are fanboys and haters ready to attack every conceivable position in the tech world—“position,” of course, meaning “company or product....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineGale Crater, a 150-kilometer-wide depression named after an Australian banker-turned-amateur astronomer, has emerged as the preferred destination for the next spacecraft to set wheels on Mars. The proposed landing site, which includes a tantalizing 5-kilometer-high mound of ancient sediments, may have once been flooded by water. Nature has learned that it rose to the top last month following a secret ranking of four candidate sites by co-investigators working with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, a 900-kilogram rover dubbed “Curiosity” set to launch later this year....

The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany’s landscape are striking emblems of the country’s shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world’s poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power. In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly....

Anxiety around children’s eating habits often peaks during sweets-laden holidays like Halloween, but the factors that contribute to excess weight in kids extend well beyond special occasions. Most children who are obese—now 17 percent in the U.S.—will carry that extra heft into adulthood, along with the long-term health consequences. Scientists project that today’s generation of children will live shorter lives than their parents and have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and atherosclerosis....

Thirty-three years after the invention of gene-splicing, the reality of biotechnology is still far short of what many once dreamed it would be, partly because the tools for manipulating genes have been crude. That is about to change. As nine scientists explain in “Engineering Life,” beginning on page 44, new “bio fab” approaches to assembling complete genetic circuits promise to advance biotechnology in much the same way that the invention of integrated circuits transfigured electronics....

Meteorologists watched as afternoon thunderstorms brewed in the mountainous region of central Guinea. By the evening of 22 October, the storms had intensified and were moving west towards the coast of Africa. At 8.20 p.m., the meteorologists received a thunderstorm alert, and for the next 45 minutes the 130,000 residents of the city of Fria were hammered by heavy rain, flash floods and winds of up to 77 kilometres per hour....

Florida’s next two decades could be more disruptive than any period in its history as climate change threatens the state’s 8,500-mile coastline and chews away at its $1 trillion economy. New modeling by Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic think tank, reveals that “100-year floods” could occur every few years rather than once a century in many locations, endangering an additional 300,000 homes, 2,500 miles of roadways, 30 schools and four hospitals....

Few of us have not paused at one time or another to marvel at the beauty of a soap bubble. The iridescent, evanescent orbs, which can persist for minutes before vanishing in an instant, have captivated bubble-blowing children and pensive bathtub recliners alike. They have also caught the eye of physicists and mathematicians, who have strived for hundreds of years to understand and predict the properties of bubbles at a fundamental level....

The long-range weather forecasts that warned of where Hurricane Katrina would strike depended on data from polar satellites. They capture not only details over the Arctic and Antarctic but also virtually every point on the planet’s surface as the world turns under them. Now the replacements for the aging U.S. military and civilian fleet are in jeopardy. The program is as much as $3 billion over budget, and the launch of the first replacement satellite is as many as three years behind schedule....

Prions, the infectious agents best known for causing degenerative brain disorders such as ‘mad cow’ disease, may have been spotted in bacteria. A section of a protein in Clostridium botulinum, the microbe that causes botulism, can behave like a prion when it is inserted into yeast and Escherichia coli bacteria, researchers report in the 13 January issue of Science1. Prions are formed by proteins that can fold in a number of structurally distinct ways....

Last March a group of Alabama lawmakers met with the Pentagon’s top acquisition official to discuss a new program, the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM). The lawmakers—looking out for the city of Huntsville, a legendary missile development hub—wanted to know what came next. The official told them the usual process was at work: the military would run a competition for JAGM and pick one contractor to develop it. A few months later, though, those same lawmakers demanded to know why the usual process would no longer be followed—they had just learned a new plan called for the Pentagon to pick at least two teams to compete against each other, and they weren’t happy about it....

A spider’s fangs are natural injection needles, making them perfectly suited for piercing the skeletons of prey and delivering a kiss of venom, a new study finds. The toothy barbs of a large wandering spider are curved in order to hold the spider’s prey in place, and their conical shape helps them resist deformation. Understanding the biomechanics of spider fangs could inspire new medical injection devices, researchers say. “For biomedical applications, for example, the spider fang may lead to the design of new infusion techniques, new blood-bypassing instruments and many other life-saving technologies,” said Benny Bar-On, a biomaterials scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Germany and co-author of the study published today (May 27) in the journal Nature Communications....

Sci-fi fans and animal-rights activists alike have been announcing its arrival for decades, but in a world where food scientists are still trying to figure out the best ways to extend the life of cake, it’s hard to imagine that meat created in a petri dish might gain a place on our dinner plates anytime soon. Yet, today in London Mark Post, a vascular physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, allowed two independent tasters to sample a hamburger patty he had grown in his lab....

Farms failed and livestock starved in the central United States during the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s. The event was not just the region’s worst dry spell in modern memory — it was the worst in North America over the past millennium, researchers report in Geophysical Research Letters. “Not only did 1934 [the first year of the Dust Bowl] stand out in terms of extent and intensity, but it was the worst by a fair margin,” says Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a co-author of the study....

People in New York City’s Times Square will witness plumes of pulverized bone erupt as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crushes one ton of confiscated ivory Friday to protest the illegal poaching of African elephants for the ivory trade. The event follows the only other high-profile ivory crush in the U.S., a six-ton eradication of seized tusks in November 2013. The brutality of the ivory trade has crippled all elephant populations worldwide, with 50,000 African elephants killed each year, leaving an estimated 434,000 remaining, according to a study published today in Science....

China’s energy use should flatten out sometime around 2030, with a similar leveling off of its greenhouse gas emissions, a federal researcher said yesterday. Mark Levine, director of the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said his research bucks the mainstream view that China’s energy appetite is swelling indefinitely. Instead, as Levine and others argue in a report released yesterday, China will reach “saturation” around 2030 – it simply won’t have to make appliances, roads and raw materials at the pace it needs to right now....