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Originally posted on the Nature news blog Every summer solstice, tens of thousands of people throng to Stonehenge, creating a festival-like atmosphere at the 4,400-year-old stone monument. For the 2015 solstice, they will have a bit more room to spread out. A just-completed four-year project to map the vicinity of Stonehenge reveals a sprawling complex that includes 17 newly discovered monuments and signs of 1.5 kilometer-round “super henge”. The digital map — made from high-resolution radar and magnetic and laser scans that accumulated several terabytes of data — shatters the picture of Stonehenge as a desolate and exclusive site that was visited by few, says Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, UK, who co-led the effort....

The dentist’s office of the future will have little resemblance to the small private practices that many people visit today: offices staffed by one or two dentists and a handful of hygienists who may have treated the same families for generations. Within a decade, dentistry will become increasingly digitized, flexible and mobile—not just in industrialized countries, but around the world. Dentists who are part of the Millennial generation are already approaching their practice in a vastly different manner than their predecessors....

Oil and natural gas fracking, on average, uses more than 28 times the water it did 15 years ago, gulping up to 9.6 million gallons of water per well and putting farming and drinking sources at risk in arid states, especially during drought. Those are the results of a U.S. Geological Survey study published by the American Geophysical Union, the first national-scale analysis and map of water use from hydraulic fracturing operations....

As Brazilian authorities retrieved 16 more bodies from the Air France Flight 447 crash this morning, investigators were focusing on airspeed indicators called pitot tubes as the cause of the disaster. On May 31, the Airbus A330 jet was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it vanished during a thunderstorm with 228 people on board. Initial speculation centered around the possibility of a lightning strike, but last week Airbus released a memo stating that “there was inconsistency between the different measured airspeeds” coming from different pitot tubes....

Scientists reacted sharply to revelations that the White House is discussing ways to potentially force federal researchers to debate the credibility of mainstream climate science, saying it threatens to pull experts into conspiratorial exercises that might harm their careers. The pushback came as some White House officials try to formalize a “red team” debate to question the scientific studies that underlie the National Climate Assessment. The exercise is widely viewed among scientists as an attempt to confuse public perceptions about the impacts of rising temperatures....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

July 1962 Nuclear War Planning “The May 31 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine considers in detail the consequences of the 20 megatons scheduled for Boston in a nuclear attack scenario: ‘It is likely that the vectors of epidemic disease would survive radiation injury better than the human population. Eastern equine encephalitis, hepatitis, poliomyelitis and other endemic disease could easily reach epidemic proportions under these circumstances.’ Prompt disposal of the dead will be essential for ‘control of epidemic disease and its vectors, flies and rodents’ and for ‘equally important, though less apparent,’ psychological reasons....

Scientists have been measuring this rise from satellites since 1993, using instruments called altimeters. But for an 18-month period that began in the middle of 2010, something surprising happened. Instead of rising, sea levels fell. “Every few months we check in on sea level and try to get some idea as to what’s happening and why. For most of the altimeter record, it’s been a fairly bland story. But some years have really thrown some curveballs,” said John Fasullo, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research....

The third of a four-part series. Click here for part one and here for part two. Not long after the auto bailouts, the financial crash and the election of President Obama, General Motors Co. had a choice to make. It had designed an electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, to prove it could build something besides gas guzzlers. To make this car even close to affordable, it would need a battery unlike any that had been made before....

Cancer plays a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the body, and the drugs sent to treat it are often the losers—as is the cancer patient. The drugs have trouble distinguishing between tumor cells and healthy ones and may drop their payload on the normal cells, causing miserable side effects and leaving nearby cancer cells untouched. Malignancies may also get a helping hand from the body’s own leading defense weapon, the immune system....

A planetary scientist has identified the largest-known solid object in the Solar System that could float in a bathtub. The rock-and-ice body, which circles well outside the orbits of the planets, is less dense than water — although a bathtub big enough to hold it would stretch from London to Frankfurt. The body, dubbed 2002 UX25, lies in the Kuiper belt, a reservoir of dwarf planets, comets and smaller frozen bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune....

In 1904 a woman in Italy confronted two life-threatening events: first, diagnosis with cancer of the uterine cervix, then a dog bite. Doctors delivered the rabies vaccine for the bite, and subsequently her “enormously large” tumor disappeared (“il tumore non esisteva più”). The woman lived cancer-free until 1912. Soon thereafter several other Italian patients with cervical cancer also received the vaccine—a live rabies virus that had been weakened. As reported by Nicola De Pace in 1910, tumors in some patients shrank, presumably because the virus somehow killed the cancer....

Despite advances in weather prediction technology, meteorologists must still qualify any hurricane forecasts with a “cone of uncertainty,” which depicts just how far the center of a storm might deviate from its projected track. This year’s hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, which began June 1, is expected to be less active than those recent years, but with season’s peak less than a month away researchers are exploring new data-driven approaches to better warn those potentially in the path of approaching storms....

It’s fourth and goal and the home team’s football quarterback can’t get through to his coach on the sideline; the cast of a Broadway musical goes silent mid-show; a television news crew has to scramble to dig up cables that let reporters broadcast live on location—all because you tried to use your fancy new wireless device to download streaming video from the Internet, and it knocked out nearby wireless microphones. That has not happened yet, but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is concerned enough with the possibility that it is having doubts about opening up “white spaces”—the slots of unused bandwidth built into the spectrum to keep broadcast signals from interfering with one another and to provide bandwidth for licensed wireless devices such as wireless microphones—to new, unlicensed cell phones, computers and other wireless devices that benefit from faster data downloads than those available today through Wi-Fi connections....

By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES, April 10 (Reuters) - Meager precipitation and a premature spring thaw caused by unusually mild temperatures last month have left the U.S. Western mountain snowpack, a key source of fresh surface water for the region, at record low levels, the government reported on Friday. Melting of winter snows began much earlier than usual this year, from the Sierra Nevada range in California to the lower elevations of Colorado’s Rockies, leaving much of the Western snowpack greatly diminished or gone by early April, when it is typically at its peak....

By Alissa de Carbonnel BRUSSELS, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Faced with a U.S. retreat from international efforts to tackle climate change, European Union officials are looking to China, fearing a leadership vacuum will embolden those within the bloc seeking to slow the fight against global warming. While U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to act on campaign pledges to pull out of the 2015 Paris accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions, his swift action in other areas has sparked sharp words from usually measured EU bureaucrats....

“I paint in order not to cry,” artist Paul Klee once remarked. The artist suffered from an autoimmune disease, which crippled his hands and made it difficult for him to even hold a pen. Yet he painted obsessively. His turmoil seemed to release an outpouring of creative energy. Systematic research has shown that many eminent creators—think of Frida Kahlo, the Brontë sisters or Stephen Hawking—endured harsh early life experiences, such as social rejection, parental loss or disability....

From Ensia (find the original story here), from an article commissioned by Courier; reprinted with permission. August 1, 2017—Seventy-seven-year-old Heinz Spahn—whose blue eyes are both twinkling and stern—vividly recalls his younger days. The Zollverein coal mine, where he worked in the area of Essen, Germany, was so clogged with coal dust, he remembers, that people would stir up a black cloud whenever they moved. “It was no pony farm,” he says—using the sardonic German phrase to describe the harsh conditions: The roar of machines was at a constant 110 decibels, and the men were nicknamed waschbar, or “raccoons,” for the black smudges that permanently adorned their faces....

Drought is projected to intensify in frequency and severity, bringing with it more wildfires, insect-induced tree mortality and a host of economic impacts as global temperatures rise, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment released by the U.S. Forest Service. Simply put, the report released Monday synthesizes a growing body of research that finds that drought is not good for America’s forests. “Looking at 300 pages as a whole, the main message is that even if we don’t know exactly how drought will manifest in the future, the consequences for forests are likely to be worse,” said Charles Luce, a research hydrologist with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station and co-editor of the report....

Where are the images and ideas from dreams located in the brain, and is there any way to capture them? —Derek Meier, Chicago Mark A. W. Andrews, director and professor of physiology at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., replies: THE ANSWER to the latter part of your question is simply, “No.” Although we have technology that can measure general brain activity, we have no method for assessing or capturing our individual thoughts and dreams....