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Since the 1950s, scientists have been trying to drill through the oceanic crust to expose the mantle below. Although that goal remains out of reach–the crust is more than four miles thick–a new drilling project at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean has reached almost a mile below the sea-floor and exposed what lies beneath the uppermost layer of crust for the first time. A team of American and Japanese scientists began drilling at the site–500 miles west of Costa Rica–in 2002, lured by theoretical predictions of thin crust in areas where the sea-floor spread most rapidly....

View slideshow Glacier National Park in the U.S. may soon lose the reason for its name. Spring comes earlier in the high reaches of the Arctic. And 11 of the last 12 years rank among the warmest since record keeping began in 1850. Climate change has become not only a problem for future generations but a current event that portends catastrophe. The effects of global warming can be seen in retreating glaciers, threatened animals and plants as well as rising seas....

This week’s Supreme Court ruling that the Affordable Care Act violated the craft store chain Hobby Lobby’s religious freedom by requiring it to provide employees with insurance coverage for certain contraceptives was based on a complete misunderstanding of how these forms of birth control work. The owners of Hobby Lobby believe the contraceptives—Plan B, Ella and intrauterine devices (IUD)—cause abortions, which they object to as Christians. It is scientifically accepted that pregnancy starts when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus....

NASA on Saturday is set to launch the next generation of space-based gamma-ray detectors. If all goes as planned, GLAST—for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope—will within months begin to send back detailed, real-time data on the most energetic explosions and flare-ups the cosmos has to offer. You may think of gamma rays as tools for scorching tumors or maybe as the stuff of comic book and TV lore that belted mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner and turned him into the Incredible Hulk....

Just sixty years ago polio was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases in the U.S. Vaccination campaigns effectively stamped out domestic cases of the disease, with the last cases of naturally occurring paralytic polio in the U.S. in 1979. But news that a small number of children have developed polio-like symptoms in California has fueled instant public interest and concern. Keith Van Haren, a pediatric neurologist at Stanford University, said in a report released February 23 that five children between August 2012 and July 2013 had developed paralysis reminiscent of polio....

Key concepts Atmosphere Environment Speed Weather Wind Introduction Have you ever wondered how wind is made? Wind is caused by a difference in air pressure. Air travels from areas of higher pressure to places where there is less pressure. And just as air flows out of the high-pressure inside an inflated balloon if the opening is not tied, air in the atmosphere will move to a lower pressure area, creating wind....

A satellite captured a birds-eye view of the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting Earth, revealing spectacular images just released by NASA. The Landsat 8 is an Earth-observing satellite, and hovers an average of 438 miles (705 kilometers) above the surface of the planet. With the Space Station orbiting at only 250 miles (400 km) above the surface, the Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) gets a unique view of the ISS when the two orbits align....

This spring, the 17-year cicadas of Brood X will emerge from underground, climb tree trunks and molt, leaving their crunchy shells behind. Soon after, the males will join together in a droning chorus to the delight (or consternation) of their human neighbors. Those with a keen ear might detect that there are several buzzy songs occurring at once. This is not because the cicadas have a large repertoire. Rather, there are few different cicada species, including the Magicicada septendecim and the Magicicada cassini, each with a different tune....

Captchas are those annoying “What does this garbled text say?” puzzles that you have to solve before you’re allowed to sign up for something online. (Read more about Captchas in March’s Scientific American.) They’re designed to thwart spammers whose automated software bots would otherwise pollute the Web site with phony sign-ups. But Captchas are sometimes so difficult that even humans can’t solve them. And although they’re no longer sufficient to stop spammers’ increasingly sophisticated bots, they’re 100 percent effective in keeping out blind people....

Atoms are now such a commonplace idea that it is hard to remember how radical they used to seem. When scientists first hypothesized atoms centuries ago, they despaired of ever observing anything so small, and many questioned whether the concept of atoms could even be called scientific. Gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with Albert Einstein’s 1905 analysis of Brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid....

Just three years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) was in deep financial trouble, with a US$300-million deficit. Today the agency’s future looks healthier. Last week, the World Health Assembly — the annual gathering in Geneva, Switzerland, of health ministers of the WHO’s 194 governing member states — voted in favor of major budgetary reforms that look set to put the agency on a firmer financial footing. The agency has also taken action to prune and prioritize its work, which critics say has long been spread too thinly....

Worm grunters have mastered the art of charming worms out of their burrows so they can be collected and sold as bait. First, the hunters pound a stob, or wooden stake, into the soil, and then they rub the stake with a flat piece of metal called a rooping iron. The vibrations resonate through the ground. In response, hundreds of large earthworms emerge, some as far as 12 meters from the baiter....

Why does organic milk last so much longer than regular milk? Craig Baumrucker, professor of animal nutrition and physiology at Pennsylvania State University, pours out an answer: This longevity disparity actually has little to do with whether or not milk is organic. Rather organic milk frequently lasts longer—as long as a month, compared with about a week for regular milk—because producers use a different process to preserve it. According to the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, organic milk needs to stay fresh longer because it is produced in fewer dairies and generally has to travel farther to reach store shelves....

By Nichola Groom LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California, grappling with how to keep the lights on and meet environmental goals after closing a major nuclear power plant, is considering allowing owners to delay retiring some older gas-fired generators. In an interview on February 4, California Energy Commission Chair Robert Weisenmiller said that the State Water Resources Control Board “has said we can go in and make a case with them for extending the lives of some of these units” and “we’re going to start the discussion with them....

DECEMBER 7, 2014: IN QUARANTINE When we arrive at the school in the village of Tambiama, a few people stand in a dirt yard behind a strip of red and white quarantine tape. Then, as a policeman and a soldier call to the rest, men, women, and children slowly file out—more than 40 people altogether. We’ve here, in northern Sierra Leone, to meet with the friends and neighbours of a woman from Tambiama who died from Ebola on November 14....

It’s often surprising to me how profound insights can arise from simple questions. Here’s one: How does the brain capture a single concept? Naturally, our minds make use of networks of neurons—but are they sparse or distributed over large populations of cells? Researchers are exploring and debating that question and will likely be doing so for some time. There is now evidence that each of us has sets of “concept cells” that know all the 10,000 or so concepts that a typical person remembers....

A hot, Jupiter–like planet orbiting a distant star has water in its atmosphere, according to a new analysis. Three teams of astronomers reported in February that they could not detect water vapor in light coming from a pair of gaseous planets outside our solar system, even though theories predicted it should be there. [For an update on this story, click here.] Now astronomer Travis Barman of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – An odd little freshwater fish may be using the chemical equivalent of visual camouflage to mask its smell and hide in plain sight, a new study finds. If the chemical deception is confirmed, pirate perch would be the first animal discovered to use the technique against a wide variety of prey, ranging from insects to amphibians. The finding, published online in the journal The American Naturalist, could mean that many more organisms use chemical means to hide themselves than scientists currently realize....

If energy were chickens, every time someone left the lights on or kept their computers plugged in overnight, they would be looking at sickly, green-looking fowl. At least, that’s the concept behind Energy Chickens, a game created by a group of researchers and developers at Pennsylvania State University. Energy Chickens encourages people to keep their virtual chickens healthy by engaging in basic energy-saving behavior around the house. For every appliance a user has, he or she gets a chicken to look after....

For most of the past century, electricity sales and economic activity have fluctuated in tandem. This was certainly true in 2008, when an economic recession saw sales dip sharply after reaching a historic high the year before. Since then, however, the trajectories of economics and electricity appear to have diverged. While the U.S. gross domestic product has crawled steadily back to pre-recession levels, electricity sales experienced a brief lift only to fall again over the past two years....