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By Ian Simpson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A powerful winter storm pummeled the U.S. East Coast on Monday, snarling travel, shutting down federal offices in Washington and closing schools and local governments throughout the area. The latest in a series of winter fronts that have hammered the region, the storm is expected to dump up to 9 inches of snow on the U.S. capital as it sweeps from the Mississippi Valley to the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic states, the National Weather Service said....

A long-awaited study is making worldwide headlines for finding that the outlawed psychoactive drug MDMA is startlingly effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But researchers and study participants say the substance itself, while extremely powerful, catalyzes healing rather than working on its own: MDMA treatment also requires dozens of hours of therapy—before, during and after the drug experience—with professionals whose special training is expensive and intense. Researchers hope the new study, published this week in Nature Medicine, will help this treatment gain regulators’ approval for clinical use within a couple of years....

This year, the Commerce Department will investigate the feasibility of a bicycle share program. The Agriculture Department’s Risk Management Agency will redraw planting zone maps for the purposes of insuring nursery-grown plants. And the Department of Defense will scale down its fleet of gas-guzzling Humvees. These are all examples of steps federal agencies will take in 2013 in an effort to deal with the risks of future climate change. The Obama administration released its first climate change adaptation plans Thursday, as part of the annual sustainability reports....

By Zoë Corbyn of Nature magazineThe placenta has long been thought of as a passive organ that simply enables a fetus to take up nutrients from its mother. But new research in mice shows that when calories are restricted, the placenta steps up to the plate-actively sacrificing itself to protect the fetal brain from damage.Researchers at Cambridge University, UK, examined what happened to 10 fetuses from 8 mice when their pregnant mothers were deprived of food for 24 hours-as might happen in the wild – about mid-way through gestation....

Like many of her neighbors, Maria Recchia-O’Neill has a sport utility vehicle sitting in her driveway in Rye Brook, just north of New York City. She drives it to work and around town to run errands. But although her vehicle looks like any other SUV, her Chevrolet Equinox gets excellent gas mileage—and it doesn’t emit any pollutants or climate change–promoting carbon dioxide. That is because it is a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle—one of 40 such automobiles that U....

In the past year there’s been a lot of talk about the lack of trust in science and the need to distinguish legitimate research from misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of fallaciousness. But how? Many commentators have pointed to the importance of peer review—the process through which scientific claims are scrutinized for validity by other researchers with expertise in relevant fields, before the papers are published. Those observers have insisted that a study’s appearance in a peer-reviewed journal is a hallmark of legitimacy....

Nacre, an iridescent material that lines some seashells, gains strength and toughness from its structure: brittle mineral chips glued into layers by squishy proteins. Now researchers have used the same principle to develop a superstrong glass composite that could one day make nearly unbreakable smartphone screens, windshields and other items that currently rely on various types of treated glass. The new material combines rigid glass flakes, less than one hundredth of a millimeter thick, with flexible acrylic....

Key concepts Physics Mathematics Energy Projectiles Introduction If you’ve ever been shot with a rubber band then you know it has energy in it—enough energy to smack you in the arm and cause a sting! But have you ever wondered what the relationship is between a stretched rubber band at rest and the energy it holds? The energy the rubber band has stored is related to the distance the rubber band will fly after being released....

A man was attempting to murder a toddler in San Diego, and Norm Stamper shot and killed him. The year was 1972 and Stamper, a police lieutenant in San Diego at the time, recalls that his heart pounded, his breath quickened and his vision narrowed into a tunnel. “I couldn’t have told you what was going on four-feet away, to the left or to the right,” he says. He pulled the trigger, the man fell and an official inquiry found that Stamper’s actions were justified....

David Cleavinger distinctly remembers looking out to his cornfields on a recent 111-degree summer day in Wildorado, Texas. Winds were whipping the stalks at 40 mph, and despite the puddles of water settling in the irrigated corn rows, he knew his crop would barely stand a chance this season. “We have irrigation, but it doesn’t matter how much irrigation you have,” he said of the frustratingly fruitless work. In the face of violent winds and extreme heat, Cleavinger’s corn was barely able to take in the little available water before it quickly evaporated....

The United States is not prepared to deal with the aftermath of a major nuclear attack, despite North Korea’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons and the increasing tensions between nations overall. That was the blunt assessment of public-health experts who participated in a meeting last week on nuclear preparedness, organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The gathering is “an acknowledgement that the threat picture has changed, and that the risk of this happening has gone up”, says Tener Veenema, who studies disaster nursing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-chaired the conference in Washington DC ....

Scientists have studied brain structure for decades, so most disease-related structural anomalies have been long known. New findings of this nature are rare—yet last summer one neuroscientist studying depression published just that. Over nine years of sorting through countless brain images, Jerome J. Maller of Monash University and Alfred Hospital in Melbourne noticed a particular type of brain abnormality that seemed to show up more often in depressed patients. Their occipital lobes were often wrapped around each other....

What’s the book about? Too Big to Know is about what happens to knowledge when it becomes a network. The basic idea is that the properties of knowledge that we’ve taken for granted at least in the West for, oh, 2,500 years are not actually properties of knowledge. They’re properties of knowledge when its medium is paper. And when you remove the paper and put things online, it takes on the properties of its new medium—of the Internet....

By Nina Chestney SPEYSIDE (Reuters) - Scotch whisky distillers are burning their unwanted grain byproducts, wood chips and other types of biomass for a source of energy in remote areas of the Highlands, where gas links are scarce and fuel oil is pricey. The production of Scotch whisky has evolved over more than 500 years and is steeped in tradition. It is also a big business, generating 4 billion pounds ($6 billion) a year in exports - a quarter of all Britain’s food and drink sales abroad....

Contrary to reports by famous Greek historian Herodotus, the ancient Egyptians probably didn’t remove mummy guts using cedar oil enemas, new research on the reality of mummification suggests. The ancient embalmers also didn’t always leave the mummy’s heart in place, the researchers added. The findings, published in the February issue of HOMO – Journal of Comparative Human Biology, come from analyzing 150 mummies from the ancient world. Mummy history In the fifth century B....

What if there was an easy way to take the carbon dioxide from coal power smokestacks and turn it back into a rock that would sit quietly, deep below the earth’s surface? That would get around a key sticking point of current carbon storage schemes, which entail injecting CO2 into porous sedimentary rock formations such as sandstone—that the gas could eventually escape, seeping back up to the surface and into the atmosphere, heating the planet....

An ancient, predatory creature known as the devil frog may have looked even scarier than previously thought. The monster frog, Beelzebufo ampinga, lived during the Cretaceous Period in what is now Africa, and sported spiky flanges protruding from the back of its skull and platelike armor down its back, almost like a turtle shell. “We knew it was big; we knew it was almost certainly predatory,” said study co-author Susan Evans, a paleontologist at the University College London....

Antibiotic use is growing steadily worldwide, driven mainly by rising demand in low- and middle-income countries, according to a report released on September 17. The research presents the clearest picture yet of how and where the drugs are used, and the prevalence of different types of antibiotic resistance. The Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP), a non-profit group headquartered in Washington DC, based the analysis on data from scientific literature and national and regional surveillance systems....

Many experts now agree that schools can re-open safely if they implement coronavirus control measures including mask wearing, physical distancing of three feet with masks on and six feet with masks off (per recently updated guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control), and good ventilation, reports Tanya Lewis at Scientific American (4/15/21). As of last month, “nearly half of U.S. school campuses were open,” Lewis writes. And school reopening in Florida, Utah and Missouri did not result in spikes in COVID-19 cases, research reveals....

Viruses sense chemical signals left behind by their forebears so they can decide whether to kill or just to infect their hosts. The discovery—in viruses that attack Bacillus bacteria—marks the first time that any type of viral communication system has ever been found. But researchers say that many other viruses could communicate with each other through their own molecular languages—perhaps even viruses that are responsible for human diseases. If that is the case, scientists might have found a new way to disrupt viral attacks....