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Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s announcement yesterday that it would shutter California’s last nuclear plant and replace the power with energy efficiency and renewable energy was the result of a confluence of progressive state policies, CEO Anthony Earley said. The closure of Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors on California’s central coast in 2024 and 2025 will likely mean the end of nuclear power in the state, due to an existing state moratorium on new plants until the problem of radioactive waste is dealt with permanently....

By Jane QiuSHANGHAI, China–China is setting its sights on exploring and exploiting the deep sea. Until recently, the country’s ocean research focused largely on coastal and offshore waters. But with its breakneck economic development demanding ever more resources, and a growing desire to have more influence in territory disputes and international waters, China is investing heavily in its deep-sea research and exploration program, experts revealed at a meeting here last week....

There is no doubt the prolific Gustave Whitehead deserves an honorable mention in the Hall of Aviation Pioneers. He built dozens of aircraft and workable gliders as well as several lightweight gasoline-powered engines, and Scientific American frequently mentioned his work. But was he “first in flight”? No. Those honors go to the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, who completed the first powered, man-carrying, controlled flight of more than a few meters in the first decade of the 20th century....

Carmela Cuomo thought she had the secret within reach, hidden in a shallow black tank at the NOAA marine fisheries laboratory in Milford, Conn. The horseshoe crabs she had plucked from New Haven Harbor in 2000 trundled about their springtime ritual, digging pits in the sand, laying their eggs and fertilizing them. She was trying to understand what formula of light, food and chemistry induced these 500-million-year-old creatures to breed. But the next year, before she could figure it out, the crabs stopped mating, and the secret eluded her....

Addressing an Illinois temperance society in 1842, Abraham Lincoln said something about “intoxicating liquor” that probably got a frosty reception. “It is true that… many were greatly injured by it,” the future president noted. “But none seemed to think the injury arose from the use of a bad thing but from the abuse of a very good thing.” America has always had trouble deciding whether alcohol is a bad thing or a good thing....

If the full name of any germ could be a household word, it would be Escherichia coli O157:H7, a bacterium that has in the past caused severe food poisoning linked to Jack in the Box hamburgers, Taco Bell lettuce and prepackaged spinach. Now E. coli O157:H7 is being overshadowed by more virulent strains of what is normally a benign gut microbe. This spring a recently identified strain of E. coli, O104:H4, killed dozens of people in Europe and landed hundreds more in the hospital....

MAY 1955 GERM THEORY–“A new look at the biological formulation of the germ theory seems warranted. We need to account for the peculiar fact that pathogenic agents sometimes can persist in the tissues without causing disease and at other times can cause disease even in the presence of specific antibodies. During the first phase of the germ theory the property of virulence was regarded as lying solely within the microbes themselves....

A car detects when a driver starts to nod off and gently pulls over. A tablet or laptop senses its user is confused and offers assistance. Such interventions seem futuristic, but in fact they may not require any technological breakthroughs: a recent study suggests that with the aid of a standard camera, a simple computer program can learn to read people’s eye movements to determine what they are doing and perhaps how they are feeling....

Say what you will about cybercriminals, says Angela Sasse, “their victims rave about the customer service”. Sasse is talking about ransomware: an extortion scheme in which hackers encrypt the data on a user’s computer, then demand money for the digital key to unlock them. Victims get detailed, easy-to-follow instructions for the payment process (all major credit cards accepted), and how to use the key. If they run into technical difficulties, there are 24/7 call centres....

The cyber attacks on Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers and leak of more than 19,000 pilfered committee e-mails—just before the party’s national convention this week—have created improbable twists an election that already seemed stranger than fiction. But one thing that stands out is the unusual level of confidence with which investigators pinned the blame on Russian intelligence agencies. If true, this would amount to another country trying to tilt the outcome of a U....

Selflessness can be sexy. Generosity has been shown to pique the fancy of people seeking long term partners. It seems understandable that generosity to others might promise generosity in a relationship, but beyond identifying love interests, helping others seems to strengthen all human relations. Without selflessness, the logic goes, we as a society would devolve into chaos. Those who do not share at the metaphorical sandbox are not invited back to play....

Earth’s largest mass extinction to date is sometimes called the Great Dying—and for good reason: it wiped out about 70 percent of life on land and 95 percent in the oceans. Researchers have long cited intense volcanism in modern-day Siberia as the main culprit behind the cataclysm, also known as the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, 252 million years ago. A recent study pins down crucial details of the killing mechanism, at least for marine life: oceans worldwide became oxygen-starved, suffocating entire ecosystems....

It may look like a floor lamp mounted on a vacuum cleaner, but Anybots, Inc.’s new “QB” is actually the latest in surrogate robotics. It is designed to serve as your eyes, ears and voice when you can’t be there in person. Even better, it rolls around on two wheels like The Jetsons’ Rosie and can be navigated remotely via the Web and a Wi-Fi connection. Anybots formally unveiled the robot on May 18 and plans to start selling QBs this fall, at a hefty $15,000....

By Karolos Grohmann SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Organizers of the Sochi Olympics defied the odds when they battled unusually warm temperatures for a week but they were helpless against a winter fog that caused events to be postponed on Monday. The men’s biathlon 15km mass start was called off for a second straight day and thick fog also forced the postponement of the men’s snowboard cross competition. “I think it is actually quite ironic that the biggest issue we’ve had so far is due to winter fog and that’s led to the biggest postponement we’ve had,” said IOC spokesman Mark Adams....

1966 Soft Landing on the Moon “Six hundred miles from the site where the Russian spacecraft Luna 9 made the first controlled landing on the moon in February, the U.S. spacecraft Surveyor 1 touched down in the Sea of Storms and began sending back thousands of pictures. The pictures from Surveyor 1 show an area having the appearance of a ‘freshly turned field’ with rocks and pebbles protruding through a thin layer of dust....

A committee investigating problems in papers claiming a method to apply stress to create embryonic like cells has found the lead researcher guilty of scientific misconduct. The judgement is the latest twist — but not the final word — in the bizarre story of stimulus-triggered activation of pluripotency (STAP), a method that researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, still say is able to turn ordinary mature mouse cells into cells that share embryonic stem cells’ capacity to turn into all of the body’s cells....

You know that funny feeling you sometimes get that you have been somewhere before—although you are almost certain you have not? It is just your mind playing tricks on you. Or, more accurately, according to new research, it is an error in your so-called episodic memory in which similarities between new and familiar experiences are confused by your brain’s hippocampus. The hippocampus—two sea horse–shaped neuronal clusters framing the midbrain—is the well-characterized seat of episodic memory that records times, places and events....

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in our April 1994 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long history of Nobelists publishing in Scientific American. The real wage of the average American worker more than doubled between the end of World War II and 1973. Since then, however, those wages have risen only 6 percent. Furthermore, only highly educated workers have seen their compensation rise; the real earnings of blue-collar workers have fallen in most years since 1973....

If you’re serious about rescuing all your analog memories before it’s too late—before the recording media or playback devices fade away—one thing is for sure: the task ahead will be either time-consuming or expensive. In each case, you can either do the digitizing yourself, or you can send your recordings away to a company that does it for you. If you’re committed, though, it’s a very satisfying project. Here are the basics: Photo prints....

Sometimes, it’s the simplest technologies that have the greatest potential impact on people’s lives. Take the Vestergaard Frandsen Group’s mobile personal filtration system, otherwise known as LifeStraw. It is a powder-blue plastic tube—much thicker than an ordinary straw—containing filters that make water teeming with typhoid-, cholera- and diarrhea-causing microorganisms drinkable. The filters, made up of a halogenated resin, kill nearly 100 percent of bacteria and nearly 99 percent of the viruses that pass through LifeStraw....