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Yesterday’s announcement by the international LIGO collaboration of the direct detection of gravitational radiation on September 14, 2015, initiates a new phase in the exploration of the universe and our search for the physical laws that govern it. Of course the details of the measurement must and will get the critical scrutiny they deserve—this is the way of science—but the data shown seem very convincing. This report represents a triumph on many fronts....

By Jonathan Stempel (Reuters) - The bald eagle may no longer be extinct, but the U.S. effort to protect the national bird became harder on Wednesday. A federal appeals court revived a religion-based challenge to a U.S. regulation that allows only members of Indian tribes recognized by the government to possess the birds’ feathers, so long as they first obtain permits. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Department of the Interior did not show the regulation was the “least restrictive means” to advance the compelling government interest in protecting the bald eagle because of its status as a national symbol....

Oliver O’Reilly was teaching his daughter to tie her shoes when he realized something: he had no idea why shoelaces suddenly come undone. When he went looking for an answer, it was apparent that no one else knew either. So O’Reilly, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, roped in two of his colleagues to help work it out. In a paper published on April 11 in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, they show that a combination of forces act on shoelace knots to cause a sudden, runaway failure....

Your friend Carol loves to prepare gifts of marbles in bags for children. On Monday, she has five red marbles, six blue marbles and seven white ones. Warm-Up: How many different bags can she pack so each bag will have a different collection of marbles? Two bags are different if for at least one color, one bag has a different number of marbles from the other. For example, a bag with two red marbles and one blue is different from a bag having one red and one blue or a bag having one red and two blue....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichA tortured, volcanic wasteland, baked by a runaway greenhouse effect, the surface of Venus has clearly had an unpleasant history. But just how unpleasant has become the subject of renewed debate among planetary scientists trying to understand the planet’s enigmatic topography.Ever since NASA’s Magellan spacecraft radar-mapped Venus twenty years ago, researchers have been struck by the relative sparseness and random distribution of its impact craters. The pattern, completely unlike that found on other terrestrial planets, suggests a surface that is uniformly young....

Dear EarthTalk: Do insulating paints actually insulate and save energy? If they do, are they environmentally friendly to use? – Bob Dibrindisi, Easthampton, MA Paint additives that claim insulating qualities have been marketed since the late 1990s, but energy research organizations have not confirmed their insulating value. For its part, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not recommend using paints or coatings in place of traditional bulk insulation. “We haven’t seen any independent studies that can verify their insulating qualities,” the agency reports....

A recent study showed that certain brain areas expand in people who have greater numbers of friends on Facebook. This was welcome news for online social network addicts, particularly teenagers: “Mom, I’m not just on Facebook; I’m doing my temporal lobe calisthenics.” There was a problem, though. The study, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was unable to resolve the question of whether “friending” plumps up the brain areas or whether people with a type of robustness in brain physiology are just natural social butterflies....

In 1966, a team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists journeyed to two small glaciers in Alaska to dig snow pits needed for measuring snow depth and density at the remote mountainous locations. Those early findings, repeated twice a year for the last 50 years, became the baseline for the government’s Benchmark Glacier program, the longest continuous glacier research in North America. The program provides data on glacier health in a warming climate....

The landmark study, AHeFT, showed BiDil (isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine) to be a major medical advance in treating heart failure in African Americans. A “placebo”-treated group of heart failure subjects were administered current standard heart failure therapies, and compared to BiDil-treated subjects who were administered current standard heart failure therapies plus BiDil. A-HeFT showed that BiDil provides a profound mortality benefit, reduction in first hospitalizations for heart failure, and improvement in patients functional status for a lethal disease that disproportionately burdens blacks....

BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill in the Gulf of Mexico that will soon make landfall, is no stranger to major accidents. In fact, the company has found itself at the center of several of the nation’s worst oil and gas–related disasters in the last five years. In March 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others....

Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects. In a recent study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues placed pea seedlings in pots shaped like an upside-down Y....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and climate change is a prominent example. Take the recent “deep freeze” along the US east coast....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazinePotential cancer treatments are loitering in the wings as clinical trials are delayed by widespread shortages of common chemotherapy drugs.The I-SPY 2 Breast Cancer Clinical Trial, for example, a high-profile experiment aiming to test the use of certain molecular markers to guide cancer treatment, was designed to allow researchers to adapt the study’s protocol in response to early results. But principal investigator Laura Esserman, an oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is finding it harder to adapt to the shortages....

Key Concepts Forces Compression Tension Introduction Have you ever wondered how bridges stand tall in the face of gravity, weather and the heavy traffic crossing over them? Building them might seem complicated, but they are based on some surprisingly simple forces that you have probably experienced yourself. Have you ever stomped on an empty can? Or played tug-of-war? Then you might know more about engineering suspension bridges than you think!...

LONDON (Reuters) - Global installed wind power capacity increased by 12.4 percent to more than 318 gigawatts in 2013 led by China and Canada, industry figures showed on Wednesday. Capacity rose from around 283 GW at the end of 2012, data from the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) showed. However, installations slowed in 2013 to about 35.5 GW, almost 10 GW less than a year earlier mostly on a drop in the United States....

For decades, the ancient game of Go has stood out as the one board game that computers couldn’t crack. Played by tens of millions of people across Asia, its complexity and subtlety meant that Go’s top human players reigned supreme against the advance of artificial intelligence (AI). Now, for the first time, a computer has beaten a human Go professional without the advantage of a handicap. AlphaGo, a program developed by Google’s London-based company DeepMind, bested European champion Fan Hui in five games out of five....

In the past decade or so the proportion of AIDS cases in the southern states of the U.S. has largely risen or remained unchanged compared with other regions of the country. As this animated cartogram makes clear, the geographic shift to the South (states outlined in black) since 2000 has been subtle but noticeable. It wasn’t always this way. When epidemiologists in 1981 first reported the existence of HIV in the U....

It is folly to respond to COVID by focusing only on the coronavirus that causes it, because the virus alone did not dictate the catastrophic impact. For instance, in the U.S., the illness initially hit urban populations hard. But the virus has traveled to more rural areas over time, and recently the impact has shifted to Southern states. In those areas, people younger than 70 years old have been dying more frequently from COVID than they have elsewhere....

In 1955, Jonas Salk developed and debuted the inactivated polio vaccine. Within five years, cases of polio in the United States dropped drastically, and childhood vaccinations for infectious diseases like polio became a new standard of care. The Salk vaccine heralded a new dawn for treating infectious diseases during the 1960s, specifically severe respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in children. However, when a formalin-inactivated version of an RSV virus vaccine similar to the polio vaccine was trialed in 1967, many immunized infants actually experienced an enhanced form of RSV disease—complete with high fever, bronchopneumonia and wheezing—when they later became infected with wild-type, or naturally occurring, RSV viruses circulating in the community....

When we pack our children off to school, we envision them embarking on a lifelong career of learning. Yet one thing they typically never study is the art of studying itself. Our intuitions, it turns out, do not always map to reality. In “Psychologists Identify the Best Ways to Study” by John Dunlosky et al. we comb through the vast scientific literature on learning techniques to identify the two methods that work best....