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The ski resort town of Whistler, British Columbia, is ending its hydrogen fuel-cell bus program, the world’s largest demonstration of its kind, and switching back to diesel. The 20-bus project was launched ahead of the 2010 Winter Olympics to showcase the technology before an international audience in a location with challenging terrain and climatic conditions. This month, the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure confirmed it will not be continuing with the demonstration project after it concludes in March 2014....

The Leonid meteor shower is forecasted to peak Monday afternoon (Nov. 17) in the U.S. eastern time zone, so stargazers in the United States are advised to look to the skies between midnight and dawn on Monday and Tuesday morning for the best view, astronomers say. This year, the Leonid meteor shower should treat skywatchers to beween 10 and 15 meteors per hour, NASA meteor expert Bill Cook, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told Space....

Warming of the Pacific Ocean off Washington state could destabilize methane deposits on the seafloor and trigger a release of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters. In the worst-case scenario, if oceans warm by up to 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100, the volume of methane release every year by 2100 would quadruple the amount by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the study estimates....

Editor’s Note (8/6/21): Shortly after this story was published, NASA officials announced that data received from Perseverance suggested that no rock was collected during the rover’s initial sampling activity. The Perseverance mission has assembled a response team to evaluate the situation and to plan additional sample collection attempts. This story has been updated to include this new information. Almost six months into its mission, the Mars rover Perseverance has at last performed its ground-breaking ceremony....

When the starting gun fires at the Olympic track in Rio de Janeiro, there is little doubt who will be in the lead. In the Men’s 1,500 Meters Asbel Kiprop will be up front. In the women’s 5,000 meters Almaz Ayana will run away, and she may also take the 10,000 Meters. In the marathon Helah Kiprop will push the women whereas Eliud Kipchoge will be the one to watch among the men....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong. Perhaps the brain was less complicated than they thought, he said. Perhaps, he said, the brain worked on the same fundamental principles as a simple sand pile, in which avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall — a process he dubbed “self-organized criticality....

BUSINESS LEADER OF THE YEAR Google, Inc. Mountain View, Calif. The Web’s leader in accessing information gets better Corporate data storage grows by 50 percent yearly. Desktop hard disks routinely hold multiple gigabytes. This ocean of information would not be navigable without superior search tools. Since it went live in 1998, Google has evolved into the innovator that Microsoft and other established information technology companies now strive to match. Google has extended search capabilities that even help the user organize photographs and word-processing files on a PC desktop....

Most would acknowledge that women and minorities already face more hurdles in academia than their white, male peers. A lack of mentors, occasionally overt discrimination and the academy’s poor work-life balance, are well-documented issues. But now a study has suggested that these groups may be at a disadvantage even before the starting whistle sounds. A study published on April 22 (and currently under review) looked at how likely faculty were to respond to a request to meet with a student to informally discuss potential research opportunities—a scenario picked as a proxy for the many informal events that could boost an academic career and which fall outside institutions’ formal checks and balances....

They call it the tera­scale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion. To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the tera­scale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts)....

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, during the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, and in the small hours of the next day went down into the cold Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1,517 lives. There have been worse tragedies in history. Some were more violently spectacular, some still govern the daily routines of the survivors. Yet the Titanic disaster has strongly resonated with us for a century....

Twelve states, including two with Republican governors, are joining the U.S. Climate Alliance, launched by California, New York and Washington. A different coalition of nine states, 125 cities, and hundreds of businesses and universities signed an open letter that declared “we are still in” the international deal (E&E News PM, June 5). The Mayors’ National Climate Action Agenda, a group aligned on actions to limit warming, more than tripled its membership....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Last week, we discussed the importance of the parathyroid gland in regulating bone health. We talked about how the parathyroid uses Vitamin D to help perform its job. So let’s learn more about Vitamin D, often referred to as the “sunshine Vitamin” for reasons we will soon learn. I frequently encounter patients who ask me about Vitamin D and request to have their “levels” checked....

This month, in my Scientific American column, I wrote about the rise of fake news stories: Bogus stories, posted on no-name Web sites, intended to generate ad income (and perhaps to influence the presidential election). At first, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed the significance of the fake-news tsunami. But as the backlash continued, Facebook soon rolled out new tools to combat the spread of fake news. As a spokesman puts it, “We cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves....

To spank or not to spank? This age-old parenting question elicits fierce debate among parents, psychologists and pediatricians. Surveys suggest that nearly half of U.S. parents have spanked their children as a disciplinary tactic, but many experts argue that this form of punishment—hitting a child on the bottom with an open hand—increases the risk that kids will develop emotional and behavioral problems. Other scientists counter that research on the issue is fraught with problems, making it impossible to draw definitive conclusions....

Social media is changing the character of our political conversations. As many have pointed out, our attention is a scarce resource that politicians and journalists are constantly fighting to attract, and the online world has become a primary trigger of our moral outrage. These two ideas, it turns out, are fundamentally related. According to our forthcoming paper, words that appeal to one’s sense of right and wrong are particularly effective at capturing attention, which may help explain this new political reality....

Human skulls deliberately warped into strange, alien-like shapes have been unearthed in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in Mexico, researchers say. The practice of deforming skulls of children as they grew was common in Central America, and these findings suggest the tradition spread farther north than had been thought, scientists added. The cemetery was discovered by residents of the small Mexican village of Onavas in 1999 as they were building an irrigation canal....

THEY MOVE TOO SLOWLY, forget things and are inflexible. They don’t do teamwork and can’t adapt to new technologies. Many people describe older workers in these terms, and the characterizations are often the reasons personnel managers give for hiring younger employees instead. But are these views substantiated? Do older employees in fact perform poorly? If so, at what tasks? Neuroscientists and psychologists active in the field of “cognitive gerontology” are investigating these questions....

What are the physical and chemical changes that occur in fireworks? —S. BREALY, CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Paul Nicholas Worsey, professor of mining engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla, teaches a course in pyrotechnics. He provides the following answer: Fireworks, or pyrotechnics, contain burning compounds. The most common is the aerial shell, which is fired from a mortar tube. It has four components: a lift charge, a timedelay fuse, a breaking charge and a light-effect generator....

(Reuters Health) - - Long-term follow-up of patients in a 2014 study confirms that stroke patients recover better if doctors physically remove a clot from a blocked artery instead of just letting the clot-busting drug tPA try to do the job. The conclusion is based on 500 Dutch patients treated in a landmark study known as MR CLEAN. The findings, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, may encourage more hospitals to adopt the technique....

From the land of dams and canals comes a new device billed as the savior of agriculture and reforestation in drought-plagued areas. The “Waterboxx” is the brainchild of Dutch businessman Pieter Hoff, who sold his lily-growing operation in 2003 to focus on water. Then he started tinkering with a polypropylene box, about the size of a laundry basket. It has a fluted lid and a wick extending from the bottom. The plant sits in a cylindrical opening in the center that goes all the way through the box....