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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Network Challenge earlier this month demonstrated that social networks, more than being platforms for self-promotion, can be also be highly effective tools for rapidly gathering and disseminating very precise information. With the help of Facebook, Twitter and a homemade Web site, a winning team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) was able to within nine hours identify the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 of DARPA’s red weather balloons, which were lofted 30....

As CNN and others are reporting, an increasing number of cell phone gabbers are complaining of an ailment called “cell phone elbow.” Here are the symptoms: pain or numbness in the hand—especially the pinky and ring fingers. Not to be confused with tennis or golfer’s elbow (forms of tendonitis), this new diagnosis stems from the nerves that run through the elbow. With more than four billion cell phone contracts out across the globe, according to the International Telecommunication Union’s annual report, is a larger health issue on the horizon or is it just hype?...

Each generation thinks the next one is more self-centered. A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences supports this perception: American society has steadily become more egocentric since the nation’s beginnings. An overall rise in economic prosperity may play a role in this egotism, according to a different study: people who were young adults during hard times are less narcissistic than those who came of age during economic booms. To measure trends in egocentrism, researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed the text of State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to 2012....

As psychologist Benjamin Scheibehenne and his wife left the restaurant where they had just finished dinner, they discussed whether to stop somewhere else for dessert. It was an everyday decision, one they had made countless times before, but this particular evening they could not make up their minds. “When we came out of the restaurant, we didn’t really know whether we were still hungry or not,” Scheibehenne recalls. “We realized we were completely clueless about how much we actually consumed....

There is a lot riding on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS). Not only does the agency’s first new heavy-lift booster since the Saturn 5 that took U.S. astronauts to the moon play a central role in the future of the American spaceflight, it also provides a critical test for technology expected to figure prominently in revamping the country’s ailing manufacturing industry. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., is testing an approach called selective laser melting (SLM) to create parts for the J-2X and RS-25 rocket engines that will power the SLS, whose maiden voyage is slated for 2017 (pdf)....

This past July Russ George served as chief scientist on a cruise to fertilize the northeastern Pacific Ocean with iron—the latest in a long string of similar, and usually controversial, efforts he has led. He has been attempting to commercialize such ocean fertilization efforts for years, including setting up the failed company Planktos. In parallel, he has also been promoting plans to generate carbon credits for companies and governments, allowing them to emit greenhouse gases in exchange for replanting carbon dioxide-absorbing forests from Canada to Europe....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineThe environmentally friendly version of polythene might not be so friendly after all.Polyethylene is one of the most widely used materials in the world, and the discarded plastic bag has become one of the most potent symbols of human impact on the environment. As worries over the vast scale of waste from this plastic has grown, so has the use of purportedly ‘degradable’ forms of it....

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the East India Company established a monopolistic trade network on the high seas, gaining immense wealth and influence at home in England. Their ships sailed from Europe with silver and bullion, returning months or years later with exotic goods from Asia and Africa. Along the way, enterprising ships captains engaged in private trading of their own, abusing company resources for personal gain. Now, researchers at Columbia University have shown that it was this illicit trading, rather than officially sanctioned activity, that was directly responsible for the creation of the first global market and the success of the East India Company....

For thousands of world-class athletes, a passport is something they can’t forget to pack before heading off to London for the summer Olympic games. But for a few athletes, a different kind of passport is keeping them out of competition entirely. A new anti-doping program known as the athlete biological passport (ABP), which looks for indirect evidence that an athlete has cheated, is being implemented by several international sports authorities. Already the testing scheme, developed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), has ensnared world-class athletes—and survived a challenge to its validity....

Surgical robots have performed fairly well in the operating theater in the past decade, helping physicians perform hysterectomies, prostate removals and other complex, yet minimally invasive surgeries. The technology likely has a long, promising future in the medical field, but only if the makers of these machines can solve a few key problems, in particular high costs and safety concerns. Both of these issues arise from the rigid nature of today’s surgical robots....

A star with an unusual history is racing through the galaxy at breakneck speed—most likely blasted away by a supernova and carrying traces of the exploded star. The strange runaway star, which is rocketing along at more than 960,000 miles per hour (1.54 million kilometers per hour), is stained in carbon even though it’s too immature to have created the stuff itself, scientists said. Kathryn Plant, a senior at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), presented the new observations earlier this month at the American Astronomical Society’s 227th meeting in Kissimee, Florida....

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett raised a remarkable question among legal experts when she declined to affirm the presence of rising temperatures and their human-driven causes. Would acknowledging climate change jeopardize her ability to appear impartial when overseeing cases involving global warming? The facts of climate change are well-established, and some experts note that judges have a responsibility to acknowledge them unequivocally in order to rule on questions related to the powers of federal agencies....

Although their exteriors are made from intricately woven glass fibers, Venus’s flower basket sponges are better known for something often found inside them: a breeding pair of shrimp that becomes trapped within the sponge’s lava-lamp-shaped body and goes on to live there symbiotically. This romantic biology is the reason the deep-sea sponges are presented as wedding gifts in Japan—and it is also why a team of engineers became curious about how water passes through the sponges, helping their captives thrive....

To mathematician Amir Aczel the most important number of all might just be zero. Zero—nothing—may sound boring, but without it our entire number system and the world of mathematics it enables could not exist. In his new book, Finding Zero: A Mathematician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers (St. Martin’s Press, Palgrave Macmillan Trade, 2015), Aczel searches for, and finds, the earliest known artifact bearing a representation of zero. The object, an inscription on a stone slab, was originally found in the 1930s in the ruins of a seventh-century temple in Cambodia....

By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy is mapping out how to expand its presence in the Arctic beginning around 2020, given signs that the region’s once permanent ice cover is melting faster than expected, which is likely to trigger more traffic, fishing and resource mining. “The Arctic is all about operating forward and being ready. We don’t think we’re going to have to do war-fighting up there, but we have to be ready,” said Rear Admiral Jonathan White, the Navy’s top oceanographer and navigator, and director of the Navy’s climate change task force....

How does one protect elephants from poachers in an African reserve the size of a small country? This daunting task typically falls to park rangers who may spend weeks patrolling the bush on foot, sometimes lacking basic gear such as radios, tents or even socks. They are largely losing to ivory poachers, as attested by the latest available data on Africa’s two species of elephant, both threatened: savanna elephant populations plummeted 30 percent between 2007 and 2014 and those of forest elephants by 62 percent between 2002 and 2011....

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Three bison were shot and killed inside Yellowstone National Park, where hunting is banned and where the U.S. Army once protected the nation’s last band of purebred bison from poachers, a park ranger said on Tuesday. A $5,000 reward is being offered for information leading to a conviction in the rare illegal killing of the protected animal, said Yellowstone Chief Ranger Tim Reid. The three bison, also called buffalo, were found dead on a roadside in the northern part of the park and were likely shot between the evening of March 13 and morning of March 15....

Every time I speak with an audience about diversity, I get the same question: How do we do it? All of my audiences—schools, academic departments, businesses, health care organizations and law firms—seem mystified. They want the secret recipe or a foolproof checklist. They hope I will say, “Follow these simple steps, and you will have diversity and inclusion.” So let me begin with this disclaimer: a simple, foolproof method for ensuring that a group is well represented across racial, ethnic, socioeconomic or gender lines does not exist....

Regardless of when you went to college, or whether you went at all, there’s likely a strong association in your mind between the American college experience and drinking. A freewheeling culture of keg parties and mass alcohol consumption is central to nearly every college movie, joke and meme. And as a result, many students feel like fitting in means drinking hard. But the truth is that college students have a warped understanding of how much their peers drink....

Long the bete noir of conservationists, paper and forest companies are using the climate debate to try to recast themselves as environmental champions, caretakers of natural resources capable of sucking large quantities of heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. With sweeping climate and energy legislation in the works, four paper companies and a trade group representing 175 or so forest and paper businesses and associations have hired lobbyists to work on those issues....