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By James Mackenzie and Naomi O’LearyROME (Reuters) - A cyclone killed 18 people and made hundreds homeless as extreme rainfall flooded eastern parts of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, Italian authorities said on Tuesday.The government declared a state of emergency after Cyclone Cleopatra dropped 450mm of rain in an hour and a half overnight, causing rivers to burst their banks, sweeping away cars and flooding homes across the island.“This is a national tragedy,” Prime Minister Enrico Letta said....

GOD MOLECULES David Biello’s “Searching for God in the Brain” discusses the neural circuitry involved in religious experience. Based on my team’s research, I believe that the body’s naturally occurring hallucinogenic molecules are a more fundamental cause of spiritual experience—whether that experience is self-willed or brought about by external means. The powerful hallucinogen DMT has been found in human blood, lung and brain. Clinical research we performed in the 1990s with DMT, which also occurs naturally in many plants, led us to propose a role for the brain-based compound in mystical states....

One of the world’s most important carbon-storing ecosystems may be more resilient to environmental change than previously suspected, scientists have just reported. And that could be good news for addressing global warming. A new study, released Friday in the journal Nature Communications finds that plants in carbon-rich European peat bogs are able to adapt to changes in temperature, precipitation and other climate-related factors. As the environment changes, specific types of plants may die off and be replaced by new species—but the study suggests that the incoming species tend to be similar to the old ones, meaning the stability of the bog is preserved....

The human brain’s memory-storage capacity is an order of magnitude greater than previously thought, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reported last week. The findings, recently detailed in eLife, are significant not only for what they say about storage space but more importantly because they nudge us toward a better understanding of how, exactly, information is encoded in our brains. The question of just how much information our brains can hold is a longstanding one....

Residents of Youngstown, Ohio, received an extra surprise on Christmas Eve and again on New Year’s Eve—earthquakes, measuring 2.7 and 4.0 on the Richter scale, respectively. No one was injured and only a few cases of minor damage were reported after the Dec. 31 event. Scientists have quickly determined that the likely cause was fracking—although not from drilling into deep shale or cracking it with pressured water and chemicals to retrieve natural gas....

Luke Miller, a cognitive neuroscientist, was toying with a curtain rod in his apartment when he was struck by a strange realization. When he hit an object with the rod, even without looking, he could tell where it was making contact like it was a sensory extension of his body. “That’s kind of weird,” Miller recalls thinking to himself. “So I went [to the lab], and we played around with it in the lab....

Space food has come a long way from the powders, purees and freeze-dried cubes early astronauts had to endure. New technologies are pushing the boundaries of food preparation in microgravity. But will astronauts ever be able to simply cook homemade meals like we do on Earth? Maybe one day, but for now they might have to start with dessert: this fall the International Space Station (ISS) will test the first “real” space oven—by baking cookies....

In 1870 Alfred Ely Beach, then editor of Scientific American, financed the construction of a prototype pneumatic subway in New York City—from Warren Street, south down Broadway to Murray Street. From that milestone forward, the growth and resilience of New York City’s rapid transit system has come under greater scrutiny this week as the region responds to serious damage suffered as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Scientific American gave extensive coverage to the system during its piecemeal phases in the late 19th century and during its expansion and consolidation in the early and mid-20th century....

Celeste Warren is vice president of the Global Diversity Center of Excellence at Merck, one of the leading pharmaceutical companies worldwide. She understands what it takes to have an inclusive setting for the workforce. “You want a diverse workforce, so you have to create an inclusive environment around our employees so they’re able to feel energized, they’re able to feel empowered, so they are able to do what we want them to do,” she says....

Braving explosions and invisible hydrogen fires as well as bursts of radiation at least eight times higher than government hourly safety standards, a cohort of 50 or so workers has returned to the embattled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The workers represent the last line of defense in cooling the overheating reactors and spent fuel pools, such as reactor No. 3, which is still billowing white smoke or steam—a possible indication of a breach in the thick steel and concrete that contains the nuclear core or of water boiling off its spent fuel pool....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the new book Coffee Is Good for You: From Vitamin C and Organic Foods to Low-Carb and Detox Diets, the Truth About Diet and Nutrition Claims (Perigee, 2012), by Robert J. Davis, who teaches the Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Trying to make sense of the seemingly endless stream of food and nutrition claims can be overwhelming. Remembering the following 10 rules will make the task easier and allow you to stay focused on what’s really important:...

By Terry Wade HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc <BP.L> was “grossly negligent” for its role in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico four years ago, a U.S. district judge said on Thursday in a ruling that could add billions of dollars in fines to the more than $42 billion in charges taken so far for the worst offshore disaster in U.S. history. Shares of BP traded in the United States fell 5 percent, or $2....

Camels are like edible cargo vans, as useful for their sturdy backs as for their milk and meat. But a new study by Iranian researchers suggests the health of that country’s fleet is in jeopardy. Nearly 84 percent of male camels in eastern Iran may be infected with helminths (parasitic worms) that can cripple reproduction and afflict other organs, the scientists report in the journal Parasitology Research. The mosquito-borne helminths, Dipetalonema evansi, have long been known to beset camels and other species of livestock....

More than a year after being launched by hackers on a campaign to infect computers running Microsoft Windows, the Conficker worm’s effects are still being felt. England’s Greater Manchester Police department, for example, has had to cut its computers off from a national criminal database since detecting Conficker on its network last week. The reemergence of Conficker, which has infected millions of computers worldwide since first surfacing in November 2008, is a reminder of just how difficult it is to eradicate self-replicating worm programs once they penetrate a network....

It began more than a decade ago, as engineers and hobbyists started getting enthralled with a jury-rigged electric technology that purportedly enhanced brain function. The movement is still growing, and the brain zappers are no longer just young garage tinkerers—now they include older professionals who fork over hundreds of dollars for high-grade wearable systems. As scientists, clinicians and industry leaders study these fascinating but controversial mind-altering practices, one thing is clear: the idea of applying an electric current to the scalp to boost learning or treat medical conditions in the comfort of one’s own home is gaining traction....

In dance clubs the drug called “ecstasy” is known as a potent (and illegal) way of enhancing your senses and boosting your mood. Now a study published online in July in the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggests that when coupled with psychotherapy, the drug might also be an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). South Carolina psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer, along with his co-therapist and wife, Annie Mithoefer, ran the trial with 21 participants who had developed chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD as a result of experiences with crime or war....

Mission controllers have yet to receive a signal from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Schiaparelli lander, a smart car–size spacecraft that attempted to touchdown on Mars on Wednesday. “Absence of information is the worst thing you can have, because there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Andrea Accomazzo, an ESA project scientist speaking at a news conference in Darmstadt, Germany. “It’s true that the data we have collected so far is not exactly nominal for Schiaparelli....

LE BOURGET, France—Diplomats crafting a new global climate change accord pulled their first real all-nighter yesterday, working through dawn to stitch together a deal riddled with political bullet holes. Yet by the time negotiators stumbled out of this U.N. tent city erected on the outskirts of Paris, the deal remained still largely unfinished—despite the emergence of a potentially powerful new coalition of some of the world’s poorest countries, vulnerable islands, the United States, Europe and progressive Latin American nations calling for ambition....

Michael Jura, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, solves this mystery. Since our solar system is already formed, we must try to reconstruct its history by studying current star formation in our local neighborhood, the Milky Way galaxy. The best model of our solar system’s history states that it formed from the collapse of a single interstellar cloud that may have been as large as a light-year across—10 million times larger than the diameter of the sun....

In the spring of 2020, faced with a deadly pandemic and instructions to stay at home, a remarkable number of Americans began baking bread. They planted vegetable gardens. They took up DIY home repair. They sat down for dinner with the same few family members—every single night. For anyone who was not an essential worker, the experience felt like a return to pioneer days. According to two studies published this year, in many ways, we really did reverse the clock....