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JULY 1960 INFANT MORTALITY— “The death rate of U.S. infants, after a long and precipitous decline, has leveled off in the last few years, according to a study by Iwao M. Moriyama of the National Office of Vital Statistics. In some states it has even risen slightly, after reaching an all-time low of 26 per 1,000 live births in 1956. Most of the reduction in mortality of children under one year of age is attributable to control of infectious diseases, primarily influenza and pneumonia....

September 1962 Antarctic Fauna “As for the vast regions of water that underlie the great ice shelves of the Antarctic continent, such as those of the Ross and Weddell seas, it has long been held that these are quite deficient in life. This supposition has been upset recently by the finding of large fishes—mostly Nototheniids—together with bottom invertebrates frozen in situ and exposed well above sea level on the wind-scoured surface of the Ross Ice Shelf near the U....

Guest Post by Ayah Bdeir, founder and CEO of littleBits, an award-winning open source library of electronic modules that magnetically snap together to allow users to create simple circuits and innovative projects.Probably one of the most annoying things I hear adults say is, “I’m not really a technology kind of person.” Unfortunately, I hear it pretty often, and to me, in 2013, it sounds like “I’m not really a reading and writing kind of person....

I have an idea. (No, it was not beginner’s luck.) The idea came to me while listening to University of Chicago evolutionary geneticist Jerry A. Coyne give a talk on a cruise ship in early March. If you remember last month’s column, you already know about the hardships of science lectures on the high seas, where “buffeted” refers not to the effects of winds and waves but to the feeling you get after one too many trips to the smorgasbord....

Most people can mark their time on Earth by significant world events: the landing of a man on the moon, say; the dismantling of the Berlin Wall; or, more negatively, the 9/11 attacks. Another significant event is impending. Scientist Ralph Keeling wants this generation to remember when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million, because of humans. “I hope that many people out there in the decades to come will say, ‘Gosh, I will remember when it crossed 400,’” he said....

Why do bags form below our eyes? —K. Davin, Juneau, Alaska Rhoda S. Narins, clinical professor of dermatology at New York University Medical Center and president of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery, explains: Dark circles and bags under the eye occur for several reasons: the skin there is much thinner than it is elsewhere on the body and becomes looser as we age. This very thin skin also sits on top of underlying purple muscle and blood vessels and therefore appears darker....

El Niño has become a hot topic. Most people in the general public now know the term, and they have a vague idea that it is some kind of pattern in the Pacific Ocean that means the U.S. will have a warm winter…or snowy winter…or hot summer—or something. Almost every day, somewhere in the country, a meteorologist is blaming El Niño for unusual weather. The perceived wisdoms, and misunderstandings, are widespread....

Text updated 7:52 p.m. ET | Tuesday afternoon’s earthquake was a shared experience for millions of Americans along the East Coast, but how intense was it where you live? The U.S. Geological Survey has released a summary of the quake’s intensity – that’s not its Richter magnitude, mind you – by ZIP code. Enter your ZIP code to see how intense the quake was reported to be where you live and how far you were from the epicenter in Virginia:...

Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, is often readily available via the Web thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites. BitTorrent software poses a particular problem for stopping the trade of these illicit images because it breaks the files into pieces and sends them from one computer to the next via different paths without passing through any centralized servers. This has for the most part rendered cops and security experts powerless to trace the origins of the files and catch the predators....

In the past 15 months several devastating earthquakes have rumbled beneath the Pacific. In February 2010 a magnitude 8.8 temblor slammed central Chile; this past September a magnitude 7 quake walloped Christchurch, New Zealand, leading to a magnitude 6.3 aftershock this past February. The magnitude 9 megaquake that devastated Japan March 11 was the fifth largest in the last 110 years. Some may wonder if these quakes are linked. A high-magnitude earthquake in Japan, one notion goes, might redistribute stress in Earth’s crust, subsequently triggering another temblor in the following months or years—a quake that could even strike as far away as the western shores of the U....

When dolphins dive deep below the water’s surface, they avoid succumbing to decompression sickness, or “the bends,” likely because the massive sea creatures have collapsible lungs, a new study finds. These lungs allow dolphins to inhale and exhale two to three times quicker than humans. Understanding how dolphins breathe rapidly and maintain lung functionality under immense pressure could help scientists keep humans safe when they are in similarly extreme situations, such as under anesthesia during surgeries, the researchers said....

Like an overwhelmed traffic cop, the depressed brain may transmit signals among regions in a dysfunctional way. Recent brain-imaging studies suggest that areas of the brain involved in mood, concentration and conscious thought are hyperconnected, which scientists believe could lead to the problems with focus, anxiety and memory frequently seen in depression. Using functional MRI and electroencephalography (EEG), psychiatrist Andrew Leuchter of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues measured the activity of depressed patients’ brains at rest....

Advances in technology tend to spoil us. PCs just a few years old have nothing on today’s smart phones, and, whereas megapixel images were once the state of the art in digital photography, gigapixel images (composed of at least one billion pixels, or picture elements) are beginning to show up on the Web in vivid detail. Gigapixel images also hold tremendous potential for providing law enforcement and the military with detailed reconnaissance and surveillance information....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineConsumers who flush unwanted contraceptives down the drain have long been blamed for giving fish more than their fair share of sex organs. Drugs excreted by patients can also taint rivers, even after passing through wastewater-processing facilities.But evidence is accumulating that the effluent coming from pharmaceutical factories could also be carrying drugs into rivers. Many ecotoxicologists had assumed that water-quality standards, along with companies’ desire to avoid wasting valuable pharmaceuticals, would minimize the extent of bioactive compounds released by factories into wastewater, and ultimately into rivers....

Judah Folkman, “the father of antiangiogenesis,” a way to starve tumors of their blood supplies, died yesterday from an apparent heart attack. He was 74 years old. Folkman, director of the Vascular Biology Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, served as the hospital’s surgeon in chief from 1967 to 1981. During his tenure, he published a groundbreaking article in The New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting that tumors require angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels (from established ones) to provide the nutrients their cells need to grow beyond a certain size....

The ancient ancestors of today’s harvestmen, the spider-like arachnids sometimes called “daddy longlegs,” had not just one, but two sets of eyes, a newfound fossil reveals. The recent discovery of this harvestman fossil in eastern France may shed light on the evolution of these arachnids, which can be found on every continent except Antarctica, the researchers said. Using X-ray techniques, the scientists made images of the 305-million-year-old harvestman fossil. It reveals that the two sets of eyes found on the harvestman species Hastocularis argus were separated, with one set located close to the center of the head, and another on the sides of the head....

It’s amusing to reduce the development of next-generation electric- or hydrogen-powered cars to a binary paper-versus-plastic decision, but the companies making these cars and the infrastructure to support them are hoping there will be room for both. Hydrogen cars, in particular, have had a bumpy road thus far—the Obama administration has been at odds with Congress over whether to fund hydrogen fuel-cell research. Meanwhile, the first commercial models are not expected to hit the road until 2015, a few years after their hybrid and all-electric counterparts....

By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari SaitoIWAKI, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima’s hottest radiation zones....

During the summer of 1963, when i was six years old, my family traveled from our home in Philadelphia to Los Angeles to visit my maternal relatives. I already knew my grandmother well: she helped my mother care for my twin brothers, who were only 18 months my junior, and me. When she was not with us, my grandmother lived with her mother, whom I met that summer for the first time....

Our brains have evolved to recognize and remember faces. As infants, one of the first things we learn is to look at the faces of those around us, respond to eye contact and mimic facial expressions. As adults, this translates to an ability to recognize human faces better and faster than other visual stimuli. We’re able to instantly identify a friend’s face among dozens in a crowded restaurant or on a city street....