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This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – Cross-country skiers often collapse due to exhaustion at each race’s end, only to come back a day or two later and compete again at seemingly superhuman levels. Speed skaters racing on the traditional large oval maintain a painful crouch at speeds greater than 30 mph in race after race throughout the games. How do they do it? And why don’t elite runners run in as many distance events at the Summer Olympics?...

Cassava is a starchy, tuberous root first domesticated about 10,000 years ago in South America. Also dubbed manioc and yucca, cassava may be more familiar to North Americans as tapioca—tiny pearls of starch used to thicken pies and jams. For millions of people in the tropics, however, it is a staple, not a baking aid. Now, concerted efforts at crossbreeding and genomic selection have created novel versions of cassava that could dramatically boost yields, ward off malnutrition and grow in a wide range of conditions....

People rarely survive gunshot wounds to the head, but so far Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, shot point-blank in the back of her head on Saturday, has held on. Monday morning her doctors indicated they were “slightly more optimistic” about her prognosis. In the wake of this brutal tragedy it is worth recognizing the series of highly fortunate events that led to Giffords’s continued survival. The most important predictors for how well a victim will recover from a gunshot wound to the head are the type of bullet and its travel path once inside the brain, and Giffords was fortunate on both counts, says Keith Black, chairman and professor of neurosurgery at Cedars–Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles....

By Declan Butler and Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineThe U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) on March 30 recommended the publication of two controversial avian flu papers.In December 2011, the board said that experimental details of the two studies should be redacted from any publications because of concerns that the information could be used in a bioterror attack. The board also feared that publishing the details would prompt more laboratories to work on the viruses, making an accidental release more likely....

Scientists have discovered another appetite hormone called obestatin. Though closely related to the hunger hormone ghrelin, obestatin has the opposite effect and offers a new target in the fight against fatness. Science, November 11, 2005 Emotional stress hampers problem solving, but propranolol, a beta blocker sometimes used to treat panic attacks, reversed the decline by interfering with the action of the stress hormone norepinephrine. Society for Neuroscience meeting, November 2005...

An Earth-like alien planet may reside right in our solar system’s backyard, just 13 light-years or so away, astronomers announced today (Feb. 6). That number is just an estimate, though, and not based on an exoplanet discovery. The researchers used data from NASA’s prolific planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which is staring at more than 150,000 stars simultaneously. Kepler detects planets by measuring the temporary brightness dips caused when the worlds pass in front of, or transit, their stars’ faces from the instrument’s perspective....

The short answer is that dogs very likely possess mirror neurons, but we have no concrete proof just yet. Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma in Italy and his colleagues discovered mirror neurons by accident during the 1990s, when they were studying motor neurons in rhesus monkeys. Rizzolatti and his co-workers found that certain neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex became active both when a monkey watched another monkey take food and when the monkey grabbed the food itself....

One person is sentenced to state or federal prison every 90 seconds in the United States, amounting to almost 420,000 per year. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. We incarcerate for multiple reasons, including justice and punishment, but one of the main justifications is public safety. Putting individuals convicted of crimes, especially violent crimes, in prison is thought to make the rest of us safer. But how much safety does all this imprisonment actually buy us?...

Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people I know have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world’s poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity....

(Correcting to 115th count instead of 114th count in 2nd paragraph) By Barbara Goldberg NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) - The elusive snowy owl, rarely seen outside the Arctic, is turning up more frequently in the skies of North America than it does in the pages of a Harry Potter book, data from the National Audubon Society suggested on Wednesday. Sightings of the majestic raptors, popularized by the owl Hedwig in author J....

It’s never an easy business to predict which flu viruses will make people sick the following winter. And there’s reason to believe two of the four choices made last winter for this upcoming season’s vaccine could be off the mark. Twice a year influenza experts meet at the World Health Organization to pore over surveillance data provided by countries around the world to try to predict which strains are becoming the most dominant....

By Amy MaxmenHelpful bacteria don’t just aid digestion; they also fend off the flu, according to a report published March 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.A research team led by Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, found that mice treated with neomycin antibiotics were more susceptible than control mice to influenza viruses. It turned out that neomycin-sensitive bacteria naturally present in the mice’s bodies provided a trigger that led to the production of T cells and antibodies that could fight an influenza infection in the lungs....

Medical professionals treating the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings have one advantage over first responders at the Oklahoma City bombing: the accumulated knowledge of treating blast injuries gained over a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to quick action after the blasts, new damage control surgery protocols, aggressive treatment to prevent secondary infections and advances in prosthetics, many Boston bombing survivors will be facing a life of mobility and near-normalcy that wouldn’t have been likely 15 years ago....

The giant wind turbines cropping up on ridges, shorelines and other windy locales across the world affect more than the wind—they are also changing local temperatures, notes a new study. That’s likely because the enormous blades chop up the incoming wind and thereby more thoroughly mix different layers of the atmosphere. According to temperature readings from one of the oldest wind farms in the U.S., near Palm Springs, Calif., the turbines make it warmer at night and cooler during the day, generally speaking....

Join us below at 12:30 P.M. Eastern time on Wednesday (November 7) for a live 30-minute online chat with Andrew Appel of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology and Policy. With many New Jerseyans still coping with the aftermath of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Sandy, government officials gave voters more options for this election, allowing them to cast ballots by e-mail or fax. It’s a legally contentious move that gives in-state residents the same benefits as overseas military personnel....

BOSTON (Reuters) - The top court in Massachusetts is expected to hear arguments on Tuesday in a closely watched lawsuit against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology questioning to what extent universities and colleges can be held responsible when students commit suicide. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will weigh whether to revive a lawsuit by the father of Han Nguyen, a PhD candidate who at the age of 25 jumped to his death from the top of a building on the prestigious university’s campus in 2009....

ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy on Tuesday offered Australia any help it wanted to retrieve four bombs mistakenly dropped inside the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef marine park last week.U.S. Navy Harrier fighter jets were forced to drop the bombs, two inert and two carrying explosives but not armed, after civilian boats were spotted near their original target.The aircraft, which were not able to land safely carrying the bombs, were participating in Operation Talisman Saber, a joint U....

A commercial flight is no place to run experiments—at least with any scientific rigor. Airplane manufacturers and airlines alike want to try out new cabin designs, seating arrangements and boarding procedures, but testing those ideas on actual passengers at 40,000 feet is prohibitively expensive, potentially dangerous and impossible to control. The National Research Council of Canada is now building a facility in Ottawa that re-creates several aspects of air travel, with a reconfigurable cabin that can faithfully simulate hours-long plane trips....

When President George W. Bush was in the White House, he hyped hydrogen as the future of the automobile industry. But with President Obama now on the job, the next major step for the nation’s cars and trucks comes with a plug. Obama laid out the goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 during the summer of 2008, as he campaigned for the presidency. It was ambitious then but may prove even more difficult now that a slumping economy has brought two of Detroit’s Big Three automakers into bankruptcy court and dragged new car and truck sales to under 10 million a year—well below the high-water mark of roughly 17 million in 2005....

Americans eat more than 17 billion quarts of popcorn every year, yet some of the biomechanics of this deceptively simple treat still escape science. Most existing popcorn trivia—that 96 percent of kernels pop at 356 degrees Fahrenheit, for example—originated from commercial research, so a French physicist and aeronautical engineer took it on themselves to meticulously investigate the thermodynamic and acoustic properties of popcorn popping. The basic journey of hard kernel to fluffy morsel is straightforward....