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Everybody wants to get fit fast… but should you? In my early coaching career, I specialized in marathon and triathalon coaching. I eventually branched out and worked with everyone from fitness models to previously sedentary seniors. But consistently, throughout my career, people would email or call and ask seemingly innocent questions like: How long will I need to train to complete a marathon? My answer generally alternated between either “as long as possible” or “it depends....

Smell that? It’s the scent of mounting credibility for a controversial theory of smell that puts molecular vibrations front and center. Physicists have now analyzed the proposed mechanism and deemed it plausible. The new calculations by no means prove the theory, but they give it added legitimacy, says biophysicist and perfumer Luca Turin, who developed the idea. “Most people would probably feel that if it can be done at all, evolution has managed to make use of it....

Dear EarthTalk: How energy efficient (and comfortable) is under-floor heating, sometimes known as radiant heating?—Marcy Dell, Boston Underfloor radiant heating involves under laying the floor with a hot element or tubing that transfers heat into the room via infrared radiation and convection, obviating the need for forced or blowing air. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Savers website, radiant heating has a number of advantages over other forms of heat distribution: “It is more efficient than baseboard heating and usually more efficient than forced-air heating because no energy is lost through ducts....

In 1937 the great neuroscientist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington of the University of Oxford laid out what would become a classic description of the brain at work. He imagined points of light signaling the activity of nerve cells and their connections. During deep sleep, he proposed, only a few remote parts of the brain would twinkle, giving the organ the appearance of a starry night sky. But at awakening, “it is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance,” Sherrington reflected....

Like many babies, the wide-eyed twins are cute. The fact that they are macaque monkeys is almost beside the point. What is not beside the point, however, is their genetic heritage. These baby macaques are, as reported in Cell, the first primates to have been genetically modified using an extremely precise gene-editing tool based on the so-called CRISPR/Cas system. Conducted by researchers in China, the new study is significant because it paves the way for the custom development of laboratory monkeys with genetic profiles that are similar to those found in humans with certain medical disorders....

Stephen Morris, professor of experimental nonlinear physics at the University of Toronto, maintains a Web page on just this topic. So we asked him to tackle the question: Water is one of those rare materials that expands while it freezes. If a crust of ice with a small hole in it forms over liquid water, it can trap the liquid below, leaving it no room to expand during freezing. So, as the water begins to solidify, it is forced up through the hole and begins to freeze around the hole’s edge, forming a hollow, water-filled spike....

The scene occurs very near the end (there’s your spoiler alert) of what may be the best sports novel ever written, End Zone, by Don DeLillo. (The book came out in 1972, but I’m not clear on the expiration dates for spoiler alerts.) The protagonist, college football running back Gary Harkness, tells a teammate about his hobby: “I like to read about mass destruction and suffering…. Horrible diseases, fires raging in the inner cities, crop failures, genetic chaos, temperatures soaring and dropping, panic, looting, suicides, scorched bodies, arms torn off, millions dead....

How could influenza A develop resistance to antiviral medicines? The influenza A virus has high genetic variability and mutates rapidly. It needs only one point mutation to develop resistance to certain antiviral drugs, and such mutations happen all the time. For H1N1, the virus subtype that caused the most recent influenza A pandemic in humans, the point mutation H274Y affected the shape of the pocket where the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) binds to the protein neuraminidase....

CONSPIRACY DRIVERS Melinda Wenner Moyer’s article on “Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories” took me back about a decade to when I was a member of a team of HIV/AIDS researchers and activists battling the denialists who variously argued that HIV did not exist, was not the cause of AIDS or was created in government laboratories for evil purposes. At that time, AIDS denialists influenced national policies on HIV/AIDS in South Africa, costing an estimate of more than 300,000 lives, and manipulated vulnerable individuals worldwide to make health-threatening choices....

Pre-dawn emergency workers searched feverishly for survivors in the rubble of homes, primary schools and an hospital in an Oklahoma City suburb ravaged by a massive Monday afternoon tornado feared to have killed up to 91 people and injured well over 200 residents. The 2-mile (3-kilometer) wide tornado tore through town of Moore outside Oklahoma City, trapping victims beneath the rubble as one elementary school took a direct hit and another was destroyed....

Physics is at an impasse. The path its practitioners have been following for decades, known as the Standard Model, came to a triumphant end in 2012, when researchers found the model’s last undiscovered particle, the Higgs boson. The Standard Model describes the behavior of known particles remarkably well, but it cannot explain what dark matter is, among other things. Thus, many physicists have turned to supersymmetry, or SUSY. SUSY posits that every known particle has a heavier partner, which gives it the power to explain dark matter....

“Rare” may be too generous a term for the phenomenon called neutrinoless double beta decay, a burst of radioactive emission in which two neutrinos cancel each other out and vanish. To observe the nuclear process in a single atom, you might have to wait trillions of trillions of years—far longer than the age of the universe. Then again, neutrinoless double beta decay may not happen at all. No one has ever seen it, but physicists are keen to observe the phenomenon, which would indicate that the beguiling particles known as neutrinos have many new secrets to reveal....

Middle age is often accompanied by the onset of presbyopia, a condition whereby the eye’s crystalline lens loses some of the youthful elasticity that enabled it to focus on nearby objects. The remedy for most people has been reading glasses or, for those already wearing prescription lenses, bifocals. For the handful of humans who work in the topsy-turvy environs of the space station or a spacecraft, presbyopia can be a bit more problematic because reading can take place at any number of odd angles, not to mention in microgravity, which tends to degrade vision....

They’re big, they’re bright, they’re beautiful—and they shouldn’t even exist, at least to our current astronomical knowledge: gargantuan spiral galaxies that make our giant Milky Way seem downright modest. Spirals are supposed to be small fry compared to the greatest giant ellipticals, which are football-shaped swarms of stars thought to be the universe’s biggest and brightest galaxies. But now a search across billions of light-years has snared a rare breed of “super spiral” galaxies that rival their giant elliptical peers in size and luminosity, raising questions over how such behemoths are born....

The recent deaths of three men in Canada after police stopped them in their tracks with TASER guns have resurrected the debate over use of the weapons, which utilize electric pulses and strong muscle contractions to incapacitate people considered to be a threat to officers and the public. The three separate cases are still under investigation, but the association between them and the technology has led to misconceptions about the way these weapons affect the body, law enforcement and TASER International say....

For the longest time the cerebellum, a dense, fist-size formation located at the base of the brain, never got much respect from neuroscientists. For about two centuries the scientific community believed the cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”), which contains approximately half of the brain’s neurons, was dedicated solely to the control of movement. In recent decades, however, the tide has started to turn, as researchers have revealed details of the structure’s role in cognition, emotional processing and social behavior....

Key Concepts Physics Mass Potential energy Kinetic energy Introduction It is fun to race, especially when the competition is evenly matched! In this race the force of gravity provides the power and the competitors are the same size, weight and distance from the finish line. Gather the materials and see who the winner will be! Background If you roll two soccer balls down a hill, they should roll similarly—and take about the same amount of time to complete the path....

World leaders have about two decades before overshooting their most ambitious climate goal of preventing temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. It doesn’t sound like much time to turn things around, but it’s substantially more wiggle room than some previous estimates have suggested. A study in yesterday’s Nature Geoscience seems to support a blockbuster paper from last September challenging a widely held belief that the world is about to blow by the 1....

By Daniel CresseyAfter an epic series of experiments, a group of researchers has observed and reproduced what could be the spontaneous generation of prions–rogue misfolded proteins that have been implicated in the destruction of the central nervous system.These misfolded proteins, the culprits in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and scrapie, are highly infectious. Although famously transmitted by the ingestion of infected meats, prions are also thought to arise spontaneously in a tiny fraction of humans and other animals....

Neuroscientists thought memories were stored in the synapses connecting the brain’s neurons but new research suggests they may reside in the neurons themselves. If supported, the work could have major implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Along with new findings in gray matter, a new telescopic array in New Mexico has found what might be traces of failed Milky Ways: faint, incredibly diffuse galaxies hidden in the Coma galaxy cluster....