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It was a through-the-looking-glass moment for Chris Goldfinger, sitting in a meeting about Sumatran earthquakes on a recent Friday afternoon in Chiba, Japan, on the outskirts of Tokyo. The floor started heaving as if a switch flipped. That terrible shaking turned out to be the magnitude 9.0 Sendai temblor, tsunami-maker and devastator. “We felt pretty safe,” says Goldfinger, director of Oregon State University’s Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Lab, “but, oddly, still had time to run outside and ride through four or five minutes of mainshock....

An independent review has identified several areas of concern in the development of NASA’s next Mars rover, which the space agency aims to launch in July 2020. The technologies required for the 2020 Mars rover mission’s sample-collecting system appear to be relatively immature, for example, and five of the robot’s seven science instruments feature a “condensed development schedule,” said a new report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). These and several other issues may affect Mars 2020 project managers’ ability to achieve the mission’s technical objectives, meet project milestones (such as the intended launch date) and control costs, said the OIG report, which was published Monday (Jan....

The discovery of poliovirus in New York state, London and Jerusalem this year has taken many by surprise — but public-health researchers fighting to eradicate the disease say it was only a matter of time. “No country in the world is immune to the effects of polio,” says Zulfiqar Bhutta, a global-health researcher at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. “It’s all interconnected.” The virus found in these regions is derived from an oral polio vaccine used in some countries....

LHC gets its own rap song You know a science experiment has arrived when a rap song extolling its virtues just hit YouTube. After 14 years, CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, is getting ready to switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson and the possible source of dark matter as well as study the differences between matter and antimatter....

My digital alarm clock has many responsibilities. First, it has to wake me up at 6:30 A.M. to get my kid to school. Later, I reset it for the various 10-minute naps I take during the day. Resetting the alarm clock for a new time entails changing the hour one hour at a time on a 24-hour clock and then changing the minute value one minute at a time. In the worst case, the minute value must be changed by clicking 59 times....

Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom Daphne J. Fairbairn Princeton University Press, 2013 ($27.95)Biologists have long debated the specific traits that set humans apart from other animals: Is it self-awareness, or morality, or emotions? Recent research has cast doubt on each of these premises, but Odd Couples notes that we are exceptional in at least one respect: how we distinguish men from women. Throughout the animal world, it is far more common for males than for females to be petite and brightly colored....

Editor’s Note: We have strived to maintain accessibility in our Bring Science Home activities by limiting the required technology. We recognize technology is now more widely available than it was when we began this series in 2011 and that it can add value to scientific exploration. This is our first activity that requires the use of a smartphone or tablet. Please let us know what you think! E-mail editors@sciam.com with feedback about the use of technology in this—and future—Bring Science Home activities....

When marine biologist Candida Savage was collecting samples of nitrogen and other nutrients in the coastal waters of Fiji, she was jarred by what she found at one horseshoe-shaped coral reef: The nitrogen levels were off the charts. It was the last thing she had expected to find in a pristine environment brimming with healthy corals and diverse fish, far from the farming activities and polluted wastewater that typically accompany high nitrogen levels....

From the outlook of a planet that resides next to a quiet, relatively predictable star, the circumstances that lead to dramatic stellar explosions elsewhere in the universe can sound somewhat improbable. Some such blasts, known as type Ia supernovae, occur when a small, dense star known as a white dwarf—roughly the diameter of Earth, but hundreds of thousands of times more massive—grows too large by siphoning material off a neighboring star, igniting a thermonuclear explosion....

Solar power development is big business in sunny California, fueled by low solar panel prices and the drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change. Some biologists, however, are growing concerned that the placement of new large-scale solar power plants in the Mojave Desert may harm the biological diversity found there. A study published Monday shows that solar power developers in California have been using mostly undeveloped desert lands with sensitive wildlife habitat as sites for new solar power installations rather than building on less sensitive, previously developed open lands....

Key concepts Food science Baking Pastries Fats Introduction Have you ever wanted to bake the perfect pie? No matter whether it is apple, pumpkin, chocolate, pecan or pumpkin, every good pie needs a well-made piecrust. If the pastry crust is heavy or chewy it can affect the taste of the whole pie. How do you make a pastry crust that is light and flaky? In this scrumptious science activity you will find out by investigating how the temperature of fat used (in dough) can affect a pastry’s texture and taste—all while baking your very own pastry crusts!...

It must have been amazing sight 66 million years ago for the dinosaurs to look up and see a giant rock, of order the length of Manhattan (7–50 miles in diameter), getting bigger and bigger in the sky. But the fun would have stopped when the rock hit the ground and blasted out the enormous Chicxulub crater, 93 miles in diameter, off the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The human species did not exist back then and might not have existed today if not for the mass extinction that resulted from this impact....

The federal government is giving more then $7.5 billion to 15 states and localities hit by major disasters in recent years to help protect against the effects of climate change, one of its largest single investments in disaster mitigation. The money—$7.65 billion in total—aims to make disaster-damaged communities more resilient by paying for reconstruction projects that will withstand increasingly severe storms, hurricanes and other effects of climate change. The funding differs from most federal disaster aid because instead of paying simply to repair or rebuild damaged buildings and facilities, communities must spend the recovery money on mitigation projects that “increase resilience to disasters,” according to a recent government notice....

Four-Legged Pharmacies On February 6, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug made by genetically modified animals—in this case, transgenic goats from Framingham, Mass.–based GTC Biotherapeutics. The goats generate the human protein antithrombin, which inhibits clotting. Called ATryn, the drug was already approved in Europe in 2006 [see “The Land of Milk and Money”; SciAm, November 2005, and “Old MacDonald’s Pharm”; SciAm, September 2006]. The company says that 150 transgenic goats could produce 100 kilograms of a protein drug a year for tens of millions of dollars....

Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved controversial reforms to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) on 18 September. More than 330 members of the Duma voted in favor of the law, with only 107 against, in a move critics say will deprive the 289-year-old body of its independence and halt attempts to revitalize Russia’s struggling science system. If, as is widely expected, the parliament’s upper house and Russian President Vladimir Putin approve the law, the 436 institutes and 45,000 research staff of Russia’s primary basic-research organization will be managed by a newly established federal agency that reports directly to Putin....

Americans from Maine to Texas have recently reported receiving mysterious packages sent from China. Often labeled as jewelry, the parcels instead contain clear plastic bags with unknown seeds of various shapes, sizes and colors. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and state agriculture agencies are urging people not to plant—or even throw away—these organisms. Instead they want recipients to send the seeds to them for investigation. Last week an official at the Plant Protection and Quarantine program at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) said that so far the agency has “identified 14 different species of seeds, including mustard, cabbage, morning glory and some of the herbs—like mint, sage, rosemary, lavender—and other seeds, like hibiscus and roses....

NOVEMBER 1959 NERVE GROWTH— “No longer do physicians encourage the patient with a regenerated facial nerve to try to regain control of facial expression by training; their advice today is to inhibit all expression, to practice a ‘poker face’ in order to make the two sides of the face match in appearance. The outlook is equally dim for restoration of coordination in cases of severe nerve injury in other parts of the body....

Human embryonic stem cells can live on indefinitely when carefully cultured under just the right conditions. The legal and legislative environments for these cell lines, however, has gotten a lot less hospitable in recent weeks. After a federal judge placed an injunction on federal funding for all human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in late August scientists and advocates faced rules that were far more stringent than those under the George W....

COAGULATION CASCADE When damage occurs to blood vessels, exposure of the blood to collagen in the cell walls and material released by the cells triggers the activation of clotting factors. One factor activates the next factor in a series of events (some not depicted here) that eventually produces fibrin. Fibrin forms a mesh to hold together a plug of platelets to form a clot (platelets are a type of cell that circulates in the blood to help coagulation)....

The rise of the Appalachian Mountains seems to have triggered an ice age 450 million years ago by sucking CO2 from the atmosphere. Researchers report evidence that minerals from the mountain range washed into the oceans just before the cold snap, carrying atmospheric carbon dioxide with them. The result clarifies a long standing paradox in the historical relationship between CO2 and climate, experts say. At the start of the so-called Ordovician ice age, about 450 million years ago, the planet went from a state of greenhouse warmth to one of glacial cold, culminating in mass extinctions of ocean life....