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By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Only 34 countries have national plans to fight the global threat of antibiotic resistance, meaning few are prepared to tackle “superbug” infections which put even basic healthcare at risk, the WHO said on Wednesday. In a survey of government plans to tackle the issue, the World Health Organization said only a quarter of the 133 countries that responded were addressing the problem. “This is the single greatest challenge in infectious diseases today,” said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security....

Some scars run deeper than others, and the early loss of a parent can be one of the most life altering. Many mammalian species, including humans, are known to pass this trauma to the next generation. Now biologists have shown that orphaned insects, too, interact differently with their own progeny. As reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, larval earwigs left to fend for themselves grow up to become less than caring parents....

The U.S. military has evolved so fast in the post-September 11th era that much of its technology would be nearly unrecognizable to commanders, soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors only a few decades ago. Some of the biggest advances over the past decade have come with the development, application and integration of sophisticated information technology and robotics in daily operations. The September 11, 2001 attacks created both motive and opportunity for military technology to advance rapidly....

The outer limits of 21st-century physics involve arcane pursuits with strange and wonderful names like M-theory and the de Sitter universe. Many of these endeavors rely heavily on Albert Einstein’s explanation of how gravity emerges from the bending of spacetime. With the assistance of The Office for Creative Research (OCR), a New York City data visualization firm, Scientific American decided to look for some measure of how often recent scientific papers in relevant areas of physics still lean on Einstein’s 100-year-old achievement....

October 1963 Stress and the Zulu “A study of high blood pressure among Zulus in the Union of South Africa by Norman A. Scotch of the Harvard University School of Public Health reports that hypertension, or high blood pressure, was significantly more prevalent among the urban Zulus than those on a rural ‘reserve.’ Scotch first attributed this to the greater severity and variety of stress in the location, where the predictable strains of city life and detribalization are complicated by the stressful effects of apartheid, the South African policy of strict separation of the races....

Twenty-five scientists, including me, had an epiphany about the Arctic in 2003. The National Science Foundation had invited us to a retreat in Big Sky, Mont. Before this gathering, each of us had been focusing our Arctic research on our own narrow topics. As we shared our perspectives, we came to a frightening realization: the changes we had been finding individually were connected. They fit together perfectly. The Arctic system as a whole was careening toward a precarious new state....

The U.S. education policy world—the entire country, for that matter—is on a quest to increase the ranks of future innovators in science and technology. Yet the programs that get funded in K–12 education do not support students who are already good at and in love with science. These students have potential for outstanding contributions, but without public investment they will not be prepared for the rigors of a scientific career. This is especially true for those without highly educated and resource-rich parents....

Researchers have created a wearable device that is as thin as a temporary tattoo and can store and transmit data about a person’s movements, receive diagnostic information and release drugs into skin. Similar efforts to develop ‘electronic skin’ abound, but the device is the first that can store information and also deliver medicine — combining patient treatment and monitoring. Its creators, who report their findings today in Nature Nanotechnology, say that the technology could one day aid patients with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy....

Tropical forests spew methane into the air, unwittingly abetting human-produced climate change. So say geochemist Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and atmospheric physicist Thomas Röckmann of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht in the Netherlands. But new research, using more sensitive measurement techniques and better growing conditions, failed to turn up any evidence of significant methane emission. The new study, conducted by botanist Tom Dueck and his colleagues at Plant Research International in Wageningen, the Netherlands, found only negligible methane emissions coming from plants....

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla March 1 (Reuters) - Two U.S. astronauts whipped through a third spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Sunday to rig parking spots for new U.S. space taxis. Station commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts expected to spend about seven hours installing antennas, cables and navigation aides on the station’s exterior truss. Instead, the astronauts, who were making their third spacewalk in eight days, were back inside the space station in 5....

In patients who have survived severe brain damage, judging the level of actual awareness has proved a difficult process. And the prognosis can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. New research suggests that some vegetative patients are capable of simple learning—a sign of consciousness in many who had failed other traditional cognitive tests. The findings are presented in a paper today in Nature Neuroscience (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group)....

Researchers investigating a cave in southern Oregon have found the oldest relatives of the common bedbug, suggesting that some 11,000 years ago humans may have been in contact with the parasites. The fossilized remains, which belong to the cimicid family (a group that includes today’s common bedbugs), were found during archaeological investigations of the Paisley Five Mile Point Cave site, researchers said in a new study detailing the findings. In particular, Cave 2, of the eight rock shelters on the site, has yielded thousands of insect remains as well as some the oldest preserved evidence of human activity in North America....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will reward states and communities that seek to address the effects of climate change under a new grant program that provides an unprecedented amount of money for resilience projects and planning. FEMA announced last week that it will allocate $500 million next year through its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program for mitigation efforts such as moving buildings out of floodplains and strengthening building codes. “It’s a huge increase of resources that FEMA has never had available to it before,” said Rob Moore of the Natural Resources Defense Council....

The miracle of life on Earth hinges on a delicate balance. The sun’s rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet. At the same time, some of that solar energy is reflected back out to space, ensuring the planet doesn’t heat up too much. But as humans have pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the Earth’s energy balance has tilted. Greenhouse gases prevent extra energy from radiating back out to space, causing global temperatures to rise....

Roger Beachy grew up in a traditional Amish family on a small farm in Ohio that produced food “in the old ways,” he says, with few insecticides, herbicides or other agrochemicals. He went on to become a renowned expert in plant viruses and sowed the world’s first genetically modified food crop—a tomato plant with a gene that conferred resistance to the devastating tomato mosaic virus. Beachy sees no irony between his rustic, low-tech boyhood and a career spent developing new types of agricultural technologies....

If you trawl a net through the ocean’s depths, chances are just about every living thing you haul to the surface will be able to glow. Marine biologists estimate that between 80 and 90 percent of deep-sea creatures are bioluminescent—they produce light through chemical processes. Like the deep sea itself, the reasons why many of these organisms flash, twinkle and gleam remain mysterious to science. But in the past decade marine biologist Edith “Edie” Widder has tackled more puzzles about undersea bioluminescence than any other researcher....

The physicists who came to our presentation at the 2010 Neutrino conference in Athens, Greece, probably expected us to put to rest a controversial finding from a decade prior. Instead we left them in a stunned silence. The story begins in 1996, when we revealed data, obtained at the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggesting a problem with the widely accepted idea that neutrinos—tiny, ubiquitous particles that pass right through most matter—come in three types, or flavors....

Herman Merte, a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, explains: What one sees drifting above a hot bath—often called “steam”—is in fact tiny drops of liquid water that have coalesced out of the gaseous mixture of air and water vapor above the fluid’s surface. The vapor, itself an invisible gas, arises from evaporation, whereby water molecules escape from a liquid. Evaporation is a slower process than boiling but is accelerated when water heats up (gaining increased energy)....

Remoras, or shark suckers, are a family of eight species of tropical fish that for more than a millennium have inspired a mythology that is almost stranger than those odd little hats they’ve got on. The hats are sucking disks that remoras use to latch onto pretty much anything for a free ride, whether it is other fishes, turtles, divers or ships. Now scientists have figured out where the shark sucker’s sucking disks actually came from....

From Nature magazine A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro. Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab. The structure, called an optic cup, is 550 micrometres in diameter and contains multiple layers of retinal cells including photoreceptors. The achievement has raised hopes that doctors may one day be able to repair damaged eyes in the clinic....