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The human nose can distinguish at least 1 trillion different odors, a resolution orders of magnitude beyond the previous estimate of just 10,000 scents, researchers report today in Science. Scientists who study smell have suspected a higher number for some time, but few studies have attempted to explore the limits of the human nose’s sensory capacity. “It has just been sitting there for somebody to do,” says study co-author Andreas Keller, an olfactory researcher at the Rockefeller University in New York....

President Obama has called for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next year and the remaining 68,000 by the end of 2014, but questions linger regarding what the troops are leaving behind after more than nine years of combat. In particular, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has accused U.S. and NATO-led coalition troops of littering his country with weapons that use “nuclear components.” Karzai made this comment last week during an address to the Afghanistan Youth International Conference, throughout which he broadly criticized coalition forces and pointed out that the U....

Following two weeks of surging heat in Philadelphia in 2012, Gregory Tasian, a urologist and a clinical epidemiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, saw two patients within 12 hours of each other suffering from the same affliction. A boy and girl both presented with large kidney stones, but neither had a history of this condition, also known as nephrolithiasis. In fact, a scan of one of the patients from a few months earlier showed no indication of any kidney trouble, so the problem must have struck fast and hard....

Stories of vampires date back thousands of years. Our modern concept stems from Bram Stoker’s quirky classic Dracula and Hollywood’s Bela Lugosi—the romantic, sexually charged, bloodsucking outcast with a fatal susceptibility to sunlight and an abhorrence of garlic and crosses. In contrast, vampires of folklore cut a pathetic figure and were also known as the undead. In searching for some underlying truth in vampire stories, researchers have speculated that the tales may have been inspired by real people who suffered from a rare blood disease, porphyria....

If you walk down to the office gallery at Pearlfisher Inc., a design agency based in London, you are bound to hear the unmistakable cluck of plastic balls colliding. At first, you might dismiss it as the sound of employees chilling out on a ping pong game. But if you walk further, following signs for “Jump In!,” the sound will turn into a rattle like that of maracas. What you see next might take your breath away – a huge ball pit filled with 81,000 white plastic balls....

A group of scientists have detailed how to create materials that can redirect light around an object and make it invisible. This possible precursor to the ultimate camouflage ?demonstrates the depth of ingenuity of the 2006 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 50 awards. These accomplishments go beyond invoking the Invisible Man. Drawn from the worlds of research, business and policymaking, a good number of the names on our list have in common an interest in leading technological innovation as a force for the public good: A fundamental understanding of the molecular processes that produce the mind-erasing devastation of Alzheimer’s....

Earth is crawling with lizards and snakes. More than 10,000 species of these reptiles, called squamates, have adapted to thrive across almost every continent. But this vast assortment took a surprisingly long time to develop, according to University of Bristol paleontologist Jorge Herrera-Flores and his colleagues. Instead of trying new adaptations as quickly as possible, squamates succeeded by evolving with a relatively slow and steady pace, the researchers say—an idea counter to many biologists’ assumptions about how and why life generates diversity....

Aside from the main outcome of last week’s US presidential election, the vote tallies also promised to vindicate or vilify a cadre of blogging statisticians. For at least the past three election cycles, some bloggers have predicted the winner of the presidential election in each state with an accuracy that seemed to border on wizardry. Their secret? Aggregating dozens of national and state polls conducted throughout the election campaign, and applying statistics....

Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the “thunder lizard.” Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed. The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History....

The left’s war on science begins with the stats cited above: 41 percent of Democrats are young Earth creationists, and 19 percent doubt that Earth is getting warmer. These numbers do not exactly bolster the common belief that liberals are the people of the science book. In addition, consider “cognitive creationists”—whom I define as those who accept the theory of evolution for the human body but not the brain. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker documents in his 2002 book The Blank Slate (Viking), belief in the mind as a tabula rasa shaped almost entirely by culture has been mostly the mantra of liberal intellectuals, who in the 1980s and 1990s led an all-out assault against evolutionary psychology via such Orwellian-named far-left groups as Science for the People, for proffering the now uncontroversial idea that human thought and behavior are at least partially the result of our evolutionary past....

If you have pondered how intelligent and educated people can, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, believe that evolution is a myth, that global warming is a hoax, that vaccines cause autism and asthma, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration, conjecture no more. The explanation is in what I call logic-tight compartments—modules in the brain analogous to watertight compartments in a ship. The concept of compartmentalized brain functions acting either in concert or in conflict has been a core idea of evolutionary psychology since the early 1990s....

NASA and the US National Science Foundation would see their budgets rise in fiscal year 2015 under a $1.1 trillion spending bill approved by the US Congress. The measure, passed by the House on December 11 and by the Senate on December 13, also includes an additional $5.4 billion in aid and research funds for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. US President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill into law, finalizing the budget for US agencies through September 30, 2015 (see table below)....

Jed Brown of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and colleagues analyzed decades-worth of data on fish passages in the Merrimack, Connecticut and Susquehanna rivers in the U.S. Northeast. Roughly 2 percent of the targeted number of American shad made it through Essex Dam on the Merrimack River in 2011 and close to 0 percent passed through dams on the Connecticut and Susquehanna. Restoration targets for river herring, two species of silver-colored fishes, are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of fish but in recent years, less than 1,000 herring on average have returned to these rivers from the ocean....

Perry A. Gerakines, an assistant professor in the department of physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, explains. We have extensive evidence that Earth has already been hit by asteroids many times throughout history-the most famous (or infamous) example is probably the asteroid or comet that created the Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico and may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago....

Carbon prices will be applied to car exhaust for the first time under the Obama administration’s new tailpipe rule, launched yesterday. But while environmentalists were celebrating, some economists were quietly concerned that U.S. EPA’s carbon calculation is too low. The agency incorporated a preliminary price of $21 for every ton of carbon dioxide expelled from vehicles to help reach its new standard of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016. That amounts to about 20 cents per gallon or, as two economists claim, a level that’s “far too small a price incentive to prompt substantive mitigation measures....

Physicists often describe the fabric of the universe we inhabit as four-dimensional spacetime, comprising three dimensions of space and one of time. But whereas we spend our days passing freely through space in any direction we wish (gravity and solid obstacles permitting), time pushes us along, willingly or not, in a single predetermined direction: toward the future. This is the arrow of time—life carries us from the past, through the present, and into the future....

What do you get when you put polluted water, fossil-fuel exhaust, sunlight and heat-loving green slime into a metal box? If the box belongs to David Bayless, you get pure oxygen, clean water and a potential means to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Bayless, director of Ohio University’s Ohio Coal Research Center, thinks that the easiest way to eliminate the carbon dioxide given off by coal-burning power plants is nature’s way, through photosynthesis....

A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka by Meera Subramanian PublicAffairs, 2015 (($26.99)) India is a land of contradictions—it houses both a rapidly rising middle class and a third of the population that lives without electricity. Much of the development that is improving people’s lives is also threatening their future by harming India’s natural environment. If the nation’s progress is to continue, people must find a way to live sustainably, journalist Subramanian says....

Oncologists will soon be adding “financial counselor” to their job description. With an increasing number of cancer patients suffering economic hardships as a side effect of expensive therapy, most oncologists are finding that cost needs to be considered as part of treatment options. Leading cancer organizations are now working on incorporating cost into treatment guidelines and other materials. The change, which departs from the current American medical ethos, is fraught with thorny questions not only for cancer doctors and patients but also for the health care system at large....

From Simons Science News (find original story here). Someday, quantum computers may be able to solve complex optimization problems, quickly mine huge data sets, simulate the kind of physics experiments that currently require billion-dollar particle accelerators, and accomplish many other tasks beyond the scope of present-day computers. That is, if they are ever built. But even as daunting technical challenges keep the dream at bay, theorists are increasingly putting the ideas and techniques of quantum computing to work solving deep, long-standing problems in classical computer science, mathematics and cryptography....