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A leading agriculture company is about to put the United States on the map with the world’s biggest carbon sequestration projects. In coming months, Archer Daniels Midland will ramp up construction on an initiative to grab carbon dioxide emitted from an ethanol facility and inject the gas underground. The Department of Energy announced the project’s groundbreaking at the company’s facility in Decatur, Ill., in late August. When combined with a separate, related sequestration project starting this fall on the same corn processing plant, the initiative will pump more industrially captured carbon dioxide underneath the earth for permanent storage in deep saline rock reservoirs than ever has been attempted in the United States....

All babies lack sufficient vitamin K at birth, putting them at risk for severe bleeding in the brain or intestines until they get the vitamin by eating solid foods, typically around six months of age. The vitamin is essential for blood clotting, and a vitamin K injection after birth eliminates this bleeding risk. A tiny percentage of parents have always declined the shot but the numbers are growing, according to a new study....

Editor’s Note (2/24/08): The Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to reach orbit this morning, crashing into the Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica. Read our coverage here. Human activity—from coal-fired power plants to car tailpipes—is responsible for nearly 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide wafting into the atmosphere yearly. We know that roughly 15 billion metric tons remains in the atmosphere for a century or more. A portion of the rest ends up in the ocean—acidifying saltwater and making life tough for corals—and another chunk appears to be helping tropical trees grow thicker....

Chemically speaking, we are all potheads. Raphael Mechoulam of Hebrew University in Jerusalem discovered that astounding fact in 1992, and now the reasons why are finally emerging. Numerous experiments with genetically altered mice and rats have shown that when natural brain compounds, called endocannabinoids, are missing or their receptors are blocked, the animals are more susceptible to pain, cannot control their appetites, have trouble handling anxiety and are less able to cope with stress....

Three-dimensional television and the like got a major marketing push nearly two years ago from the consumer electronics and entertainment industries, yet the technology still has major limitations. Whereas glasses-free 3-D on television screens and computer monitors is seen as crucial to generating widespread interest in new consumer electronics, for the most part, viewers still need to wear glasses to experience stereoscopic 3-D images, although glasses-free TVs are starting to hit in Japan....

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so. This quote from Galileo Galilei, one of the founding fathers of science, is a call to arms for ingenious bench scientists, clinicians and theoreticians to render consciousness measurable: to build an instrument that can tell whether that prone person who is nonresponsive or behaving in a reflexlike manner is actually conscious of something—of anything. Such a “consciousness meter” should reliably distinguish between a sleeper who is experiencing a vivid dream—even if she does not recall most of its content later on—and one who is in a dreamless, deep sleep, not feeling anything....

A group of geographers and ecologists from three continents has taken an unprecedented look at Antarctica’s emperor penguins. Using very high resolution (VHR) images from satellites 450 kilometers above Earth, the team has come up with the first total population count for an entire species. With a whopping 595,000 penguins, they found nearly twice as many emperor penguins as did previous studies, and they counted 46 colonies, up from the earlier total of 38....

Thousands of infants each year die in their cribs from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) for reasons that have remained largely a mystery. A study published May 25 provides strong evidence that oxygen deprivation plays a big role. One reason the cause of SIDS has been so difficult to study is the sheer number of variables researchers have had to account for: whether the infant sleeps face down, breathes secondhand smoke or has an illness as well as whether the child has an unidentified underlying susceptibility....

Long journeys require human explorers to carry plenty of water. Astronauts need an average of 1.6 kilograms (0.4 gallon) of water to sustain each of them every day, as well as an additional 27 kilograms (7.2 gallons) for other purposes, according to NASA, and boosting even one of these kilograms into orbit costs $25,000. Given plans to send manned missions to the moon and, eventually, establish a base, it would clearly be far simpler if future explorers could fulfill their water needs there....

Researchers have identified a pair of genes that increase a child’s risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) before the age of 19—adding to a growing list of 30 known genetic factors for the malady. Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic condition that affects an estimated 1.4 million people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) . Abnormal immune responses lead to inflammation in the digestive tract lining causing several disorders, the most common of which are Crohn’s disease (usually affecting the small intestine) and ulcerative colitis (restricted to the colon)....

Every country worldwide will be building walls to defend itself from rising seas within 90 years because the cost of flooding will be more expensive than the price of protective projects, researchers predict in a new study. The encroaching seawater threatens to flood hundreds of millions of people every year by 2100 as homes that are already below flood heights, or will be, succumb to climbing oceans. If governments fail to take any action, the annual cost of damage stands to reach hundreds of billions of dollars, at best, and as high as $100 trillion under grimmer scenarios, according to the paper, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Hearing and seeing things that aren’t there is more common than you might think. As part of their series Science & Story, our friends at the World Science Festival are bringing together neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks and award-winning journalist John Hockenberry to discuss Sacks’ latest book, released November 6, which explores the bewitching and surreal world of hallucinations. The conversation, at Cooper Union in New York City, will canvass the rich cultural history and contemporary science of the hallucinatory experience and will also touch on Sacks’ own early psychedelic forays that helped convince him to dedicate his life to neurology and to write about the myriad riddles of the human mind....

Key concepts Chemistry Solubility Solutions Inks Dyes Introduction Have you ever made a tie-dyed T-shirt? It can be a lot of fun to dye a shirt in bright colors with spiraling designs. In this science activity you will get to dye a T-shirt with your own colorful artwork using only permanent markers. Along the way, you’ll find out how solubility helps your drawings leave beautiful designs on the fabric. Background You’ve probably noticed that when a drop of water lands on a piece of paper with words or a picture printed on it, sometimes the ink runs....

By Meeyoung Cho and Jane ChungSEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea should reduce its reliance on nuclear power as advised by a working group last month but should clarify how many new reactors will be added in absolute terms, participants at a public congressional hearing said on Thursday.A working group in October recommended that South Korea reduce nuclear power’s share of overall generating capacity, but participants at the hearing said that might still mean a rise in the number of reactors as power demand grows....

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION In 1983 and 1984 scientists established that HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) causes AIDS, which had recently begun cropping up in gay men in California and New York. The discovery quickly led to predictions that a preventive vaccine would soon be on tap. Similarly, in 1996, after powerful drug combinations began forcing HIV down to undetectable levels in the blood, prominent HIV researcher David D. Ho of the Rockefeller University voiced optimism that attacking the virus early and hard could prove curative....

Physiology or Medicine: James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof News article: Researchers Win Nobel for Cell Transport System Podcast: The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Rothman, Schekman and Südhof Read a 1996 article co-authored by James E. Rothman in Scientific American Physics: François Englert and Peter W. Higgs News article: Higgs Boson Predictors Awarded the 2013 Nobel Physics Prize Podcast: The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics: Englert and Higgs...

One hundred years ago a Scientific American article about the history and large-scale structure of the universe would have been almost completely wrong. In 1908 scientists thought our galaxy constituted the entire universe. They considered it an “island universe,” an isolated cluster of stars surrounded by an infinite void. We now know that our galaxy is one of more than 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe. In 1908 the scientific consensus was that the universe was static and eternal....

Currently, quantum computing researchers and enthusiasts need to know quantum programming; it’s simply a must. Soon, though, all they will need is a quantum app store and a line of code. Not an app store like in your smartphone, but similar to a code repository of today, such as GitHub—a type of digital library where software developers make the code they have written available to anyone. And in the near future, developers will be able to put in their lines of code that will call on quantum computers to deal with specific tasks a regular computer can’t....

In the early days of the Internet, optimists projected that it would usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Maybe this will happen yet, but currently the net is proving to be a powerful tool in the hands of criminals and terrorists. On top of the rising number of globally based online thieves bent on stealing our identities and money, a growing cadre of state and nonstate actors are adding Internet weapons to their traditional arsenals that can be unleashed in cyber attacks....

The smallest, most precise measurement ever made required one of the largest scientific instruments ever constructed. Five years ago the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a ripple in spacetime that was just one ten-thousandth the width of a proton—a technical tour de force tantamount to pinpointing the distance to the nearest star to three one-thousandths of a centimeter. The Lilliputian ripple was a gravitational wave, a distortion in the fabric of the cosmos generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth....