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SYDNEY (Reuters) - Extreme heat and high winds fanned dozens of bushfires across Australia on Friday, prompting hundreds to flee their homes in some of the worst conditions seen since Black Saturday in 2009.One person died in the Grampians bushland in the southeastern state of Victoria, about 300 km (186 miles) west of Melbourne, where bushfires are burning out of control amid temperatures which have hit above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees F), destroying or damaging houses....

It was an unlucky dinosaur that came face-to-face with the beady-eyed glare and giant, toothy grimace of the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex. But the seven-metric-ton predator, which hunted through the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, was not the only beast with these features: other large predatory dinosaurs also gazed through small eyes in their large head. A new study suggests that those squinty eyes could be a trade-off for powerful chomping jaws....

Amid gloomy reports of an impending epidemic of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, emerging research offers a promising twist. Recent studies in North America, the U.K. and Europe suggest that dementia risk among seniors in some high-income countries has dropped steadily over the past 25 years. If the trend is driven by midlife factors such as building “brain reserve” and maintaining heart health, as some experts suspect, this could lend credence to staying mentally engaged and taking cholesterol-lowering drugs as preventive measures....

A cold breeze blew off the Antarctic plain, numbing the noses and ears of scientists standing around a dark hole in the ice. Flecks of ice crackled off a winch as it reeled the last few meters of cable out of the hole. Two workers in sterile suits leaned over to grab the payload — a cylinder the length of a baseball bat — dangling at the end of the cable....

In November 2012, as an early and severe flu season bore down on North America, the news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, was reassuring. “So far, this season, most (90%) of the influenza viruses … are well-matched to the 2012–2013 influenza vaccine; this should mean that the vaccine will offer good protection,” the agency stated. Yet vaccine effectiveness against H3N2, the main flu strain circulating that season, proved to be only 46% in adults aged 18–49, 50% in those aged 50–64, and a dismal 9% in people aged over 65, a vulnerable group....

Nobody noticed when an Australian radio telescope captured a fleeting explosion coming from far beyond the Milky Way in 2001. Records of the powerful flare sat unseen for more than half a decade until a group of scientists sifting through archival data spotted the eruption—a so-called fast radio burst (FRB). According to one of those scientists, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University, the burst produced as much energy in a few thousandths of a second as the sun does in a month....

Monterey, Calif.—Mental problems at sea? Fish and mollusks could begin to have them—thanks to rising CO2 levels. Some of the resulting behaviors are odd, some compromising, and they reveal just how fundamentally carbon emissions are affecting our increasingly fragile Earth. As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of the gas is absorbed by the oceans, gradually making the water more acidic. Numerous studies in recent years have documented how lower pH (higher acidity) can make it harder for shellfish and tiny organisms to form shells or internal skeletons and to reproduce....

A tiny, vanished toad has returned home. About 2,000 Kihansi spray toads have been reintroduced into the Kihansi Gorge in Tanzania after the animal was declared extinct in the wild. This is the first example of an amphibian species that had been declared extinct in the wild being repatriated to its native habitat, according to a release from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), an environmental group which has led the effort to return the toads to their home....

In 2005 engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Jaguar, a system that would later be upgraded into a world-beating supercomputer. By 2011 it had grown to a room-size system that used seven megawatts of energy, ran nearly 225,000 processor cores and had a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops, or 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. Topping Jaguar, albeit necessary to deliver ever more complex modeling of sophisticated energy challenges, would not be easy....

A pair of new studies documents the existence of “quasiparticles” with one quarter the electric charge of a single electron—odd, considering that electrons can not actually be split into smaller particles. More than a mere curiosity, the demonstration may hold the key to a powerful form of quantum computing in which the quasiparticles’ quantum states could be braided together. Fractional charges are nothing new. Researchers learned to make them more than 20 years ago by first confining electrons to a thin layer of semiconductor, chilling them to near absolute zero (–459....

The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It … Every Time by Maria Konnikova Viking, 2016 ($28; 352 pages) Texas rancher J. Frank Norfleet came to Dallas with one task: raise enough cash to buy 10,000 acres of his neighbor’s Panhandle ranch. He was a “cash man,” who didn’t believe in credit. But after only a few days in the big city, he left $90,000 in debt, having been swindled not once but twice by a conman called Stetson....

A storm buried Skara Brae for centuries, and it would take a storm to unearth it again. Roughly 5,000 years ago, a small community of farmers settled in the village on a small island off Scotland’s northeast coast. The villagers lived in geometrically identical stone houses, grew barley, raised cattle and sheep, and carved tools using volcanic rock from Iceland that washed ashore. Over 700 years, they built an ordered society until, archaeologists believe, the climate changed and powerful storms buried the village in water and sand....

Everybody talks about self-driving cars as though they’re still years away. Including me, in my Scientific American column this month. But a lot of autonomous-driving features have quietly slipped onto our public roadways, right under our noses. A few months ago Yahoo Autos invited me to be a judge for its Ride of the Year competition (I am the anchor columnist for Yahoo Tech). We wound up testing 22 new car models....

[Editor’s note: This story was updated at 9:45am on January 28 to note the unmapped area of Antarctica.] Tucked beneath East Antarctica’s vast ice sheet is a frozen world, complete with subglacial lakes, rivers, basins, volcanoes and mountains. But roughly 91 percent of Antarctica—nearly twice the size of Australia—is unmapped, and the largest unsurveyed region on the icy continent is a region called Princess Elizabeth Land. Now a team of geologists has scoured that area to reveal a massive subglacial lake and a series of canyons, one of which—more than twice as long as the Grand Canyon—could rank as Earth’s largest....

The term ecotravel doesn’t have to conjure images of heavy backpacks and sweaty tents—or a trip without luxury—anymore, although a “staycation” remains the most environmentally friendly form of vacation. The drive to be green has swept through all kinds of travel now, from urban hotels to sleek trains. Though the overall impact of tourism on climate change is difficult to assess, the United Nation’s World Tourism Organization says our vacations contribute about 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, which reached 8....

Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space plane SpaceShipTwo crashed today (Oct. 31) in California during a rocket-powered test flight that resulted in the death of one pilot and injuries to the other one, a Kern County Sheriff’s Department representative has confirmed. SpaceShipTwo — which is built by the company Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic — “suffered a serious anomaly” after its rocket motor ignited, leading to the crash of the spacecraft. One of the pilots parachuted out of the prototype spaceliner, and the other pilot perished during the failed flight, Ray Pruitt, the sheriff’s office spokesman, confirmed....

By Julie Steenhuysen The World Health Organization is advising women living in areas where the Zika virus is being transmitted to delay getting pregnant, advice already given by several countries where the virus is in widespread transmission. The WHO issued the advice last week, but its meaning only became clear on Thursday when the health agency issued a correction to its advice on preventing sexual transmission of the virus. Although Zika is primarily spread by mosquitoes, it can also be spread through sexual transmission....

It was not the news residents of the Florida Panhandle wanted to wake up to: Hurricane Michael had strengthened overnight into a category 4 storm, sporting winds of 140 miles per hour. And it didn’t stop there. The hurricane remarkably continued to intensify until it slammed into land Wednesday afternoon with devastating 155 mph winds at its core—just shy of a category 5 designation. Michael’s jump from category 2 to 4 in just 24 hours was far from the first time a hurricane has made such a major leap in strength: Hurricane Harvey ramped up quickly before it hit Texas last year, and in 2004 Charley made the same jump as Michael in just three hours before battering southwest Florida....

In November last year, an eight-year-old girl became China’s youngest person to get lung cancer. The cause, according to her doctor, was fine particulate matter that accumulated in her lungs and led to malignant changes in her cells. Air pollution has been enveloping Chinese cities in smog, periodically closing schools and businesses, and drastically reducing visibility. A month before the girl’s diagnosis, outdoor air pollution and one of its main constituents, particulate matter, were declared carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)....

The ring is an almost magical piece of engineering. All that sensory and analytic power packed into that tiny, elegant package! And the logic behind the ring seems, at first glance, unassailable. The ring transmits more and more data from users to its maker, Ōura, which keeps refining its algorithms to make its “precise, personalized health insights” more accurate. Ideally, the ring will help you cultivate healthier habits and alert you to problems requiring medical intervention....