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It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world. The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, could be the final nail in the coffin for models of the atomic world that are more intuitive than standard quantum mechanics, say some physicists....

More so than many illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) frustrates those who suffer from it and those close to them, due to its nebulous assembly of symptoms, along with continued controversies over its etiology, diagnosis, treatment and even its nomenclature. Now, the discovery of a familiar retrovirus in many CFS patients could bring new energy to the field—and fresh hope for more specific medical care. Chronic fatigue is in part a misnomer....

Melting ice sheets in Antarctica will wallop California with greater sea-level rise than the world average, threatening the state’s iconic beaches and important infrastructure, according to a report issued yesterday. The latest science shows that the rate of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is increasing. That soon will become the primary contributor to global sea-level rise, overtaking ocean expansion from warming waters and the melting of mountain glaciers and ice caps, said the study, submitted to the California Ocean Protection Council....

In his new book The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss, photographer Levon Biss displays some of the striking and unusual examples of the more functional plant elements that emerge after most people have looked away. The subjects of the photographs in Biss’s book come from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s carpological collection. Such repositories help scientists preserve plants to learn about how they function....

Men in the U.S. kill many more individuals than women do. They are also far more likely to use a gun, whether the victim is an adult or a teenager. But they are more likely to use a weapon other than a gun when the victim is under age 13. Female killers, however, are more likely to use a weapon other than a gun—a blunt object, knife or poison, for example—against all age groups....

Law-makers in Washington DC greeted the new year with a frantic deal meant to avert a fiscal crisis. But the bill that passed the Senate and the House in pre-dawn votes on 1 and 2 January keeps researchers on tenterhooks for at least another two months by delaying mandatory spending cuts that could threaten science funding. The last-ditch effort aimed to stave off the effects of the ‘fiscal cliff’: a painful series of tax hikes and budget cuts, scheduled to take effect in 2013, that is meant to reduce the US budget deficit but could push the country’s weak economy back into recession....

By Lisa Anderson NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Protecting the infrastructure of American cities from the effects of climate change is rising on the agenda of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a top agency official. “Increasingly, we’ve moved not only from a security focus to a resiliency focus,” said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at Homeland Security, an agency better known for its fight to curb terrorist threats....

The writer of a field guide to North American birds and three academic colleagues have challenged the videotape evidence offered as proof of the existence of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas’ Big Woods region. Long believed to be extinct, the bird made headlines around the world last April when scientists announced that they had spotted it several times and caught it on film. But David Sibley and his team argue that the low-quality video shows the more common pileated woodpecker, not the ivory-bill, preparing to take flight from a tupelo tree and then flapping into the distance....

Warming temperatures possibly increased the frequency of extreme Arctic cyclones between the 19th and 21st centuries, a finding that highlights concerns about climate impacts in the future and coastal erosion in the polar north, according to new research. The paper in Geophysical Research Letters used climate models to peer back in the past and found that there was a statistically significant change in both sea-level pressure and extreme Arctic cyclone activity between the mid-1800s and 2005....

By Ed Yong of Nature magazineThe wrinkles that develop on wet fingers could be an adaptation to give us better grip in slippery conditions, the latest theory suggests.The hypothesis, from Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist at 2AI Labs in Boise, Idaho, and his colleagues goes against the common belief that fingers turn prune-like simply because they absorb water.Changizi thinks that the wrinkles act like rain treads on tires. They create channels that allow water to drain away as we press our fingertips on to wet surfaces....

Like Alaska’s mighty Yukon, a broad river once flowed across Antarctica, following a gentle valley shaped by tectonic forces at a time before the continent became encased in ice. Understanding what happened when rivers of ice later filled the valley could solve certain climate and geologic puzzles about the southernmost continent. The valley is Lambert Graben in East Antarctica, now home to the world’s largest glacier. Trapped beneath the ice, the graben (which is German for ditch or trench) is a stunning, deep gorge....

The U.S. government—and major U.S. banks—seem to have lost their appetite for coal. After spending five years and approximately $50 million on preliminary studies as well as selecting a proposed site in Mattoon, Ill., the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has scuttled plans to build the so-called FutureGen power plant. The facility would have captured the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted when coal is burned for electricity generation....

Splenda is not satisfying—at least according to the brain. A new study found that even when the palate cannot distinguish between the artificial sweetener and sugar, our brain knows the difference. At the University of California, San Diego, 12 women underwent functional MRI while sipping water sweetened with either real sugar (sucrose) or Splenda (sucralose). Sweeteners, real or artificial, bind to and stimulate receptors on the taste buds, which then signal the brain via the cranial nerve....

Apple has long enjoyed the reputation of making a computing platform that provides security protection that is superior to its peers—in a word, Microsoft. The emergence of a group of malicious software (malware) programs in recent months—collectively known as Flashback or Flashfake—that specifically target Macs and their OS X operating system now has Apple in the unfamiliar position of being on the defensive. Written as a Trojan horse program, Flashback has infected hundreds of thousands of Macs to date, allowing cyber criminals to steal information from those computers and turn many of them into virtual zombies that can be manipulated to attack other computers....

Scientists have long struggled to understand why women with heart disease risk factors are more likely to develop breast cancer. Now research suggests that high cholesterol may play an important role. Estrogen drives the majority of breast cancers in women. The hormone binds to proteins known as receptors inside the tumor, helping it grow. So when Philip Shaul, a pediatrician and biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and his colleagues learned that a common breakdown product of cholesterol also activates estrogen receptors, they thought they might be on to something....

Caffeine’s buzz is so nice it evolved twice. The coffee genome has now been published, and it reveals that the coffee plant makes caffeine using a different set of genes from those found in tea, cacao and other perk-you-up plants. Coffee plants are grown across some 11 million hectares of land, with more than two billion cups of the beverage drunk every day. It is brewed from the fermented, roasted and ground berries of Coffea canephora and Coffea arabica, known as robusta and arabica, respectively....

David White was first evaluated for a kidney transplant in 2011, but it would be four years before he got the call that his turn had come. In between undergoing various forms of dialysis to do the job his kidneys couldn’t and attending medical appointments to ensure he was healthy enough to survive the four-to-six-hour surgery, White busied himself with reading, exercise, and even trying to learn a new language to keep his mind off the fact that his kidneys were failing....

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love,” Jane Austen writes in her 1817 novel Northanger Abbey. What if one’s friend is the source of those pangs? Can he or she still be a friend? Journalist Carlin Flora explores this question in our cover story, “Can Men and Women Be Just Friends?”. Despite massive gains in gender equality, platonic friendship between heterosexual men and women still draws some suspicion....

When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter global warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B....

(Reuters) - A hurricane and a tropical storm are heading west across the Pacific Ocean toward the tourist haven of Hawaii and the U.S. National Hurricane Center said parts of the islands might need to post watches later on Tuesday. Hurricane Iselle was about 1,055 miles (1,700 km) east-southeast of Hawaii, moving west at 9 miles per hour (15 km per hour) with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph (200 kph), the National Hurricane Center said....