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Lisa, an elementary school teacher from Ambler, Pa., came home from work one day and said to her husband, “Honey, guess what? I landed that summer teaching position I wanted!” “Wow, congratulations!” he replied. “I know how hard you worked to get that job. I am so happy for you! You must be really excited.” The way Lisa’s husband reacted to her good news was also good news for their marriage, which, more than 20 years later, is still going strong; such positive responses turn out to be vital to the longevity of a relationship....

Electronically scan a book to import its content into a word-processing program. Save a snippet handwritten on a personal digital assistant (PDA) screen into a spreadsheet. Decipher a scrawled form or the zip code on an envelope. In all these cases, software translates typed or handwritten characters into digital text that can be edited, e-mailed, stored or used to tell a high-speed machine which direction to route a letter. That software was originally known as optical character recognition; today the term refers just to recognizing text from a typeset page....

Now is the summer of our really, really big discontent. As I write in early August, our offices are still closed as the pandemic rages on. And some people who stop their vehicles at red lights chaff, figuratively, at wearing masks in public, because freedom. It is under these conditions I want to share some recent items I chanced on. As the saying goes, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work will probably not be compensated to the same extent as a man’s, and her salary as a percentage of the average in her field will likely go down should her field undergo a transition to majority female....

Why do whales beach themselves? Are strandings increasing? Darlene Ketten, a neuroethologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, lays out an explanation: I often use the analogy of a car crash: a lot of things can cause a crash, but you get the same end result. We can determine the cause of a stranding in only about 50 percent of all cases. In those, sometimes the cause is obvious, such as when a ship strike leaves an animal with distinctive fractures and gashes....

By Priya Shetty of Nature magazineSouth African teenagers could pocket as much as 2,700 rand (US$400) over the next 18 months in exchange for staying HIV-free. South Africa has 17% of the world’s HIV-infected people, with young girls one of the highest risk groups, because poverty drives them to have sex in exchange for gifts. Researchers now want to see whether using cash payments as a reward for getting good grades and having annual HIV tests could curb the girls’ risky sexual behavior....

Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide are set to plateau or perhaps decline slightly in 2015, according to work published yesterday in Nature Climate Change. Experts at the Global Carbon Project and the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom found emissions globally could drop as much as 0.6 percent this year—after growing at that rate in 2014—a sharp difference from the 2.4 percent annual growth rate the world has averaged in the past decade....

SHANGHAI, China—The Chinese government announced today that the death toll from Monday’s devastating earthquake could climb to more than 50,000 people. The new estimate came as the country’s defense minister gave orders for 101 helicopters to airlift people out of less populated parts of affected areas in Sichuan Province, in an effort to stem the number of casualties caused by the magnitude 7.9 temblor. Rescue workers, using microphones and fiber-optic cable to probe rubble, frantically are searching for trapped victims....

By Helen Shen of Nature magazineNearly all organisms share a single genetic language: DNA. But scientists have now demonstrated that several lab-made variants of DNA can store and transmit information much like the genuine article.Researchers led by Philipp Holliger, a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, say that the alternative molecules could help others to develop new drugs and nanotechnologies. They publish their results today in Science....

When an infant born with HIV was reportedly “cured” of the disease it seemed too good to be true. The success, detailed by researchers in March 2013 and later published in The New England Journal of Medicine, ignited hope that other babies could benefit from the same aggressive drug regimen that the infant received. Through a series of rare circumstances the so-called “Mississippi baby” began standard HIV treatment 30 hours after birth, but the potent drug cocktail regimen was abruptly halted when the child was 18 months old....

Technological innovations have enabled human cultures to thrive, and now researchers have discovered what might be the oldest example known so far of such an occurrence. These ancient innovations are in the form of miniature stone blades, which appear to have contributed to a population boom in south Asia. Recent genetic research of people across the globe suggests that roughly 45,000 to 20,000 years ago, one of the most dramatic population booms after humanity dispersed from Africa occurred in southern Asia, leading to “the highest population densities in the world in prehistory,” explains Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in England....

Imagine a fantastically large orchestra playing expansively for 14 billion years. At first, the strains sound harmonious. But listen more carefully: something is off key. Puzzlingly, the tuba and bass are softly playing a different song. So it is when scientists “listen” to the music of the cosmos played in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, our largest-scale window into the conditions of the early universe. Shortly after the big bang, random fluctuations–probably thanks to the actions of quantum mechanics–apparently arose in the energy density of the universe....

More than one in 500 children have some form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All autistic children suffer from an impaired ability to communicate and relate to others, but some of them are able to socially interact to a greater degree than their peers. A recent study of a group of these so-called high functioning autistics suggests the neurological basis for their social impairment. Neuroscientist Mirella Dapretto of the University of California Los Angeles and her colleagues surveyed the brains of 10 autistic children and an equal number of nonautistic children as they watched and imitated 80 different faces displaying either anger, fear, happiness, sadness or no emotion....

Noah’s Ark supposedly provided shelter to animals from the rising floodwaters. But at a federal breeding site near Shasta Lake, Calif., the opposite is occurring: The tanks of Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery are providing refuge this summer for salmon nearly out of water. There, staffers are rearing the only insurance policy that the Sacramento River’s winter-run Chinook have against extinction: a living genetic bank of 1,035 baby fish, selected to reseed the population should it extinguish in the wild....

Women in Science I was surprised that the design of math and science curricula was not addressed in the article “Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement,” by Diane F. Halpern, Camilla P. Benbow, David C. Geary, Ruben C. Gur, Janet Shibley Hyde and Morton Ann Gernsbacher. Traditionally, instruction in these fields has almost exclusively used a method of thought and communication that appeals more strongly to males than females. Your article raised the issue of differing visuospatial skills between genders....

The Logic of Intuition Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer. Viking, 2007 ($25.95) How does an outfielder catch a baseball? It’s amazing, really. A ball’s trajectory is described by a complicated set of mathematical equations, but the human brain has evolved a simple way to solve the problem: watch the ball and move such that the angle between your eyes and the ball stays constant. Kids automatically follow this “gaze heuristic” in their first game of catch, even though no one has explained it to them....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - A top Montana Department of Livestock official is pushing a proposal to allow hunting of bison inside Yellowstone National Park for the first time in its 142-year-old history to keep their numbers in check. Marty Zaluski, Montana state veterinarian and member of a federal, state and tribal team that oversees bison in and around Yellowstone, said hunts in the park of the nation’s last purebred herd of bison would lessen conflicts tied to their management....

Panting, increased grooming, a dip in the lake. All of these measures are what pets use to cope with a prolonged heat spell. Animals have evolved their own methods to cool off. In the wild, all of this works well. Pets, however, depend on the help of their owners to gain access to these relief measures. Such concerns are highlighted by increasingly frequent heat waves, such as the one that has seen temperatures in Sacramento, Calif....

A never-before-seen subatomic particle has popped into existence inside the world’s largest atom smasher, bringing physicists a step closer to unraveling the mystery of how matter is put together in the universe. After crashing particles together about 530 trillion times, scientists working on the CMS experiment at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) saw unmistakable evidence for a new type of “beauty baryon.” Baryons are particles made of three quarks (the building blocks of the protons and neutrons that populate the nuclei of atoms)....

Support for science is on the U.S. national ballot in 2020. The decision of dozens of Nobel laureates to endorse Joe Biden for president, as well as that of leading peer-reviewed journals to condemn Donald Trump, highlights a stark November choice: the Trump administration’s aims of curtailing the influence of scientific research on public policy, or a Biden presidency that should prove more receptive. Such editorials express dismay about the Trump administration’s handling of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic....

By Richard A. LovettA series of earthquakes that hit the North American heartland nearly 200 years ago were considerably smaller than reported in the history books, according to research presented at a meeting this week.The quakes struck the New Madrid fault zone 200 kilometers south of St Louis, Mo., in 1811 and 1812, long before modern seismometers allowed accurate measurements of their intensity. In the 1980s, however, some scientists estimated that the magnitudes of these quakes were over 8....