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PATENT NO. 7,805,767 Body Armor with Batteries You’d never catch Iron Man lugging around seven kinds of batteries. But that’s exactly what U.S. Army squad leaders are required to do on 72-hour missions. The batteries, which can weigh a total of 16 pounds, are used to power radios, GPS systems and night-vision goggles. One of the goals of a newly patented variety of body armor, which has circuits and a power supply built into it, is to lighten the load that soldiers have to carry....

NEW YORK CITY—The Big Apple may not be as gritty today as it was even a decade ago, but it—and several other large urban areas worldwide—could benefit from a deeper examination of how it can better meet the needs of its nearly 8.4 million inhabitants. So say two of the world’s most recognizable icons for luxury and culture—the BMW Group and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation—which convened a gathering in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum here Friday to provide details about the city’s forthcoming BMW Guggenheim Lab, part of a social science project that aims to solicit input directly from the streets on how to improve urban living....

By Victoria Cavaliere SEATTLE (Reuters) - A drug-resistant superbug infected 32 people at a Seattle hospital over a two-year period, with the bacteria spreading through contaminated medical scopes that had been cleaned to the manufacturer’s recommendation, officials said on Thursday. Eleven of the patients infected at Virginia Mason Medical Center between 2012 and 2014 eventually died, the hospital and city health officials said. But those patients were critically ill before being infected and it was unclear what role, if any, the bacteria played in their deaths....

Physics seems to be one of the only domains of human life where truth is clear-cut. The laws of physics describe hard reality. They are grounded in mathematical rigor and experimental proof. They give answers, not endless muddle. There is not one physics for you and one physics for me but a single physics for everyone and everywhere. Physics often seems weird, but that’s a good sign—it is not beholden to preconceptions....

Many studies trumpet the positive effects of oxytocin. The hormone facilitates bonding, increases trust and promotes altruism. Such findings earned oxytocin its famous nickname, the “love hormone.” But more recent research has shown oxytocin has a darker side, too: it can increase aggression, risk taking and prejudice. A new analysis of this large body of work reveals that oxytocin’s effects on our brain and behavior actually look a lot like another substance that can cut both ways: alcohol....

If you ask middle school students what a scientist looks like, they will tell you he is an old white guy with crazy hair, glasses and a lab coat. More often than not, he is depicted inside and playing with chemicals. This stereotype is pervasive—and completely, totally wrong. This is why I love the new Tumblr site This Is What a Scientist Looks Like at http://lookslikescience.tumblr.com. Scientists from all kinds of fields are asked to submit photographs of themselves and write a brief bit about who they are....

Drive through many oil and gas fields in the U.S. and one thing stands out above the pumpjacks and storage tanks, especially at night—steadily flickering flames. Those flames are known as gas flares, which burn off excess natural gas from crude oil and natural gas wells across the globe. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using satellites to learn more about those flares—how much gas is being burned, how many flares exist and where they are....

LIJIANG, China – After photographing Black Dragon Lake here for eight years, He Jiaxin knows of more places where he can get the lake to mirror the majesty of its surrounding mountains than anyone else. But this year, he has a problem: The lake has disappeared. Since its springs dried up last year, no water has flowed into Black Dragon Lake for more than 400 days. At the same time, hot weather caused a high evaporation rate, turning a large part of the lake into a play yard for children....

From Nature magazine Researchers report today that penis size does matter to women — though within limits. The finding suggests that women’s preferences could have fuelled the evolution of the human male penis, which is longer and thicker than that of any other primate. Male genitalia evolve quickly. They diversify earlier than other physical traits, with a wide variation in size and shape across the animal kingdom that can reveal a species’ evolutionary pressures....

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves by James Nestor Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 Initially a skeptic, journalist Nestor quickly became enthralled by the extreme sport of freediving, whereby humans plunge hundreds of feet into the sea without the aid of oxygen or sophisticated equipment. The result of his investigation into freediving, among the most dangerous adventure sports in the world, is this mediation on humans’ relationship to the ocean, “the last truly quiet place on Earth....

Since word got out that Michael Hoffmann and a team of his students had developed a state-of-the-art, sustainable, energy-producing toilet for rural, developing countries, his phone has begun to ring much more frequently. Hoffmann, a California Institute of Technology professor, was the team leader for Caltech’s winning entry into the Bill and Melinda Gates contest to invent a more sustainable toilet. He and his team of six developed a flushing toilet that sanitizes the water and produces hydrogen from human waste to create electricity....

Every winter and spring, rains across the central U.S. combine with snowmelt along the northern reaches of the Mississippi River to inundate the hardwood-dominated bottomlands of the lower Mississippi. When the floodwaters recede and soils dry up in summer, logging crews move in. One of their targets has been swamp ash. These wetland trees have thin-walled cells with large gaps between them, creating a low-density wood—and some say a special sound—that has made it the material of choice for some of the most famous guitar players in rock and roll....

Martin Still is an expert in endings. At 10,500 meters, onboard a Virgin Atlantic flight from San Francisco to London, he describes blasts that rip apart matter, explosions that destroy stellar systems and cataclysmic events that shake the cosmos. The NASA astrophysicist makes the prospect of astronomical obliteration sound exciting, although a conversation about any kind of destruction is not one most passengers prefer on a transatlantic trip. For a man obsessed with entities long-since expired, it seems cruelly fitting that Still, whom I sat with on that flight two years ago, may soon see the death of his own NASA program: managing the Kepler space telescope, which orbits the sun with a mission to find exoplanets near other stars....

Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people I know have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world’s poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity....

A spending package signed into law last week by President Bush will provide enough cash to stave off the sacking of 90 employees at financially strapped Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., the nation’s leading particle physics lab. Acting Deputy Secretary of Energy Jeffrey Kupfer told Fermilab it will receive a $29.5-million infusion, including $9.5 million for a key neutrino experiment planned to be completed in 2014. But it remains to be seen whether Congress will dole out enough funds to keep the lab operating at its current capacity in fiscal year 2009....

Space Suit Stuffing Superinsulating aerogels are more than 85 percent air by volume, earning them the nickname “solid smoke.” Yet existing silica aerogels are brittle, like cheap Styrofoam. A much tougher alternative comes from the NASA Glenn Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, both in Cleveland, where scientists have invented new polymer-based versions some 500 times stronger. These aerogels, composed of heat-resistant polyimide plastics, are flexible enough to be folded in half....

By Zoë Corbyn An ethical storm hit the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year after it invited more than 5,000 incoming students to receive a personal genetic analysis of three genes associated with how they metabolize lactose, alcohol and folic acid. Privacy fears led to a public outcry and a bill in the California legislature to block the program. That effort failed, but the California Department of Public Health has since ruled that federal law prohibits the university from giving students their individual results....

When very-high-energy gamma-rays slam into Earth’s atmosphere, they trigger particle showers that emit a faint blue light. With this light, astronomers want to trace the rare gamma-rays — only a few strike each square meter of the atmosphere each month — back to their sources, violent objects such as supermassive black holes. But first researchers must find a home for the planned €200-million (US$277-million) Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) — or rather, two homes....

When light reflects off a concentration of molecules with the same handedness, called homochiral molecules, some of this light becomes circularly polarized: the reflected waveforms corkscrew in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. FlyPol, a spectropolarimeter, measures how much light is transformed in this way as it bounces back from sunlit landscapes. The quantity of this polarized light, observed over a range of wavelengths, is like a fingerprint that reveals not only the type of organism (grass, tree or alga—FlyPol is calibrated for plants) but also details about its health....

A mummy from ancient Egypt was heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago. The newly reported tattoos are the first on a mummy from dynastic Egypt to show actual objects, among them lotus blossoms on the mummy’s hips, cows on her arm and baboons on her neck. Just a few other ancient Egyptian mummies sport tattoos, and those are merely patterns of dots or dashes....