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Three new books reveal how our inner worlds influence our behaviors. Our unconscious mind is more in control than we might think, argues theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow in Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (Pantheon, 2012). Imaging shows that unconscious thought requires substantially more brain activity than conscious reasoning. Our unconscious has evolved to help us act on information quickly. It dictates our choices of friends and forms our biases....

A powerful disaster-inducing geomagnetic storm is an inevitability in the near future, likely causing blackouts, satellite failures, and more. Unlike other threats to our planet, such as supervolcanoes or asteroids, the time frame for a cataclysmic geomagnetic storm—caused by eruptions from our sun playing havoc with Earth’s magnetic field—is comparatively short. It could happen in the next decade—or in the next century. All we know is, based on previous events, our planet will almost definitely be hit relatively soon, probably within 100 years....

Cities around the world are driving vehicles off the streets by imposing strict anti-pollution measures, but the car still rules in the United States. This week, the city of Paris launched a ban on vehicles built before 1997 during weekday daylight hours. Mayor Anne Hidalgo has been candid about her desire to expand the ban to cut back on smog from diesel cars and to “reclaim” the city for pedestrians and bikers....

By Reuters Staff GENEVA/LONDON (Reuters) - Laos has suffered a case of vaccine-derived polio, the World Health Organization said on Monday, in a new setback to a global plan to eradicate the crippling disease after the virus resurfaced in Ukraine and Mali. The WHO said an 8-year-old boy died of the disease on Sept. 11, and genetic sequencing suggested the virus strain has been circulating in the area of Bolikhamxay province, which has low immunization rates, for more than two years....

What will replace today’s hard drives and flash memory devices? The former tend to be slow, the latter unsuited to long-term use. Then there is RAM, many forms of which are volatile—turn off the power, lose your data. These shortcomings, as well as the same demands that drive most technological innovation—to make it smaller, faster, cheaper, less prone to failure—have produced a number of candidate data-storage technologies in recent years, all of which offer some combination of advantages over the devices in wide use today....

Speed-reading is either a productivity enhancer or a gimmick that lets people gobble up content without really understanding or retaining what they’ve read. This debate—dating back to the late 1950s—resurfaced recently when Samsung integrated the new Spritz speed-reading app into the high-profile Galaxy S5 smartphone and Gear 2 smartwatch launched last month. Spritz streams words one at a time inside an onscreen display box called a “redicle.” Samsung’s devices will initially let users speed read e-mails, but the software can be modified to work with text messages, social media feeds, maps and other digital content, according to the eponymous Boston-based start-up that developed the app....

When a star becomes a white dwarf—an old, extremely dense star that would have once had a mass similar to our own sun’s—the eventful part of its life is over. It releases what heat and light it has left over billions of years, slowly cooling until it no longer shines. Some white dwarfs, however, are not content with this ending. If a white dwarf exists in a two-star system with a companion, it can avert its fate and go out with a bang, not a whimper....

Stress can be toxic at any age. It rattles us when it strikes, shaking up our relationships and narrowing our focus. When it becomes chronic, it ravages our health. Physically, emotionally and intellectually, stress can drag us down. An even more insidious effect is the assault it can launch on a child’s brain, impeding the development of critical cognitive skills. A number of researchers, including myself, have discovered that psychological stress affects the thinking skills and brain development of even very young children, likely beginning prenatally....

Ever since the starship Enterprise first whisked across television screens in 1966, Star Trek has inspired audiences with its portrayal of a future, spacefaring humanity boldly going where no one has gone before. Creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision went on to spark five other TV series and now 11 movies, as a new film hits multiplexes this week. This prequel, simply titled Star Trek and directed by J. J. Abrams—the force behind TV’s Lost and Fringe, among other projects—chronicles the early years of Captain Kirk and some of his Enterprise shipmates, including Spock, McCoy and Uhura....

By Kate Kelland A study of a new 3-parent IVF technique designed to reduce the risk of mothers passing hereditary diseases to their babies has found it is likely to work well and lead to normal pregnancies, British scientists said. Britain’s parliament voted last year to become the first in the world to allow the 3-parent in-vitro-fertilization (IVF)technique, which doctors say will prevent incurable inherited diseases but critics see as a step towards “designer babies”....

During an early episode of the über-pyrotechnic television series MythBusters, Adam Savage was busted by the camera crew for misremembering his predictions of the probability of an axle being ripped out of a car, à la American Graffiti. When confronted with the unmistakable video evidence of his error, Adam sardonically rejoined: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” Skepticism is the fine art and technical science of understanding why rejecting everyone else’s reality and substituting your own almost always results in a failed belief system....

When a baby is born in rural Nepal, its severed umbilical cord is commonly tied with a thread of raw cotton. In many cultures, the cord stump is also rubbed with ash, oil, butter, spices, mud or even dung. Throughout the developing world, birth attendants with unwashed hands use dirty knives, scissors, razor blades or broken glass to cut the cord. Freshly cut umbilical cords are attractive breeding grounds for bacteria, and such practices are a major reason why the biggest threat to newborn babies in the developing world is infection....

Imagine a Christmas tree so covered in ornaments that you can barely make out the foliage underneath. Now, instead of candy canes, snowflakes and Santa Claus figurines, picture millions of small black, white and orange butterflies dangling from the branches, leaves and trunks of trees in central Mexico. Every year, between November and March, oyamel, oak and pine forests on the mountainous border of Michoacán and Mexico state house most of the monarch butterflies that migrate from the United States and Canada by flying south to Mexico for the winter....

The Ewe people of Togo, among others in Africa, have a proverb: “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.” Indeed, the grand specimens of the genus Adansonia can live more than 1,000 years, with trunks 30 feet across. Six of the world’s eight baobab species are found only in Madagascar. But according to a recent study in Biological Conservation, climate change and human development will soon erode the habitats of two Madagascan species....

By Nichola Groom(Reuters) - When Gloria Adams signed a contract to install a rooftop solar power system on her Oahu home in late August, she looked forward to lower electric bills and a return on her investment in the years ahead.She never dreamed that she would have to stop the project, get the Hawaiian Electric Company’s permission before she could proceed, and possibly help pay for any upgrades to her neighborhood’s electricity circuits to handle the extra load....

New York’s emerging plan to regulate natural gas drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale needs to go further to safeguard drinking water, environmentally sensitive areas and gas industry workers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has informed state officials. The EPA’s comments, in a series of letters this week to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, are significant because they suggest the agency will be watching closely as states in the Northeast and Midwest embrace new drilling technologies to tap vast reserves of shale gas....

Why do people do good things? Is kindness hard-wired into the brain, or does this tendency arise via experience? Or is goodness some combination of nature and nurture? Dacher Keltner, director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, investigates these questions from multiple angles, and often generates results that are both surprising and challenging. In his new book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover the innate power of human emotion to connect people with each other, which he argues is the path to living the good life....

Hannah Corderman is trying to fill in the blanks in her world, but the blanks are growing bigger. She cannot always hear conversations, so she nods or smiles at what seem like appropriate moments, taking her cues from people around her. Picking out individual words can be hard even though doctors recently turned up the volume on her hearing aids. “There’s a lot missing from conversations—bits and pieces,” she says. “But I make it work....

On July 20 a man who was ill flew on commercial planes from the heart of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. That man became Nigeria’s first Ebola case—the index patient. In a matter of weeks some 19 people across two states were diagnosed with the disease (with one additional person presumed to have contracted it before dying). But rather than descending into epidemic, there has not been a new case of the virus since September 5....

More than a dozen research groups worldwide have started analysing wastewater for the new coronavirus as a way to estimate the total number of infections in a community, given that most people will not be tested. The method could also be used to detect the coronavirus if it returns to communities, say scientists. So far, researchers have found traces of the virus in the Netherlands, the United States and Sweden. Analysing wastewater—used water that goes through the drainage system to a treatment facility—is one way that researchers can track infectious diseases that are excreted in urine or faeces, such as SARS-CoV-2....