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Researchers have taken the first step toward building silicon-based computers that use a fraction of the power of today’s machines. A team has injected electrons into silicon in such a way that their spins, or magnetic orientations, tend to be aligned in one direction instead of the other. Although the reported effect is subtle, silicon has never before supported such attempts to implement spintronics—the manipulation of electrons by their spins instead of their charges....

It’s turning out to be a particularly harsh flu season. The epidemic hasn’t hit the University of Maryland College Park yet; students are just getting back from winter break. But in the close quarters of dorm rooms and cafeterias and study groups, the flu will come. And when it does, Dr. Don Milton, a professor of environmental health, will be ready and waiting to learn from it. On a blustery January day, Milton was with undergraduate research assistants Louie Gold and Amara Fox trying to get students to sign up for his new study on how the flu—and other viruses—spread....

Researchers using satellite data have pinpointed New Mexico’s San Juan Basin as a major source of leaking methane in the United States. The region was responsible for 10 percent of all the methane emissions from the natural gas sector in the country, according to a study published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters. If gas, coal mining and petroleum sectors are included, the San Juan Basin was responsible for 5 percent of the emissions....

In bad winters, when reindeer cannot reach lichen on the ground, reindeer herders in Scandinavia ski into the woods and knock down dead limbs—for Miriam Lanta, it’s fun work, although the reason is not. A single reindeer can consume eight pounds of lichen a day. But tree lichen—knotted fungi and algae, curling to create its own shade—grows as slow as a fraction of a millimeter a year, clotting over decades in dark webs on old arctic trees....

Today students in most classrooms sit, listen and take notes while a professor lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 human beings in the room, there is little to no human interaction. Exams often offer the first opportunity for the professor to get real information on how well the students digested the knowledge. If the test identifies gaps in students’ understanding of a basic concept, the class still moves on to a more advanced concept....

Most of us recognize that nagging feeling of regret that comes from agonizing over some real or perceived misdeed from our past. Maybe we harmed someone directly or failed to act when we felt we should. This feeling has value: guilt, when it is adaptive, motivates us to appraise its presence and to perhaps take reparative action or to think twice the next time we are faced with a similar situation....

Plants soak up some of the 1017 joules of solar energy that bathe Earth each second, harvesting as much as 95 percent of it from the light they absorb. The transformation of sunlight into carbohydrates takes place in one million billionths of a second, preventing much of that energy from dissipating as heat. But exactly how plants manage this nearly instantaneous trick has remained elusive. Now biophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that plants use the basic principle of quantum computing—the exploration of a multiplicity of different answers at the same time—to achieve near-perfect efficiency....

Skimping on sleep weakens your immune system, makes you more of a pessimist and increases your risk of gaining weight—among other recent findings. And yet more folks than ever before are dealing with the increasingly faster pace of life by staying up later and/or getting up earlier. More than a third of adults in the U.S. get less than seven hours of sleep each night, which may be one reason why drowsy driving, based on 2013 statistics, takes the lives of around 800 Americans and injures about 44,000 annually....

If a child you know refuses to share his toys, chances are he knows he is doing wrong but cannot help it. New research published in March in Neuron reveals that underdevelopment of an impulse control center in the brain is, at least in part, the reason children who fully understand the concept of fairness fail to act accordingly. As babies, we are inherently selfish, but as we grow, we become better at social strategy—that is, satisfying our own needs while behaving in a manner acceptable to others....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

In the classic story, a boy tries to repeatedly fool his town into believing that there is a wolf on the prowl. This morality tale ends poorly for the boy, but a small Australian bird can do one better. When a pied currawong goes looking for brown thornbill nestlings to eat, the thornbill parents call wolf—or, actually, they call hawk. The false alarms fool the currawong into thinking that its own predator, the brown goshawk, is nearby....

Light bathes our planet, splashing off the mountaintops, flooding the deserts, tundra, savanna and forests, and seeping as deep as 1,000 meters into the ocean. Bacteria, plants, animals and all kinds of living things have evolved different ways to detect and respond to light. Despite their familiarity and prevalence, eyes are not essential. Biologists have known for several decades that some eyeless animals perceive light. Likewise, some animals with eyes—even rather sophisticated eyes—rely on other body parts to see....

(Credit:Noah Zerkin/Twitter With Permission)In recent times, Google’s Sergey Brin has become an ambulating, flying billboard for his company’s next great invention, Google Glasses.These things will project all the information you need to know (Mariah Carey just kissed someone!) straight into your eyes, as you bump into another fellow human, who is trying to take in the winner of the 3:30 race at Belmont Park.Yesterday, though, Brin took his glasses for a very curious roam into the depths of New York’s subway....

How do you govern something that doesn’t exist yet? That, in a broad sense, is the question facing scientists and governments who are interested in exploring geoengineering’s potential to fight climate change but wary of the risk of stirring controversy and conflict. A new effort to provide U.S. government guidance on research restrictions that might be necessary will be launched tomorrow by the Washington-based National Commission on Energy Policy, which has assembled a task force of experts in science, national security and diplomacy to tackle tough questions surrounding geoengineering....

The large earthquake that jolted Ecuador on Saturday, April 16, reached magnitude 7.8. The shaking occured in a fault region that has unleashed much bigger quakes in the past, including the largest earthquake ever recorded by scientific instruments, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Saturday’s quake near the Pacific coast killed at least 270 people, many crushed in collapsed buildings. The quake occured in a very seismically active area on the Pacific coast of South America....

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Serbian power utility Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) said on Thursday high water levels on the Morava river have forced it to halt two hydro power plants with a combined capacity of 34 megawatts. The heaviest rains and floods in 120 years hit Serbia and Bosnia this week, killing three people, cutting off electricity and leaving several towns and villages isolated. EPS said it has introduced emergency measures and mobilized teams to monitor the situation at its facilities....

Birds and bees make perching look easy, but creating a tiny aerial drone that can land on—and then re-launch from—a wall, tree branch or other surface takes a lot of work. Such micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have previously used spikes or magnetic landing gear, and expend a lot of precious power to take flight again. But researchers from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other institutions have created a minuscule wing-flapping robot that literally turns the problem on its head—with a disklike top that can cling to most surfaces using static electricity, much like rubbing a balloon and sticking it onto a wall....

Carbon dioxide emissions from generating electricity could be cut by 78 percent within the next 15 years if the country makes the same Herculean effort to expand solar and wind technology that it did to build the Interstate Highway System. That’s the conclusion of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study published Monday in Nature Climate Change, which shows that a new system of transcontinental transmission lines connected to wind and solar farms nationwide is the key to dramatically reducing emissions from the nation’s power plants....

Limiting emissions trading in an international climate deal is “a real killer for us politically,” former President Clinton once warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in one of a handful of phone calls the two leaders shared about the fallout from the Kyoto Protocol. The transcripts of their conversations, released last week as part of a BBC Freedom of Information Act request, provide a window into the world of millennial climate politics....

Europe should slash the acceptable human exposure limits on two neonicotinoids — a class of insecticide previously linked to bee declines — says a key European Union safety agency. In a report released today, the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA), based in Parma, Italy, says that recent research suggests that acetamiprid and imidacloprid “may affect the developing human nervous system”. The European Commission — which requested that the EFSA look at a potential link to human health in the first place — now has to decide what action to take on the basis of the agency’s recommendation....