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By Gene Emery NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Dietary supplements send 23,000 people, many of them children, to the emergency room in the U.S. each year, according to a new estimate. Just over 9% require hospitalization. Many patients report heart symptoms. The supplements include herbal products, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other complementary nutrition products hawked for a wide range of uses, often with little or no testing to back up claims....

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazineHistory is rich with ’eureka’ moments: scientists from Archimedes to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are said to have had flashes of inspiration while thinking about other things. But the mechanisms behind this psychological phenomenon have remained unclear. A study now suggests that simply taking a break does not bring on inspiration – rather, creativity is fostered by tasks that allow the mind to wander.The discovery was made by a team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler, psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara....

By Jarrett Renshaw PHILADELPHIA, May 13 (Reuters) - Federal investigators said on Wednesday that preliminary data showed an Amtrak train in Philadelphia was traveling at more than 100 miles per hour, or roughly twice the speed limit, when it derailed, killing seven people and injuring more than 200. The National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) disclosure came as investigators pored over video footage and data from the black box aboard the train that crashed late Tuesday....

The most comprehensive survey yet finds that the benefits of antidepressants outweigh the risks in children and teens during the first few months of treatment. The finding comes three years after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered pharmaceutical companies to put black warning labels—the strongest possible—on antidepressants cautioning that the drugs may increase the risk of suicidal behavior in kids. The FDA ordered the beefed up warnings in response to a hearing by two of its advisory committees that looked at the potential risks of drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft....

An analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages reveal how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes. The researchers argue that women’s friendships in particular drive the process of finding a mate and supporting the next generation. The data could also undermine traditional notions about how humans like to organize themselves. “There has been a view in anthropology that the ancestral state for humans is a form of patriarchy, and I’m not sure that that’s true,” says University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, an author of the study published April 19 by Nature Scientific Reports....

The first in a series of stories on Bangladesh and climate migration. HARINAGAR, BANGLADESH—One by one, the men in Gaurpodomando’s family walked out of this mud-caked village and never returned. First, his uncles went. Both fishermen, they suffered as their catch declined year after year, before they crossed illegally into India to find work in construction. His brothers earned so little fishing that they braved tiger attacks in the nearby Sundarbans forest to forage for honey and timber....

LONDON – Changes in solar activity, sunspots and cosmic rays, and their effects on clouds have contributed no more than 10 percent to global warming, according to two British scientists. The findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reconfirm the basic science that increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing most climate change. They also reexamine the alternative case made by climate deniers: that it is the Sun’s changing activity and not us that is causing the Earth to heat up....

Many of us are familiar with crowdfunding: donating money to people and their projects using one of many platforms on the Internet. During the pandemic, people have sought help through crowdfunding in record numbers, making the activity seem like part of the American safety net. Some of these campaigns are truly transformative. Brandon Stanton—of the popular Humans of New York project—started a GoFundMe campaign for Kasson, a young man who had been blinded in an attack....

Although the term genetic engineering has been in use for at least three decades, and recombinant DNA methods are now mainstays of modern research, most biotechnologists’ work with living things has little in common with engineering. One reason is that the tools available for building with biological parts have yet to reach a level of standardization and utility equal to that in other engineering fields. Another has to do with methods and mind-sets in biology, although these, too, can be powerfully influenced by technology....

Editor’s Note (11/9/20): Ballot measures passed in the recent election included strengthening an existing ban on the use of facial recognition by police and public officials in Portland, Me., as well as other regulations of technology. This editorial provides more information on the issues with facial recognition and why jurisdictions across the U.S. are attempting to control its use. State and local authorities from New Hampshire to San Francisco have begun banning the use of facial-recognition technology....

The mounting death toll and devastation in Vanuatu since Cyclone Pam smashed the Pacific island nation this weekend have heightened calls for a global climate change compensation fund. From the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, small island leaders said yesterday that the losses in Vanuatu—with 24 confirmed dead and more than 3,300 people displaced, according to the United Nations—hit home for them, as well. They and others insist that providing a way to address the unavoidable economic losses suffered due to climate change, known in the lingo of international negotiations as “loss and damage,” must be a central part of any new climate accord....

Solution: As you can see pictorially here, even if we move M to M’, the intersection of the crossing line with Euclid remains the same. The first question is how to prove it. The second is: Where is the intersection point with Euclid? Call the distance from Euclid to the pine P and the distance from Euclid to the maple M. In what follows, we will count in hundreds of meters....

Conformity gets a bad rap, and it often deserves one. People abuse drugs, deface national parks, and spend $150,000 on tote bags after seeing others do so. Peer pressure doesn’t have to be all bad, though. People parrot each other’s voting, healthy eating, and environmental conservation efforts, too. They also “catch” cooperation and generosity from others. Tell someone that his neighbors donated to a charity, and that person will boost his own giving, even a year later....

The spherical Jollbot doesn’t resemble a grasshopper, but it owes its ability to jump to these tiny creatures. Insects don’t have the muscle action to hop like kangaroos, so they store energy like a compressed spring and release it suddenly to leap. Likewise, when the flexible Jollbot is flattened and then released, it bounds upward roughly 20 inches (50 centimeters) into the air. Jollbot is an example of a biomimetic machine—one that borrows ideas from nature as inspiration for its appearance, behavior and physical mechanisms....

Edited by Dava Sobel Optimization under uncertainty is a field of study in which my grown son will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case, concerns the production of wind energy. He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me as a way to optimize their clarity, so that even a layperson, such as myself, can understand what he’s saying, in between each beautifully made equation and graph. For me, it’s a matter of optimizing my time with him, my only child, who lives so far away and does not get along with the man I married....

Editor’s Note (3/12/2019): This article was originally published on March 12, 2009. It is being re-posted on the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago this month, a software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) hatched a plan for an open computer network to keep track of research at the particle physics laboratory in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland....

It’s near impossible to predict which stories will draw the most eyes, and this year was no different. The top 10 stories published in 2015—ranked by the number of overall page views—both confirmed our intuitions and surprised us, too. #10 Lenin’s Body Improves with Age For thousands of years humans have used embalming methods to preserve dead bodies. But nothing compares with Russia’s 90-year experiment to preserve the body of Vladimir Lenin, communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union #9 Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think Three recent studies suggest we have no idea how unequal our society has become #8 Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2015 From autonomous drones to emergent AI to digital genomes, this year’s list from the World Economic Forum offers its latest glimpse of our fast-approaching technological future #7 Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones Parents’ traumatic experience may hamper their offspring’s ability to bounce back from trauma #6 War in Space May Be Closer Than Ever China, Russia and the U....

The number 747 is so ubiquitous, having adorned the sides of so many aircraft over the decades, that it has become almost synonymous with the jet airliner. Some 3.5 billion people have flown on 747s, according to Boeing, which has manufactured more than 1,400 since the first 747-100 left the factory in 1968. But not all 747s wound up in regular passenger or cargo service. Today, for instance, one of NASA’s two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft is ferrying the retired space shuttle Endeavour to Los Angeles for display in a museum....

Andrew Koob received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Purdue University in 2005, and has held research positions at Dartmouth College, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Munich, Germany. He’s also the author of The Root of Thought, which explores the purpose and function of glial cells, the most abundant cell type in the brain. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Koob about why glia have been overlooked for centuries, and how new experiments with glial cells shed light on some of the most mysterious aspects of the mind....

Ever wondered why some people seem able to gobble down anything and still stay slim? New research shows that the answer may lie in serotonin, a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger produced by nerve cells. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, (U.C.S.F.) report in the journal Cell Metabolism that the nerve messenger, a known appetite suppressant, not only controls whether and how much you eat but, independent of that, also plays a role in what the body does with the calories once they’re consumed....