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Named for a Dutch physicist, the Casimir effect governs interactions of matter with the energy that is present in a vacuum. Success in harnessing this force could someday help researchers develop low-friction ballistics and even levitating objects that defy gravity. For now, the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a two-year, $10-million project encouraging scientists to work on ways to manipulate this quirk of quantum electrodynamics....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineWhen it comes to doing science on the International Space Station (ISS), the laws of gravity have been flipped: what goes up mostly stays up. A case in point are two freezers packed with more than 2,000 Arabidopsis seedlings awaiting return to Earth, where they can be analyzed for changes in gene expression.The samples cannot fly home aboard the unmanned European, Japanese and Russian cargo capsules that regularly deliver equipment and experiments to the station, because these capsules burn up on re-entry....

The Milky Way Galaxy, to take a census view, is a populous place with a very low birthrate—it is home to hundreds of billions of stars, but only a handful of new ones appear each year. Neighboring galaxies show similar traits; accordingly, they must have once formed stars at a much more rapid clip. Across the universe, astronomers can see galaxies earlier in cosmic history, and unsurprisingly the birthrate then was much higher....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. Tuesday evening’s deadly derailment that sent an Amtrak Northeast Regional train careening off its tracks has many people asking how such a tragedy could happen. Investigators on the case have not announced an official cause just yet, but it seems that speed played a major factor: the train was, apparently, traveling down the track at 106 mph, more than 50 mph over the posted speed limit on the bend where the train derailed, according to National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt....

Dear EarthTalk: Our community is talking of culling local deer herd numbers. Frankly, I think it’s the people who are overpopulated, crowding out every last inch of habitat. What happens when we finally do develop everything? Pow! There goes the last doe?—Anne Williamson, State College, Pa. It’s hard to believe that deer, those innocuous enough vegetarian browsers that occasionally tromp through our backyards, are considered the scourge of many a suburban neighborhood across the continent....

Miami vibrates with color and bright nightlife. And below the surrounding coastal waterline, coral reefs play out their own neon dramas that rival those of the city. Making these similarities obvious to the public is the aim of the art duo called Coral Morphologic. Musician J. D. McKay and marine biologist Colin Foord collaborate and use footage of coral from Florida and around the world in video, multimedia and art installations....

Brain cancer is terrifying. It attacks an organ we see as the core of our personality, our mind, our very humanity. And because the disease grows inside the brain, it is notoriously difficult to treat. The organ has evolved many defenses to keep foreign substances out as a method of self-protection, but those substances include many anticancer drugs. Using knives or radiation on this citadel of consciousness carries tremendous risks. For these reasons, the five-year relative survival rate for people aged 55 to 64 who get glioblastoma, the most common type of primary brain tumor, is a grim 5 percent....

Mountains are fountains. Humid air crashes into upthrusted rock and releases its water in the form of rain, snow or ice. But the tiny particles created when fuel is burned—aerosols—can interfere with this process by providing even more impurities in the air on which water can condense. The many more resulting smaller droplets collide less often, thus forming fewer raindrops and, ultimately, less rainfall. Or so the theory goes. And now, records stretching back 50 years for a mountaintop in China strongly support this idea....

The experimental setup is simple: a six-foot-wide, 60-foot-long corridor with a straight black line running along the floor. A blindfolded subject attempts to walk the line, and a researcher records any wobbles to the right or left. Christine Mohr, now a lecturer in experimental psychology and neuropsychology at the University of Bristol in England, designed the study for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich. Before the study participants walked the line, Mohr asked them about parapsychology–specifically, their belief in so-called psi phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis (using mental imagery to move objects)....

Human breast milk contains valuable antibacterial enzymes that milk from dairy animals did not–until now. Researchers report that transgenic goats can successfully produce milk containing the enzyme Lysozyme, and that this milk exhibits an antibacterial effect when fed to young goats and pigs. The researchers hope that in the future, enhanced nonhuman milk will give an immune boost to children in the developing world where diarrhea takes more than two million lives each year....

The report, released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), highlights just how costly extreme weather could be as well as how important disaster reporting is. It focuses on six types of hazards: floods, droughts, extreme temperatures, storms, wildfires, and landslides from 1971-2010. It’s easy to look at the graphics in the report and see trends in the number of reported disasters and their cost. Each has risen notably since the 1970s....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. I recently saw Eileen, a 45-year-old female accountant, in my office who reported an aggravating “eye twitching.” Now this is a common, yet potentially annoying, medical problem. It may not be debilitating, but it’s sometimes enough to distract you from your tasks and drive you bonkers. Eileen tells me that she’s had intermittent and multiple bouts of seemingly non-stop eye twitching in her eyelid almost daily for one month, with each episode a few minutes long....

The Vatican released a striking bioethics document today that condemns not only embryonic stem cell research, human-animal hybrids, and human cloning, but also the commonplace practice of in vitro fertilization that many couples depend on to have children. The document, titled “The Dignity of the Person,” was released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is charged under Pope Benedict XVI to develop moral instructions for handling bioethical issues of the day....

Giant spiral galaxies such as Andromeda and the Milky Way outshine and outweigh most of their galactic peers. They grew so large both by swallowing lesser galaxies and by grabbing gas from the space around them. New observations of exotic “tadpole” galaxies are shedding light on how the Milky Way assembled its most luminous component: the starry disk that is home to the sun and Earth. First spotted in the 1990s, tadpole galaxies sport bright heads, which spawn brilliant new stars, and long, faint tails....

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it is also in the eye of a honeybee, the eggs of a lobster and the surface of petrified wood—as is evident from a selection of images entered in the 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. In its fifth year, the competition honors superior images of living organisms or their components attained with the help of light microscopy. The judges chose 10 winners and awarded honorable mention to many others, evaluating entries based on the scientific value of the images, aesthetics and the difficulty of capturing the information displayed....

As the pandemic entered its third year, the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and the Baylor College of Medicine gifted the world the first COVID vaccine designed specifically for global health. This patent-free vaccine, called CORBEVAX, is a milestone for global health equity. Based on an older and more widely used technology than the now well-known COVID mRNA vaccines, it could help end vaccine hesitancy in some parts of the world....

Primates of the World Jean-Jacques Petter François Desbordes Translated by Robert Martin Princeton University Press, 2013 ($29.95) Woolly monkeys, rotund yet agile primates of South America, look plump because of their thick fur, which is the densest possessed by any primate. Muriqui spider monkeys are also known as hippie monkeys for their tendency to hug one another in times of stress. In infancy, bearded saki monkeys use their prehensile tails as a “fifth hand” but lose that grasping ability as they mature....

HAMBURG, Germany – Twenty-five years after Gerhard Knies conceived of powering Europe with the Sahara Desert’s sun, the North Africa Solar project has grown into something considerably more than a mere mirage, but it’s still less than a reality. Part of the plan is to erect a network of solar plants that generate electricity by concentrating the heat from sunlight to make electricity, generating 100 gigawatts or the equivalent of 100 large nuclear power plants....

The world is no better prepared for the next global health emergency than it was when the current Ebola epidemic began nearly two years ago, an expert panel warns. The problems that led to the deaths of more than 11,000 people in history’s worst Ebola outbreak have not been solved, a group of 20 physicians, global health experts, lawyers and development and humanitarian experts convened by Harvard University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) warn in a paper published on November 22 by The Lancet....

By Fredrik Dahl VIENNA (Reuters) - Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster is unlikely to lead to a large number of people developing cancer like after Chernobyl in 1986, even though the most exposed children may face an increased risk, U.N. scientists said on Wednesday. In a major study, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) said it did not expect “significant changes” in future cancer rates that could be attributed to radiation exposure from the reactor meltdowns....