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If Hollywood makes a movie about the worst financial crisis since the Great De­­pres­­sion, a basement room in a government building in Washington will serve as the setting for a key scene. There investment bankers from the largest institutions pleaded successfully with Securities and Ex­­change Commission (SEC) officials during a short meeting in 2004 to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves needed for a rainy day. This decision, a real event described in the New York Times, freed billions to invest in complex mortgage-backed securities and derivatives that helped to bring about the financial meltdown in September....

Note this is an updated version of an essay published in May, 2020, under the headline “One Key Factor in Whether COVID-19 Will Wane This Summer” The first reference to the seasonality of infectious respiratory disease was recorded around 400 B.C., when the renowned ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote the earliest account of a winter epidemic of such an illness. Ever since, we have pondered the impact of seasonal change on respiratory disease prevalence....

Key concepts Physics Heat Temperature Thermal insulator Introduction Have you ever thought about surprising your classmates with ice cream—but wondered how to get it to school before it melted? An insulated bag or a cooler filled with ice might keep your treat cool just long enough. Using the same principles, it is even possible to bake ice cream in a hot oven and have it come out still frozen! This activity will show you how....

Mice may stare out at chances they dare not take, as the poet Ted Hughes observed—but rats are another matter entirely. When caught in a cat’s gaze, a rat might stare brazenly back. It may scurry around, apparently untroubled that a hungry predator is looking right at it. This happened often when cats moved into a rat-infested recycling facility in Brooklyn, in the middle of Fordham University ecologist Michael Parsons’ experiment (for a study completely unrelated to cats)....

Fifty years ago, scientists uncovered a microbe capable of withstanding radiation in canned meat that had been bombarded with gamma rays. Named Deinococcus radiodurans–or “strange berry that withstands radiation” [pictured at right]–the microorganism can survive doses of radiation up to 500 times that which would kill a human. These doses shatter D. radiodurans’s DNA–just as they would in a human–but the microbe can repair its broken DNA and spring back to life within hours, depending on the dose....

By Julie Steenhuysen The largest analysis yet has found Ebola virus particles present in semen as long as 565 days after recovery from an infection, highlighting the potential role of sex in sparking another outbreak, researchers reported on Tuesday. The study, published in the Lancet Global Affairs, involved 429 men seen between July 2015 and May 2016 who were part of the Liberian government’s Men’s Health Screening Program (MHSP), the first national semen testing program for Ebola virus....

NORDHEIM, Texas – School Superintendent Kevin Wilson tugged at his oversized belt buckle and gestured toward a field less than a mile from Nordheim School, where 180 children attend kindergarten through 12th grade. A commercial waste facility that will receive millions of barrels of toxic sludge from oil and gas production for disposal in enormous open-air pits is taking shape there, and Wilson worries that the ever-present Texas wind will carry traces of dangerous chemicals, including benzene, to the school....

Adapted from The Game Theorists’s Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know—Your Kids, by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Commonwealth Publishing (Taiwan) and Grand China Publishing House (China). Copyright © 2016 by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman. Sibling rivalry? We talk about it all the time, but what we’re really concerned with is the incessant squabbling that can turn a happy home into what feels like a battleground....

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A helicopter from a Chinese icebreaker is set to lift passengers from a Russian ship stranded in Antarctic since Christmas Eve, putting an end to a nine-day international rescue cooperation.The helicopter on the Snow Dragon has been waiting on standby for better weather conditions to start the rescue operation. The Chinese ship got within sight of the Akademik Shokalskiy on Saturday, but turned back after failing to break the ice, which was more than 3 meters (10 feet) deep in places....

By Venus Wu HONG KONG, July 12 (Reuters) - The oldest giant panda living in captivity is set to challenge the world record for the animals’ longevity, with her age said to put her on par with a human centenarian. Hong Kong’s giant panda Jia Jia, whose name means “good”, will turn 37 this summer at theme park Ocean Park, matching the Guinness World Records title for the oldest panda survivor in captivity - Du Du, who died in 1999, aged 37....

Researchers have discovered an array of fossilized footprints in an ancient sand dune in Gibraltar, the small British territory on the southwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. One of the prints, they suggest, may have been made by a Neandertal. If they are right, the find is highly significant: Only one other Neandertal track site is known, a set of 62,000-year-old footprints from Romania. And the Gibraltar print is reportedly much younger, in which case it could have been made by one of the last Neandertals ever to walk the Earth....

By now I have reached an age at which my birthdays can be thought of as a countdown to the inescapable end. We live our life without knowing when that end will come. But acknowledging its inevitability encourages us to build monuments of our accomplishments that will outlast us. Of course, our DNA can give us that sort of longevity through our children. But we often wish to add meaning to the world we leave behind that goes beyond our genetic code....

Eating with Tension The long, thin beaks of shorebirds called phalaropes are no good at sucking up water and any tasty crustaceans within. Instead they rely on the attractive force of liquid known as surface tension to ferry prey upward. The birds first swim in small, fast circles on the surface of the water, creating a vortex that pulls creatures up within their reach. They next peck at the water and then rapidly open and close their beaks....

Flashback: A middle-aged man enters a comfortably furnished room, sits on a couch and receives a pill. After swallowing the drug, his medical monitors place a mask over his eyes and headphones over his ears and encourage him to lie back. Soothing classical music plays, and during the next eight hours the self-identified religious man embarks on an inward journey occasioned by the drug: psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms....

The near-complete fossil of a tiny creature unearthed in China in 2002 has bolstered the idea that the anthropoid group of primates — whose modern-day members include monkeys, apes and humans — had appeared by at least 55 million years ago. The fossil primate does not belong to that lineage, however: it is thought to be the earliest-discovered ancestor of small tree-dwelling primates called tarsiers, showing that even at this early time, the tarsier and anthropoid groups had split apart....

[This is Part 2 of an In-Depth Report on The Future of Nuclear Power.] Brown’s Ferry is the name of an unprepossessing boat crossing on the Tennessee River in Alabama. It is also the birthplace of a revival for nuclear power in the U.S. In May 2007 the one gigawatt-electric nuclear reactor known prosaically as Unit 1 restarted boiling water—after a 22-year shutdown and a refurbishment that cost $1.8 billion. Brown’s Ferry is just the first....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – A bat that uses blood flow to reshape its tongue while feeding could help inspire the development of shape-shifting medical instruments, according to a new study. Scientists have known for a long time that the tongue of the nectar-feeding bat Glossophaga soricina was covered with tiny hairs, but these structures were considered to be passive and unable to move on their own, like the strings of a floor mop....

Understanding the future of our planet’s climate is vital but it is easier said than done. To predict such complexity requires cutting-edge models and, according to University of Oxford physicist Tim Palmer, an understanding of chaos theory and supercomputing. Palmer will present a public lecture tonight at 7 P.M. Eastern time that will be broadcast live on this Web page, detailing the difficulties of predicting climate change and the need to embrace a degree of inexactness in modeling it....

By Joseph MiltonWe all struggle to communicate after a sleepless night, let alone pull off our best dance moves, and it seems that honeybees are no different.Sleep-deprived bees are less proficient than their well-rested hive mates at indicating the location of a food source to other members of the colony by waggle dancing – the figure-of-eight dance used to communicate the quality and location of nectar supplies to the hive – according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1....

Europe’s troubled Human Brain Project (HBP) has secured guarantees of European Commission financing until at least 2019—but some scientists are still not sure that they want to take part in the mega-project, which has been fraught with controversy since its launch two years ago. On October 30, the commission signed an agreement formally committing to fund the HBP past April 2016, when its preliminary 30-month ‘ramp-up’ phase ends. The deal also starts a process to change the project’s legal status so as to spread responsibility across many participating institutions....