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(Reuters) - The U.S. government proposed protecting old-growth forests in Idaho and Washington state on Tuesday to save the nation’s dwindling population of mountain caribou, popularly known as wild reindeer. Under the plan, roughly 375,000 acres of mostly U.S. Forest Service land in the Selkirk Mountains in northern Idaho and northeastern Washington would be designated as critical habitat for the reclusive caribou. The estimated 46 mountain caribou in the Selkirks, which bridge the border between the United States and Canada, are all that remain in the country, said Susan Burch, branch chief in Idaho for the U....

By Meredith WadmanA presidential commission has released a report that recommends White-House level oversight of U.S. research in synthetic biology-but it stops short of calling for new laws or changes to existing regulations that govern the nascent field, whether in university labs or do-it-yourselfers’ garages.It also claims to navigate a middle road between unbridled experimentation and a regulatory straightjacket that could stifle the most promising applications of synthetic biology, from malaria medicine to biofuels....

Often spinal cord injuries result in the severing of the long nerve fibers connecting the brain to the spinal cord, disrupting one’s ability to walk, among other things. But even with the primary top-to-bottom signal highway rendered out of order, the nervous system can, over time, reroute itself, finding neural detours and side streets that restore movement, according to a new study out of the University of California, Los Angeles (U....

A few weeks ago seismologist Tom Heaton was on the phone with a reporter extolling the virtues of a new earthquake early warning system he helped invent. Suddenly, an alert flashed across the computer screen in his Los Angeles–area office. “Oh, it just popped up! There was an earthquake in San Francisco and the waves will get to me in about two and a half minutes,” Heaton said with a glance....

The world’s first malaria vaccine is promising but should be used on a pilot basis before any wide-scale use, given its limited efficacy, World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Friday. The decision is likely to delay a possible broad roll-out of the shot for between three and five years. GlaxoSmithKline’s Mosquirix could, in theory, help stop millions of cases of malaria in young children in Africa at risk of the deadly mosquito-borne disease....

In the classic Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” the famed detective solves a murder mystery by noticing something that does not happen: a watchdog’s failure to bark in the middle of the night. Astronomers are now using a similar inference to solve the cosmic mystery of a black hole’s birth—looking for stars that fail to explode. Stars many times more massive than our sun often end their lives with a super-nova, a cataclysmic explosion caused by the collapse of the star’s heavy core....

The Aztecs had more numbers than we do, or at least symbols denoting numerical concepts. When it came to measuring land—critical for levying the proper tax or tribute—these medieval Mesoamericans used arrows, hearts, hands and other units representing fractions, according to a new study in Science. To figure this out, mathematician Maria del Carmen Jorge y Jorge of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (U.N.A.M) channeled the mind of an Aztec land surveyor....

How a baby is born has a profound impact on their microbiome — the community of microbes that colonize the body. That’s the finding of the largest ever study of the newborn microbiome, which offers the strongest evidence yet that children born through the vaginal canal carry different microbes than those delivered by caesarean section. Newborns delivered by c-section, the study found, tend to lack strains of gut bacteria found in healthy children and adults....

Deep in the subtropical Pacific, one of the world’s longest-lived animals has been documenting the ocean’s history. Called the Hawaiian gold coral, the organism lives in treelike colonies about 1,300 feet below the ocean’s surface. Scientists have dated pieces of its skeleton going as far back as 3,000 years. Now, those pieces, collected in a series of deep-sea dives, are being used by scientists to prove that changes in ocean chemistry are linked with changes in the climate....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineProcedures that involve human embryonic stem cells cannot be patented, the European Court of Justice declared today.Oliver Brüstle, director of the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology at the University of Bonn, Germany, who had a patent on a method for generating neurons from human embryonic stem cells rejected by the court, called the ruling “the worst possible outcome”, and “a disaster for Europe”.He and other scientists worry that the ruling will cause European companies and scientists to miss out on commercial applications for embryonic-stem-cell research....

Interplanetary sleuthing by a tag team of spacecraft has revealed a new link between the glowing ultraviolet auroras at Saturn’s poles and the planet’s mysterious radio emissions. As the Saturn kilometric radiation (so known because the radio emissions’ wavelengths are measured in kilometers), or SKR, emanates from the gas-giant planet, its intensity oscillates every 10.5 hours or so, nearly in concert with the planet’s rotation. In fact, the length of the radio cycle was once taken to represent the rotational period of the planet....

Yesterday’s landmark climate report offered a clearer picture of what’s already happened, where we’re headed and how the impacts of global warming will vary by region. It’s the first time the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included specific regional information and a digital atlas that allows users to drill down into more local data. “Climate change is already affecting every region of our planet, and every fraction of additional warming will increasingly affect every region in multiple ways,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a co-chair of Working Group I, which produced the report....

By Arron Frood of Nature magazineHas a cheap and effective treatment for chronic pain been lying under clinicians’ noses for decades? Researchers have found that a very high dose of an opiate drug that uses the same painkilling pathways as morphine can reset the nerve signals associated with continuous pain–at least in rats.If confirmed in humans, the procedure could reduce or eliminate the months or years that millions of patients spend on pain-managing prescription drugs....

As higher levels of carbon dioxide permeate the Earth’s atmosphere, scientists have long counted on forests – which, as individual trees, grow larger in carbon-rich environments – to soak up some of the excess. But after nearly a decade and a half of observing forest ecosystems in controlled settings, scientists now see evidence that elevating carbon levels may cause forests to release as much extra carbon as they absorb. That’s because trees, as they grow larger, need to absorb higher doses of nitrogen and other minerals, as well as the extra carbon dioxide....

Social-networking sites are a way to find out about people you’re curious about but have never met—say, a prospective employee you’re deciding whether to hire. But when you scan someone’s profile, you probably expect a little fudging: an overly flattering photograph, a generously phrased blurb in the “about me” section. A study in the March issue of Psychological Science, however, suggests that Facebook users do not skew their profiles to reflect idealistic visions of themselves....

By Elizabeth DiltsNEW YORK (Reuters) - Ice storms, heavy snowfall, possible tornadoes and the threat of flash floods are expected to create travel nightmares this weekend in many parts of the United States, causing flight delays and unsafe road conditions for some of the millions of people traveling ahead of Christmas.The National Weather Service on Saturday issued tornado watches for Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, and warned of ice and sleet in upstate New York as well as snowfall for areas from Kansas to the Milwaukee region in southeast Wisconsin....

If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable. Still, clear exceptions challenge that general rule. For decades chess has held the exalted position of the Drosophila of cognitive science—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us....

Intense pulses of light may be just the thing for stripping toxic lead-based paint from homes and buildings. Researchers at a small Massachusetts company report they can vaporize lead paint off of surfaces using a lamp that emits short but powerful bursts of light. “We’re trying to get away from the mess and toxicity of a chemical stripper and not create all the dust of a mechanical method,” says Michael Grapperhaus, senior scientist at Phoenix Science and Technology in Chelmsford, Mass....

Sixteen areas, including Los Angeles, Tampa and Cleveland, have unhealthful amounts of lead in the air that violate national standards, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday. Declared “nonattainment areas,” those regions, located in 11 states, must require smelters and other industries to reduce the amount of lead they emit into the air. Under federal law, those areas have five years, until the end of 2015, to meet a new federal health standard....

When research chemist Jeannette García found a candy-size lump of white material in a flask she had recently used, she had no idea what she had created. The material stuck firmly to the glass, so she used a hammer to break it free. But when she turned the hammer on the material itself, it refused to crack. “When I realized just how high its strength was, I knew I needed to figure out what I’d made,” García says....