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Take one kilogram of polyisocyanide polymer. Sprinkle liberally across an Olympic swimming pool. Warm gently. Within minutes, your jelly is ready. Serves 25 million. Alan Rowan, a materials chemist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, is describing the properties of a remarkable polymer developed in his lab and unveiled today in Nature. He has not actually run the swimming-pool experiment, but he sounds as if he would love to give it a try....

With identity theft on the rise, there is more reason than ever to ensure the authenticity of important documents such as passports and birth certificates. Now physicists in England have discovered that many items, including paper documents, plastic cards and product packaging, have intrinsic patterns that can be used for identification purposes. And because the configurations are virtually impossible to modify in a controllable manner, they could form the basis of a new tool in the fight against fraud....

By Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - Search and recovery efforts for at least two dozen victims of Japan’s worst volcanic eruption in decades were called off on Tuesday due to worries about rising volcanic activity, including the chance of another steam explosion. Hundreds of military searchers had been preparing to enter Mount Ontake by foot and helicopter to resume recovery of at least 24 people caught in a deadly rain of ash and stone after the peak erupted without warning on Saturday when it was crowded with hikers, including children....

RESEARCH LEADER OF THE YEAR: 1. Woo Suk Hwang, Seoul National University BUSINESS LEADER OF THE YEAR: 2. Google, Inc. POLICY LEADER OF THE YEAR: 3. Fred Kavli, Kavli Foundation Other Research, Business and Policy Leaders Getting Serious about Flu 4. Robert G. Webster, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (policy) 5. Klaus Sthr, WHO (policy) 6. Robert B. Belshe, Saint Louis University, and Iomai Corporation (research) 7. NexBio, Inc. (business)...

A new study shows that molecules cooled to have near-negligible collisional motion can still react chemically with one another. At just a few hundred nanokelvins above absolute zero, the researchers could even change the speed of the chemical reaction by tweaking the molecules’ quantum states, paving the way for highly controlled chemistry using the tools of physics. (A nanokelvin is one billionth of a kelvin.) The study appears in the February 12 issue of Science, authored by scientists from two institutes affiliated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): JILA, run jointly by NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder; and the Joint Quantum Institute, a partnership between NIST and the University of Maryland, College Park....

Excerpt from The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think, by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Published by Dutton, a Member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. © 2013 Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. All Rights Reserved. Mystique is a dog who lives at Lola ya Bonobo, [the wildlife sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] where Vanessa and I study bonobos....

Sunburns readily advertise that we’ve had fun in the sun, and perhaps have been a bit careless, but what exactly goes on in our cells to produce the painful, red inflammation has not been clear. Now, researchers have discovered a molecular signal that triggers sunburns. When our skin cells are exposed to ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation , a specific form of RNA, called micro-RNA, is damaged, the study found. (RNA is similar in structure to DNA, which makes up our genes....

Name: Thomas Miller Title: Professor of entomology Location: University of California, Riverside Potato taste is a category of coffee taste, and the name is as close as professional coffee tasters can come to describing it. The term winds up categorizing that batch of coffee as undesirable. Rwanda started having problems with potato taste about four years ago, after they started concentrating on specialty coffee. The difference between specialty coffee and regular coffee is like night and day....

Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a person with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them....

Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust. Splat! Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of such a possible course for human civilization in the 21st century....

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Nine countries in the Black Sea region and southeast Europe agreed on Thursday to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in large power plants and oil refineries by 2027 as part of plans to forge closer ties with the European Union.Aging coal-fired plants dominate power generating capacities in Albania, Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldavia, Serbia and Ukraine which are all striving to intensify energy market cooperation with the EU....

The genes that direct all life on earth employ just four base units: A is for adenine, which bonds with thymine (T). G is for guanine, which bonds with cytosine (C). Combinations of A, T, G and C appear in each and every living thing—and now scientists have added two new letters to the alphabet. These unnatural base pairs are a first for the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. In 2008 a team of chemical biologists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif....

By Ian Simpson (Reuters) - A North Carolina judge ruled on Thursday that Duke Energy Corp must immediately stop the sources of groundwater pollution at its 14 coal-fired power plants in the state. The issue of pollution from coal ash gained momentum in North Carolina last month, when a spill from a retired Duke power plant dumped at least 30,000 tons of ash in the Dan River. In the ruling, Wake County Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway reversed a decision by the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission....

SKIN COLOR AND WEALTH REMAIN PERVASIVE FAULT LINES IN U.S. society, as best proved by the persistence of economically and racially segregated communities. People living in these places face excessive stressors, including poverty, substandard housing, malnutrition and lack of health care. Environmental burdens—notably pollution from power plants, freeway corridors and chemical manufacturing plants—are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods. Each of these inequalities is bad enough on its own. Yet the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine describes this combined exposure as “double jeopardy,” because social stressors can impair an individual’s ability to fend off illnesses that pollution creates or aggravates....

The Obama administration announced new rules on Thursday aimed at cutting methane emissions from new oil and gas wells and fracking operations. The rules also will require energy companies to provide pollution information to the Environmental Protection Agency so it can regulate methane emissions from existing oil and gas wells. Methane warms the climate 86 times as much as carbon dioxide over a period of 20 years before breaking down in the atmosphere....

From chihuahuas to great Danes, dogs differ more in size than any other mammal species on the planet. A mutation behind such variation has been traced to an unexpected source: ancient wolves. The mutation lies near a gene called IGF1, which researchers flagged 15 years ago as having a major role in the size variation of domestic dogs. It was the first of around two dozen such genes identified. But efforts to pinpoint the gene variant responsible had come up empty....

By Joseph MiltonGenetically modified (GM) crops can save farmers using conventional seeds even more money than those using the transgenic varieties, according to an analysis published in Science this week. And ensuring that some fields are kept free of the GM crops seems to be key to the overall success of the transgenic variety.Researchers, led by entomologist William Hutchison of the University of Minnesota in St Paul, assessed the effects of planting maize (corn) genetically modified to produce Bttoxin, which kills the European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis)....

August 1967 Efficient Agriculture “The fact that the production of food and fiber engages only 5 percent of the U.S. labor force is primarily due to the mechanization of farming. Other technological developments—chemical fertilizers, pesticides, plant breeding and so on—make essential contributions, but mechanization is still the outstanding factor. The picking and winnowing of a crop usually accounts for at least half of the total cost of production. It is also by far the most difficult part of the agricultural process to mechanize....

When our ancient ancestors migrated out of Africa and throughout the rest of the world, telltale variations in the DNA of the people who settled along the way marked their passage. Today anthropologists and molecular biologists of the Genographic Project, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others, seek to reconstruct the forgotten migration routes by looking for those genetic “footprints,” as senior writer Gary Stix relates in his article “The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents"....

From lobotomy to antidepressants to scream therapy, the methods used to treat mental disorders have changed dramatically in the past century. Drug fads, commercialization and many other influences have shaped the way we diagnose and remedy mental illness. These recent releases illuminate the past to better inform our understanding of mental health today. In the early 1950s the pharmaceutical industry questioned whether there would be a market for antianxiety drugs, Andrea Tone explains in The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers....