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Seismic equipment that was installed in Iraq to detect earthquakes has also recorded plenty of other big bangs — explosions from nearby mortars and car bombs. The individual “fingerprints” of these explosions could be used by experts to reconstruct these fast-paced incidents, and may even have real-time applications to help responders, according to a new study. In Baghdad throughout 2006, the sound of bombs was common. But on the night of Oct....

Is love in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps among humans it is, but not so in other mammals. In the case of some bats, love is detected by nose. In the bat family Emballonuridae at least one of its 51 species (and likely more) uses the sense of smell to find the mate with the greatest genetic diversity. The bat family, also called sac-winged bats, have bag-shaped glands in each wing that are open to the air....

Extreme Earth by Michael Martin Abrams, 2015 (($85)) Landscapes of undulating sand dunes and barren ice fields, and the diverse and hardy people who populate such harsh environments, fill this large-format book. Photographer Martin traveled to some of Earth’s most unforgiving terrains, making more than 40 trips between 2009 and 2015. He portrays here the vast beauty of four climate zones: the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the deserts of the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere....

By Mica Rosenberg NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. court ruling that dramatically ramped up BP Plc’s <BP.L> potential penalties for the 2010 Gulf oil spill could create new liability risks not just for deep water drillers but also for other industries like mining and nuclear power generation. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Thursday found that BP was guilty of “gross negligence” ahead of the rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico....

CHONGQING—Coal powers China. In addition to producing about 75 percent of its electricity, the dirty, black rock is burned everywhere from industrial boilers to home stoves. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging up the fossil fuel, shortages abound forcing curbs in electricity use, and the country’s transportation infrastructure creaks under the weight of distributing it across the country. But the Chinese reliance on coal is most visible in the air....

Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. the world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it, because prices are escalating. But another challenge looms. By 2050 the world’s population will increase by two billion or three billion, which will likely double the demand for food, according to several studies. Demand will also rise because many more people will have higher incomes, which means they will eat more, especially meat....

A scientist adds a few chemical compounds to a bubbling beaker and gives it a swirl. Subtle reactions occur, and, lo and behold, a new life-form assembles itself, ready to go forth and prosper. Such is the popular imagining of synthetic biology, or life created in the lab. But researchers in this field are not as interested in animating the inanimate. In fact, scientists remain far from understanding the basic processes that could allow inert, undirected compounds to assemble into living, self-replicating cells....

The human brain is not a chimp brain. Sure, somewhere between five million and eight million years ago, before the two species diverged, there was no difference. But at this point, despite our bodies weighing only 20 percent more than those of chimps, the human brain weighs 250 percent more and contains 50 percent more neurons. Eight million years notwithstanding, that would seem to be a sign of rapid change....

Researchers have been trying for years to develop flexible electronic displays, a breakthrough that would bring us tablet computers that fold and roll up and clothing with stretchable video screens embedded in the fabric. The biggest problem has always been finding a malleable, ultrathin base layer, or substrate, on which to build the display. Polymer LEDs (PLEDs)—a form of the organic light-emitting-diode displays now going into extravagantly expensive, vanishingly thin televisions—are mere microns thick and pliable....

Vett Lloyd saved the tick that latched onto her while she was gardening outside her home in New Brunswick, Canada in 2011. A biologist who specialized in cancer genetics, she plucked the blood-sucking creature from her skin and sent it to the local public health office to have it tested for the dangerous bacteria she knew it could carry. But officials told her not to worry, Lloyd said. Lyme disease was exceedingly rare in the forested maritime province northeast of Maine....

The superbug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) has provoked fear in doctors and patients alike because it is endowed with genetic characteristics that make it impervious to many antibiotics, and it can be deadly to boot. Less well known, however, is another class of bacteria that also resist antibiotics, but for reasons that have puzzled scientists. These bugs cause stubborn infections in ears and urinary tracts and post-surgical wounds, even though, from their genetic profiles, they should be perfectly good targets for antibiotics....

Maria Zambon was having déjà vu. Earlier this fall, she found out about a new coronavirus that had come seemingly from nowhere to kill a Saudi man in Jeddah in June and seriously sicken another. The survivor had been flown from Qatar to a London hospital. His lungs were overwhelmed with infection, his kidneys failing. Virologists at Erasmus Medical Center (EMC), in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were already working on an isolate from the Saudi man to decode the virus’s genetic sequence....

If a researcher at a major U.S. university wants to do a clinical study of a new vaccine, he or she first must obtain the approval of an institutional review board. More often than not, the panel comprises the researcher’s colleagues and peers who are either personally acquainted with the researcher or, at least, know of the researcher’s work as well as the recognition—and funding—that it could attract. In other words, the people in charge of green-lighting or nixing the study have a stake in the outcome....

Key concepts Astronomy The sun Light The seasons Earth’s orbit Introduction Have you ever lived somewhere where you get to experience the full glory of all four seasons? If so, you know well the full blossoms and dramatic skies of spring; the long, sun-drenched days of summer; the trees shaking in crimson and gold in fall; and the sparkling snows of winter. But do you know why we have these seasons over and over again in a cycle as predictable as sunrise and sunset?...

February 1963 Smug Prosperity “U.S. citizens—known for their material prosperity and a certain smug contentment in it—may be surprised to learn that samplings of public opinion in West Germany, Brazil and Cuba have shown that the peoples of these countries are even more buoyant about their recent progress and more hopeful of the future. Americans may be chastened as well to learn that these peoples also identify their personal wellbeing more closely with the fortunes of their countries....

Ernest Hartmann, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., explains. The questions, “Why do we dream?” or “What is the function of dreaming?” are easy to ask but very difficult to answer. The most honest answer is that we do not yet know the function or functions of dreaming. This ignorance should not be surprising because despite many theories we still do not fully understand the purpose of sleep, nor do we know the functions of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is when most dreaming occurs....

Daughters are useless and unworthy!” shouted an elderly woman in a village near Busan in South Korea in 1996. Other old women sitting with her, as we talked about families, nodded their agreement. Why, I asked? It was not because daughters were lazy, she said. “No, women did a lot of hard labor in the fields, and their marriage costs virtually nothing. People don’t want daughters, because they are not helpful to the family—they leave the family when they marry....

By Joseph J. Kolb ALBUQUERQUE N.M. (Reuters) - A wind-driven wildfire raged unchecked for a sixth day through parched pine woodlands and brush on a Navajo reservation in northwestern New Mexico on Wednesday, threatening dozens of homes after destroying about 11 dwellings, officials said. The Assayii Lake fire has charred more than 13,000 acres (5,261 hectares) since it erupted last Friday in the Chuska Mountains, about 6 miles (10 km) east of the Arizona border, and spread eastward toward the communities of Sheep Springs and Naschitti....

The nuclear warheads resting on ballistic missiles in silos, circling the globe in submarines or carried—sometimes mistakenly—by aircraft hail from an era when the U.S. targeted its largest foe, the U.S.S.R. and, more recently, Russia and China. But a document newly obtained by the Washington, D.C.–based Federation of American Scientists (FAS)—founded by the creators of the original nuclear bomb in 1945 and monitoring the weapons ever since—reveals that in recent years the U....

Having a word stuck on the tip of the tongue is enough to activate an unusual condition in which some people perceive words as having different tastes, according to a new study. When people with the inherited condition, called synesthesia, looked at pictures of objects that come up infrequently in conversation, they perceived a taste before they could think of the word. Some researchers believe synesthesia is an extreme version of what happens in everyone’s mind....