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Modern lifestyles may not need to curb their appetites for smaller, faster smartphones and tablets when the digital age finally runs up against the physical limits of silicon-based computer chips. New research by Stanford University engineers might have just crowned a silicon successor by showing how to build a computer out of carbon nanotubes. The 178-transistor computer only operates on one bit of information and a single instruction, which may seem unimpressive compared with modern computers that are based on 32-bit or 64-bit processors relying on millions to billions of transistors....

China has launched Tiangong 2, its second orbiting space lab—marking another stepping stone towards the country’s goal of building a space station by the early 2020s. The module, which launched aboard a Long March rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert at 22:04 local time on 15 September, will initially fly uncrewed in low-Earth orbit, but a planned second launch will carry two astronauts to it in November....

DAKAR (Reuters) - China plans to send about 1,000 medical workers and experts to West Africa to help in the fight against the Ebola outbreak, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday. China, Africa’s biggest trade partner, has come under criticism for not doing enough in the fight against the worst outbreak of Ebola on record. Countries such as Cuba, the U.S. and European nations have sent hundreds of personnel....

If you ever get the impression that your dog can “tell” whether you look content or annoyed, you may be onto something. Dogs may indeed be able to discriminate between happy and angry human faces, according to a new study. Researchers trained a group of 11 dogs to distinguish between images of the same person making either a happy or an angry face. During the training stage, each dog was shown only the upper half or the lower half of the person’s face....

Ebola knows no borders—and frontline aid teams (and even one of their pets) remain in the direct line of contagion. This reality has become increasingly evident in recent days after one case of Ebola developed in Texas, triggering a massive U.S. public health response, and yesterday a nurse’s assistant in Spain was confirmed as the first person in the current outbreak to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa. In Sierra Leone, meanwhile, a European staffer of one aid organization was reported yesterday as having contracted the disease....

So far, dark matter has evaded scientists’ best attempts to find it. Astronomers know the invisible stuff dominates our universe and tugs gravitationally on regular matter, but they do not know what it is made of. Since 2009, however, suspicious gamma-ray light radiating from the Milky Way’s core—where dark matter is thought to be especially dense—has intrigued researchers. Some wonder if the rays might have been emitted in explosions caused by colliding particles of dark matter....

At the University of Zurich, Rolf Kümmerli investigates new drugs to stop deadly infections. He spends his days in a laboratory stocked with petri dishes and flasks of bacteria—exactly the place where you would expect him to do that sort of work. But Kümmerli took an odd path to get to that lab. As a graduate student, he spent years hiking through the Swiss Alps to study the social life of ants....

Gerrymandering is clawing across courtrooms and headlines nationwide. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard cases on the constitutionality of voting districts that allegedly entrenched a strong advantage for Republicans in Wisconsin and Democrats in Maryland but dodged direct rulings in both. Another partisan gerrymandering case from North Carolina is winding its way up with a boost from an emphatic lower court opinion in August. But so far it has been impossible to satisfy the justices with a legal framework for partisan gerrymandering....

Humans have not set foot on the moon since December 14, 1972, when astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission departed the lunar surface to return home. Thankfully, Cernan and Schmitt, a trained geologist, collected 110 kilograms of lunar material—the largest-ever haul of moon rocks and soil—before heading for Earth. That material is still yielding new insights into the moon’s history, as evidenced by a paper in the July 2 issue of Science claiming the first solid evidence for graphite, the form of carbon commonly used as pencil lead, in a lunar sample....

It was April 14, 1912. Charles Joughin had finally fallen asleep after a hard day’s work in the ship’s kitchens. Suddenly, he was woken by a tremendous jolt. He felt the vessel shudder violently beneath him. Then, after a momentary pause, it continued moving forward. Assuming that the danger had passed, Joughin tried to return to sleep. But at about 11:35 pm, just a few minutes after the jolt, he was summoned to the bridge....

It’s not very appetizing to think of food as a cocktail of hormones, but it may help explain how diet affects health. “It’s really clear,” says Donald Jump, a biochemist at Oregon State University, “that food is just a pile of biochemicals.” The biochemicals in a cookie or a piece of broccoli can elicit reactions from human cells that are similar to that of hormones, write Randy J. Seeley and Karen K....

By Richard Monastersky “This earthquake is a lesson in humility,” says Emile Okal, a geophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies great earthquakes and tsunamis. Few experts had thought that the seismic zone near Sendai, Japan, was capable of producing earthquakes anywhere near as powerful as the magnitude-9.0 shock on 11 March, the largest on record in Japan. Okal and his colleagues want to understand why the event was so much stronger than many people expected – and what it means for seismic risks in Japan and elsewhere around the globe....

Forget cow tipping—next time you want to mess with a bovine friend, try waving a magnet in its face. Researchers have found that when grazing or resting, cattle and deer tend to point their bodies toward Earth’s magnetic poles, which suggests they are able to sense magnetic fields in the same way as many smaller animals. German and Czech researchers used Google Earth satellite images to look at 8,510 domestic cattle in 308 pastures located randomly across six continents....

A 38-year-old man who had been barely conscious for six years can now speak to his family, eat on his own, brush his own hair and teeth and even recite part of the Pledge of Allegiance. Last year, six years after suffering brain damage in an assault, the man began showing dramatic improvement during deep-brain stimulation, a breakthrough therapy that involves sending electrical pulses to a specific brain region. The new treatment was first administered in 2005, researchers report this week’s issue of Nature....

The global warming hiatus—a decade-plus slowdown in warming—could be chalked up to some buoys, a few extra years of data and a couple buckets of seawater. That’s the finding of a new study published on Thursday in Science, which uses updated information about how temperature is recorded, particularly at sea, to take a second look at the global average temperature. The findings show a slight but notable increase in that average temperature, putting a dent in the idea that global warming has slowed over the past 15 years, a trend highlighted in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report....

“City of God” director Fernando Meirelles, one of the creative directors of the opening ceremony, said he wanted to make the rainforest a focus of the ceremonies. He has advocated for forest policies before and is directing a TV series on climate change for the BBC. “The world is threatened because of global warming. We are calling for action,” he said before the ceremony. As the 11,000 competitors from the world’s nations entered Maracanã Stadium on Friday in downtown Rio, they each planted a seedling in silver towers representing urban claustrophobia....

Fortunes can be made or lost on the stock exchange, a fact well illustrated recently by the dot-com bubble burst. Even in less volatile times, traders spend their days making careful decisions about what to sell and when. But new research indicates that the behavior of the stock market can be forecasted remarkably well by taking rational thought out of the equation. J. Doyne Farmer of the Sante Fe Institute and his colleagues designed a computer model in which traders placed orders to buy and sell at random....

When the robotic Papa Mau completed its 16,668-kilometer scientific expedition across the Pacific Ocean last month, the surfboard-sized submarine did more than set a new world record for the longest distance traveled by an autonomous vehicle. The wave-powered sub reached Australia’s Hervey Bay with a load of data that will keep marine biologists, oceanographers and other scientists busy for quite some time, including observations of rogue waves that satellites failed to detect during the Papa Mau’s year-long voyage....

Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth by Jim Rendon Touchstone, 2015 ($26) “God let me live for a purpose.” So I was informed, emphatically, by a fireball of a woman named Dr. Ruth Westheimer the first time I met her—all 4′7″ of her. The renowned sex therapist, author and media personality lost most of her family in the Holocaust, and she has been driven ever since to make her positive mark on the world....

Scientists have long been studying the process of how mammalian stem cells differentiate to form specific types of brain cells. Researchers are now reporting another small step toward understanding what conditions are necessary for spinal motor neurons to form: they have coaxed human embryonic stem cells to differentiate into one critical component of the nervous system. Su-Chun Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues exposed human embryonic stem cells to a variety of growth factors and hormones in sequence in order to encourage them to change into motor neurons....