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(Adds details about decision) By Colleen Jenkins March 5 (Reuters) - Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will eliminate its elephant acts - long an integral part of the spectacle billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth” - by 2018 amid criticism by animal welfare activists, the circus’ parent company said on Thursday. Feld Entertainment said the 13 Asian elephants used in its traveling shows will live at the company’s 200-acre (81- hectare) Center for Elephant Conservation in central Florida after they are retired over the next three years....

This year has been one of incredible loss. We are approaching 200,000 deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. and nearly a million around the globe. And on the streets, the killings of Black, Indigenous, Latinx individuals and other people of color—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks and many others at the hands of those sworn to protect us continues a long history of loss because of racism....

So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to “imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists…. Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms....

Breaking more than seven months of calm, western Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula once again burst into volcanic flames this past summer. After a swarm of earthquakes in late July and early August rocked the area, lava burst forth from the Fagradalsfjall volcano into the Meradalir valleys—close to the barely cooled lava from the same volcano’s 2021 eruption—treating tourists and researchers to the vibrant red-orange glow of fresh molten rock just 20 miles from the capital city of Reykjavk....

Smog caused by ground-level ozone isn’t just an outdoor air problem. A new study shows that when the irritant’s level rises outside, the number of people inside suffering from so-called “sick building syndrome” also increases. (Ozone, an air-polluting oxygen molecule (O3), forms when sunlight strikes motor vehicle tailpipe emissions.) “We found that outdoor air pollution, ozone, is associated with symptoms of lower-respiratory and upper-respiratory stress that occur in buildings to workers,” says environmental health scientist Michael Apte of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who analyzed U....

String Theory A candidate unified theory of all physical forces and particles. Inflation A period of accelerated cosmic expansion early in the history of the universe. Observable Universe The sum of all we can see. Also called “our universe.” Other Universe An unobserved region of spacetime, perhaps having distinct properties and laws of physics. calabi-yau Six-dimensional shape of hidden dimensions. Brane Short for “membrane.” It can be a two-dimensional sheet (like an ordinary membrane) or a lower- or higher-dimensional variant....

Any kid who ever clutched the wheel of a parked car and vocalized engine noises such as “vroom, vroom, bbbbbbb, nehnehnehnehneh, vroooom” has thought about this basic physics question: If I went fast enough, could I drive along the racetrack’s wall without falling? In the spring of 1978 I actually went to the Indianapolis 500. And my biggest question was whether I could negotiate the incredibly slippery bathroom floors without falling....

Dry dust baked in this summer’s heat wave might be driving up valley fever cases across the southwestern United States. California and Arizona have reported increases in this fungal infection this year, part of a rising tide spanning the past decade. “Recent increases in rates have been reported,” said Matt Conens at the California Department of Public Health in an email. “The reasons are unclear but may include changes in reporting, cyclical changes and increased migration into endemic areas....

A mysterious, centuries-long cool spell, dubbed the Little Ice Age, appears to have been caused by a series of volcanic eruptions and sustained by sea ice, a new study indicates. The research, which looked at chemical clues preserved in Arctic vegetation as well as other data, also pinpointed the start of the Little Ice Age to the end of the 13th century. During the cool spell, which lasted into the late 19th century, advancing glaciers destroyed northern European towns and froze the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, places that are now ice-free....

Key concepts Wave Pressure Density Introduction Have you ever noticed seagulls bobbing up and down on the ocean? You might have also seen surfers catch a wave that takes them to shore. Maybe you have floated on a lake, going up and down as a wave passed by. Or perhaps you have seen debris, such as driftwood, that has been washed up by waves. Water waves are fascinating—they come in all sizes, from a tiny ripple to monster waves that are 10 meters high....

Many of us now expect our online activities to be recorded and analyzed, but we assume that the physical spaces we inhabit are different. The data-broker industry does not see it that way. To it, even the act of walking down the street is a legitimate data set to be captured, catalogued and exploited. This slippage between the digital and physical matters not only because of privacy concerns—it also raises serious questions about ethics and power....

Every year more than 6,000 people with liver disease or facing liver failure receive whole-organ transplantations in the U.S. Although the procedure is relatively safe and effective, problems remain: Demand outpaces supply; whereas the current U.S. waiting list stands at more than 15,000 only about 6,000 donations are made yearly. The procedure can cost more than $300,000 and immunosuppressants, drugs that prevent the immune system from rejecting the new organ, can lead to dangerous infections and uncontrolled bleeding....

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have identified long-sought and elusive broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV in a pair of papers published in the July 9 issue of Science. These proteins produced by the immune system are crucial for creating a preventive vaccine, and could also have therapeutic uses developed in the coming years or decades. Variations in individuals’ immune systems can dramatically affect responses to infection—HIV is no exception....

This year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be “above normal,” with 12 to 18 storms, thanks in part to unusually warm ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. Six to 10 of those storms are likely to reach hurricane strength, the agency said in its initial forecast for the 2011 storm season, which begins June 1 and ends Nov. 1. NOAA forecasters expect three to six of those storms to become major hurricanes with winds reaching 111 miles per hour or greater....

An alarm suggesting a potentially toxic ammonia leak on the International Space Station early Wednesday (Jan. 14) forced astronauts to evacuate the U.S. side of the orbiting lab, but NASA says there is no proof such a scary leak actually occurred. It might have beeen a false alarm. The station’s six-person crew, which includes two Americans, three Russians and an Italian astronaut, took refuge in the station’s Russian-built segment, isolating themselves from modules built by NASA, Europe and Japan due to the leak alarm at 4 a....

Our diets are unhealthy, that much is clear. Now, an increasing number of scientists and physicians wonder if our propensity for unhealthy, obesity-inducing eating might be tied to the food choices made during our first weeks and months of life. Indeed, the latest research indicates that what we learn to like as infants paves the way for what we eat as adults. If true, we might be able to tackle the obesity epidemic in a new and more promising way, one that starts with the very first spoonful....

Failure to make difficult choices to cut greenhouse gas emissions exposes humanity to an increasingly dire set of climate scenarios. But there is a way to buy time: Geoengineering. The idea of tinkering with planetary controls is not for the faint of heart. Even advocates acknowledge that any attempt to set the Earth’s thermostat is full of hubris and laden with risk. Some ideas are the stuff of science fiction: 15 trillion mirrors positioned in orbit to shield the planet from the sun’s rays; a fleet of blimps 20 kilometers up feeding a constant stream of sulfur into the stratosphere; a navy of robot-controlled ships prowling the world’s oceans, spraying seawater skyward to generate reflective clouds....

A new technique may allow researchers to get a closer bead on the intrinsic strength of gravity, which is so feeble compared with other forces that its signature is easily drowned out in the laboratory. Physicists have built a sensor that kicks atoms into free fall so as to detect subtle quantum changes that precisely reveal gravity’s strength, referred to as G. Although such experiments have come into vogue in recent years as a way of testing theories that suppose gravity leaks into large but unseen extra dimensions of space, the true value of measuring G is probably much more prosaic, says experimental physicist James Faller of the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the study....

Half a mile below the surface of the ocean, off the coast of Oregon, the Alvin submersible’s headlights flicker on to reveal a colorful oasis. Plush carpets of white, yellow and orange microbes cover the seafloor, punctuated by fields of clams and mussels. Red rockfish watch the vessel warily with bulbous milky eyes, while bubble plumes belch from mounds of chalky, variegated rock. The halo of illumination draws visitors forward like a lure, exposing this alien terrain bit by unexpected bit while obscuring its true extent....

I was looking for a group project for a new investigative reporting class for undergraduates that I would teach in spring 2011. I had already begun looking at the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on clinical trials when ProPublica published its “Dollars for Docs” database. Thanks to a series of court cases around the nation, a handful of drug companies were being forced to reveal payments they were making to physicians. ProPublica collected the drug company’s publications—which were hard to find and even harder to extract data from—and put them in an easy-to-search database....