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By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) called on Friday for pilot projects to test two experimental ways to curb Zika-carrying mosquitoes, including testing the release of genetically modified insects and bacteria that stop their eggs hatching. Zika virus, which is sweeping through the Americas, is transmitted primarily by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which the U.N. health body has described as an “opportunistic and tenacious menace”. Finding the most effective ways to control these mosquitoes could be a major boost to the fight against the disease, the WHO said in a statement....

AUGUST 1958 BERYLLIUM— “The story of berylliosis is one of the most fascinating, contradictory, infuriating and controversial episodes in medical history. Some medical people argue even now that beryllium is incapable of causing disease. When one examines the clinical, biochemical and toxicological evidence, however, one cannot escape the fact that beryllium has caused at least 500 cases of poisoning in the U.S. alone during the past two decades. The story of beryllium highlights the whole problem of occupational disease in the present era....

“It’s not enough to study the environmental conditions that structure these communities of trees and palms,” says Carolina Levis, a palaeoecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the lead author of the study. “We need to ask ‘what are the human influences in these communities?’” A cornucopia The researchers wanted to know whether this was because of human influence or the environment. So they compared the distribution of domesticated species to more than 3,000 known pre-Columbian archaeological sites and likely settlement areas, including near the banks of rivers....

WTF, Evolution?! A Theory of Unintelligible Design by Mara Grunbaum Workman, 2014 Sea potatoes, pigbutt worms and hairy squat lobsters are among the odd, ugly and “unintelligible” creatures portrayed in this full-color compendium of unusual members of the animal kingdom. Science journalist Grunbaum, who writes a popular Tumblr blog of the same name as her book, accompanies photographs of bizarre organisms with hilarious commentary, often in the form of fictional conversations between the author and “evolution,” who has this to say about the smalltooth sawfish: “You know how I usually put fish’s teeth inside their mouths?...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Nearly 2,000 Chinese enterprises were found to be in violation of state pollution guidelines following a nationwide inspection campaign covering 25,000 industrial firms, the environment ministry said on Thursday. With the environment identified as one of the government’s top priorities after years of unfettered economic growth, Beijing has promised to enhance its powers to monitor and punish industries accused of ignoring state regulations. Beijing has struggled to make local governments and industries comply with laws and has long been criticized for relying on national campaigns to bring industrial sectors like coal, steel or rare earth to heel....

In the realm of medical research, which more commonly concerns itself with the diseased condition, a landmark study of healthy brain development has uncovered a number of surprises. Among them is the finding that, whereas childhood is characterized by improvement on tasks of cognitive and motor function, this progress levels off at around age 11 or 12, just prior to adolescence. These results, announced today in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, are the product of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study, begun in 1999, that included 385 healthy children aged six to 18 years old....

Large cruise ships typically host 1,800 passengers or more, plus 800 staff. Remarkably, many of these massive structures—three football fields long and 14 stories high—can deftly turn on a dime, spin 360 degrees, even mosey sideways. For years big ship propulsion had a standard configuration: a propeller in the rear with a rudder behind it to steer. But increasingly, they are being equipped with an innovative propulsion system called the Azipod, made by ABB Oy in Finland....

Could being visually impaired have had a role in the musical genius of Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles? A study provides some clues by showing that adult mice kept in the dark quickly develop sharper hearing and become better at distinguishing pitch and frequency. The improvements were correlated with adaptations in the brain — such as strengthening of connections between neurons — that normally happen only early in life. For their study, published today in Neuron, Hey-Kyoung Lee, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and her collaborators selected two sets of healthy adult mice....

Do you believe in evolution? I do. But when I say “I believe in evolution,” I mean something rather different than when I say “I believe in liberal democracy.” Evolutionary theory is a science. Liberal democracy is a political philosophy that most of us think has little to do with science. That science and politics are nonoverlapping magisteria (vide Stephen Jay Gould’s model separating science and religion) was long my position until I read Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010)....

The universe does not look right. That may seem like a strange thing to say, given that cosmologists have very little standard for comparison. How do we know what the universe is supposed to look like? Nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as “natural”—and the universe we see does not qualify. Make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved....

Treatments for human diseases often come from unexpected places. Several years ago microbiologist Sarah Higginbotham was talking with an ecologist colleague about how she looks for bioactive organisms—those that produce substances that inhibit the growth of other organisms. “When I told him I look for places where lots of organisms live together, he said, ‘Sloths sound perfect,’” she says. Sloths are microbial jackpots because they move so slowly and infrequently and because their fur contains microscopic grooves that create a perfect breeding ground for algae, fungi, bacteria, cockroaches and caterpillars....

Excerpted with permission from Prisoners, Lovers, & Spies: The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to al Qaeda, by Kristie Macrakis. Available from Yale University Press. Copyright © 2014. In the fall of 1916 British censors opened a letter by a most intriguing spy. His name was George Vaux Bacon and he was an American journalist sent to Britain in September 1916 by German Secret Service officers based in New York City....

Laser technology mounted on airplanes can map Earth’s surface with uncanny precision and detail. The systems have been used to study floods, landslides, snowpacks and just about anything else under the sun that can enhance understanding of the natural processes happening around us. Employed by the military, meteorologists, astronomers, conservationists and even automotive engineers, it can spit out three-dimensional models of a distant surface and is accurate within an inch or two (three to five centimeters)....

ARGONNE, Ill.—Twenty miles southwest of Chicago, government researchers are pursuing the automotive version of Mr. Right. He’s powerful. He has endurance. He isn’t too expensive to have around. And he never, ever explodes. That’s one way to think of the perfect car battery, which will have to balance many different factors to lure the American masses to the electric car. For the moment, though, Mr. Right is just a set of equations in a notebook....

HOUSTON — NASA’s historic Mission Control is soon to be made even more historic. The agency’s original control room in Houston, which first went active 50 years ago Wednesday (June 3), has been dormant since 1992. A National Historic Landmark, today it is a public tour stop and features the authentic consoles used for the Apollo 11 moon landing and Apollo 13 in-flight emergency, among 40 other space missions. Now, a restoration effort is getting underway to make sure the room is around for many generations to come....

LEARNING CODE I appreciate “Making AI More Human,” Alison Gopnik’s article about the two ways that artificial intelligence is being configured to approach learning. In top-down methods, such as Bayesian models, abstract concepts are used to create a hypothesis and predict which patterns of data should be seen if it is true. Meanwhile in bottom-up methods, such as “deep learning,” abstract concepts are derived by looking for patterns in concrete data....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. It’s Raining Protons Like terrestrial hurricanes and thunderstorms, solar storms can wreak havoc in multiple ways. Solar flares are relatively small-scale explosions that emit bursts of radiation. They cause enhanced radio absorption in the so-called D layer of Earth’s ionosphere, interfering with Global Positioning System signals and shortwave reception....

Satellites are good at measuring temperatures over vast stretches of ocean, but less accurate at monitoring a particularly important type of marine environment—coastlines. Now help could come from an unlikely source: a water sports “navy” of surfers, anglers, scuba divers and others. A U.K.-led team of researchers has proposed this alliance to help gather coastal climate data in a recent paper in Frontiers in Marine Science. The idea follows an influx of useful data collected by scientists who just happen to surf, led by marine remote-sensing researcher Bob Brewin from Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) in England....

“This paper will prove valuable,” wrote John Herschel in a scientific memorandum on April 23, 1842, noting the effect of sunlight on a sample he had treated with “ferrocyanate of potash.” The light turned the chemical blue, leading Herschel to believe he had found a basis for the invention of color photography. He had not—nor would he live long enough to witness the true usefulness of his discovery. A British astronomer and chemist, Herschel had already played a crucial role in the 1839 invention of the black-and-white salt print—the first photographic negative—by finding a way to fix, or set, the fugitive image with sodium thiosulfate....

In early August the Drug Enforcement Administration declined to reclassify marijuana under the federal Controlled Substances Act. The drug is currently listed on Schedule I, meaning that it is viewed as having “no currently accepted medical use in treatment” and is therefore technically banned by federal law. The proposed change would have moved it to Schedule II, where it would join morphine, opium and codeine. That would make marijuana potentially available by prescription nationwide....