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Keep the antenna level. Rotate it 90 degrees. Move it a few inches to the left. Stand to the right. Hold it a bit higher … there–nope. Try again. That has been my high-definition television (HDTV) experience. I plunged into the alphabet-soup world of digital television (DTV) in 2003, shortly after I replaced my electron-gun boob tube with a 42-inch plasma flat panel. I hoped to enjoy beautifully crisp images–only to see what a lousy picture my Manhattan cable company was piping in....

Environment Virtues of a Human-Centric Culture Cultivating trust among employees builds productivity, loyalty and, ultimately, profits. So why is it so difficult for corporations to get right? July 13, 2017 — Elie Dolgin Environment The Secret to a ‘High-Trust’ Organization Ph.D. physicist and fifth-generation chairman and CEO of SC Johnson, Fisk Johnson, opens up about how to place principles at the heart of a business, how science is a tool for transparency, and why putting people before profits is the key to success…...

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order on Tuesday directing regulators to review an Obama administration rule that expanded the number of federally protected waterways as the new president targets environmental regulations conservatives label as government overreach. Trump’s executive order directs the Justice Department to ask a federal court to put legal challenges to the rule on hold as the administration conducts its review, a senior official said. The order, which the White House did not immediately make public, will kick off what will likely be a lengthy process to undo the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency and the U....

GLOUCESTER, Mass.– Pete Libra is frustrated. The 40-year-old cod fisherman sees lots of fish in the ocean, and he wants to catch more. Fishing authorities see fewer, and want him to catch less. “I’m not a scientist. But I see the fish,” said Libra. His is the voice of many of the fishermen in Gloucester, the heart of a once-great fishing industry that powered fledgling America and underwrote New England’s economy....

Summer vacation may be over, but many of us are already thinking about our travel plans for the holiday season. Those of you who’ve traveled abroad may have already experienced travelers’ diarrhea at some point. And those of you who haven’t yet, count yourself lucky. Travelers’ diarrhea (or TD) is the most common illness in those who travel internationally, occurring in 20%-50% of all travelers to some extent. Imagine being in a completely foreign country (which can be anxiety-provoking in and of itself) and feeling ill....

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has thrown his weight behind the country’s traditional systems of medicine earlier this month by creating the Ministry for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH). Among its stated goals is to promote “educational standards, quality control and standardization of drugs”. Modi — who is said to begin each day by practising yoga — made a pitch for declaring an ‘international yoga day’ in a speech at the United Nations in September....

By Michael Martina BEIJING (Reuters) - An animal welfare group said on Tuesday it will save 130 bears from a bile extraction farm in China, its largest rescue so far, in a bid to end a business that has sparked outrage over animal cruelty amid growing opposition. Hong Kong-based Animals Asia says as many as 10,000 bears are held in captivity in China and used for bile extraction, often under poor conditions that cause long-term physical and psychological suffering....

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of serving as one of several judges for the Nikon Small World contest. Our task was to sit in a dimly lit room and try to rank the hundreds of entries—images taken by professional and amateur scientists around the world using visible-light microscopes. Some were easy: The rules of the contest, which Nikon has run since 1974, forbid images obtained with nonlight microscopes such as electron-based instruments....

Researchers have printed inks containing nanoscopic graphene flakes to build macroscopic, three-dimensional objects that they say could benefit numerous fields, including energy storage and bioengineering. A team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has 3-D printed porous, highly compressible aerogels using a graphene oxide ink (Nat. Commun. 2015, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7962). And researchers at Northwestern University designed tissue scaffolds with ink that contains graphene flakes within a flexible, biocompatible polymer (ACS Nano 2015, DOI:10....

Perfectly pristine fossils might make great museum showpieces, but they are not always the most informative for paleontologists. Some of the more salient secrets of ancient life are locked inside fossils, and lucky breaks can reveal internal details that may otherwise remain hidden. In the case of one particular 429-million-year-old trilobite—an extinct arthropod that looked like a big version of a wood louse—a crack in just the right place has allowed paleontologists to see the world through the creature’s eyes....

One day in 1950, nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to a few colleagues he was lunching with at Los Alamos National Laboratory that would become known as the Fermi Paradox: If the Milky Way is indeed teeming with alien civilizations, as many theories suggest, where are they? Shouldn’t we see evidence of their existence? Nearly 60 years later, the question remains just as vexing. After all, decades of searching for extraterrestrial radio signals or evidence of alien civilizations have come up empty....

The tainted water crisis in Flint, Mich., didn’t just poison children with lead; it also likely contributed to two outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, according to a new study (Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett. 2016, DOI:10.1021/acs.estlett.6b00192). When Flint switched its drinking water source in 2014 from Lake Huron to the Flint River, the corrosive river water created ideal growth conditions for deadly Legionella bacteria. The first to link pipe corrosion to risk of disease at the community scale, the study is a wake-up call to the many cities failing to address corrosion in their aging water pipes....

Key concepts Hydrodynamics Fluid dynamics Physics Water Introduction Have you ever wondered why when you drop a steel nail into water it sinks like a stone, but when a well-built steel ship is in the ocean it floats, even though it weighs much more than a tiny nail? The answer has to do with the fact that when an object is placed in water, water is pushed out of the way....

History is riddled with the remnants of photographic tampering. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and Brezhnev each had photographs manipulated—from creating more heroic-looking poses to erasing enemies or bottles of beer. In Stalin’s day, such phony images required long hours of cumbersome work in a darkroom, but today anyone with a computer can readily produce fakes that can be very hard to detect. Barely a month goes by without some newly uncovered fraudulent image making it into the news....

If you have been trying to keep up with the Joneses, you are not alone—it seems we are all wired that way. Researchers report that the social emotions of envy and gloating are much stronger on every measure than are the sentiments of relief and regret, which are felt privately. A team led by economist Aldo Rustichini of the University of Minnesota used skin conductance to measure volunteers’ emotional arousal as they played a lottery game either alone or with a partner....

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Wednesday accused drug makers who manufacture pricey biologic medicines of using “unacceptable” anti-competitive tactics to keep competitors off the market, costing Americans billions. The tactics—some of which Gottlieb will refer to as a “toxin”—have prevented other drug makers from launching biosimilar medicines, highly similar versions of the same drugs. “The branded drug industry didn’t build its success by being business naïve. They are smart competitors....

Physicists think they have achieved one of the most coveted goals of their discipline: creating a superconducting material that works at near-room temperature. The evidence is still preliminary and comes with a major caveat. So far, the material has been made only under pressures of about 200 gigapascals—or two million atmospheres. But if confirmed, the feat would be the first example of superconductivity above 0 degrees Celsius, and some physicists say that the work could be a milestone in the study of superconductivity, which researchers hope will one day make the generation, transmission and use of electricity vastly more efficient....

Why do some patients respond well to the new cancer immunotherapies and others don’t? The genetic components of the tumors or of the patients may contribute. Our work and that of other scientists now also suggest a role for differences in the makeup of the individuals’ microbiome, the friendly bacteria that inhabit various parts of the body. These bacterial communities, particularly the ones found in the intestines, can differ in their constituent species....

Milk is well known as a great dietary source of protein and calcium, not to mention an indispensable companion to cookies. But “nature’s perfect food,” a label given to milk over time by a variety of boosters, including consumer activists, government nutritionists and the American Dairy Council, has become a great source of controversy, too. The long-running dispute over whether milk, both from cows and goats, should be consumed in raw or pasteurized form—an argument more than a century old—has heated up in the last five years, according to Bill Marler, a Washington State lawyer who takes raw milk and other food poisoning cases....

Nursing homes are unnecessarily administering powerful antipsychotic drugs to many elderly residents, including residents with dementia [1] , according to a new report by the Health and Human Services inspector general. The Food and Drug Administration in 2005 mandated that drug makers issue warning labels [2] on atypical antipsychotics, noting that the drugs—which are generally FDA-approved for treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—increase the risk of death for elderly patients with dementia....