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With apple-picking season in full swing throughout the U.S., people need to know when a piece of fruit is ripe for harvest. Farmers judge this by keeping track of the number of days since a tree has bloomed, or by cutting open an apple and inspecting its seeds. Amateur pickers unfamiliar with these time-tested techniques will be happy to know that researchers can now divine when an apple is ready to eat, using a small handheld device and a smartphone....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you take a close look at the world, you’ll find that you’re surrounded by ancient history. There are lots of great examples of this, but today we’re going to talk about one example in particular that’s near and dear to my—and hopefully your—mathematical heart: Roman numerals. These ancient numbers can still be seen all over the place—on signs, clocks, monuments, and even in movie credits!...

Welcome to The Undark Podcast. In this episode, join freelance journalist Maggie Andresen and podcast host Lydia Chain as they navigate the profound social, economic, and environmental consequences of dredging for sand in Lagos, Nigeria. Undark Magazine · Ep. 57: In Lagos, Vulnerable Communities Buried by Urbanization Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. You can also subscribe to The Undark Podcast at Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, or Spotify....

The foiled plan is just one of the tens of thousands of terrorist pursuits that have pockmarked the globe in recent decades–including the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the 1975 hostage taking at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, the 1995 sarin gas attacks in Tokyo, and the September 11, 2001, strikes in the U.S. Although terrorism includes a diversity of actions, all of them, by definition, are intended to harm innocent civilians–and perpetrate fear–in the name of political, religious or other ideological goals....

Late last year a series of sophisticated Internet attacks emanating from China burrowed deep into the computer systems of some two dozen U.S. corporations, among them Northrop Grumman, Dow Chemical and Yahoo. One fought back. After revealing that the attacks targeted not only its core intellectual property but the e-mail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn, its Chinese-language search engine. The move led to threats by the Chinese authorities to shut down Google’s operations inside China....

A trapper in the north woods observes a common raven (Corvus corax) roll over on its back with its feet in the air next to a beaver carcass on the snow. A biologist laboriously climbs a cliff to band raven nestlings, and the birds’ parents rain down loose rocks from above. A lone raven clamors loudly near a remote cabin, alerting a man next to it to look up and see a hidden cougar that is about to spring on him....

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Russia and the Ukraine on Friday again scuttled plans to create the world’s largest ocean sanctuary in Antarctica, pristine waters rich in energy and species such as whales, penguins and vast stocks of fish, an environmentalist group said.The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources wound up a week-long meeting in Hobart, Australia, considering proposals for two “marine protected areas” aimed at conserving the ocean wilderness from fishing, drilling for oil and other industrial interests....

Rahul Bernath is the Sales and Marketing Director for the home fitness bike called CAR.O.L at carolfitai.com. Before joining CAR.O.L, Rahul graduated from the University College London with a First Class Degree and worked with some of the UK’s most valuable consumer brands in marketing and sales. The name of this rather innocuous-looking stationary bike stands for CARdiovascular Optimization Logic. CAR.O.L is an AI-powered, interactive exercise bike with self-learning algorithms that took more than four years to develop....

In its forward-looking report for the year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts renewable energy will be the fastest-growing power source through 2040. New investments in renewable energy rose from $9 billion in the first quarter of 2004 to $50 billion for 2015’s first quarter, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and the volume of installed photovoltaic systems in the United States has grown every year since 2000. The story that renewable energy advocates often share of how their favorite power sources have grown so rapidly over recent years belies the reality that those industries have expanded from small market shares to start....

In 1871 Charles Darwin surmised that humans were evolutionarily closer to the African apes than to any other species alive. The recent sequencing of the gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo genomes confirms that supposition and provides a clearer view of how we are connected: chimps and bonobos in particular take pride of place as our nearest living relatives, sharing approximately 99 percent of our DNA, with gorillas trailing at 98 percent. Yet that tiny portion of unshared DNA makes a world of difference: it gives us, for instance, our bipedal stance and the ability to plan missions to Mars....

President Trump hinted at a policy to reduce carbon emissions. It was a first for the president in a State of the Union address—though he did not say the words “climate change.” The nod came when Trump expressed support for planting trees, an idea that has gained momentum among international business leaders and conservative lawmakers in the United States. “To protect the environment, days ago, I announced that the United States will join the 1 trillion trees initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and the private sector to plant new trees in America and around the world,” Trump said....

Today, you can walk around a new neighborhood like a native if you have a smartphone and the right apps. But that’s just the start. Devices such as Google Glass promise, for better or worse, to augment your reality more quickly and naturally, enabling you to almost immediately identify people, get directions and translate signs. Using Microsoft’s Xbox Kinects, researchers have also demonstrated virtual meetings that can be held face to holographic face....

Excerpted from The Future Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action, by Mathew Burrows. Palgrave Macmillan Trade, 2014. Copyright © 2014. Reprinted with Permission. Most of us are relatively comfortable talking about the rise and fall of countries or even civilizations. That’s an age-old story we’re familiar with. Being able to change or duplicate human nature, however, has been such a staple of science fiction and related films and television—like Blade Runner, The Six Million Dollar Man, or The Matrix—that it has been easy to dismiss as entertainment or diversion....

In my Scientific American column this month, I chased down the answers to questions about wi-fi that have plagued mankind from the beginning—at least, the beginning of wireless Internet. Things like “Why do I have four bars but still can’t connect?” and “Why do I see a phony hot spot called ‘Free Public Wi-Fi’ in airports?” Here’s an online special for you: Three more questions—and answers, provided by the people who should know....

The first global estimate of the number of whales killed by industrial harvesting last century reveals that nearly 3 million cetaceans were wiped out in what may have been the largest cull of any animal—in terms of total biomass—in human history. The devastation wrought on whales by twentieth-century hunting is well documented. By some estimates, sperm whales have been driven down to one-third of their pre-whaling population, and blue whales have been depleted by up to 90%....

In a remote part of Nevada, bones of giant prehistoric swimming reptiles harken back to when the arid region once sat on a coastline. Hundreds of miles away, in what is now Nebraska, volcanic ash buried more than 100 barrel-bodied rhinos some 12 million years ago. From Connecticut to Wyoming, dinosaur sites tantalize with clues of feeding frenzies and ancient trackways. Many of the fossils excavated in the U.S. have been moved to urban museums, or at least to a nearby visitor center....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The deadly threat posed by German submarines during World War One helped spur scientists to develop sonar, using underwater sound signals to locate objects like subs that might be taking aim with a torpedo. In the 20th century, it was an important technological breakthrough. But it was old technology as far as whales go. These marine mammals have been using echolocation - bouncing high-frequency sounds off underwater objects - to find prey for tens of millions of years....

55 Cancri e is an exoplanet with an identity crisis. Following its 2004 discovery in a scorching close orbit around a star 40 light-years away, astronomers dubbed the planet a “super-Earth.” At just under eight times the mass and twice the size of our own world, 55 Cancri e is a welterweight that straddles the hazy boundary between terrestrial and gas-giant planets. Nothing like it exists in our solar system. For years researchers have thought the best explanation for its intermediate size is a rocky, Earth-size core smothered beneath a thick, steamy atmosphere....

Prolactin, a hormone that increases during pregnancy, regenerates myelin destroyed in mouse models of multiple sclerosis (MS). The results may explain why symptoms of MS sometimes abate during pregnancy. Journal of Neuroscience, February 21 T. rex and other meat-eating dinosaurs had small genomes, on par with modern birds, which have about 1.45 billion bases (humans have about three billion). The finding counters a hypothesis that birds evolved and maintained smaller genomes to conserve energy for flight....

The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time. This “lukewarm” option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good....