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They are meeting in China; they are meeting in the United Kingdom; and they met in the United States last week. Around the world, scientists are gathering to discuss the promise and perils of editing the genome of a human embryo. Should it be allowed—and if so, under what circumstances? The meetings have been prompted by an explosion of interest in the powerful technology known as CRISPR/Cas9, which has brought unprecedented ease and precision to genetic engineering....

More than 200 tops spin in vessels half-buried in the dirt outside Stephentown, N.Y., a town near the Massachusetts state line. Inside the vessel a vacuum permits each top to rotate as many as 16,000 times per minute, despite the fact that each weighs more than one metric ton, thanks to its steel and carbon-fiber composition. Such fast spinning in a vacuum (to reduce friction) allows each top to store some 25 kilowatt-hours of electricity....

Sometime in late June or July 1609, Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei constructed his first spyglass—a simple contraption of lenses at the ends of a tube. The previous year in The Hague, a Dutchman named Hans Lipperhey had filed for a patent on the device, but it was Galileo who would go on to make it famous. By the summer of 1609, Galileo, then a professor of mathematics in Padua, Italy, had managed to make a working model....

When a craft sinks or goes missing at sea, search-and-rescue teams often rely on computer models to determine where to scour for survivors. Currently used models incorporate data from satellites and offshore sensors to predict a drifting object’s path, producing maps of the areas where it is most likely to be found. If the initial search is unsuccessful, the models incorporate that information to update their predictions. Now a team of researchers has developed a new algorithm to anticipate the location of drifting objects during the first three hours of a search....

By Kevin Murphy(Reuters) - At least two people were killed as wild storms and suspected tornadoes tore through parts of Mississippi and Arkansas on Saturday, injuring several others, damaging homes and sweeping trucks off a highway, authorities said.Two adults died when the car they were driving in struck a fallen tree in the road in Jasper County, Mississippi, county coroner Randy Graham told Reuters.Local television reports said a man was killed in Coahoma County when his mobile home blew over in high winds, but authorities could not be reached for confirmation early on Sunday....

What if sideline rage could be nipped in the bud with a quick genetic test that told Mom and Dad what sports – if any – Junior could master? The Boulder, Colo., company Atlas Sports Genetics today began selling just that sort of product: for $149, it says it will screen for variants of the gene ACTN3, which in elite-level athletes is associated with the presence of the muscle protein alpha-actinin-3....

In 1999 scientists discovered a mutant mouse with the ability to ward off aggressive cancers. Bred with a female, this mighty mouse passed on his cancer resistance to roughly 40 percent of his offspring. No matter how many times the researchers challenged the immune systems of these mice with levels of cancer cells millions of times stronger than those lethal to regular mice, they proved incapable of developing cancer. Now investigators have found that normal mice injected with white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice become resistant themselves....

Severe drought, temperature extremes, formerly productive land gone barren: this is climate change. Yet, says botanist Jan Pokorny of Charles University in Prague, these snippets from Kenya are not about greenhouse gases, but rather the way that land-use changes—specifically deforestation—affect climate; newly tree-free ground “represents huge amounts of solar energy changed into sensible heat, i.e. hot air.” Pokorny, who uses satellite technology to measure changes in land-surface and temperatures, has done research in western Kenya for 25 years, and watched the area grow hotter and drier....

From Nature magazine A relatively wet climatic period may have triggered the development 7000 years ago of complex culture in hunter-gatherer communities in the Atacama Desert, including the earliest known examples of ritual mummification. Bands of hunter-gatherers lived along the Atacama coastline from 11000 BC to 500 BC, but the Chinchorro began mummifying their dead only around 5000 BC. An early Archaic burial (dated 9000-8000 BC) that uses similar funerary symbols to the later mummy burials suggests that mummification was a local development, rather than being introduced from elsewhere....

Most Americans who worry about cyberwarfare are concerned that it will be directed against the United States. But the truth is that cyber conflict is far more likely to involve smaller players — and the dangers associated with that possibility are just as real. That’s because war is more common in small, unstable areas: it’s where the most conflicts are. The U.S. and other big powers — Russia and China, for instance — have pretty well-established diplomatic channels....

Emory University medical fellow Dr. Nicole Herbst was shocked when she saw three patients who came in with abnormal results from chest CT scans they had bought on Groupon. Yes, Groupon—the online coupon mecca that also sells discounted fitness classes and foosball tables. Similar deals have shown up for various lung, heart and full-body scans across Atlanta, as well as in Oklahoma and California. Groupon also offers discount coupons for expectant parents looking for ultrasounds, sold as “fetal memories....

A molecular biologist has borrowed a technique from genetic science to date hand-printed art. The so-called print clock method, developed by Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University, could help historians and collectors pinpoint when thousands of undated, hand-printed materials were created. Hedges, who does field work in the Carribbean and happens to collect old maps of the area, conceived of the method after noticing that later editions of the same maps had more line breaks....

The preliminary deal agreed between six world powers and Iran over its nuclear programme has been hailed as an opportunity to end years of global tension, prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and ease sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy. Iranian science may also be a winner. Negotiators must still resolve many outstanding issues before the June 30 deadline for a formal, written deal (see ‘Challenges to a formal deal’)....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineIn a new twist of a historic tragedy, 13 Americans who say they are survivors of thalidomide are suing four companies for producing and distributing the notorious drug. They say that the drug – used by pregnant women for morning sickness until it was discovered to cause severe birth defects–affected more people in the United States than thought, and caused a wider range of deformities. And, they say, the companies have done all they can to hide these facts....

While officials at NASA and the European Space Agency, as well as planners in China, plot out ultra-expensive and complicated missions to return samples from Mars, there are an increasing number of researchers blueprinting low-cost and novel ways to further explore the Red Planet. Be it via souped-up helicopters or inexpensive landers and orbiters, they say it’s time to script new ways to gather more data from a variety of places on that remote world....

In a major step toward helping victims of paralysis walk again, researchers at Duke University Medical Center today announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots. The Duke researchers, working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes that gathered signals from her brain’s motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill....

Researchers who wrote “design by the Creator” in a paper about the function of the human hand have triggered a debate over the quality of editing and peer review at the journal that published it—and ultimately retracted it. The paper by Cai-Hua Xiong of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, and his co-authors appeared in the journal PLoS ONE on January 5. But it came to prominence this week after its apparently creationist slant was flagged on Twitter, spawning the hashtags #Creatorgate and #HandofGod....

PARIS – After a week of escalating actions to try to curb a pollution crisis, culminating with a temporary ban Monday of nearly half the city’s cars, Paris is again breathing easy. Minister of Ecology Philippe Martin said late Monday that 90 percent of Parisian drivers followed the rules, which allowed for only cars with odd-numbered license plates to drive around Paris and its outlying suburbs. “Bravo, and thank you,” Martin said while announcing that the restrictions, which the ministry originally considered continuing through yesterday with even-numbered cars, would end Monday night....

Key concepts Mathematics Probability Statistics Introduction Have you ever noticed how sometimes what seems logical turns out to be proved false with a little math? For instance, how many people do you think it would take to survey, on average, to find two people who share the same birthday? Due to probability, sometimes an event is more likely to occur than we believe it to. In this case, if you survey a random group of just 23 people there is actually about a 50–50 chance that two of them will have the same birthday....

During times of war, wild animals are more likely to be hunted or displaced from their natural habitat by humans seeking shelter. Rates of ivory poaching goes up and animal reproduction declines. From 1950 to 2000, more than 80 percent of wars across the globe occurred within biodiversity hotspots, several at African wildlife preserves. Since it’s difficult to capture ecological data in conflict zones, the effects of warfare on wildlife has been a challenge to study....