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The monkey picks up a potato-sized rock in his tiny hands, raises it above his head and smashes it down with all his might on another stone embedded in the ground. As the creature enthusiastically bashes away, over and over, flakes fly off the rock he is wielding. They are sharp enough to cut meat or plant material. The monkey does not pay much attention to the flakes, save to place one on the embedded rock and attempt to smash it, too....

By Zeeya Merali A quantum trick could provide sharper ticks for the atomic clocks of the future. A set of studies demonstrate that quantum entanglement can make the measurement technique used by atomic clocks even more precise. The “ticks” of the current standard atomic clocks are marked by the regular vibrations of an ensemble of cesium atoms, which vibrate 9.2 billion times every second. However, noise inherent in the system means that there is a fundamental “classical limit” to how accurately the clocks can measure those vibrations....

The criminal justice system has a problem, and its name is forensics. This was the message I heard at the Forensic Science Research Evaluation Workshop held May 26–27 at the AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C. I spoke about pseudoscience but then listened in dismay at how the many fields in the forensic sciences that I assumed were reliable (DNA, fingerprints, and so on) in fact employ unreliable or untested techniques and show inconsistencies between evaluators of evidence....

Neuroscientists are coming closer to understanding why some bad moods seem to tumble uncontrollably through your head like a collapsing chain of dominoes. One misbegotten thought after another drives you to imagine frightful things to come or to relive your shameful past: “Remember that one thing five years ago? Wow, I really am a loser.” The spiral into such a mood may occur in a brain network that connects two key regions involved with memory and negative emotions, says psychiatrist Vikaas Sohal at the University of California, San Francisco....

MONROVIA (Reuters) - Liberia is on the verge of containing the spread of the Ebola virus with only two of its 15 counties reporting new infections, the head of the country’s Ebola response said on Tuesday. Tolbert Nyenswah, who is also a deputy health minister, said the new cases were reported in Montserrado county, which includes the capital Monrovia, and Grand Cape Mount, on the border with Sierra Leone. Bong, Nimba, Sinoe, and Margibi counties have not reported a single case since the end of December, he said....

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Climate models show an increased chance of a 2014 El Nino weather event, said Australia’s bureau of meteorology, leading to possible droughts in Southeast Asia and Australia and floods in South America, which could hit key rice, wheat and sugar crops. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said an El Nino could occur during the southern hemisphere winter, May-July, with Australian cattle and grain farmers already struggling with drought which has cut production....

Big, dark ocean waves were rolling our research ship from side to side. The Falkor is 83 meters long and weighs more than 2,000 metric tons, but a storm from Siberia that had just missed us was still churning the seas. Sitting in the science lab on the main deck, I was trying to keep my coffee from spilling onto my map of the seafloor. It was mid-October 2015, and we were in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, about 1,600 kilometers east of Japan....

In DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek franchise, Princess Fiona almost exclusively wears her hair pulled back. The character’s preference for braids has more to do with physics than fashion. Letting a cartoon character’s hair down requires calculating a string of complex equations to create a realistic effect, so computer animators often just opt for short hair and updos rather than long, loose tresses. Likewise, most animated characters turn up on the big screen with straight locks because rendering them in three dimensions is a simpler mathematical task....

As with most things related to people, the food we eat comes with a carbon cost. Soil tillage, crop and livestock transportation, manure management and all the other aspects of global food production generate greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of more than 17 billion metric tons per year, according to a new study published on Monday in Nature Food. Animal-based foods account for 57 percent of those emissions, and plant-based ones make up 29 percent....

The birth of a child leaves its mark on the brain. Most investigations of these changes have focused on mothers, but scientists have recently begun looking more closely at fathers. Neural circuits that support parental behaviors appear more robust in moms a few weeks after the baby is born, whereas in dads the growth can take several months. A study in Social Neuroscience analyzed 16 dads several weeks after their baby’s birth and again a few months later....

When employers are hiring, interviewing candidates is pretty much a given. Yet that practice may be overrated. Research has shown that unstructured interviews, in particular, do not inform an employer much and can actually hurt if one already has more objective data such as standardized test scores. A new study reports that interviews do not just make us less accurate at predicting how qualified a candidate will be, they increase overconfidence in predictions, compounding the problem....

Publication of the genome of the North American green anole lizard has filled a yawning genome-sequence gap in the animal lineage. The paper, which appears today in Nature, is the first to sequence the genome of a non-avian reptile. “This fills out a clade that has been completely ignored before,” says lead author Jessica Alföldi of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Amniotes, the first truly terrestrial vertebrates, diverged from other animals some 320 million years ago to form the mammalian and reptilian lineages....

A team in the US has shown that enantiopure and racemic crystals can be separated by magnetic levitation. The isolation of pure enantiomers is of particular importance in the pharmaceutical industry, where one enantiomer is typically responsible for the therapeutic effects of a drug, while the other may be inactive or even toxic. One alternative to the often used solution-based separation techniques such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is to purify the desired enantiomer from a mixture of crystals of enantiomerically pure and racemic compound....

New measurements provide the strongest evidence yet for wriggling magnetic waves that may explain why the solar corona is a good 200 times hotter than the surface of the sun: regular pulsations in the speed of charged, high-energy gas or plasma streaming from the sun combined with matching magnetic fields. The findings point to magnetic field ripples known as Alfvén waves whipping plasma back and forth, releasing heat, according to a report published online by Science....

The Diamond Princess cruise ship. A Georgetown church in Washington, D.C. A Latin American restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina. A hotel in Oklahoma City. Two Broadway theaters in New York City. All announced that they’ve undergone a “deep clean” in recent weeks after discovering that a person infected with the novel coronavirus had been there. They are just the tip of a pile of businesses and consumer gathering spots that say they are stepping up cleaning protocols....

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford whose work in the 1960s ushered in a new era of astronomy, has received a $3-million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Breakthrough Foundation announced today. “I am very surprised,” Bell Burnell says, “almost speechless, in fact, which doesn’t often happen to me.” Previous prizewinners include the late physicist Stephen Hawking, the seven lead scientists behind the discovery of the Higgs boson and the entire international team responsible for the direct detection of gravitational waves....

When asked what he likes best about working for Google, physicist John Martinis does not mention the famous massage chairs in the hallways, or the free snacks available just about anywhere at the company’s campus in Mountain View, California. Instead, he marvels at Google’s tolerance of failure in pursuit of a visionary goal. “If every project they try works,” he says, “they think they aren’t trying hard enough.” Martinis reckons that he is going to need that kind of patience....

From Leonardo da Vinci’s exquisite pen-and-ink drawings of the human skeleton to the digital Visible Human Project in its three-dimensional glory, this fascinating book, now in paperback, documents more than 500 years of anatomical illustration in living color. Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux. MIT Press, 2011 Talk about haute couture. In 1968 Playtex, the bra and girdle manufacturer, beat out a slew of military-industrial companies to win the contract to design and hand-sew the space suit for the 1969 Apollo mission to the moon....

Astronomers have discovered traces of a star that went supernova about 140 years ago as viewed from Earth*, around the time of the U.S. Civil War and the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The expanding debris cloud, or remnant, known as G1.9+0.3, lies near the center of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from Earth. Besides making G1.9+0.3 the youngest supernova remnant known in our galaxy, the finding begins to fill a peculiar astronomical gap....

By Ewen Callaway Premature aging can be reversed by reactivating an enzyme that protects the tips of chromosomes, a study in mice suggests.Mice engineered to lack the enzyme, called telomerase, become prematurely decrepit. But they bounced back to health when the enzyme was replaced. The finding, published online November 28 in Nature, hints that some disorders characterized by early aging could be treated by boosting telomerase activity. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group....