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From Nature magazine Certain fears can be inherited through the generations, a provocative study of mice reports. The authors suggest that a similar phenomenon could influence anxiety and addiction in humans. But some researchers are sceptical of the findings because a biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon has not been identified. According to convention, the genetic sequences contained in DNA are the only way to transmit biological information across generations. Random DNA mutations, when beneficial, enable organisms to adapt to changing conditions, but this process typically occurs slowly over many generations....

More than any other cue, the sight of advancing feet alerts humans to the presence of moving creatures, according to researchers from Queen’s University in Ontario and Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. The investigators rendered walking human and animal figures as constellations of white dots on a computer screen (right). Volunteers were shown a random sequence of these dot clusters—some in correct anatomical orientation, some upside down, some scrambled—and were asked to determine which direction the “creatures” were walking....

The latest salvo in an ongoing row over global-warming trends claims that warming has indeed slowed down this century. An apparent slowing in the rise of global temperatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is not explained by climate models, was referred to as a “hiatus” or a “pause” when first observed several years ago. Climate-change sceptics have used this as evidence that global warming has stopped. But in June last year, a study in Science claimed that the hiatus was just an artefact which vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected....

In a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned aeons. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these bipedal creatures thought of themselves as extraordinarily privileged, occupying a unique place in a cosmos of a trillion trillion stars. Conceited as they were, they believed that they, and only they, could escape the iron law of cause and effect that governs everything....

BERLIN, March 27 (Reuters) - Lufthansa said it will introduce new rules requiring two crew members to be in the cockpit at all times after one of the pilots at its Germanwings unit crashed a plane in the French Alps. Prosecutors believe Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked himself alone in the cockpit of the Airbus A320 on Tuesday and deliberately steered it into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board. Lufthansa had said on Thursday that it did not see any reason to hastily change its procedures, but many other airlines swiftly changed their own rules....

Marine turtles are imperiled and Mexico’s supreme wrestling star, El Hijo del Santo (“Son of the Saint”), is fighting on their behalf. A media magnet, he is using his influence to promote a campaign against eating sea turtles, a massive effort designed to persuade people in Mexico to protect rather than eat the turtles that visit their shores each year to spawn. Populations of sea turtles have undergone a steep decline in the past 50 years, even though they are protected by the Mexican government and the U....

I’m a cloud-computing, Chrome OS fanboy for the most part. But today was one of of those days I was glad to have old-school Mac and Windows PCs lying around my home office.I’m no power user, but Google Docs suits me for word processing, while Google Sheets works fine for creating spreadsheets. However, when it comes to importing and editing files from the incumbent power, Microsoft Office, Google just isn’t meeting even my low-end needs....

Self-driving cars were a lot simpler when they were still confined to science fiction. But Uber’s recent rollout of semiautonomous taxis in Pittsburgh and the tough questions Tesla faces after a death involving its Autopilot feature are strong reminders that fact is quickly closing in on fiction. In an effort to keep the two from colliding, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT) on Tuesday made good on its promise earlier this year to give Silicon Valley start-ups and Detroit incumbents alike guidance to help them build safe self-driving vehicles....

Is your home littered with sticky notes telling you to mail that birthday card or pay that parking fine? Are your desk and computer similarly festooned with paper or digital reminders? Chances are, they are not very effective. Recent research suggests there is a better way: put an unusual object in a spot where it will catch your eye at the right moment. “There are so many virtuous things we want to do that we don’t follow through on,” says behavioral scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine A sneak peek at the first results from a NASA mission to measure the Moon’s gravitational field hints at a lunar crust that is only half as thick as once thought. There were a few gasps among scientists in the audience at a 13 September seminar at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they took in the data revealed by Maria Zuber, principal investigator for NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission....

The economy has dominated the headlines for years, but unforeseen consequences of life sciences and climate change mitigation are also beginning to weigh heavily on people’s minds. The World Economic Forum experts and industry leaders have gauged the likelihood and potential impact of 50 risks of global significance (the 2013 Global Risks Report came out in January). We have arranged each risk according to how much views have changed in the past year (with the biggest combined increase in estimated likelihood and potential impact at the upper left of the page); orange shading highlights science and technology concerns....

The number zero as we know it arrived in the West circa 1200, most famously delivered by Italian mathematician Fibonacci (aka Leonardo of Pisa), who brought it, along with the rest of the Arabic numerals, back from his travels to north Africa. But the history of zero, both as a concept and a number, stretches far deeper into history—so deep, in fact, that its provenance is difficult to nail down. “There are at least two discoveries, or inventions, of zero,” says Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000)....

Of the many values that typify the American dream, surely one of the most cherished is that of rugged individualism. The “go-it-alone” mentality characterizes all sorts of indispensable American icons, including the brave revolutionaries of 1776, the lonely cowboy on the open range, and the craggy pickup-truck driver in a recent TV advertisement who, the ad declares, is at the age of “knowing how to get things done” (the ad is for Viagra)....

One of the grand strategies nature uses to construct nervous systems is to overproduce neural elements, such as neurons, axons and synapses, and then prune the excess. In fact, this overproduction is so substantial that only about half of the neurons mammalian embryos generate will survive until birth. Why do some neural connections persist, whereas others do not? A common misconception is that neurons that do not make the cut are defective....

Republicans are calling for more oil drilling. Europe says it’s doubling down on clean energy. But as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues into its second week, President Biden has stayed mum about how tectonic shifts in global markets should affect the future of U.S. energy. Gasoline prices have remained Biden’s consistent focus. He expressed concern about rising costs to motorists last month at the invasion’s opening, and again during his State of the Union address last week....

Astronomers just discovered a rare monster galaxy that grew rapidly in the universe’s early days—and then went quiet surprisingly fast. The newfound giant, known as XMM-2599, lies about 12 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that scientists are seeing the galaxy as it existed when the universe was quite young. (The Big Bang that created the universe occurred 13.82 billion years ago.) “Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” Benjamin Forrest, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California Riverside (UCR), said in a statement....

Power plants in the U.S. burned more than one billion tons of coal in 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. Nearly 400 million of those tons came from the region known as Appalachia, a swath of territory stretching along the spine of the Appalachian mountains from southern New York State to northern Mississippi. These ancient mountains hold high-quality bituminous coal, which fuels the aging coal-fired power plants that supply roughly 50 percent of the nation’s electricity and more than 40 percent of the nation’s emissions of carbon dioxide—the leading greenhouse gas....

By Eric HandAs an engineer, Subra Suresh has made a career of studying stress and fatigue: from aluminum alloys in planes and silicon wafers in chips, to the walls of cells infected with malaria. As the man nominated by President Barack Obama’s administration to head the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Suresh may soon find himself as challenged as the materials in his lab, as the agency competes for cash in an increasingly austere budget climate....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration announced its first steps on Friday toward what could be tighter regulation of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has revived U.S. oil and gas production, seeking public input on whether companies should be forced to disclose the contents of so-called fracking fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it would gather public comment for 90 days on whether it should require chemical manufacturers to disclose what is in the fluids that are injected into shale seams to release trapped oil or gas, a technology that has transformed the oil and gas industry....

Building rocket ships out of cardboard boxes is a standard make-believe activity. But a class of Pratt Institute design students in New York City have taken it to the next level. In a partnership with NASA 19 students designed and built scale models of Mars spacecraft interiors over the course of a school year and presented the final products to a NASA representative on May 5. The design and architecture students brought a human-focused eye to their designs, striving to create an home that was both fun and functional for long hauls to and from the Red Planet....