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By Emma MarrisA shortage of a drug used in executions in the United States has sent U.S. states scrambling to find supplies, or alternative drugs. Among the 35 states in which capital punishment is legal, some–including Arizona and California–had been sourcing a key execution drug, sodium thiopental, through a company in London–until UK government officials put a stop to its export. The only U.S. company making the drug, which sought to move its manufacturing base to Italy, has now given up producing sodium thiopental because it cannot assure Italian officials that it won’t be used for executions....

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese—that favorite food of kids, packaged in the nostalgic blue box—will soon be free of yellow dye. Kraft announced Monday that it will remove artificial food coloring, notably Yellow No. 5 and Yellow No. 6 dyes, from its iconic product by January 2016. Instead, the pasta will maintain its bright yellow color by using natural ingredients: paprika, turmeric and annatto (the latter of which is derived from achiote tree seeds)....

CLIMATEWIRE | The next frontier for renewable energy may be found in underwater currents. The Department of Energy is looking to tap that resource through its funding of 11 projects designed to harness the power of moving water in rivers and ocean tidal currents. The long-term goal is to have sources of renewable energy that can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, said Mario Garcia-Sanz, the program’s director....

After police were tipped off about potential wrongdoing at a historic cemetery outside Chicago, they found a large back lot strewn with hundreds of cast-off coffins, smashed sepulchers and old bones. Four employees of the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Ill., have been charged in connection with the grave scheme, which entailed wrongfully exhuming old plots and selling them as new. As the freshly re-bereaved flood the grounds to check on family sites and law enforcement agencies investigate the cemetery’s sparse paper trail, a handful of forensic anthropologists are winding their way through the weedy back lot to assess the crime’s scope....

Since the end of the 19th century, archaeologists have strived to uncover the ancient history of the Near East and to trace the regions biblical roots. They focused on the Fertile Crescent between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris in Iraq, where lie the ruins of the ancient city-states of Assur, Babylon, Ur and Uruk. The architecture, tablets and other artifacts of these cities illustrate a tumultuous history that began more than 5,000 years ago....

A strategy designed to improve memory by delivering brain stimulation through implanted electrodes is undergoing trials in humans. The US military, which is funding the research, hopes that the approach might help many of the thousands of soldiers who have developed deficits to their long-term memory as a result of head trauma. At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on October 17–21, two teams funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency presented evidence that such implanted devices can improve a person’s ability to retain memories....

At long last Earthlings may be on the verge of colonizing another planet—but those first Terran ambassadors will be plants, not humans. NASA is expected to announce within days whether they will attach a one-liter “greenhouse” to its next Mars rover to be launched in 2020. A similar greenhouse would take a voyage to the moon with any team that manages to land a robot there by 2015 to snag Google’s Lunar X PRIZE....

The original definition of planet is wanderer, from the Greeks who watched these bright lights wander through the firmament of fixed stars. Observers discerned nine of these travelers over the course of human history, the last being Pluto in 1930. But recent discoveries of more objects orbiting the sun, both bigger than Pluto and similarly rounded in shape, called into question the arbitrary limit of nine, with some proposing that Pluto did not merit its planetary status....

Many people still chalk up the destructive behavior of a drug addict to a lack of willpower or weakness of character. To a neuroscientist, however, drug addiction is a psychiatric illness that develops when the repeated use of narcotics disrupts brain chemistry. Such a chemical disturbance cries out for a chemical solution—that is, a drug treatment. Doctors have few pharmaceutical remedies for drug addiction, which is often resistant to talk therapy....

Thomas Abdallah has seen a lot of water in his 26 years of work for New York City’s transit system. In December 1992 a nor’easter storm killed the subway’s power, forcing rescue crews to evacuate passengers from flooding tunnels. In August 2007 a five-inch deluge that meteorologists called an “extreme climate event” shut down the system again. So did Hurricane Irene in August 2011. Then came Hurricane Sandy. As Sandy’s storm surge began to flood downtown Manhattan last October, dozens of New York City transit workers scrambled in the wind and rain to place plywood sheets and sandbags across subway entrances....

LAS VEGAS—As tech vendors unleashed a barrage of 3-D HD TVs, smarter smart phones and home energy management systems on the public this week here at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel could not have been happier. All of these high-performance communication and entertainment gadgets generate a lot of data, and someone needs to provide the horsepower to make sure that data flows to where it needs to go. Intel wants to be that someone....

PERCEPTIVE POULTRY In “Brainy Bird,” Carolynn “K-lynn” L. Smith and Sarah L. Zielinski discuss evidence that chickens are more intelligent than has been supposed. Yet the complex behaviors that the authors present as evidence do not support the claim that chickens have advanced cognitive skills. They could just as easily be explained by the blind guidance of genes. For example, the absence of evidence for individual variation in the described chicken actions makes a stronger case for species-specific behavior through natural selection than for mammalian-level cognition....

Western Australia’s plan to start culling sharks in a “more aggressive” attempt to prevent attacks on humans could severely damage populations of threatened great whites, experts say. It is also based on an antiquated approach to the problem, shark researchers say, and seems to contradict the scientific advice given to the region’s government just last year. “My immediate reaction is disgust”, says George Burgess, a noted shark researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville....

Fission in nuclear reactors forges radioactive metal by-products so toxic that they must be stored deep underground, at great cost and effort, for millennia. But a protein made by a common microbe could help ease this hazardous burden, researchers report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Two of nuclear waste’s most problematic ingredients are metals called americium and curium; each has particularly long-lived forms that decay slowly over thousands of years....

Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of The Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.) Most of the world’s children live in low- and middle-income countries. Yet few epidemiological studies of autism prevalence have been conducted in these countries, and little is known about how the symptoms of autism vary from culture to culture. The limited data available suggest that outside North America and Europe, many cases of autism go unrecognized....

We are geoscientists. We have dedicated our lives to studying the Earth, its natural processes and its features. Our days are spent poring over maps, trekking out to ice sheets, mountains and coral reefs, and using satellites to gain some insight into what the Earth is doing around us. We are also women of color. This defines much of our experience in the world. In many situations, we carry burdens that many of our peers do not....

DENPASAR, Indonesia, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Indonesia closed the airport on the tourist island of Bali on Monday and ordered 100,000 residents living near a grumbling volcano spewing columns of ash to evacuate immediately, warning that the first major eruption in 54 years could be “imminent”. The airport was closed for 24 hours from Monday morning, disrupting 445 flights and some 59,000 passengers, after Mount Agung, which killed hundreds of people in 1963, sent volcanic ash high into the sky, and officials said cancellations could be extended....

Name: Greg Graffin Title: Lead singer, Bad Religion Lecturer in life sciences and paleontology at U.C.L.A. Location: Ithaca, N.Y., Los Angeles How are evolution and punk rock related? The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. It’s a process of collective discovery. It’s debate, it’s experimentation, and it’s verification of claims that might be false. In your new book, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World without God, you talk about the “anarchic exuberance of life....

It’s not your normal, electronic silicon-based machine, but scientists have made a computer from a small, circular piece of DNA, then inserted it into a living bacterial cell and unleashed the microbe to solve a mathematical sorting problem. “A computer is any system that can read some input and give some readable output,” says Karmella Haynes, a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina and co-author of a new study appearing in the Journal of Biological Engineering....

Machine-learning algorithms that generate fluent language from vast amounts of text could change how science is done — but not necessarily for the better, says Shobita Parthasarathy, a specialist in the governance of emerging technologies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In a report published on 27 April, Parthasarathy and other researchers try to anticipate societal impacts of emerging artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies called large language models (LLMs). These can churn out astonishingly convincing prose, translate between languages, answer questions and even produce code....