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By Jill Serjeant NEW YORK (Reuters) - Long-running children’s television show “Sesame Street” is welcoming a new kid to the block - a Muppet with autism called Julia. A redhead who loves to sing and remembers the words to lots of songs, Julia will debut on the show for preschoolers on April 10 after a five-year outreach effort to families and experts on autism, Sesame Workshop said on Monday. “For years, families of children with autism have asked us to address the issue,” Dr....

Sometime early in this century the intelligence of machines will exceed that of humans. Within a quarter of a century, machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to physical movement. They will claim to have feelings and, unlike today’s virtual personalities, will be very convincing when they tell us so. By around 2020 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain....

“there is a bilaterian in that truck,” Jun-Yuan Chen said as we watched the vehicle disappear around a bend in the road. Chen, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing, and I, along with Stephen Q. Dornbos, a colleague then at the University of Southern California, had just collected a truckload of black rocks from a 580-million- to 600-million-year-old deposit in Guizhou Province. Chen was sure they held something important....

Fittest Cities Minneapolis–St. Paul Washington, D.C. Boston Portland, Ore. Denver San Francisco Hartford, Conn. Seattle Virginia Beach, Va. Sacramento, Calif. The American Fitness Index, an annual report from the American College of Sports Medicine, ranked America’s fittest cities based on both residents’ health and cities’ accommodations for physical fitness and health. The index is based on how many residents are overweight, how many smoke and how many exercise regularly. The cities themselves also had to perform well in terms of the opportunities they provided for residents to exercise and eat healthily....

This story was original published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – Speed skaters move so fast that air resistance is a major factor in each race. At the low, near-sea-level elevation of Sochi, Russia, air resistance will be too high for competitors at the 2014 Winter Olympics to set any new world records, experts predict. All world records in men’s and women’s traditional, long-track speed skating, from 500-meter sprints to 10,000-meter races taking more than 12 minutes, were set at tracks in cities more than 3,400 feet above sea level....

Reading a good book immerses you in a character’s world—and may change your views, according to a recent study at Ohio State University. Psychologists Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby assigned 78 heterosexual males to read one of three stories, two about a homosexual protagonist and one about a heterosexual protagonist. Afterward, the readers reported having no trouble identifying with the straight character, but their ability to relate to the gay protagonist varied based on when they discovered his orientation....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

When the first wave of coronavirus infections hit the U.S. in March 2020, what kept me up at night was not only the tragedy of the acute crisis but also the idea that we might soon be facing a second crisis—a pandemic of chronic illness triggered by the virus. I had just finished reporting and writing a book about infection-associated syndromes and contested chronic illnesses, long an underresearched and dismissed area of medicine....

The number of people engaged in scientific research has been rising strongly. China reports a tripling of researchers between 1995 and 2008, with substantial growth currently; South Korea doubled the number of researchers between 1995 and 2006 and continues its upward swing. Even the U.S. and Europe have posted gains. The research workforce grew by 36 percent in the U.S. between 1995 and 2007 and by 65 percent in Europe between 1995 and 2010....

I developed what appears to be a photographic memory when I was 16 years old. Does this kind of memory truly exist, and, if so, how did I develop it? —Peter Gordon, Scotland Barry Gordon, a professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (and no relation), offers an explanation: The intuitive notion of a “photographic” memory is that it is just like a photograph: you can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail, zooming in on different parts....

By Rex DaltonThe rapper Earl ‘DMX’ Simmons is not known for his conciliatory lyrics. So Tyrone Hayes, a biologist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, drew from Simmons’s lexicon earlier this year while writing a series of ’trash-talking’ e-mails to representatives of Syngenta, the world’s largest producer of the herbicide atrazine.Those e-mails, which Hayes says were prompted by a heated encounter with a Syngenta scientist, are included in an ethics complaint that Syngenta filed with top University of California officials on July 19....

The renewable ethanol fuel blended into the United States’ gasoline supply does not lower prices at the pump as advocates have claimed, according to a study released this week by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The paper critiques earlier studies sponsored by the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), which found that mixing ethanol with transportation fuel reduced gasoline prices by 89 cents in 2010 and $1.09 in 2011. “The RFA and Secretary of Agriculture are relying on the [papers] for policy recommendations, and once I started seeing signs and billboards all around D....

The lasting legacy of climate change will be heat. The land, the oceans, all of it. It’s the tie that binds and while the global average temperature is the defining metric, the increasing incidence of heat waves and longer lasting extreme heat is how the world will experience it. All eight papers dealing with extreme heat events in this year’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s attribution report show a clear climate change signal that made them more likely, more hot or both....

The Wall Street mantra “greed is good” could soon be adopted by cosmologists to explain the origins of dark energy, the mysterious entity that is speeding up the expansion of the Universe. At a cosmology meeting last week in Cambridge, UK, attendants debated a controversial class of theories in which gravity is carried by a hypothetical ‘graviton’ particle that has a small, but still non-vanishing, mass. Such a particle would tend to gobble up vast amounts of energy from the fabric of space, enabling the Universe to expand at an accelerated, although not destructive, pace....

More than 1 million acres of Texas plains and forests has gone up in smoke this month as hundreds of fires blazed through the Lone Star State. Gusting winds, statewide drought and low humidity have created tinderbox conditions that state and federal firefighters are still struggling to contain. Lacking a forecast of steady downpours to cool the scorching earth, the Texas Forest Service is expecting the fire conditions to continue wreaking havoc throughout the state....

Two fossils have got paleontologists scratching their heads about where to place an enigmatic group of animals in the mammalian family tree. A team analyzing one fossil suggests that the group belongs in mammals, but researchers looking at the other propose that its evolutionary clan actually predates true mammals. The situation begs for more analysis, more fossils, or both, experts say. The fossils represent previously unknown species, described today in Nature....

High exposure to the toxic metal cadmium could prematurely age cells, potentially triggering a number of diseases as people age, according to a new study. In a large national study, high exposure to cadmium was linked to shorter telomeres, “bits of DNA that act as caps” on chromosomes to help stabilize genes, said Ami Zota, a George Washington University assistant professor of environmental and occupational health who led the study. Shorten those caps too much, and cells weaken, leading to diseases....

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. —Al Pacino in Scarface, 1983 In the studio of sculptor Tom Eckert, life appears to imitate art. A new snow shovel—Eckert cannot get much use of it in Tempe, Ariz.—hangs on the back wall, covered by a sheer piece of fabric. We had seen photographs of Eckert’s art before our visit, so we suspect that the translucent curtain is carved out of wood....

Whales, dolphins, seals and other marine mammals can generate their own heat and maintain a stable body temperature despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Like people, they are endothermic homeotherms—or more colloquially, “warm-blooded.” But these animals take thermoregulation to an extreme, enduring water temperatures as low as –2 degrees Celsius (28.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and air temperatures reaching –40 degrees C (–40 degrees F). How do they pull it off? And don’t they ever feel cold?...

The detective story had begun, as they always do, with a ringing phone. A biologist was on the line. He had found a corpse. A few days later he called a second time, having found another. Soon the calls were coming “again and again,” Melissa A. Miller recalls. “At the hghest point, we were getting four a day.” As the bodies piled up, so did the questions. Miller is a wildlife pathologist and veterinarian....