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Editor’s note: This is an extended version of the News Scan story “Expert Education,” from the June 2010 Scientific American. DEATH VALLEY, CALIF. —The dozen students and scientists spread over an area called Furnace Creek looked like cyborgs in floppy hats scrabbling over the boulders. Before hammering chips off rocks, they inspected them with magnifying lenses held up next to eyeglasses sporting miniature cameras and infrared lights. A seasoned geologist could tease out a history of earthshaking clashes here from evidence in the terrain—a break in a steep grey slope, for instance, suggested a fault at work fracturing the landscape....

The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won’t be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost....

Wild estimates were tossed around to describe how many sex-starved cicadas were expected to crawl out of the ground leading up to this year’s debut of a new generation of Brood II. Some said there would be up to 30 billion. Some said 1 trillion. Still others said cicadas would outnumber people 600 to 1. Now that the emergence is in full bloom, and in some places likely reaching its end, residents in much of New York City, Washington, D....

October 1965 Protein from Oil “In a pilot plant at Lavera in France, substantial amounts of high-grade protein are being produced by microorganisms growing on a diet consisting mainly of petroleum hydrocarbons. This unusual concept, tested by a research team of the Société Française des Petroles BP, has proved so successful that there is good reason to believe petroleum will become an important food resource for the earth’s growing population. Why turn to petroleum to solve the food problem?...

It’s already Halloween in some countries, which means there’s a new Google doodle. Already live in Australia (and soon elsewhere) is a new doodle for the holiday, which lets users become a witch and create a witch’s brew. Related stories The wizards behind Google’s doodles li> At Google, doodling is real work Google breaks old promise by working on search banner ads Users can combine various ingredients to play mini games, from whack-a-mole with the undead, to a shell game where your goal is to find a mummy in a coffin....

Several years of contentious debate over the Internet’s future come to a head next week. On February 26 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will decide whether local communities can take a more active role in upgrading their access to high-speed broadband. During the same session, the regulatory agency will vote on the so-called “Net neutrality” issue that would ban paid prioritization of Internet traffic as well as the blocking and throttling of online content and services....

That update lowered the odds of an El Niño occurring in fall and early winter to 65 percent, down from 80 percent last month. But “we’re still fairly confident that El Niño will come,” said Michelle L’Heureux a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, who puts out the El Niño forecasts along with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. If and when the El Niño forms, it would influence weather and climate patterns in particular regions around the globe, for example, tamping down on hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean....

Borrowing ideas from weather forecasting, researchers have developed a system to predict, weeks in advance, when a city will see the peak of its seasonal flu outbreak. A reliable flu forecast could limit an outbreak by informing people and health officials so they can step up protective measures, the researchers said. The researchers tested the model on 108 cities across the United States during the 2012-2013 flu season, and found they could accurately predict the timing of the influenza peak in more than 60 percent of the cities two to four weeks in advance, on average, according to the study, published today (Dec....

Low-lying communities from Minnesota to Missouri are bracing for what could be the Mississippi Basin’s worst flooding since 1993 as temperatures rise and rainstorms continue to track over areas with deep winter snowpack. The weekend brought some of the worst flooding in decades to towns along the Missouri River and its tributaries in Nebraska and Iowa, killing two and forcing evacuations from communities south of Omaha, Neb. By yesterday, the focus was shifting south and east toward Kansas City and then to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers north of St....

The word “archaeology” typically brings to mind crumbling ruins from ancient civilizations—not gleaming rocket ships or high-tech spacecraft. But more than 60 years of space missions have scattered countless artifacts throughout Earth orbit and across the solar system, creating a historic legacy of exploration for current and future generations. Alice Gorman, a researcher at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, is one of a few pioneering “space archaeologists” studying the Space Age....

FEBRUARY 1957 THE INFLUENZA VIRUS–“The virus particle has a relatively simple structure which we may hope to understand fairly well. The normal living cell is something of which our knowledge is both enormously extensive and utterly incomplete. The infected cell presents us with a far more complex problem. It is perhaps characteristic of the growing edge of biology that when a new phenomenon like virus multiplication comes to be studied, almost all the knowledge of cellular chemistry and function gained from other types of study turns out to be irrelevant....

After a few false starts, astronomers say they have finally observed water vapor in the atmosphere of a so-called hot Jupiter, a large gaseous planet tightly orbiting a distant star. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, a research team measured the infrared starlight shining through the atmosphere of planet HD 189733 b as it passed in front of its star 63 light-years away. The planet soaked up infrared light at several wavelengths in a pattern expected of water molecules, as detailed online today in Nature....

Modern physics began with a sweeping unification: in 1687 Isaac Newton showed that the existing jumble of disparate theories describing everything from planetary motion to tides to pendulums were all aspects of a universal law of gravitation. Unification has played a central role in physics ever since. In the middle of the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell found that electricity and magnetism were two facets of electromagnetism. One hundred years later electromagnetism was unified with the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity, in what physicists call the electroweak theory....

Ariel Knafo, associate professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, responds: The jury is still out on whether we are fundamentally generous or greedy and whether these tendencies are shaped by our genes or environment. Some evidence points to humans being innately cooperative. Studies show that in the first year of life, infants exhibit empathy toward others in distress. At later stages in life we routinely work together to reach goals and help out in times of need....

By Keith Coffman DENVER (Reuters) - Crews rescued a 19-year-old Canadian climber stranded on a ledge at 13,000 feet (3,940 meters) in a rugged part of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, a park official said on Wednesday. The climber, identified as Samuel Frappier of Quebec, had been in an “extremely precarious” perch on Longs Peak, about 60 miles (97 km) northwest of Denver, before rangers reached him, park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said....

Conservation often seems to boil down to preserving the environment versus economic opportunity. If a given patch of land is saved, then a farmer will go hungry. If a marine reserve is created, then fisherfolk will lose their jobs. But two new studies demonstrate that intact ecosystems offer a variety of economic benefits, and preserving the environment may do more economic good than bad. Robin Naidoo and Taylor Ricketts of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) performed a classic cost-benefit analysis of the Mbaracay Forest Nature Reserve in eastern Paraguay, part of the disappearing Atlantic woods of South America....

SAVE THE INSECTS Dell Computer had $56 billion in sales during its last fiscal year. That amount, however, is less—by a billion—than the estimate of the value that bees, dung beetles and other insects bring every year to the U.S. economy. Cornell University entomologist Jon E. Losey and Mace Vaughan of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Ore., made the first ever estimate of “services” provided by wild insects in a study that appeared in the April issue of the journal Bioscience—one that the authors acknowledge is “very conservative”—only a small fraction of the actual benefits furnished by creatures considered by many to be mere pests....

Those days are long gone when placing a telephone call meant simply picking up the receiver and asking the operator to patch you through. Modern cell phones require users to navigate a series of menus to find numbers, place calls or check messages. Even the most tech-savvy may take weeks to discover some of the more arcane multimedia functions. Imagine the difficulty for someone unable to read. That is the challenge for mobile communications companies aiming to branch out into developing countries....

Disposable gowns designed to deflect the splatter of bodily fluids, used in thousands of U.S. hospitals, have underperformed in recent and ongoing laboratory tests and may fall short of safety standards, leaving health care workers with a greater risk of infection than advertised. A peer-reviewed academic study, published to little notice amid the coronavirus pandemic, found that isolation gowns commonly worn in medical units or intensive care units ripped too easily and allowed about four to 14 times the expected amount of liquid to seep through when sprayed or splashed....

NORTHERN TULI GAME RESERVE, Botswana—The African wild dogs are about 80 feet (25 meters) away as Craig Jackson slips out of his Land Rover with a softball-size wad of tinfoil. He unwraps the dank sand—reeking of ammonia and other unidentified compounds—and plunks it on the ground. The sand was collected hundreds of kilometers away on the Okavango River Delta where two pack leaders, Yollo and Chinaca, had left their scent-laced urine....