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The dramatic neutron-star merger that astronomers spotted last year generated a jet of material that seemed to move at four times the speed of light, a new study reports. “Seemed” is the operative word here, of course; the laws of physics tell us that nothing can travel faster through space than light. So, the superluminal motion was an illusion, which was caused by the jet’s (still very fast) speed and the fact that it blasted almost directly at us, researchers said....

Are you impressed with meals that look like one food but are actually made of something else? Tofu burgers and artificial crabmeat, for example, are not what they appear to be. It’s actually an old trick. In medieval times fish was cooked to imitate venison during Lent, and celebratory banquets included extravagant (and sometimes disturbing) delicacies such as meatballs made to resemble oranges, trout prepared to look like peas and shellfish made into mock viscera....

Excerpted with permission from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. Available from Crown Archetype/Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2013. September 28, 2002, is one of the most significant dates in the history of American sports. You won’t find it in the record books. That morning, on a stainless steel autopsy table inside the Allegheny County coroner’s office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, lay the body of Mike Webster, the legendary center of the Pittsburgh Steelers....

Tropical cyclones, or hurricanes as they are known in the regions bordering the Atlantic Ocean, are among nature’s fiercest manifestations, capable of releasing as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs. Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast leaving more than 1,800 people dead; Typhoon Morakot killed more people and did more damage to Taiwan than any other storm there in recorded history; and Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar (Burma) and resulted in at least 146,000 fatalities....

These brightly colored bikes and their riders, often seen braving a gauntlet of impatient taxis, city buses and delivery trucks in dense urban areas, are nearly ubiquitous in these cities, granting commuters the freedom to leave their cars behind and get to their destination on their own schedule without having to walk far or take a bus or train. Several things are nearly certain about these bike-sharing programs and the more than 25 others across the country: Since 2007 when the first program began in Tulsa, nobody has ever died on a bike-share bike, a statistical oddity to be sure....

Pluto lovers, don’t despair: Researchers have not given up the fight for the former ninth planet. Many of them put up a fuss two years ago when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded Pluto to the status of mere dwarf planet. Now they plan to revive the debate, this time under the banner of public understanding of science. Researchers on both sides of the issue are set to gather in August at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md....

Harlem’s first Starbucks, heralded as a sign of urban renewal when it opened in 1999, sits at the intersection of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, just down the street from the historic Apollo Theater. One recent weekday morning, customers of every imaginable race and socioeconomic stratum pour through the coffee chain’s doors, where a massive portrait of its most famous investor, basketball great Magic Johnson, graces one of its walls....

As surface water has dwindled during California’s epic drought, desperate farmers and municipalities have staged a run on other sources: the state’s vast underground hydrological savings banks, such as aquifers beneath the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins. Before the great dry spell, about 40 percent of California’s water supply came from these underground reservoirs. But by 2015, the percentage had jumped to 75. Refilling these vaults won’t be easy because they’ve been drained so heavily....

The little tips of chromosomes get shorter every time a cell divides, and this shortening is a mark of cellular aging. If they get short enough, the cell dies or stops dividing. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her studies on telomeres with colleagues Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, has spent the better part of her career trying to figure out why. In recent years, Blackburn has expanded on that initial work to show that these gauges of cellular health serve as barometers of environmental and emotional stress and predictors of various diseases....

The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts—their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues. A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second language—even one learned in adolescence—affects how people read in their native tongue. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again....

Nine countries could kill many people on a moment’s notice by launching missiles carrying nuclear warheads. A 10th, Iran, may be weaponizing uranium. The U.S., Russia and China can bomb virtually any country with long-range ballistic missiles and, along with France and the U.K., could do the same using submarines. The effects of even one bomb could far exceed the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “People came fleeing…. One after another they were almost unrecognizable....

“How do you tell a community in the United States that has no running water or electricity to wash their hands?” Crystal Lee drives hours through dust on Route 66 past the border town of Gallup, N.M., on her way through the parched road to the Navajo Nation in Arizona. She is going to see family who have made it through the pandemic. “Every single day, I knew of someone who had passed from COVID,” Lee says, staring straight ahead....

BEIJING, Aug 9 (Reuters) - A typhoon battered China’s east coast on Sunday, killing eight people and forcing authorities to cancel hundreds of flights and evacuate more than 163,000 people. Typhoon Soudelor killed six people in Taiwan earlier on the weekend then moved across the Taiwan Strait and slammed into the mainland’s Fujian province late on Saturday. It churned towards the neighbouring provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi on Sunday, the Xinhua state news agency said....

Starting a science graduate degree was one of the most exciting things to happen to each of us. We also knew that graduate school would be particularly difficult. Skylar has a heart condition called polymorphic arrhythmia and has an implantable cardioverter defibrillator that ended her scientific scuba-diving career. Gabi has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a disorder that weakens the protein collagen in her body and causes widespread pain. Although our conditions challenge us in different ways, we are able to cope and function at high levels....

Many animals, including some mammals and birds, are known to avoid power lines in remote regions. Now scientists propose that this behavior may result from the sensitivity of some Arctic animals’ eyes to ultraviolet (UV) light emitted from the cables. Although some humans may find power lines and pylons aesthetic eyesores, the huge flashes of UV light they emit are beyond the limits of human vision. However, to animals that can see in this visual range, power lines and pylons appear as “horrendous” structures sending “massive flashes across the sky”, says Glen Jeffery, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London....

Glen Whitney, a mathematician and former hedge fund manager, was disappointed when Long Island’s Goudreau Museum, a small space devoted to math, closed a few years ago. His response: think much bigger. In December his Museum of Mathematics is scheduled to open near Manhattan’s Flatiron District. “From the moment you walk in, you will be surrounded by math, whether you know it or not,” Whitney says. The museum is designed to be fun, but it also has a serious purpose....

Last of a three-part series. To see the first two parts, click here and here. As plug-in electric vehicle sales continue to putt along, automakers are increasingly pinning their hopes on hydrogen fuel cells as the clean vehicle technology of the future. Fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) produce zero tailpipe emissions. On a life-cycle basis, FCVs running on hydrogen derived from steam-reforming natural gas—currently the most affordable way of making hydrogen—produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of a gasoline-powered car....

Despite a massive international effort to eradicate poliomyelitis, the disease is alive and well in some corners of the world. Several previously polio-free African countries have now become re-infected because of major outbreaks in northern Nigeria where, experts say, vaccine campaigns are flawed and failing. “There are not enough kids, particularly in the northern part of the country [getting vaccinated]…. In some areas, as much as 40 to 50 percent of the kids are missed in the vaccination campaign,” says Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesperson for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Polio Eradication Initiative....

Imagine if we could hop over to our nearest massive galaxy neighbor Andromeda and check out what our Milky Way looks like from the outside. Or, want to know if the recently discovered Earth-like exoplanet is habitable? Send a probe over to check! The main challenge to space exploration has never been our imagination, or even our ability to come up with new technologies to make space flight possible, but the vastness of space....

The year is 1974, and Harry Caul is monitoring a couple walking through a crowded Union Square in San Francisco. He uses shotgun microphones to secretly record their conversation, but at a critical point, a nearby percussion band drowns out the conversation. Ultimately Harry has to use an improbable gadget to extract the nearly inaudible words, “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” from the recordings. This piece of audio forensics was science fiction when it appeared in the movie The Conversation more than three decades ago....