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By Ellen WulfhorstNEW YORK (Reuters) - The eastern United States faces a major winter storm this week that could reach blizzard conditions in some areas and snarl plans for travelers returning from holiday trips, forecasters said on Wednesday.The powerful storm will stretch from the Midwest into the mid-Atlantic states and New England on Thursday and Friday, forecasters said.“We are telling people, prepare for road closings and take mass transit. Especially tomorrow,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters in a conference call about the storm....

The elegant spiral shape of galaxies is one of the quintessential sights of astronomy. A classic example is the galaxy Messier 51: it resembles a giant cyclone, and one of the first names given to it was the “whirlpool.” The brightest stars in this galaxy are confined like pearls on a coiled necklace. Running alongside the strands of stars are dark swaths of dust, which betray the presence of interstellar gas, from which stars are born....

Star Trek portrayed a vision of the future that was more equitable and just than the world we live in—but the way it articulated space as a “final frontier” recalls a legacy of violent frontier exploration and colonialism in the name of displacement and resource extraction. Quilombolas from the ethnic territory of Alcântara, are all too familiar with this history. Quilombolas, the descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations in Brazil to create their own settlements, called quilombos, have historically faced racism and exclusion at the hands of the Brazilian state....

If you enjoy computerized personality tests, you might consider visiting Apply Magic Sauce (https://applymagicsauce.com). The Web site prompts you to enter some text you have written—such as e-mails or blogs—along with information about your activities on social media. You do not have to provide social media data, but if you want to do it, you either allow Apply Magic Sauce to access your Facebook and Twitter accounts or follow directions for uploading selected data from those sources, such as your history of pressing Facebook’s “like” buttons....

A sheriff’s deputy pulls up to the emergency room at Scott County Hospital in rural Oneida, Tenn., with an agitated, disoriented passenger who appears to need psychiatric care, maybe even immediate hospitalization. But no one at the county hospital is trained to make that decision. The nearest qualified person is 59 miles across the state, at the Ridgeview Psychiatric Hospital in Oak Ridge. Only a few years ago a member of Ridgeview’s Mobile Crisis Team would have driven for 90 minutes, mostly over winding back roads, to Oneida....

The Ebola epidemic in Africa has loomed large over the chemistry community in 2015, as medicinal chemists found themselves in a race against time in a battle against the deadly disease. In January, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) tested an experimental vaccine on 60 human volunteers that elicited an immune response on all those it was tested on. But the efficacy of the vaccine was quickly questioned as the response was much lower than that exhibited in macaques....

Two years ago paleoanthropologists were knocked for a loop by the discovery of an 18,000-year-old human skeleton, later nicknamed the Hobbit, on the Indonesian island of Flores. Hardly more than a meter tall, with a skull the size of a grapefruit, the Hobbit did not seem like Homo sapiens to its discoverers, and neither did the much more fragmentary remains unearthed alongside it. The Hobbit’s small braincase and broad pelvis are characteristics normally associated with much older hominid species, but in other ways its skull resembled that of the more recent Homo erectus....

Dozens of studies in the past few years have linked single genes to whether a person is liberal or conservative, has a strong party affiliation or is likely to vote reguarly. The discipline of “genopolitics” has grabbed headlines as a result, but is the claim that a few genes influence political views and actions legitimate? We don’t think so. The kinds of studies that have produced many of the findings we question involve searching for connections between behavior and gene variants that occur frequently in the population....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The World Bank is considering increasing cash grants for the poor in the Philippines after the island nation was hit by a devastating typhoon at the weekend.The development lender provides such grants via the Philippine government to encourage the country’s poorest people to send their children to school and check their health.The bank is now discussing with the government whether to increase the speed and volume of the transfers after Typhoon Haiyan, or to remove conditions placed on them, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told a news briefing on Tuesday....

March 1961 Food for Climate Skeptics “The frigid winter now ending may be, unhappily, no fluke. The warming trend that had dominated world climate during most of the years since 1880 appears to have come to an end. Murray Mitchell, Jr., of the U.S. Weather Bureau reported that mean annual temperatures have dropped in both Northern and Southern hemispheres by 0.2 degree Fahr­en­heit since the early 1940s. In many areas climatic conditions have already returned to those that prevailed in the 1920s....

By Alex Dobuzinskis LOS ANGELES, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Officials have unveiled plans for a grassy bridge over a Southern California highway that would provide a safe and natural passage for mountain lions and other animals migrating between wilderness areas. The vegetation-lined bridge over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills, just west of Los Angeles, would cost $30 million to build and construction could not begin for years, said California Department of Transportation (CalTRANS) spokeswoman Lauren Wonder....

Quantum dots are fluorescent nanoparticles of semiconducting material. The color of light that they emit varies with the size of the dot, shifting toward the blue end of the spectrum as they get smaller. Proposed applications for dots include lasers, color displays and bioimaging. But realizing their commercial potential has been slow, because the dots are expensive; they go for at least $2,000 a gram, largely because of pricey solvents used in their manufacture....

Among hundreds of genes that might nudge your risk of Alzheimer’s up or down, Apolipoprotein E (APOE) has the strongest effect. Scientists discovered a quarter century ago that people with the APOE ε4 version of this gene are four to 15 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s, a deadly brain disorder that afflicts more than five million Americans. Yet how APOE actually sets off dementia has been somewhat of a mystery—and efforts to use it as a drug target have floundered....

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a male figure perfectly inscribed in a circle and square, known as the “Vitruvian Man,” illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world. However, new research suggests that the work, which dates to 1490, may be a copy of an earlier drawing by Leonardo’s friend....

When the animators at Walt Disney Studios first dressed up Rapunzel, the long-haired star of the forthcoming movie Tangled, and had her spin around in front of a mirror, she froze mid-turn, and the folds in her multilayered purple dress turned stiff as shells. The filmmakers had run up against a challenge that has long plagued sartorially inclined animators. “From very early on, we knew we wanted to get more elaborate clothing than had been done so far in [computer graphics],” says Rasmus Tamstorf, a senior research scientist at Walt Disney Animation Studios Research....

Editor’s Note (02/08/18): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published February 19, 2010, in light of the 2018 Winter Games which begin on February 9 in PyeongChang, South Korea. Having won six medals in his career, Seattle-based speed skater Apolo Ohno stands to make U.S. Winter Olympic history if he wins another one in upcoming short-track competition—the 1,000-meter race this weekend or the 5,000-meter relay on February 26. In various reports, Ohno has said that he’s in the best physical shape of his life, weighing five kilograms less than he did for the 2006 Games in Torino, Italy, and nine kilograms less than he did for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a chapter in the book Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good by David Linden. Copyright (c) 2001 by David Linden. In studies where the food intake and energy expenditure of subjects are carefully monitored over a period of weeks to months (which tends to average out day-to-day fluctuations) a remarkable balance between calories consumed and calories burned was observed....

In their final moments, the last protons flew at nearly the speed of light. They completed the 27-kilometer loop underneath the Alpine countryside 11,245 times a second until they were released from their metal coil and slammed into a giant steel-coated graphite block. Since December 2018, other than a few tests here and there, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been offline. But on April 22 the LHC fired up again and commenced its third run....

From the COVID vaccine to pulsars to computer programming, women are at the source of many scientific discoveries, inventions and innovations that shape our lives. But in the stories we’ve come to accept about those breakthroughs, women are too often left out. Each season at Lost Women of Science, we’ll look at one woman and her scientific accomplishment: who she was, how she lived and what she found out. Katie Hafner, a longtime reporter for the New York Times, explains the science behind each woman’s work and explores the historical context in which she lived....

We all carry in our heads various mental representations of our body—one example is the well-known brain map of our sense of touch, sometimes called a homunculus. New studies show how such mental maps blur with age and readily extend to accommodate bionic limbs. Blurred Bodies As we age, our sense of touch becomes less accurate—some elderly people have a tough time reading Braille, for example. Looking for the roots of this sensory decline, German researchers at Ruhr University Bochum stumbled on a surprise: rather than shriveling up, the brain’s sensory body map—which helps us discriminate Braille letters by determining where the raised bumps are in relation to one another—expands with age, exactly as it does during learning....