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All In The Family What persuaded the male hominid to stick around after mating? From the standpoint of biology, males have nothing to do after copulation. “It’s literally wham-bam thank-you-ma’am,” says Kermyt G. Anderson, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma–Norman and co-author of Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior. Oddly enough, bird families also tend to have stay-at-home dads. In more than 90 percent of bird species, both parents share the care of their young....

Some scientists are finding fewer risks related to solar geoengineering than determined in earlier studies, adding emphasis to calls for a global body to monitor proposals that would inject substances into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth. A few researchers have also outlined an insurance program that they say might help smaller nations protect themselves from potential but unintended consequences of artificially shading the Earth. Climate scientists David Keith of Harvard University and Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the authors of a paper that attempts to answer a growing political question: Would some nations be worse off if attempts to block solar radiation were combined with emissions cuts to limit the risks of climate change?...

Rose George, a journalist, unreels these shocking statistics in lively, unflinching style as she details this enormous problem that is seldom discussed, hidden in a “social straitjacket of denial.” The book is not all gloom and doom. She lays out possible remedies, from the biogas digesters that turn waste into fuel in China to the agricultural use of sludge in the U.S. And she is not without humor, most notably as she investigates the robo toilets of Japan that wash and dry the private parts and even check blood pressure....

The gadget blogs may work themselves into a frenzy over megapixels and processor speed. But if you want to know what really dazzles the masses, consider a feature that’s rarely called out by name: machine recognition of real-world sights and sounds. The success stories in this category represent triumphs of computation and software. Speech transcription on laptops and desktop computers is awesomely accurate. Gestures on touch screens are generally reliable (there are, after all, a limited number of movements to recognize)....

LONDON — A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference. Researchers are now corroborating what some trauma sufferers have happened upon by chance: Focusing on a highly engaging visual-spatial task, such as playing video games, may significantly reduce the occurrence of flashbacks, the mental images concerning the trauma that intrude on the sufferer afterward....

Research on climate change today focuses mostly on the future, taking stock of how humans have influenced the planet and using computer models to project unwanted changes like warming temperatures or rising seas and ways we might avoid them. But a new report suggests that there’s value in looking at not just how humans shape the climate, but how the climate shaped human development going back millions of years. “How we get here is relevant to where we are going as a species,” says the analysis released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences....

Although three weeks have passed since the fire started, there remain over 1,000 firefighters and 50 helicopters in Fort McMurray, Canada to fight the wildfire raging there. One thousand more firefighters are expected in the next week and the fire remains “out of control.” The fire covers more than 522,000 hectares, but is no longer considered a threat to nearby communities. Also fortunately, gas and electricity have been restored to the surrounding areas, and residents will be allowed to start returning to their homes in the areas deemed safe starting in June....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. On May 18, 2022, Massachusetts health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed a single case of monkeypox in a patient who had recently traveled to Canada. Cases have also been reported in the United Kingdom and Europe. Monkeypox isn’t a new disease. The first confirmed human case was in 1970, when the virus was isolated from a child suspected of having smallpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)....

In 2021 Republican legislatures in 19 states passed 34 laws that restricted access to voting in more than a dozen different ways. And those are just the bills that succeeded; hundreds of other provisions, some still under consideration, were introduced nationwide. “The momentum around this legislation continues,” the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks these efforts, wrote on its Web site. At least 165 restrictive voting bills were already on the docket for this year by mid-January....

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions unlike any other act. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairy tales, pecks that revive princesses. Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing, they satisfy hungers of a different kind....

It was an otherwise normal day in November when Madeline Lancaster realized that she had accidentally grown a brain. For weeks, she had been trying to get human embryonic stem cells to form neural rosettes, clusters of cells that can become many different types of neuron. But for some reason her cells refused to stick to the bottom of the culture plate. Instead they floated, forming strange, milky-looking spheres. “I didn’t really know what they were,” says Lancaster, who was then a postdoc at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna....

Indonesia, one of the world’s leading producers of tuna, decided several years ago it had had enough of illegal foreign fishing boats entering its exclusive economic zone and taking an average of $4 billion a year in fisheries profits. In 2014 the Southeast Asian nation—a vast archipelago of more than 13,000 islands—imposed a one-year moratorium on fishing vessels built abroad, in order to evaluate their impact. During the moratorium officials discovered boats disguising foreign ownership under local names, falsifying Indonesian fishing permits or using the same permit for multiple boats....

In the wake of radioactive releases from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, critics are saying a California nuclear plant’s susceptibility to earthquakes and tsunamis could affect its chances of renewing its operating license. While the federal licenses for Pacific Gas & Electric’s Diablo Canyon plant, near San Luis Obispo, and Southern California Edison’s San Onofre plant are valid for at least another decade, both utilities have begun the renewal process ahead of time....

One of the enduring mysteries of medicine is how individual genes, environment and lifestyle may combine to spark sickness or protect us from it. Unraveling this puzzle remains essential for scientists hoping to achieve the elusive goal of offering tailored treatments or personalized prevention plans. That’s why Pres. Barack Obama in 2015 announced an ambitious plan to roll out a precision medicine initiative that would aim to enroll a diverse group of one million people....

Seas could rise as fast as three centimeters a year if fossil fuel consumption continues at its present rate. Such increases would amount to ten times the current rise of roughly three millimeters annually. But Antarctica’s vast ice sheets may substantially melt and accelerate the rise of seawaters should the burning of fossil fuel continue unabated, according to new computer simulations of climate change’s future impact. Scientists had previously thought that East Antarctica’s massive ice sheets were relatively safe, requiring thousands of years to pass before warming global temperatures would begin to melt them....

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta—Where does the U.S. get the bulk of the imported petroleum to support its oil addiction? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not Saudi Arabia—it’s Canada, which supplies the U.S. with more than two million barrels of oil per day, or more than a quarter of all its imported oil. And more than half of that output comes from bitumen melted out of the buried sands of northeastern Alberta—a sprawling deposit of extra-heavy oil underlying more than 142,000 square kilometers, or an area roughly the size of Florida....

Clément Sire isn’t just a statistical physicist—he’s also a champion bridge player. Combining his love of physics and games, he has created a model of the poker variant Texas hold ’em that enables him to do everything from predicting the length of a tournament to figuring out his ranking simply by assessing the average size of his opponents’ fortunes. It may seem like an odd way to spend his time. After all, isn’t physics supposed to be about particle colliders and superconductivity?...

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor accident has focused new attention on how much ionizing radiation people are exposed to from different sources (see list below). By far the largest source is medical imaging technology (see “Graphic Science: Exposed” in the May 2011 issue). Americans, on average, are exposed to 3.1 millisieverts of radiation a year from natural background factors such as radon gas from the Earth and cosmic rays from the universe....

Adults may resist scientific facts because of childhood experiences. Yale University psychologists note that before children can even speak, they develop common-sense assumptions about the physical world that can persist into adulthood and clash with scientific discoveries. For instance, because objects fall down if not held up, kids may have trouble accepting the world is round, reasoning that things on the other side should naturally fall off. Intuitive notions concerning psychology also lead children to see everything as designed for some reason—for example, a cloud’s purpose might be to rain—which can lead to opposition to evolution....

The first generation of World Wide Web capabilities rapidly transformed retailing and information search. More recent attributes such as blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have just as quickly expanded people’s ability not just to consume online information but to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions as journalism, marketing and even politicking to adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating. Science could be next....