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When Apple’s iPhone hit the streets last year, it introduced so-called multi-touch screens to the general public. Images on the screen can be moved around with a fingertip and made bigger or smaller by placing two fingertips on the image’s edges and then either spreading those fingers apart or bringing them closer together. The tactile pleasure the interface provides beyond its utility quickly brought it accolades. The operations felt intuitive, even sensuous....

By Eric HandAfter the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) settled into orbit around the red planet in 1997, a magnetometer on board began sending back measurements that have puzzled planetary scientists ever since. A section of the martian crust appeared to consist of long “stripes” of iron-bearing minerals permanently magnetized with alternating orientations. Clearly, an ancient dynamo imprinted its field in the rock during the planet’s early history. But why the stripes?...

Anybody who has taken an undergraduate psychology course or filled out one of those online tests is probably familiar with the “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. For example, if you identify with the statement “I talk to a lot of different people at parties,” you might score high on extraversion. An individual’s personality is thought to be fairly stable by adulthood, and the idea that it can be measured by just a handful of factors goes back at least a century....

People across the U.S. are living longer, but life expectancy for residents along the East and West Coasts and in central Colorado and Alaska has risen more than it has in the Southeast and other disparate locations. Although the national average increased from 73.8 to 79.1 years from 1980 to 2014, the gap between counties with the highest and lowest rates grew to a startling 20 years (large graph). Equally surprising is that the disparity is driven not so much by income or race—long thought to be the greatest factors—but by behaviors such as inactivity and metabolic conditions such as diabetes (set of three graphs)....

By Joseph J. Kolb ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (Reuters) - The Los Alamos National Laboratory is evaluating how to meet a June deadline to permanently discard plutonium-tainted junk in light of a prolonged shutdown of a New Mexico nuclear waste dump after an accident there last month, a lab official said. Los Alamos, one of the leading U.S. nuclear weapons labs, has been forced to halt shipments of its radioactive refuse some 300 miles across the state to the nation’s only underground nuclear repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad, according to lab spokesman Matt Nerzig....

By Jeff Mason and Richard Cowan WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday swiftly delivered on his vow to veto a Republican bill approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, leaving the long-debated project in limbo for another indefinite period. The Senate received Obama’s veto message and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately countered by announcing the Republican-led chamber would attempt to overturn the veto by March 3....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The tech wars took a major swerve into the leftfield this week. No longer content with updating their phone offerings, companies have come over all James Bond in the hope of hitting upon the next big innovation. While one of the biggest presences in technology busies itself with Google Glass, its rivals are looking to our wrists....

No one answers the phone anymore. Back in the Clinton days, pollsters could collect voter opinions from about one in three calls. Today it is fewer than one in 11. Blame disappearing landlines — only 60 percent of U.S. households had one in 2013 — as well as cell-phone caller ID. Yet even as response rates plummet and costs of chasing mobile users soar, most data-driven election predictions still rely on phone-poll results....

When the skies open up and deluge an area, the results can be catastrophic, with roads washed out and homes destroyed by the resulting flash floods. Such extreme downpours are already occurring more often across the U.S., but a new study finds that as global temperatures rise, storms could dump considerably more rain and skyrocket in frequency. The study, detailed Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that storms that now occur about once a season now could happen five times a season by century’s end, a 400 percent increase....

A new study indicates that the genetic culprits behind schizophrenia may be much less common than previously believed. Researchers report this week in Science that a rare but devastating change in one of several different genes may dramatically increase the risk of developing the debilitating brain disorder affecting 1 percent of the world’s population and marked by psychotic behavior, hallucinations and delusions. Until now, most scientists believed that it was likely that a cluster of relatively common genetic mutations was to blame....

Rubber: there’s nothing like the real thing. Manufacturers use synthetic rubber in toys and rubber bands and even passenger car tires, but higher performance products such as truck and aircraft tires demand the natural stuff. The problem is, almost all the natural rubber in the world comes from a single species of tree, Hevea brasiliensis, crops of which cannot be scaled up easily to meet future demand. So the tire industry, seeking a new source of natural rubber, has turned to a species that was last used in World War II: a flowering shrub known as Parthenium argentatum, or guayule....

Dear EarthTalk: There’s a lot of talk today about solar and wind power, but what about biomass? How big a role might this renewable energy source play in our future? Couldn’t everyday people burn their own lawn and leaf clippings to generate power? – Deborah Welch, Niagara Falls, NY The oldest and most prevalent source of renewable energy known to man, biomass is already a mainstay of energy production in the United States and elsewhere....

Editor’s Note (7/25/22): This story is being republished in light of Pope Francis’s visit to Canada to apologize to the Indigenous community for more than a century of abuses by missionaries at residential schools across the country. The recent discoveries of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites of four former residential schools in western Canada have shocked and horrified Canadians. Indigenous peoples, whose families and lives have been haunted by the legacy of Canada’s Indian residential school system, have long expected such revelations....

Sixty years ago the U.S. Air Force repurposed its Thor missile as a launch vehicle to put small scientific, weather and military satellites into orbit. Or at least that was the plan. Many of those early satellites ended up in the ocean, along with the remnants of wayward rockets that blew up before reaching space. These vehicles include a Thor Able Star booster that lifted off with a U.S. Navy navigation satellite from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 30, 1960, and then headed southeast along an unusual flight path....

As coronavirus vaccines hurtle through development, scientists are getting their first look at data that hint at how well different vaccines are likely to work. The picture, so far, is murky. On May 18, US biotech firm Moderna revealed the first data from a human trial: its COVID-19 vaccine triggered an immune response in people, and protected mice from lung infections with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The results — which the company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced in a press release — were widely interpreted as positive and sent stock prices surging....

Power plants are guzzling water across the United States and increasing the risk of blackouts in the Southeast, where the precious resource is drying up. “Burning Our Rivers,” a new report by the River Network, found that it takes about 40,000 gallons of water to meet the average American household’s energy needs, which is five times more than the amount of water used directly in that home. Of the various modes of power production, hydropower has the biggest water footprint....

Scientists are unanimous that their current theory of physics is incomplete. Yet every effort to expose a deeper theory has so far disappointed. Now the most sensitive test yet of the shape of an electron—a property that could expose underlying “new physics”—has failed to find hints of anything novel. The finding rules out a number of favored ideas for extending physics, including some versions of a popular idea called supersymmetry....

An exotic effect in particle physics that’s theorized to occur in immense gravitational fields—near a black hole, or in conditions just after the Big Bang—has been seen in a lump of material in a laboratory, physicists report. A team led by physicist Johannes Gooth at IBM Research near Zurich, Switzerland, say they have seen evidence for a long-predicted effect called the axial–gravitational anomaly. It states that huge gravitational fields—which general relativity describes as the result of enormous masses curving space-time—should destroy the symmetry of particular kinds of particles that usually come in mirror-image pairs, creating more of one particle and less of another....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on Oct. 5, 2021, that the company’s social media platforms “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.” Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company....

Bushy and black, downy and blonde, curly and red: human hair comes in myriad shapes and colours. Now researchers have identified ten new genetic variants that influence its appearance—including the first genes to be associated with the rate at which hair goes grey, the bushiness of someone’s beard or eyebrows and whether they grow a ‘monobrow’. Understanding the variability in human hair isn’t only interesting from a cosmetic perspective—it also informs the study of evolution....