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A Pennsylvania State University investigation has found no substance behind allegations of academic misconduct by climate researcher Michael Mann, one of the central figures in the so-called ‘Climategate’ e-mail scandal. It is the third formal inquiry to clear scientists involved in the scandal, which publicized more than 1,000 private e-mails from scientists expressing doubts about their data, refusing to share information and questioning the work of others. The Penn State findings, released Thursday by a panel of five senior faculty members, concluded Mann never participated in research or other scholarly activity that “deviated from accepted practices within the academic community....

Darwin doubters have sometimes questioned evolutionary theory by asserting that no “missing link” exists between humans and other primates. But the fossil record shows that there was no instant leap to humanity: rather our species’ physical hallmarks appeared gradually over the past several million years. “Humans did not suddenly come into existence, but we share features with many other [species],” John G. Fleagle, an anatomist at Stony Brook University, has said....

DISPOSAL The liquids from this demonstration can be disposed of down the sink, but you’ll want to keep the golden penny taped inside a notebook. TRANSMUTATION In this demonstration we’ll perform a transmutation! Or at least that’s how the alchemists would see it. The Alexandrian artisans saw it as making false gold, but the practical artificer and the alchemist often interpreted the exact same chemistry in quite different ways. So here we go....

EPA’s top ethics official has referred additional allegations against Administrator Scott Pruitt to agency investigators, potentially widening the inquiries into whether Pruitt used his public office for personal gain. Kevin Minoli, the designated ethics official for EPA, disclosed last week in a letter obtained by E&E News that he had passed on recent reports of Pruitt’s ethics troubles to the agency’s internal watchdog. “Since your letter in April, additional potential issues regarding Mr....

Without fish, there can be no fishing—and such an outcome could be the future: A recent study indicates that the world’s oceans appear headed toward a global collapse as overall fishing yields continue to decline dramatically, having dropped by some 10.6 million metric tons since 1994. The problem appears to be a classic “tragedy of the commons” wherein a common asset is exploited to death because no one individual has an incentive to preserve the shared resource....

Search the App Store for iPhone antivirus software, and you’ll find only a handful of security programs. There’s a reason that the market is so soft: Apple’s stringent app-vetting process and the architecture of iOS products—which partitions, or “sandboxes,” code to protect the device—have helped keep iPhones and iPads safe. Sandboxing, which restricts an app’s reach, would also limit any antivirus program’s effectiveness. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology Information Security Center have identified and exploited two weaknesses to infect iPhones....

Chris Berdik, a science journalist and former staff editor at The Atlantic, begins with a simple premise: expectations matter. The notion is well-known in medicine, where doctors have known the power of the “placebo effect” for a long time. But it turns out that this same psychological machinery holds sway in many realms, that what we bring to a situation can, in some sense, bend reality. Berdik answered questions about his new book, “Mind over Mind,” from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook....

When a venomous snake bites its prey, a deadly cocktail of toxins rushes into the victims body causing sweating or chills, nausea, blurred vision, convulsions, and ultimately, death. It has long been thought that the victims immune system exacerbated the effects of the venom. Now, a new study shows that mast cells in the immune system of mice actually unleash proteins that break down some of the most toxic components of snake venom....

The purpose and evolutionary origins of sleep are among the biggest mysteries in neuroscience. Every complex animal, from the humblest fruit fly to the largest blue whale, sleeps—yet scientists can’t explain why any organism would leave itself vulnerable to predators, and unable to eat or mate, for a large portion of the day. Now, researchers have demonstrated for the first time that even an organism without a brain—a kind of jellyfish—shows sleep-like behaviour, suggesting that the origins of sleep are more primitive than thought....

A mop of light brown hair shakes as a slender nine-year-old boy named Jack bangs furiously at his keyboard. Jack’s eyes are fixed on a clock with six hands, which denote the month, day, hour, minute, second and 60th of a second. As soon as he types 10:28:2:14:56:32, a new clock appears, and he hammers out another set of numbers. An affable 14-year-old student named Marti had just taught me the exercise, and I guessed I could have solved one of these clocks in a few minutes....

Researchers have identified a strange side effect to a treatment for Parkinson’s disease: excessive gambling. Some patients taking medications known as dopamine agonists developed the problem within three months of starting treatment, even though they had previously gambled only occasionally or never at all. “This is a striking effect,” remarks J. Eric Ahlskog of the Mayo Clinic, a co-author of the new study. “Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual....

Controlled heat transfer with mammalian bodies: In the 1990s Stanford University biologists Dennis Grahn and H. Craig Heller discovered a novel way of treating patients with a condition known as postanesthetic hypothermia, in which patients emerging from anesthesia are so cold that they shiver for up to an hour. The condition develops in part because anesthesia reduces the body’s ability to control its own temperature. Applying heat alone does not always help, so Grahn and Heller tried another approach: they increased the volume of blood flowing to the skin of patients’ hands and then applied heat to the same area....

CLIMATE CALCULATIONS In “ClimeApocalypse!” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer draws on the widely criticized work of Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg to conclude that climate change is not a large concern when compared with poverty and global health. This is a false dichotomy; few global issues we face are of greater consequence to the poor and to all living creatures on the planet than climate change. Without immediate, large-scale action, global water supplies, agriculture, disease rates and extreme weather will have profound negative consequences on all of us....

Sprawling over a manicured suburban landscape in Portsmouth, N.H., the Pease International Tradeport office park encompasses 250 companies, a golf course and a pair of day care centers. Nearly 10,000 people arrive here for work every day. But belowground lies a toxic legacy. Until 1988, the site was a U.S. Air Force base, where fire crews, during routine training exercises, would torch old planes in a field, then douse the flames with chemical foam....

Sonic booms in your bathtub? Apparently, a hard object falling into a pool can push a jet of air out of the water so fast that it briefly breaches the sound barrier. Physicists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and at the University of Seville in Spain set up an experiment in which they pulled a disk-shaped object flat down into water so that it hit the water at the relatively leisurely speed of one meter per second (roughly equivalent to dropping the disk from a height of a few centimeters)....

Three-year-old Merle throws a tantrum in the supermarket whenever her mother refuses to buy something she wants. Little Anna screams wildly when her mother interrupts her playing to put on a jacket so the family can go out. Ben, an adorable towhead, barely two, bites into furniture and toys as soon as anyone drops the word “no.” Merle, Anna and Ben are in the tantrum phase—sometimes referred to as “the terrible twos”—and they dispense frustration and anger to everyone around them....

From a man who made his name and charted his career with lofty goals and often unexpected financial decisions, the news came with little surprise: Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., unveiled a product line of electric batteries late last night in Los Angeles. Musk introduced the Tesla Powerwall, a wall-mounted lithium-ion electric battery for homes and small businesses, and the Tesla Powerpack, a heftier version of the same core product designed for utility-scale use....

August 1966 In Vitro “If rabbit and pig eggs can be fertilized after maturation in culture, presumably human eggs grown in culture could also be fertilized, although obviously it would not be permissible to implant them in a human recipient. So far we have either failed or have at best achieved a very limited success in fertilizing human eggs in vitro. We intend to continue these experiments; the ability to observe cleaving human eggs could be of great medical and scientific value....

Every year millions of breeding monarch butterflies in the U.S. and southern Canada search for milkweed plants on which to lay their eggs. Concern over dwindling habitat has prompted conservationists to create monarch-friendly spaces along roadsides, which are abundant within the butterflies’ range and usually publicly owned. But traffic noise stresses monarch caterpillars out, a new study finds. They eventually do become desensitized to it—but that might spell trouble for them later on, too....

Vioxx Payout Merck appears to have closed the chapter on Vioxx, as the pharmaceutical giant agreed to pay $4.85 billion to plaintiffs. Clinical trials had revealed that the painkiller raised the risk of heart attack and stroke [see “Avoiding Another Vioxx”; SciAm, February 2005]. But Merck won most of the trials to reach juries, because plaintiffs’ lawyers had a hard time linking any particular problem with the drug itself. The settlement, which represents a bit less than Merck’s expected 2007 earnings, is much smaller than the $25 billion some analysts had expected Merck would have to pay....