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This coming spring scientists will open dramatic new views of the universe. NASA plans to launch the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) to explore exotic environments such as those of supermassive black holes and neutron stars, which generate enormous power in high-energy gamma rays. Around the same time, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, will begin providing an unparalleled view of nature’s fundamental building blocks and their interactions at the smallest distances....

YouTube is teaming up with Google+ to overhaul its commenting system, focusing on relevancy before recency. (Credit: Google) Laugh all you want, fuzzball, but Google is changing how YouTube uploaders manage comments on their videos. The new system, which began rolling out to a limited number of uploaders on Tuesday, favors relevancy over recency and introduces enhanced moderation tools. The new commenting system, which is powered by Google+ and was developed in collaboration between the YouTube and Google+ teams, provides several new tools for moderation, said Nundu Janakiram, product manager at YouTube....

Just as restaurants, clothing stores and offices around the world have had to close their doors to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, so have zoos, aquariums and animal sanctuaries. Some zoos have followed other industries by using online technology to keep life going. Many of them livestream animal activity to viewers, post behind-the-scenes photographs and videos, and conduct virtual fundraising. Though the institutions have been closed to visitors, zookeepers must still go in to feed the animals and provide medical care and enrichment....

Baseball has often been called “the thinking man’s game.” Even former New York Yankees catcher and frequent ruminator Yogi Berra once observed, “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.” New brain-decoding technology promises to exploit the cerebral side of the game even further, giving baseball scouts the ability to evaluate hitters based on how quickly their brains identify and react to different pitches. Batters facing professional or collegiate pitching must make extremely quick perceptual decisions—a pitch takes only about 600 milliseconds to cross home plate after the pitcher releases it....

Call it a China Syndrome for the age of global warming. With Congress crafting energy and climate legislation, disparate lobbyists are urging lawmakers to think about China and other developing countries as reasons to develop power plants that capture coal’s carbon emissions. If the United States succeeds in building commercially viable coal plants, lobbyists and some independent experts argue, it could export the technology to countries that are building traditional power plants at a rapid clip....

Adapted from What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, by Daniel Chamovitz, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (North America), One World (UK), Scribe (AUS/NZ), Kawade Shobo Shisha (Japan). Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Chamovitz. To learn more visit, books.scientificamerican.com. Cuscuta pentagona is not your normal plant. it is a spindly orange vine that can grow up to three feet high, produces tiny white flowers of five petals and is found all over North America....

From Quanta (Find original story here). Like most theoretical cosmologists, Joshua Frieman was thrilled when astronomers announced in 1998 that the expansion of the universe appeared to be speeding up, driven by an invisible agent that they called “dark energy.” Frieman and his fellow theorists imagined two possible causes for the cosmic acceleration: Dark energy could be the quantum jitter of empty space, a “cosmological constant” that continues to accrue as space expands, pushing outward ever more forcefully....

Women exposed before birth to the banned pesticide DDT may have a greater risk of developing high blood pressure later in life, according to a study published today. The study of San Francisco Bay Area women is the first to link DDT exposure in the womb to hypertension, which raises the risk of stroke and heart disease. A widely used insecticide, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 because it was building up in the environment....

By Hugo SanchezSAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - A volcano in eastern El Salvador belched more ash and gases on Monday after a big eruption on Sunday that drove more than 1,600 people into emergency shelters. No major injuries or damage were reported.The Chaparrastique volcano, which is about 140 km (87 miles) east of San Salvador, the capital, spewed ash over a wide area known for its coffee plantations on Sunday.“The Chaparrastique volcano is still producing gases combined with small emissions of ash, which is normal after an eruption,” El Salvador’s environment ministry said on its Twitter page....

By Daniel Cressey A huge ships’ graveyard in Mauritania may be the source of high levels of PCBs off the African coast.JS Callahan/tropicalpix/Alamy Researchers cruising off the western coast of Africa have confirmed the presence of mysteriously high levels of airborne toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).The production and use of these chemicals is now largely banned by national laws and under the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants – because of worries over their potential for causing cancer and other health problems....

The recipe for wild mushroom risotto starts with the ingredients list. The risotto includes rice, garlic, minced onion and vegetable stock. The mushroom mixture contains half a pound of wild mushrooms, garlic, butter, thyme, 12 grasshoppers with the legs and wings removed, and two thirds of a cup of buffalo worms, along with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Julia Child has left the building. Entering the building are Arnold van Huis and Marcel Dicke, entomologists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, along with chef Henk van Gurp, from the nearby Rijn IJssel Vakschool, which teaches hotel and tourism management....

Add methane emissions to the growing list of environmental risks posed by fracking. Opposition to the hydraulic fracturing of deep shales to release natural gas rose sharply last year over worries that the large volumes of chemical-laden water used in the operations could contaminate drinking water. Then, in early January, earthquakes in Ohio were blamed on the disposal of that water in deep underground structures. Yesterday, two Cornell University professors said at a press conference that fracking releases large amounts of natural gas, which consists mostly of methane, directly into the atmosphere—much more than previously thought....

Sarah, a 40-year-old mother of three, has found out from various tests that she has an elevated risk of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as of breast cancer. Does she have a legal or moral obligation to tell her children or close relatives that they, too, might be at high risk of getting these illnesses in the future? The legal issue is straightforward: no court has held an individual liable for failing to warn a relative about genetic test results....

“Topology is the study of whether there are holes in a space,” says mathematician Dennis Sullivan of the City University of New York Graduate Center. He just won one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, the Abel Prize, which is handed out annually by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters on behalf of the country’s Ministry of Education and Research. Sullivan was recognized for his work on topology, which investigates how you can bend, stretch or twist a shape without changing its basic nature....

Florida’s native alligators and crocodiles could be facing some new competition—from a bigger and meaner member of their own crocodilian family. Nile crocodiles—American crocodiles’ larger, more aggressive cousins from the African continent—have been identified in the wild in southern Florida for the first time, according to a new study. Between 2009 and 2012, scientists responded to reports from Floridians of “unusual looking” crocodiles, the study authors said. The scientists caught three young crocodiles—one of which was captured on the porch of a Miami home—and, through genetic analysis of tissue samples, confirmed that they were invasive Nile crocodiles, connecting them to crocodile populations in South Africa....

By Lizzie BuchenMany strategies for reining in greenhouse gases come with substantial health benefits, according to a new study. But the actions with the most dramatic impact on greenhouse gases aren’t necessarily the biggest winners for health.Twelve days before the United Nations climate summit kicks off in Copenhagen, an international task force has published five research papers exploring the impact that strategies for tackling greenhouse gas emissions would have on public health....

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” that connoisseur of witticisms, Oscar Wilde, is said to have remarked. But not everyone shares his view. Communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm carries the poisonous sting of contempt, which can hurt others and harm relationships. By its very nature, it invites conflict....

The bulbous purple burrowing frog may not have made it onto any awww-inspiring tote bags like the unequivocally adorable giant panda. But, an increasing number of people are arguing, the humble frog—and other more homely creatures—is at least equally worth rescuing from the brink of extinction. One of those people is Nathan Yaussy, an ecology graduate student at Kent State University in Ohio and the creator of the EUT—Endangered Ugly Things blog (recently profiled in The Washington Post)....

For decades astronomers have been on the hunt for so-called “solar twins”—stars with the same ages, masses, temperatures, luminosities and chemical abundances as our own sun. But seeking out solar twins in this way is akin to looking for people on the street wearing a coat like yours and calling them family, says Simon Portegies Zwart, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Instead, Portegies Zwart wants to search for our star’s true siblings—those that actually formed alongside our own star and still have the stellar bloodlines to prove it....

Drought-stricken states in the western United States could face severe flash flooding later in the year due to the combination of an intense wildfire season in the summer and a strong El Niño event the following winter. An El Niño is a complex weather event that drives warm ocean water from the Asian-Pacific east, raising ocean temperatures along the west coast of the Americas, invigorating regional weather systems and increasing the amount of precipitation in the American West....