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By Patrick RuckerWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will use his executive powers to protect more mountains, rivers and forests from development if Congress does not act to preserve such wild spaces, the U.S. Interior Secretary said on Thursday.Portions of the Grand Canyon, Redwood forests in California and Caribbean seascapes have been protected under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president broad authority to put natural terrain and historic sites under federal protection....

The Smithsonian National Zoo’s panda cam began operating again this morning, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get to watch Mei Xiang’s 8-week-old cub stretch and wriggle about. “The panda cam went live at 10:36 this morning I believe,” said Devin Murphy, communications officer at the zoo in Washington, D.C. “Within 10 minutes we had reached the maximum number of connections that we can accommodate for the panda cam, so we’ve been troubleshooting those issues throughout the day....

At Dartmouth College’s fourth annual Formula Hybrid International Competition last week, graduate and undergraduate electrical, mechanical and computer engineering students showed off high-performance plug-in hybrid vehicles they had designed and built. This year’s race pitted 24 teams from the U.S. and abroad—including those from Italy, Russia and Canada—against one another in the areas of presentation, engineering design, acceleration, maneuverability and endurance. A team from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, won the overall competition, followed by the teams from Texas A&M University and the University of California, Davis....

Polar bears are facing trouble inside and out. The animals are losing habitat as global warming melts sea ice. Now a study shows bears’ bodies hold toxic chemicals originally made in distant factories, substances that threaten adult bears’ health at a level 100 times greater than the acceptable threshold of risk for humans. For cubs, the risk is more than 1,000 times that threshold. These risks have remained high, particularly in cubs, despite restrictions or bans on many of these chemicals more than a decade ago....

We take it for granted that certain aspects of our social behavior—whether we chat easily with strangers at a party, for instance, or prefer to be a wallflower—are influenced by genetics. But now researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University have shown that genes have a much broader sway, affecting the kinds of social networks people form and the positions they occupy in them. James Fowler, a political scientist at U....

It’s a hard drive only a spy, or possibly a pyromaniac, could love. The InVincible series of solid-state hard drives made by Chinese manufacturer RunCore have two dramatic optional security features, both activated by wires connected to the drives through the power connectors. Press the green button, and the “Intelligent Destruction” feature activates, overwriting each memory cell with junk data and “uninitializing” the hard drive so it can’t be read....

Among the topics that readers tell us they like best are those that explore inner space and outer space. In this issue, we’ve got both places covered—and others as well. The cover story, “The Neuroscience of True Grit,” by Gary Stix, delves into the brain’s astonishing power of resilience and recovery in the wake of mental trauma. After a tragedy such as the loss of a loved one or a terrorist attack, we naturally feel shock....

A huge radio telescope in Chile has captured the best-ever image of planets forming around a distant star, researchers say. The spectacular view of planet birth, taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, shows numerous concentric rings in the disk of dust and gas surrounding HL Tau, a sunlike star found about 450 light-years away from Earth. “These features are almost certainly the result of young planetlike bodies that are being formed in the disk,” ALMA deputy director Stuartt Corder said in a statement....

CES 2012: Intel to Power Smart Phones, Create Ultrabook-Tablet Hybrid Devices Intel played a pivotal role in making PCs ubiquitous by developing a standard processor architecture, and the company intends to work similar magic in smart phones Microsoft Bids Farewell to Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with Preview of Windows 8 and Two-Way TV Microsoft kicked off the CES much as the company has done since its first keynote in 1998—extolling the virtues of Windows and promising big things from its operating system in the future...

Anne Madden bends creatures to her will, with the deftness of a shepherd. But Madden is a microbe wrangler—her critters cover petri dishes. Rather than merely observe bacteria and fungi, Madden sees a community ready for work. If not for fungi, bacteria-fighting penicillin or heart-saving statins would not exist. If not for bacteria, the world would not have pickles. PICKLES! “We have to find it. We have to bring it into the lab, and then we have to convince it to do something,” Madden told the NewsHour inside a lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she works as an environmental microbiologist....

When my wife, Elizabeth, was pregnant, she had a routine ultrasound exam, and I was astonished by the images. The baby’s ears, his tiny lips, the lenses of his eyes and even the feathery, fluttering valves in his heart were as crisp and clear as the muscles and tendons in a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. Months before he was born, we were already squabbling about whom he looked like. Mostly, though, we were relieved; everything seemed to be fine....

Moments of confusion can be pretty memorable, and not in a good way. How is this thing supposed to work? What is the teacher’s point? Where am I, and how do I get to where I am going? But confusion is greatly underrated, argues the journalist Jamie Holmes in his new book, “Nonsense.” Naturally, it is good to understand. Yet, Holmes writes, our discomfort with not knowing can lead us astray — to bad solutions, or to brilliant options never spotted....

“If normal body temperature is about 98 degrees Fahrenheit, why do we feel hot at that air temperature?” —S. Meyer, Melbourne, Fla. Jeffery W. Walker, a physiology professor at the University of Arizona, has a cool explanation: The human body is like an engine that continuously generates large quantities of heat, and its radiator, so to speak, disperses heat least effectively in hotter climes. Heat is an unavoidable by-product of the work being done by the tissues of the body....

Astrophysicist Alexander Kashlinsky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center tackles this question. The evolution of the universe is described by the physics of general relativity, which was discovered by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. When compared to Newtonian physics, this theory provides a radically different framework for the physical description of the gravitational force. In the Newtonian interpretation (where celestial bodies move according to the laws of Newton), space and time are absolute, with time no more than a parameter in the equations of motion....

Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” of British politics who died Monday at the age of 87, is being lionized as the woman who tilted British domestic and economic policy to the right. Less noted is how seriously she viewed the threat of climate change and the robustness, more than 20 years ago, of climate science and United Nations body tasked with assessing state of that science. In a 1990 speech at the second World Climate Conference, in Geneva, Thatcher compared the threat of global warming to the Gulf War, which was then just escalating following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait....

Hundreds of dinosaur footprints and handprints dating to 170 million years ago adorn the shore on the Isle of Skye, making it the largest dinosaur site ever discovered in Scotland, a new study finds. The discovery proves that dinosaurs—likely long-necked, four-legged, herbivorous sauropods—splashed around Scotland during the Middle Jurassic period, the researchers said. “These footprints were made in a lagoon, which is a pretty interesting environment for dinosaurs,” said study lead researcher Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh....

I take issue with the celebration of Paul Erds’ 100th birthday. Not the celebration itself, but the number. Why 100? The number 100 was chosen, of course, because 10 is the base unit of our number system: We have 10 unique symbols (0-9) that can be combined to represent any conceivable number. Ten units of 10 is 100, so it’s a nice, neat factor. If we used a base 12 system, we would have 12 unique symbols, and we’d be celebrating anniversaries of 144 years....

Just like the controversial compound it’s designed to replace, a chemical used in cash register receipts and other consumer products messes with hormones, according to research published today. The study by University of Texas scientists is the first to link low concentrations of bisphenol S (BPS) – a bisphenol A (BPA) alternative – to disruption of estrogen, spurring concern that it might harm human health. Researchers exposed rat cells to levels of BPS that are within the range people are exposed to....

Attempts to download Flappy Bird at Apple’s App Store result in a message that the game is unavailable. (Credit: Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET) Flappy Bird was removed from app stores on Sunday, just hours after its creator warned that the popular game’s demise was nigh. The free smartphone game for iOS and Android took the mobile market by storm, reportedly earning $50,000 in ad revenue each day. Flappy Bird had been download upwards of 50 million times and earned 47,000 reviews on the App Store....

Crickets chirp and bees buzz from sedum flower to flower atop the post office in midtown Manhattan during a visit to the 9th Avenue facility on a perfect New York City fall day. On a sprawling roof that covers most of a city block a kind of park has been laid, sucking up carbon dioxide and other air pollution, filtering rainfall, making it less acidic. Such verdant roofs may form part of an effective strategy for both cooling buildings and helping combat climate change, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on February 11....