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When paleontologist Jin Meng uncovered a strange skull in the vast, dry expanse of northern China’s Junggar Basin in 1996, he immediately had a hunch about the favorite activity of the ancient animal it came from. The skull was robust and heavily built, with a bony plate of nearly one-inch-thick bone around the area where the animal’s forehead would have been. A few neck vertebrae Meng discovered nearby were also conspicuously thickened, implying they were built to withstand a tremendous amount of force....

In digital cameras, more pixels normally translate to better pictures. Researchers have now demonstrated a camera that creates megapixel-quality images using just a single pixel. The trick is to apply a relatively new technique that compresses an image straight away, instead of recording a high-resolution image and then converting it into a slimmer file format. A normal digital camera focuses an image onto a grid of pixels, each of which measures the intensity of light at a spot in the image....

Corporate America has a split personality when it comes to climate change. When issuing marketing materials and press releases, U.S. companies frequently warn that rising global temperatures could cost them money. They tout specific green projects, like solar roofs and increased efficiency. But when it comes time to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the same companies stick to broad terminology and sanded-down statements. Take Target Corp., which outlined some of its efforts to become more climate-friendly in its 2015 sustainability report: solar panels, smart-grid technology, low-power stores, recycling programs and a recent pledge made at the White House to cut greenhouse gas emissions....

Of all the human species that have ever lived, only one, Homo sapiens, conquered the entire planet. The apelike australopithecines (Lucy and her ilk) never ventured out of Africa. The Neandertals never ventured in. Homo erectus got around, colonizing much of the Old World. But, so far as is known, it never reached Australia or the New World. Our own species, though, went everywhere. When, researchers have long wondered, did our ancestors begin to spread across the globe?...

Think about the last time you felt stressed. Did your heart rate quicken? Did your breathing get shallow and fast? Maybe your muscles tensed, and you became more alert? The brain prompts all these physiological changes to help us survive in the face of a potentially life-threatening situation. But when this response is activated inappropriately or persistently, it can become dangerous. Indeed, research has linked uncontrolled stress to a wide range of health problems, from heart disease and diabetes to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)....

In 1939 [1] the legacy companies of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) saw potential in Singapore and by 1959 they had set up their first sales office. Three decades later, in the 1970s, one of their sites was built at Quality Road. A further decade later, a second site was established at Jurong and has evolved to be the strategic manufacturing and global supply site for GSK’s New Chemical Entities and critical medicines. This biopharma company’s story of growth is echoed by the many others who came to Singapore for its supportive ecosystem and strategic location....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Conservationists and bioethicists often regard the packages of engineered DNA called “gene drives” with a mixture of wonder, excitement and dread. Gene drives violate the normal rules of inheritance by making sure they get passed down to all of their host organism’s offspring, not just to half of them; they therefore have the unnerving potential to rapidly and irrevocably alter a population. Much of the controversy about gene drives has centered on the practicality (and hubris) of using them to control dangerous insect pests, since insects were about the only animals in which gene drives had been shown to work....

On a sweltering August evening in 2009 Pat Elliott noticed that her feet seemed swollen. Because she had been standing for hours while teaching a workshop in Phoenix, she was not surprised. “I thought it was the heat,” she says. But her feet hurt, too, so Elliott decided to play it safe and called her doctor, who suggested she come in for some tests. Days later the marketing professional learned that she had developed an uncommon form of blood cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML)....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. A while back, I dedicated an episode to the benefits of coconut oil. Despite breathless reports of “miraculous” powers, I found scant evidence that coconut oil will melt off the pounds, balance your hormones, boost your immune system, or raise your IQ. On the other hand, coconut oil is a very stable oil....

In the days leading up to Hurricane Sandy’s destructive march on the East Coast, utilities warned customers to prepare for widespread outages and potentially extensive power failure. The question was not if the grid would fail, but to what extent. The storm highlighted an already well-known problem: The U.S. power grid is vulnerable to extreme weather. As officials from New York to Venice, Italy, have acknowledged in recent weeks, climate change is likely to increase the prevalence of such weather....

In today’s article, we’re wrapping-up our introductory series on fundamental statistics by talking about how knowledge of statistical quantities like the mean and standard deviation can help you understand the significance of the latest political polling results. Should You Believe the Results of All Political Polls? Should you believe the results of every political poll you see reported in the news? The short and simple answer is: “no.” For me, there are two reasons for this....

When Erica Kuligowski went to Puerto Rico three months after Hurricane Maria battered the island, she noticed conditions that others seemed to overlook. Vital buildings such as hospitals and schools were still standing but unusable because rain had penetrated and swamped the interiors. The water damage might have seemed unremarkable in a moonscape of destruction and power outages. But Kuligowski works for a federal agency that studies buildings. Now, the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology is undertaking a rare, comprehensive investigation into why Hurricane Maria ruined so many essential buildings in September 2017 and why systems such as emergency communications failed....

CLIMATEWIRE | The U.S. Department of Energy released the results of a six-year initiative that provides a national road map for alternative ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as electric vehicles slowly phase in. The report, called the “Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines,” or “Co-Optima,” involved 140 experts including 100 from nine DOE laboratories and an additional 40 experts from industry and universities. It concluded that a combination of lower-carbon fuels made from agricultural and forestry wastes, livestock manure, algae and waste fat, oil, and grease could be a substitute for gasoline and diesel to help fuel the nation’s 270 million cars and trucks, while EVs slowly phase in over the next 15 years....

On a US military base outside Gainesville, Florida, atmospheric scientists make lightning by shooting rockets into thunderstorms. Now they have used this explosive set-up to produce some of the most detailed images of thunder ever made. The pictures are not much to look at—just rainbow-coloured blobs and streaks. But they represent the acoustic energy that ripples outwards as lightning bolts come down from the sky. The work provides a way to look at the energetics behind thunder and lightning....

Astute moviegoers may have noticed a traveling car and its trail of exhaust in a scene from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Current tools, such as Adobe Systems’s After Effects “healing brush,” can readily camouflage, or inpaint, small blemishes. To fix larger gaffes, though, the user must tirelessly cut small patches of image and paste them over the unwanted object. The effort typically yields mediocre results for all but the smallest repairs: on the DVD of Fellowship, a blurry spot is visible where the car was....

Microsoft reduced the price of its Surface Pro tablet this weekend by $100, a few days after revealing that it has spent more money on marketing the in-house tablet than it has generated in revenue. The reductions, which were first reported by The Verge, cuts the price of Microsoft’s 64GB and 128GB tablets to $799 and $899, respectively. The discounts come three weeks after Microsoft cut the price of its Surface RT tablets by 30 percent....

North Dakota’s sparse geography has long made it a natural frontier: Pioneers here pushed the boundaries of westward expansion, then agriculture, and recently domestic oil drilling. Now the state finds itself on the leading edge of a new boom that it never would have chosen: Alzheimer’s disease. Cases are rocketing up across the United States, and especially in North Dakota, which has the country’s second highest death rate from the disease....

Young people with autism have more psychiatric and medical conditions than do their typical peers or those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a new study suggests. The early onset of these problems suggests they do not stem solely from a lifetime of poor healthcare, says lead researcher Lisa Croen, director of the Autism Research Program at Kaiser Permanente, a managed healthcare provider based in California. “One possible explanation is that there’s something physiologic or genetic that’s underlying not only what falls into the definition of autism, but also physical health and, more broadly, mental health,” she says....

In the early days of the pandemic, economist Jeanet Bentzen of the University of Copenhagen examined Google searches for the word “prayer” in 95 countries. She identified that they hit an all-time global high in March 2020, and increases occurred in lockstep with the number of COVID-19 cases identified in each country. Stateside, according to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of Americans prayed to end the spread of the novel coronavirus in March 2020, and nearly one quarter reported that their faith increased the following month, despite limited access to houses of worship....

Since Adam Smith observed that the “invisible hand” of the free market would force self-interested manufacturers to offer low prices to consumers, governments and politics have never been the same. It took almost two more centuries, however, to achieve a proper mathematical analysis of the consequences of selfish behavior in Morgenstern’s and Von Neumann’s game theory and the work of John Nash. (You may recall Nash as the mathematician who was the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind....