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As scientists and engineers puzzle over how to inexpensively deliver thin-film photovoltaic solar cells, wave and tidal powered turbines, hydrogen-fueled cars, and other advanced technologies to reduce world dependence on fossil fuels, a team of college engineering students is working on a decidedly lower-tech, though no less difficult, project they hope will bring hydroelectric power to remote areas of the African country of Rwanda. The group, part of Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering student-run Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Program (HELP), in September set up two hydroelectric turbines powered by a local water source in Banda, a mountainous region at the edge of Nyungwe National Park with a population of around 6,000....

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years. Even by the diverse standards of Saturn’s satellites, Enceladus was an outlier. Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity....

Scientific American Vol. CVI, No. 17, April 27, 1912 Editorial Light Out of a Dark Tragedy Out of the necessarily confused and contradictory stories of the “Titanic” disaster, told by the survivors, there has shone, conspicuously, one reassuring fact, which has shed a softening light upon the unspeakable horror of the disaster. Supreme among the master motives of this complicated human nature of ours are the love of life and the instinct to preserve it at whatever cost....

Once the hallmark of low-end online ads—dancing girls for dating sites and jiggling bellies for weight loss products—animated GIF images are popping up everywhere. You’ll see them used throughout Tumblr and even on big news sites in place of video. An animated GIF file is like a little cartoon and is much smaller than a video file. It’s easy to attach to an email, post to Facebook or pop into your own blog....

WHERE IS MEMORY, EXACTLY? In your July/August issue the location of human memory comes up in at least three places. In Ask the Brains, on page 70, David Smith mentions “the hippocampus, which encodes and stores memories.” In “The Mechanics of Mind Reading,” on page 56, Daniel Bor writes about “patterns in the part of the brain that stores memories, the hippocampus.” But then, on page 24, Anthony J. Greene, in “Making Connections,” says that “learning and memory are not sequestered in their own storage banks but are distributed across the entire cerebral cortex....

The social sciences offer powerful tools for making sense of the world in which we live. For policy makers, they provide guidance, in the form of study results, for making our world work better. In this edition, two feature articles examine major contemporary issues through the lens of social science theory and research. First, our cover story on “Getting Preschool Right,” written by journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, sounds the alarm on some unfortunate trends in early childhood education....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineFormer US President George W. Bush did not garner much applause from environmentalists during his eight years in the White House, but on 15 June 2006, he gave them something to cheer about. Bush signed an order to create the Papahnaumokukea Marine National Monument in Hawaii, then the world’s largest ocean conservation area. Spanning about 360,000 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, the reserve is designed to safeguard 7,000 marine species including the rare Hawaiian monk seal (Monachus schauinslandi), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) and leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) and nearly two dozen other animals on the US endangered species list....

Climate scientist James Hansen is retiring from NASA this week to devote himself to the fight against global warming. Hansen’s retirement concludes a 46-year career at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, but he plans to use his time to take up legal challenges to the federal and state governments over limiting greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, Hansen, 72, has become an activist for climate change, which didn’t sit well with NASA headquarters in Washington....

Scientists have identified four more ghostly signals of massive collisions in outer space, including of the largest to date, bringing their total haul of gravitational-wave detections to 11 in just a few years. And even better, that wealth of observations is large enough to let scientists make broader discoveries about the world around us and the black holes that fill it. A team of researchers affiliated with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U....

By Eric HandThe US Department of Energy (DOE) is planning to streamline the way it oversees the safety and security of its national laboratories. The move comes as a relief to lab directors who think that the existing oversight system is too onerous, but it is raising the hackles of groups that worry about breaches of nuclear security.Although other federal agencies are regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the DOE’s 17 national laboratories–a few of which act as stewards for US nuclear weapons–are often held to higher standards by the department’s Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS)....

Astronauts in space can grow up to 3 percent taller during the time spent living in microgravity, NASA scientists say. That means that a 6-foot-tall (1.8 meters) person could gain as many as 2 inches (5 centimeters) while in orbit. While scientists have known for some time that astronauts experience a slight height boost during a months-long stay on the International Space Station, NASA is only now starting to use ultrasound technology to see exactly what happens to astronauts’ spines in microgravity as it occurs....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich This was to be the year the giant match would light a fire. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s most powerful laser, would trigger ignition in a mixture of hydrogen isotopes by achieving a pressure of 100 billion times Earth’s atmosphere and a temperature of 100 milliondegrees Celsius. At that point, fusion reactions in the target would produce more energy than the laser consumes. But, an announcement earlier this month about the first full test of the laser–with its price tag in excess of $3....

A farm chemical with an infamous history – causing the worst known outbreak of pesticide poisoning in North America – is being phased out under an agreement announced Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency. Manufacturer Bayer CropScience agreed to stop producing aldicarb, a highly toxic insecticide used to kill pests on cotton and several food crops, by 2015 in all world markets. Use on citrus and potatoes will be prohibited after next year....

By Barbara Liston (Reuters) - A South African company has been indicted in Alabama for selling illegal rhinoceros hunts to Americans and secretly trafficking in the endangered animals’ horns, which sell on the black market at prices higher than gold, prosecutors said on Thursday. The 18-count indictment charged Valinor Trading CC, which operated in the United States as Out of Africa Adventurous Safaris, and company owners Dawie Groenewald, 46, and his brother, Janneman Groenewald, 44, with conspiracy, Lacey Act violations, mail fraud, money laundering and structuring bank deposits to avoid reporting requirements....

With its winners and losers, politics is a lot like sports. Now biologists have the testosterone—or lack thereof—to prove it. Specifically, they have found that male voters who back a losing candidate experience a drop in the hormone. Immediately before and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election result, neuroscientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor collected the saliva of 163 college-age participants to determine the amount of testosterone in their systems....

The idea of dropping an air-blast bomb—even if it’s the largest nonnuclear ordnance ever used by the U.S. in combat—to target fighters holed up in tunnels deep underground might at first seem counterintuitive. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), which the Air Force unleashed on ISIS fighters and tunnels Thursday in the Achin District of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, never actually struck the ground. But the massive crunch of air pressure created by the nearly 22,000-pound MOAB would have wiped out anyone in the vicinity, and certainly sent a clear signal that the Trump administration is willing to use unprecedented force....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with new and useful ideas. Like intelligence, it can be considered a trait that everyone—not just creative “geniuses” like Picasso and Steve Jobs—possesses in some capacity. It’s not just your ability to draw a picture or design a product. We all need to think creatively in our daily lives, whether it’s figuring out how to make dinner using leftovers or fashioning a Halloween costume out of clothes in your closet....

It seems the news has no shortage of extreme weather events: wildfires raged across Greece and the northwestern United States, flooding washed out the northeastern US, and intense heatwaves blanketed Japan and the United Kingdom. The island of Puerto Rico is facing down another hurricane season while many areas only recently regained power after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017. If it feels like we are hearing about extreme weather events more and more frequently now, it’s because we are....

In nanotechnology, the position of a single atom can make all the difference—whether a material functions as a semiconductor or an insulator, whether it triggers a vital chemical process or stops it cold. The ability to define every atom in a nanoparticle precisely would permit full control of the properties and behavior of a nanomaterial. But deep-down atomic imaging techniques, such as electron microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy, are not enough for nanoengineering, because they do not provide the precise mathematical coordinates of every atom that nanotechnologists need....

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that asthma cases in children often correlate to living close to roads and all the associated pollution-spewing traffic?—Jake Locklear, San Diego Living near a roadway certainly does exacerbate asthma, especially for kids. To wit, a recent study by the University of Southern California (USC)—the most comprehensive by far to date on this topic—found that at least eight percent of the more than 300,000 cases of childhood asthma in Los Angeles County can be attributed to traffic-related pollution at homes within 250 feet of a busy roadway....