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By Rod Nickel An employee in a high-level Canadian laboratory may have been accidentally exposed to Ebola on Monday while working with pigs who were infected with the virus as part of an experiment, government officials said on Tuesday. The man noticed a split in the seam of his protective suit during standard decontamination procedures and prior to leaving the Winnipeg, Manitoba lab, said John Copps, director of Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s National Center for Foreign Animal Disease, where the incident happened....

At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may permit us to keep climate change below two degrees Celsius....

Power harvested from the Sun and wind is pouring into electricity grids by the gigawatt. That makes it ever more important to find an efficient and convenient way to store renewable energy for those times when the breeze dies or the skies cloud over. “Now we have a good chance of solving that problem,” says Michael Aziz, a materials scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His solution is a flow battery that packs a high energy density with no need for the expensive metals found in other models....

The world’s first selfie-snapping, asteroid-hunting, public space telescope is $1 million closer to its launch into Earth orbit, having surpassed its initial crowdfunding goal. Planetary Resources’ online fundraising campaign soared past the seven-figure mark Wednesday evening (June 19), green-lighting the asteroid-mining company’s plans to deploy a publicly accessible space telescope in 2015. More than 11,000 people pledged at least $10 to the project, which promises to not only capture images of its supporters’ selected astronomical targets with the Arkyd space telescope, but also photograph their submitted self-portraits (“Space Selfies”) on a digital screen mounted on the outside of the small satellite....

Ancient Mars may have harbored deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the same type of environment where many scientists think life on Earth got its start, a recent study suggests. Observations by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) show evidence of ancient sea-floor hydrothermal deposits within the Eridania basin — a region in the southern hemisphere where some of the Red Planet’s most ancient crust is exposed. The deposits are believed to have formed due to volcanic activity in the planet’s crust at the bottom of the basin....

The election of Donald Trump introduced the American public to a number of firsts when it comes to politics, one of which is a president who regularly communicates via Twitter. Trump’s use of social media has been unusual for a president and also the subject of sharp criticism for the inflammatory content he sometimes posts. While we know that Trump’s Twitter audience has continued to increase dramatically since his election, currently hovering at over fifty million followers, we know far less about how much influence his tweets have on the way his followers think and behave....

Spontaneous patriotic chants and flag-waving crowds were sparked by word that Osama bin Laden had been killed earlier this week. Despite the man’s loathed reputation as the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the jubilation over bin Laden’s death raises the question: Why the celebration? Was it relief, a sense of justice—or the simple pleasure of revenge? As draconian as lethal retribution might seem, science has shown that the human brain can take pleasure in certain kinds of revenge....

On Friday afternoon, March 11, 2011, Kosuke Heki was in his office in Hokkaido University in northern Japan when the ground began to shake. The pulses were far apart, and each one lasted a few seconds. Heki, a geophysicist who studies an arcane phenomenon involving odd patterns formed by electrons in the sky after quakes, was interested but not unduly alarmed. It seemed like a large earthquake but far away. As the shaking continued, he thought perhaps data from the event might help his research....

Last month, while most of the world focused on the war in Ukraine and worried that a beleaguered Russian leadership might resort to nuclear weapons, thus escalating the conflict into a direct war with the U.S.-led NATO nuclear-armed alliance, a nearly tragic accident involving India and Pakistan pointed to another path to nuclear war. The accident highlighted how complex technological systems, including those involving nuclear weapons, can generate unexpected routes to potential disaster—especially when managed by overconfident organizations....

NEW YORK – LG on Wednesday unveiled its new G2 smartphone to take on Apple, Samsung, and other Android phone makers. The hardware specs are top-of-the-line, with the G2 sporting a 5.2-inch full HD display and running on a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor. The G2 is the first global device to include Qualcomm’s highest-end chip. The device also is LTE-Advanced capable, allowing for faster wireless speeds in places like Korea....

The hunt for extraterrestrial life has always been bedeviled by false positives—those occasions where scientists think they’ve found life but turn out to lack a wholly convincing case. The archetypal example comes from NASA’s twin Viking landers, which delivered controversial evidence of life on Mars in the mid-1970s. That evidence was a whiff of radioactive carbon wafting from Martian soil, hinting at microbial metabolism taking place within—but three other life-detection experiments each lander carried only found null results....

The presence of methane on Mars, first discovered a few years ago, has piqued the curiosity of researchers, who wonder if the gas results from geologic activity or, more intriguingly, from living organisms, as is largely the case on Earth. Though by no means settling the issue, new detections of methane at least point in the direction of further study. Using ground-based telescopes, Michael J. Mumma of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues monitored about 90 percent of the Red Planet’s surface for three Martian years (equal to seven Earth years)....

The human eye is a sophisticated instrument: images enter through a curved lens at the front of the sphere and pass through its gooey, vitreous liquid before reaching the light-sensitive retina—which relays the signal to the optic nerve that carries the picture to the brain. Engineers have attempted to replicate this structure for about a decade. Now a new artificial eye successfully mimics the natural instrument’s spherical shape. Researchers hope this achievement could lead to sharper robotic vision and prosthetic devices....

Picture a clump of grass—a spray of flat green blades that converge into sturdy tubes near the ground. These tubes are formed by the curled lower portion of the grass leaf, called the sheath, which represents something of an evolutionary triumph. It allows grass to grow from the base (instead of the stem, like most other flowering plants) by protecting new growth and holding mature blades upright so they can compete for sunlight....

The Trump administration appears to be quietly accepting an Obama-era international climate change deal. A career government official, State Department Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Judy Garber, confirmed last week during a speech to diplomats at a Montreal Protocol gathering that the Trump administration won’t run away from the deal finalized last year in the Rwandan capital known as the Kigali Amendment. Under that deal, the U.S. government would work globally to limit refrigerants and coolants that greatly contribute to climate change....

Read more: January 2011: The Real Sexual Revolution February 2011: Scaling Back Obesity March 2011: The Neuroscience of Resilience: How Minds Bounce Back April 2011: Quantum Gaps in Big Bang Theory May 2011: 7 Radical Energy Solutions June 2011: Living in a Quantum World July 2011: The Physics of Intelligence August 2011: Questions about the Multiverse September 2011: Better, Greener, Smarter CITIES (Single Topic Issue) October 2011: WARPED by Dark Matter: Strange Effects on the Milky Way November 2011: The First Americans December 2011: 10 World Changing Ideas...

Speed limits on ships have been of some help in saving the North Atlantic right whales from being killed in collisions, suggest studies by the US government and independent researchers — and environmental groups are suing to expand the areas where protection measures are in force. North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) are among the most endangered of all marine mammals: despite a recent population uptick, only about 450 remain. Ships are the biggest known killers of right whales, and reduced speeds have been reliably linked to a decrease in collisions and deaths....

WASHINGTON—The State Department on Monday officially announced a broad expansion of the Mexico City Policy, a regulation put in place by every Republican president since Ronald Reagan that prevents foreign non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortions from receiving American dollars. Typically, the Mexico City Policy has only impacted funds specifically earmarked for family planning programs. Under the new policy, however, organizations that perform other health-related work and happen to support abortions — for example, a foreign NGO that does sexual health education to prevent the spread of HIV and also informs women that abortion is legal in the country — could see the whole of their US health funding disappear....

If you are right-handed, chances are you will make different choices than your left-handed friends. A series of recent studies shows that we associate our dominant side with good and our nondominant side with bad, preferring products and people that happen to be on our “good” side over those closer to the other half of our body. The theory of embodied cognition, widely embraced by cognitive scientists in recent years, holds that our abstract ideas are grounded in our physical experiences in the world....

[To listen to the conversation, click here] A visitor to Antia would have come away perplexed. The beginning of the first phrase, “welcome” (kalós irthate in romanized Greek), sounded like the lewd catcall—“tweet, tweeo”—except that the drawn-out second syllable rose sharply in pitch. Some accounts contend that the now dying tradition of whistled speech, still maintained by Antia’s few dozen residents, served for centuries as the best way for sheep or goat herders there to communicate from one hillside to another....