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How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey Random House, 2014 How We Learn is Carey’s gift to guilt-ridden slackers everywhere. In the book, the award-winning New York Times science journalist dismantles the “proper” study habits drilled into students from primary school—minimize distractions, adopt a study ritual, find a quiet space—and replaces them with something that could be called responsible loafing. Slacking is built into our nature—and for good reason....

NASA is changing one of the key scientific instruments on Europa Clipper, its next major mission to the outer planets of the solar system, and has brought in a scientific luminary to lead it, project leaders announced today. Clipper is set to orbit Jupiter and study Europa, the icy Jovian moon, across multiple flybys. Earlier this month, NASA headquarters terminated the mission’s ICEMAG magnetometer instrument, citing overruns in its estimated budget....

Charles M. Lieber, a major figure in nanotechnology, asked one of his graduate students in 1998 to undertake the design of a radically new type of computer memory. It would read and write digital bits with memory elements that measured less than 10 billionths of a meter (10 nanometers). Until then, the student, a German native named Thomas Rueckes, had been spending his time in Lieber’s laboratory at Harvard University measuring the electrical and material properties of carbon nanotubes....

“By the year 2030 the electric power requirement will be 10 times the present capacity. Because of the expected decline in fossil-fuel resources, and in the absence of any other large source of energy at reasonable cost, fission power would be counted on to supply about 85 percent of this need. To fill such a demand with fission plants of the present type, however, would call for quantities of uranium ore that would soon deplete reserves....

When Sandra Evans Walsh was growing up in Parowan, Utah, her class would sometimes trek outside to a row of trees. They were about to watch history in the making, the teacher would tell them. The kids would then stare as an orange shroud spread across the sky. “I remember the clouds coming over our town and writing our names in the dust,” she said in an interview with Justin Sorensen, a geographical information systems (GIS) specialist at the University of Utah’s J....

By Ivan Castro MANAGUA (Reuters) - A strong earthquake shook western Nicaragua on Thursday, knocking out power and phone lines in some areas of the capital Managua, a Reuters witness said, but there were no reports of fatalities or major damage. The quake had a magnitude of 6.1, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and was very shallow at a depth of 6.2 miles. It was previously reported as having various magnitudes ranging up to 6....

On March 10, 2011, Prime Minister Naoto Kan felt assured that nuclear power was safe and vital for Japan. By the evening of the next day, following the massive Tohoku earthquake, the ensuing tsunami and the beginnings of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, he had changed his thinking “180 degrees.” Kan could not help but wondering how much worse the Fukushima meltdowns might get on the dark nights spent in his office after March 11, 2011....

“Cartilage doesn’t heal.” That’s what doctors often tell us when we injure the flexible tissue that lines our hips, knees and shoulders or when osteoarthritis has eroded it so that our joints hurt when we move. I’ve certainly heard it myself from orthopedic surgeons who explain that cartilage has no blood supply to bring repair cells and nutrients to an injury site. Yet it’s always struck me as improbable that a living tissue could not replace damaged cells....

More people are reaching a ripe old age than ever before. Life expectancy has increased from 45 years in the early 1800s to more than 80 today in most European countries and in Japan, Canada and Australia, among other nations. In fact, if the trend continues, a majority of babies born in these countries today will live past their 100th birthday. This greater longevity comes with some bad news. Although we manage to survive longer than preceding generations did, we often gain time without being healthier in those extra years....

The goal is to understand how burning biomass in South America is affecting the local weather and air quality, and to close crucial gaps in climate models about how the process changes Earth’s radiation balance. More importantly, aerosols may actually produce cooling at the surface as well as warming at mid altitudes, says Karla Longo, a senior scientist at INPE and one of the 40 SAMBBA field researchers. Current models cannot account for such complex interactions, and therefore can’t accurately predict how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and burning biomass will affect the radiation balance of the world’s largest tropical forest....

The more stars a system of alien worlds starts with, the more likely those planets will orbit those stars at odd tilts, scientists say. The discovery, based on a study unveiled Nov. 14, suggests that even Earth’s own sun may have had a companion star early in its development. In recent years, astronomers have detected hundreds of exoplanets — worlds circling distant stars. Many of these are “hot Jupiters” — gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn that are closer to their stars than Mercury is to the sun....

When Glenn McGee founded the Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI) at Albany Medical College in New York State in 2005, magazine articles and newspaper stories hailed the arrival of the man once described as “Socrates with a beeper.” Now, a month after his abrupt departure, former colleagues are painting a complex portrait that suggests the ethicist’s own personal and professional relationships may have led to the institute’s undoing. McGee remains a tenured professor at AMBI, and neither he nor college officials will discuss the circumstances surrounding his change in status....

Eliane Lucassen works the night shift at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, beginning her day at 6 p.m. Yet her own research has shown that this schedule might cause her health problems. “It’s funny,” the medical resident says. “Here I am, spreading around that it’s actually unhealthy. But it needs to be done.” Lucassen and Johanna Meijer, a neuroscientist at Leiden, report today in Current Biology that a constant barrage of bright light prematurely ages mice, playing havoc with their circadian clocksand causing a cascade of health problems....

U.S. Christians’ concerns about the environment and climate change haven’t shifted much in the past two decades, despite a push by some religious leaders to increase attention on the issue, a new study finds. In fact, Christians’ views may be reversing course since the 1990s, according to David Konisky, an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the study’s author. “Not only has there not been an amplification of concern among Christians about the environment, there’s seemingly been a decline, at least over the time period I’ve been studying,” he said....

The malaria parasite is a wily organism, shifting its life stages as it flits from human to mosquito and back again. It still kills some 600,000 people each year and has outwitted eradication efforts, having developed resistance to previously popular drugs and, thus far, eluded vaccine-induced immunity. The arrival of a powerful drug in the late-20th century gave researchers new hope. Called artemisinin and based on a traditional Chinese herbal remedy, it cleared the parasite faster and more thoroughly than any other current antimalarial....

Patients with a stubborn, debilitating bacterial infection may soon be treated with pills full of microbes derived from human feces. Clostridium difficile is a bacterial infection that causes diarrhea and fever in around half a million people in the United States each year, and is linked to the death of some 14,000 US citizens annually. Some physicians now treat recurrent C. difficile infections with fecal transplants, delivering donor feces filled with healthy microbes via enemas, colonoscopies or nasal tubes that run directly to the gut....

Cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands in times of stress, may help people cope when it is given before an unpleasant situation. Most studies of cortisol have looked at the hormone’s negative effects when chronic stress keeps its levels high. Psychologists Oliver T. Wolf and Serkan Het of Bielefeld University in Germany were interested in the short-term effects of cortisol on mood. They gave 22 young women 30 milligrams of cortisol—a fairly high dose....

When a US fertility clinic revealed last year that it had created a baby boy using a controversial technique that mixes DNA from three people, scientists were quick to raise the alarm. Some objected on ethical grounds, and others questioned the scientific claims made by the clinic’s leader, physician John Zhang. Now, after months of intense debate and speculation, Zhang’s team has provided more details about the child’s conception, in a paper published on 3 April in Reproductive Biomedicine Online....

In 2018 the World Health Organization proposed a “10+1” initiative for malaria control and elimination that targets 10 African countries plus India, which together host 70 percent of global cases. Although this approach is promising, it is missing an important component: genomic surveillance. Drug resistance threatens all of the progress made so far against malaria, but genomic surveillance can detect resistance years before the first warning signs appear in clinics. It can answer critical questions about how resistance emerges and spreads and can help control the balance of interventions, preserve the useful life of already existing drugs and ensure effective treatment....

Glaciers in the snowy mountains of western Canada are melting faster than they were a decade ago, according to scientists. New research suggests that ice loss in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia is happening at nearly five times the rate it was in the early 2000s. Overall, glaciers in western North America—not including Alaska—have lost about 117 billion tons of ice since 2000; they are currently losing about 12 billion tons a year....