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Social platforms large and small are struggling to keep their communities safe from hate speech, extremist content, harassment and misinformation. Most recently, far-right agitators posted openly about plans to storm the U.S. Capitol before doing just that on January 6. One solution might be AI: developing algorithms to detect and alert us to toxic and inflammatory comments and flag them for removal. But such systems face big challenges. The prevalence of hateful or offensive language online has been growing rapidly in recent years, and the problem is now rampant....

For millennia, many animals and plants have coped with occasional climate changes by moving into new areas. But humans’ relatively recent burning of fossil fuels is pushing global temperatures upward at an exceptionally rapid rate, placing many species on what a new book by science journalist Benjamin von Brackel notes has been called an “escalator to extinction”—and raising the question of whether migration can save them this time. It is estimated that land-dwelling animals are now moving toward the poles at a rate of an average of about 17 kilometers (more than 10 miles) per decade and that the front line of ocean dwellers is now doing so at a rate of 72 kilometers (45 miles) per decade....

Teens are notoriously self-conscious. Now brain-imaging experiments are revealing how this adolescent predilection might be the result of changes in brain anatomy linked with the self, and the findings may hint at how the sense of self develops in the brain. One way we build a sense of self is by reflecting on how others perceive us, a concept psychologists have dubbed “the looking-glass self.” To see how teenagers reacted to what other people thought of them, researchers asked adolescent girls ages 10 to 18 to imagine a variety of scenarios involving onlookers that were designed to evoke social emotions such as guilt or embarrassment—for example, “You were quietly picking your nose, but your friend saw you....

Hurricane Irene, a powerful storm that ran north along the US East Coast four days after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake rattled Virginia in 2011, may have triggered some of that earthquake’s aftershocks, scientists reported today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Salt Lake City, Utah. The rate of aftershocks usually decreases with time, says study leader Zhigang Peng, a seismologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta....

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory, provides this answer. The earths surface absorbs visible radiation from the sun, which causes heating. At the same time the surface and the atmosphere emit infrared radiation back to space, which produces cooling. Our eyes cannot see infrared radiation but we can feel how our skin absorbs it when we are standing next to a hot object without touching it....

Microsoft’s Surface RT debacle has more to do with a collapsing PC market and Windows RT than hardware. Imagine this. Apple comes out with the iPad about three years late and slaps on a stripped-down version of Windows 8. Now imagine the consumer response. Yeah, I wouldn’t buy it either. “Several other vendors that released [Windows] RT products had lackluster sales and difficulty clearing inventory,” Rhoda Alexander, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, told CNET....

Although we humans are capable of creating amazing new innovations, most of our daily lives are shaped instead by routines. We get up, brush our teeth, dress, have that first cup of coffee, make the commute to work—and on, day after day. As Ann M. Graybiel and Kyle S. Smith write in this issue’s cover story, “How the Brain Makes and Breaks Habits,” many such activities “simply allow us to do certain things on autopilot so that our brains are not overtaxed by concentrating on each brushstroke and countless tiny adjustments of the steering wheel....

Flowers bloom and buds pop to herald the arrival of spring, but it is much harder to mark the natural start of autumn. The spectacular color changes in fall foliage take place gradually and vary geographically. Ecologists struggle to model the timing of current autumn seasons, let alone forecast onsets a century from now. But achieving the latter goal could enable predictions about seasonal shifts expected to have an effect on future climate....

1969 Lead Poisoning Epidemic “Though lead pigments were eliminated from interior paints in the U.S. some 20 years ago, multiple layers of lead-based paint still cover the walls and woodwork in many old houses and apartments. Therefore lead poisoning, once an occupational hazard for painters, is now primarily a disease of small children: toddlers between one and five who live in slum housing and nibble steadily at the paint that flakes off dilapidated walls and can be gnawed off peeling windowsills....

On Valentine’s Day, images of couples are everywhere. They’re buying each other diamond rings, making eyes over expensive restaurant meals and canoodling over chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne. But two-by-two isn’t the only way to go through life. In fact, an estimated 4 to 5 percent of Americans are looking outside their relationship for love and sex — with their partner’s full permission. These consensually nonmonogamous relationships, as they’re called, don’t conform to the cultural norm of a handholding couple in love for life....

The largest coral reef system in the world—and the biggest sign of life on Earth, visible from space—is not growing like it used to. A sampling of 328 massive Porites coral (large structures resembling brains that are formed by tiny polyps) from across the 133,000-square-mile (344,000-square-kilometer) reef reveals that growth of these colonies has slowed by roughly 13 percent since 1990. The most likely reason is climate change caused by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to a new paper published today in Science....

Two mathematicians have found a strange pattern in prime numbers—showing that the numbers are not distributed as randomly as theorists often assume. “Every single person we’ve told this ends up writing their own computer program to check it for themselves,” says Kannan Soundararajan, a mathematician at Stanford University in California, who reported the discovery with his colleague Robert Lemke Oliver in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on March 11....

There’s been a lot of crap in the news lately, and for a change I mean that literally. Let’s start with the study presented last November 18 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics entitled “How Do Wombats Make Cubed Poo?” Yes, wombats produce dicelike discharges. The marsupial’s unique ability attracted the attention of researchers who looked at the innards recovered from two wombats lost in the everyday carnage of roadways around the world....

Engineers have long looked to nature for clues that will help then build robots that move with anything close to the grace that living things exhibit. Although the use of rigid metal and plastic parts tends to result in stiff, mechanical motion, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) is experimenting with the use of a single piece of flexible silicon and urethane polymer to create robotic fish that smoothly wriggle through the water much like their natural counterparts....

Despite the proliferation of antibiotics and assorted antibacterial hand lotions and wipes, bacteria remain a moving target for hospitals and clinics seeking to protect their patients from infections. One approach gaining traction in the effort to banish bacteria is to mimic the way the human body attacks these microorganisms by punching holes in bacterial cell membranes and hobbling their ability to morph into antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics due to a combination of their overuse (which allows bacterial cells to become familiar with these drugs and purge them before they can do their work) and the pathogens’ ability to quickly adapt to new conditions....

Solar wind can form water on interplanetary dust, potentially adding to the primordial soup that gave rise to life on Earth, scientists say. On Earth, there is life virtually everywhere water is found. Past research suggests much of this water may have come to Earth from comets raining down on the planet. But scientists have suggested another source of water in the airless void of space — the continuous flow of charged particles from the sun, a stream known as the solar wind....

TABLE OF CONTENTS Filtering: Scientists and Hackers [Excerpt Part 1] Part 1 of the Spam book excerpt series Poisoning: The Reinvention of Spam [Excerpt Part 2] Part 2 of the Spam book excerpt series “New Twist in Affect”: Content Farms and Social Spam [Excerpt Part 3] Part 3 of the Spam book excerpt series Inside the Library of Babel: The Storm Worm Storm becomes the quintessential example of software that commandeers other computers for spam distribution Surveying Storm: Making Spam Scientific, Part II Security specialists and hackers study Storm closely to learn its workings The Overload: Militarizing Spam Botnets and spam overwhelm an entire country Reprinted from Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, by Finn Brunton....

The climate is changing at a pace that’s far faster than anything seen in 65 million years, a report out of Stanford University says. The amount of global temperature increase and the short time over which it’s occurred create a change in velocity that outstrips previous periods of warming or cooling, the scientists said in research published in today’s Science. If global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next century, the rate will be about 10 times faster than what’s been seen before, said Christopher Field, one of the scientists on the study....

A bill was introduced in Congress last week and referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology by Representative Gaetz from Florida to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency. If you’re thinking, but hasn’t the EPA been around for a long time?, you’re not wrong—the EPA was proposed by President Nixon in 1970 via an executive order which was later ratified by Congress. So why might Congress want to terminate an almost 50-year-old agency?...

Simply put, good posture means that each of your body parts is in the correct spot, relative to other body parts, and relative to the gravitational pull of the earth. Make sense? Can you do that? Great! Then we are done here. Ha! If only it were that easy. What is your Good Posture? When you read the words “good posture” you probably instinctively and immediately assumed your version of “good posture....