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I was listening to the comforting background hum of the old refrigerator in my rented apartment. The noise stopped suddenly; the only sound left was the tinnitus ringing in my ears. From my chair, I looked out through the sliding glass door. Wind and rain animated the bright-yellow flannel bushes on the hillside. California had just had the driest February on record, and the flowered branches seemed to be stretching like fingers to catch the life-giving rainwater....

Proto-historic Hawaiian temples on the island of Maui may have mushroomed up within just 30 years, not 250 as previously supposed, scientists say. The findings could significantly alter researchers’ understanding of the pace of precontact sociopolitical change in the Pacific. Hawaiian genealogies and oral histories hold that sometime around 1600 A.D. a ruler named Pi’ilani united two opposing chiefdoms on Maui into a peaceful kingdom, marking the emergence of a religious state on the island....

Gold and sapphire. No, we’re not talking about Rolex wristwatches but the iPhone 5S. All rumors of course. The iPhone 5 already has a sapphire lens cover. But the 5S will get a convex sapphire home button too, according to KGI Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo (via 9to5Mac). The reason? Sapphire prevents the button from being scratched and a slightly convex shape creates room for the fingerprint sensor, according to the analyst. Note that there has also been speculation that the 5S’ touch display would handle fingerprint sensing chores....

In a lab in Japan, researchers have grown complex skin tissue, complete with hair follicles and sweat glands, according to a new study. The researchers implanted the tissue into living mice, and found that the tissue formed connections with the animals’ nerves and muscle fibers. The findings may one day help researchers create better skin transplants for human patients with severe burns or skin diseases. Prior to the new study, researchers had already developed a more basic type of skin substitute that had been used successfully in human patients, said Takashi Tsuji, a team leader at RIKEN Center forDevelopmental Biology in Japan....

The Iani Chaos region on Mars would be a great place to hike, if you could get there. The ancient flow of water has collapsed the surface, carving blocks and mesas as well as creating valleys and washes that would take years to thoroughly explore. Now, using imagery captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter, scientists have compiled the first topographical maps of Mars—focusing on Iani Chaos....

NASA’s Apollo moon missions, which lasted from 1968 to 1972, were responsible for putting the first human on an extraterrestrial surface. Six of the missions landed on the moon, where astronauts carried out a number of experiments, studying soil mechanics, micrometeoroids, seismographic activity, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields and solar wind. Getting to and from the moon required copious amounts of advanced technology, not to mention charts, spacesuits, tools and miscellaneous paperwork....

When a cell dies in a tumor, a growing fetus or elsewhere in the body, bits and pieces of its DNA enter the bloodstream. A new test that identifies the source of such DNA could make it easier to find hidden cancers, monitor the success of organ transplants and conduct prenatal screenings. To make this test, the team of researchers figured out how to analyze two types of variation at once to noninvasively pinpoint DNA fragments’ origins with near-perfect accuracy....

[Edtor’s note: this story was updated on Feb. 26, 2016, to compare nuclear plants to solar farms rather than wind farms.] The U.S. presidential campaign is picking up energy. Candidates are heading into their first big test of national appeal, the March 1 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, with contests in Texas, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Virginia, Alabama and seven other states. As the political heat increases, candidates’ contrasting plans for actual energy use are worth voter attention....

Astronomer Laura Kreidberg admits she was initially a bit worried about her latest results. Examinations of a planet orbiting the red dwarf star LHS 3844 seemed to indicate that the rocky super-Earth, 30 percent larger than our world, possessed little or no atmosphere. Kreidberg’s concern stemmed from the fact that researchers are in the midst of a heated debate about the habitability of planets around red dwarfs, which make up 70 percent of the stars in our galaxy....

It’s enough to make Cruella de Vil consider a nicotine patch: a new analysis has found that films with scenes that show smoking reliably make less money at the box office than their cigarette-free counterparts. The finding, says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, adds to the case for giving any movie that depicts smoking to an automatic “R”-rating....

Researchers may finally have hit on why pulsars, the rotating balls of neutrons that pepper the universe, spin the way they do. Simulations indicate that the key may be a wobbling shock wave that accompanies the explosion of a dying star. When stars a few times heavier than our own sun run out of fuel, they collapse into ultradense pulsars. The hallmark of that collapse is a supernova explosion, which scours away much of the star’s prior mass....

Scientists and laypeople alike have historically attributed political beliefs to upbringing and surroundings, yet recent research shows that our political inclinations have a large genetic component. The largest recent study of political beliefs, published in 2014 in Behavior Genetics, looked at a sample of more than 12,000 twin pairs from five countries, including the U.S. Some were identical and some fraternal; all were raised together. The study reveals that the development of political attitudes depends, on average, about 60 percent on the environment in which we grow up and live and 40 percent on our genes....

America is a country in deep pain. The coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice, economic insecurity, political polarization, misinformation and general daily uncertainty dominate our lives to the point that many people are barely able to cope. And life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk before 2020. Out of all the fears, stresses and indignities our citizens are living with, there emerges a kind of primal insecurity that undermines every aspect of life right now....

By Ben Hirschler DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - United Nations agencies need a final $1 billion to fight West Africa’s deadly Ebola epidemic as experts move to a new phase involving a massive detective operation to trace remaining cases, the U.N. Ebola chief said on Wednesday. David Nabarro estimated that an overall total of $4 billion in new money, equivalent to all the aid committed so far, was needed by relief agencies and the worst affected countries themselves to end the epidemic and “help these countries to get back to the economic trajectory they had”....

The future of manufacturing depends on a number of technological breakthroughs in robotics, sensors and high-performance computing, to name a few. But nothing will impact how things are made, and what they are capable of, more than the materials manufacturers use to make those things. New materials change both the manufacturing process and the end result. Scientific American’s May special report “How to Make the Next Big Thing” presents several new materials under development to help inventors and engineers deliver next-generation technologies....

For the quiet types among us, “introversion” and “social anxiety” frequently get used interchangeably. Or, just as often, social anxiety is mistakenly thought of as an extreme form of introversion. But while you can definitely be a socially anxious introvert, you can also be socially anxious extrovert—for example, you may really want to go to the bar with your co-workers but worry they actually don’t want you there. Or you may crave company but obsess about the possibility you’ll say something stupid....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the “Green Scissors” campaign, which I understand can help the environment and has support from both liberals and conservatives?—Jeff Nickson, Butte, Mont. The Green Scissors Campaign was launched in 1994 as a partnership between the environmental group Friends of the Earth (FoE) ad budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) to call attention to subsidies and programs that both harm the environment and waste taxpayer dollars—and which should be cut accordingly....

In the brand-new fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa, shelf space is already running out. The glass-doored cabinets lining the room brim with bones of early human relatives found over the past 92 years in the many caves of the famed Cradle of Humankind region, just 40 kilometers northwest of here. The country’s store of extinct humans has long ranked among the most extensive collections in the world....

Alcohol harms the liver in two ways, by damaging the organ’s cells directly and by disrupting gut microbiota, which can scar the liver. Now researchers have figured out the mechanism behind the microbial imbalance due to drinking and could use the information to devise treatments for liver disease and a broad range of other medical conditions ranging from irritable bowel syndrome to autism. “We’ve known for a very long time that patients with heavy drinking and alcohol use suffered an intestinal dysbiosis, where bacteria in the gut increase and they suffer from liver disease,” says University of California, San Diego, research gastroenterologist Bernd Schnabl, who had seen similar outcomes in mouse models....

Today nearly all computers, tablets, and cell phones have Wi-Fi capabilities, receiving and transmitting data over a range of radio frequencies. But a burgeoning technology known as visible light communication could someday carry those data in the same light that illuminates a room using “smart lighting.” Now a tag team of semiconducting organic polymers is bringing that dream one step closer. When excited with a light-emitting diode (LED), the polymer pair helps to create white light that can be rapidly switched on and off to encode information (ACS Photonics 2015, DOI:10....