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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan warned on Friday that a volcano in southern Japan located roughly 64 km (40 miles) from a nuclear plant was showing signs of increased activity that could possibly lead to a small-scale eruption and warned people to stay away from the summit. The warning comes nearly a month after another volcano, Mt Ontake, erupted suddenly when crowded with hikers, killing 57 people in Japan’s worst volcanic disaster in nearly 90 years....

From Tom Wolfe’s account of the LSD-loving Merry Pranksters and their bus ride across America in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to Roger Sterling’s acid-inspired bout of introspection on television’s Mad Men, popular culture is rife with depictions of the mind-altering effects of lysergic acid diethylamide. The synthetic drug, devised by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938, pings some of the same receptors as the neurotransmitter serotonin, producing powerful changes in consciousness....

The creation of seven vast marine parks in the indigenous territories of Papua, Indonesia, has made the islands of Raja Ampat a test case for the impact of conservation on local people. Many conservationists have considered the positive social benefits of marine protected areas to be a foregone conclusion. But if it turns out that the effects on locals are negative, or that the people just ignore conservation rules, then better strategies to preserve ocean biodiversity and seafood resources would have to be developed immediately....

Nathan Cude pulls open the top of a white Tupperware container labeled Q8R, which holds one of the hundreds of samples of American farmland he’ll handle in a year. The dark brown soil inside looks lifeless, but the microbiologist at Novozymes smiles as he utters one of his favorite lines: A spoonful of soil contains about 50 billion microbes, representing up to 10,000 different species. The number of organisms in the container surpasses the number of people who have ever lived on Earth....

As book reviewer and later columnist for Scientific American, Philip Morrison traveled often from Boston to New York to attend the monthly meeting of the editors. He was always the star turn. Speaking at machine- gun speed, yet in complete sentences and even (to my ear) complete paragraphs, he held forth illuminatingly on a great variety of subjects. His incisive quips on topics that came up at the meetings drew many a laugh....

The deaths were concentrated in a state—Kentucky—that has been relatively unscathed by tornadoes and tornado fatalities. The outbreak hit during a month when tornadoes are least likely to occur. And it struck at night, when tornadoes are unusual—and particularly deadly because people are asleep and unlikely to hear warnings. “The worst-case scenario happened—warm air in the cold season, middle of the night,” John Gordon, the National Weather Service chief meteorologist in Louisville, said at a briefing Saturday with Kentucky Gov....

Stars of the sky play a bit coy with their ages—an ancient star can often pass for a much younger one. That is a problem for astronomers seeking out habitable planets orbiting distant stars because a star’s age correlates with the life-forms it could support. “We know from studying our own planet that if the star and the planet [are] about one billion years old, only the most primitive microbial life might exist,” said Søren Meibom of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at the May American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston....

The president and the newly inaugurated 113th Congress are about to face a number of science- and technology-related decisions that will determine the country’s trajectory. We urge dramatic action on the science policy issues that matter most: Ensure a Clean, Secure Energy Supply U.S. Energy Policy must be guided by two intertwined goals: guaranteeing the security of the nation’s energy supply and limiting runaway climate change. A tax on the carbon dioxide emissions of fuels is key to achieving both....

More than ever, creativity has become a hot commodity in the workplace. Businesses compete ferociously for new ideas, and Silicon Valley — with its extreme focus on innovation — is the current bright spot of the US economy. Companies need employees who can tackle difficult problems, learn new skills fast, and identify opportunities in unexpected places. Top employers are increasingly looking to hire individuals who excel at creative thinking. But whether you are seen as creative or not may depend on whether you’re a man or a woman....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In 1964, the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton seemingly explained one of the greatest paradoxes in biology with a simple mathematical equation. Even Charles Darwin had called the problem his “one special difficulty” a century earlier in On the Origin of Species, writing that it made him doubt his own theory. The paradox in question is the altruistic behavior exhibited most famously by social insects....

The brain is built to multitask, as long as the tasks require different types of perception. Some scientists have proposed that when the brain processes information from any sense, those data are then converted to an abstract code. This “code central” theory helps to explain how we transfer rules learned through one sense to another. But it also suggests that we should be prone to mixing up information coming in from two senses at once because they would both be reduced to the same code....

Taking vitamin D, along with calcium supplements, may reduce your risk of breaking a bone, but there’s not yet enough evidence to say whether it may lower your risk of cancer, a new analysis concludes. People who were taking vitamin D and calcium supplements were 11 percent less likely to fracture a bone than people not taking the supplements, according to the study. There was an even larger reduction in fractures — about 30 percent — among elderly people living in institutions who were taking vitamin D, said study researcher Mei Chung, a nutritional epidemiologist and assistant director of the evidence-based-practice center at Tufts Medical Center....

Drivers may feel spooked by seeing the first self-driving cars appear in coming years. But the new era could prove far less disruptive and bloody than the automobile’s 20th-century battle to push pedestrians off U.S. streets. The change in American public opinion from thinking of cars as wildly dangerous vehicles to having a “love affair with the automobile” was no accident. Instead, it reflected a serious push by the car industry to change people’s psychology....

In the 1967 episode of Star Trek “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the crew of the Enterprise finds itself on an alien planet and discovers a large, doughnut-shaped machine referred to as a “time portal” that can transport anyone across spacetime to any time or place in the universe. Though not explicitly called a wormhole, it is one of the earliest appear- ances of the theorized cosmological phenomenon in popular science fiction....

A newly discovered object is the most-distant body ever observed in the solar system—and the first object ever found orbiting at more than 100 times the distance from Earth to the sun. The discovery team nicknamed the object “Farout,” and its provisional designation from the International Astronomical Union is 2018 VG18. Preliminary research suggests it’s a round, pinkish dwarf planet. The same team spotted a faraway dwarf planet nicknamed “The Goblin" in October....

President Donald Trump went directly to the public and announced via Twitter early on Oct. 2 that “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” The president’s straightforward announcement was unlike many presidents in the past. My research has focused on how politicians dodge questions. I have co-authored an entry in the Encyclopedia of Deception with scholar Michael J....

When the oversight board for California’s stem cell research agency met in late May, South Korean scientists had just described a breakthrough in so-called therapeutic cloning. David A. Kessler, dean of the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, pressed fellow board members for clarification. “So we’re not cloning human beings?” he asked. “No, we’re taking the cells out at a very, very early level of development and cloning cells,” answered neuroscientist Zach W....

Decades ago scientists identified a particular class of proteins driving illnesses from cancer to neurodegenerative disease. These “intrinsically disordered proteins” (IDPs) looked different from the proteins with rigid structures that were more familiar in cells. IDPs were shape shifters, appearing as ensembles of components that constantly changed configurations. This loose structure turns out to allow the IDPs to bring together a wide variety of molecules at critical moments, such as during a cell’s response to stress....

Dear Mr. President-elect, In the last four years, federally funded science agencies were unmade and remade. They were given new marching orders. The mandate of providing the nation with unbiased scientific advice was replaced by a new mandate—that science is subordinate to the political goals and ego of President Trump. The consequences of this new mandate are serious and far-reaching. The Environmental Protection Agency became the Environmental Pollution Agency, rolling back protections on clean air and clean water, and providing regulatory relief to President Trump’s campaign contributors from the fossil fuel industry....

As with many areas of life, the coronavirus pandemic has already disrupted the very foundation of our democracy: elections. Political campaigns have struggled to adjust to the new realities of campaigning in a time of social distancing and shelter-in-place orders. Senate campaigns, for example, have suspended door-to-door canvassing and are transitioning to being almost entirely online. Getting individuals to vote, whether in person or by mail, is one of the central concerns of most campaigns....